Millennium Approaches Quotes

Don't be afraid; people are so afraid; don't be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone...Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way.

Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.

It isn't easy, it doesn't count if it's easy, it's the hardest thing. Forgiveness. Which is maybe where love and justice finally meet.

I just wondered what a thing it would be...if overnight everything you owe anything to, justice, or love, had really gone away. Free. It would be...heartless terror. Yes. Terrible, and... Very great. To shed your skin, every old skin, one by one and then walk away, unemcumbered, into the morning.

My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can’t despise my whole life.

Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions... So when we thing we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable. Don't you think it's depressing?

I try to tighten my heart into a knot, a snarl, I try to learn to live dead, just numb, but then I see someone I want, and it's like a nail, like a hot spike right through my chest, and I know I'm losing.

Children of the new morning, criminal minds. Selfish and greedy and loveless and blind.

Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don’t mean escaping into dreams or the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification. (Terence sent me this quote the other day. A good battle cry, I believe... and one I wholeheartedly respect.)

I had a book of Bible stories when I was a kid. There was a picture I'd look at twenty times every day: Jacob wrestles with the angel. I don't really remember the story, or why the wrestling --just the picture. Jacob is young and very strong. The angel is...a beautiful man, with golden hair and wings, of course. I still dream about it. Many nights. I'm...It's me. In that struggle. Fierce, and unfair. The angel is not human, and it holds nothing back, so how could anyone human win, what kind of a fight is that? It's not just. Losing means your soul thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from God's. But you can't not lose.

I pray for God to crush me, break me up into little pieces and start all over again.

K.S., baby. Lesion number one. Lookit. The wine-dark kiss of the angel of death.

Real love isn't ambivalent. I'd swear that's a line from my favorite best-selling paperback novel, "In Love with the Night Mysterious", except I don't think you've ever read it. Well, you ought to, instead of spending the rest of your life, trying to get through "Democracy in America." It's about this white woman whose daddy owns a plantation in the Deep South, in the years before the Civil War. And her name is Margaret, and she's in love with her daddy's number-one slave, and his name is Thaddeus. And she's married, but her white slave-owner husband has AIDS: Antebellum Insufficiently-Developed Sex-organs. And so, there's a lot of hot stuff going down, when Margaret and Thaddeus can catch a spare torrid ten under the cotton-picking moon. And then of course the Yankees come, and they set the slaves free. And the slaves string up old daddy and so on, historical fiction. Somewhere in there I recall, Margaret and Thaddeus find the time to discuss the nature of love. Her face is reflecting the flames of the burning plantation, you know the way white people do, and his black face is dark in the night and she says to him, "Thaddeus, real love isn't ever ambivalent.

PRIOR (An awestruck whisper): God almighty. Very Steven Spielberg.

She'd found the creature she'd seen tonight: Adam Black. The earliest accounts of it were sketchy, descriptions of its various glamours, warnings about its deviltry, cautions about its insatiable sexuality and penchant for mortal women ("so sates a lass, that she is oft incapable of speech, her wits muddled for a fortnight or more." Oh, please. Gabby thought, was that the medieval equivalent of screwing her brains out?), but by the approach of the first millennium, the accounts became more detailed.

ROY [COHN]:Please. Let me finish. Few people know this and I’m telling you this only because. . . . I’m not afraid of death. What can death bring that I haven’t faced? I’ve lived; life is the worst. (Gently mocking himself) Listen to me, I’m a philosopher. Joe. You must do this. You must must must. Love, that’s a trap. Responsibility; that’s a trap, too. Like a father to a son I tell you this: Life is full of horror; nobody escapes, nobody; save yourself. Whatever pulls on you, whatever needs from you, threatens you. Don’t be afraid; people are so afraid; don’t be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone. . . . Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way.

We have reached a veredict, your honor. This man's heart is deficient. He loves, but his love is worth nothing.

I did my best Shirley Booth this morning, floppy slippers, housecoat, curlers, can of Little Friskies; "Come back, Little Sheba, come back..." To no avail. Le chat, elle ne reviendra jamais, jamais...

She preferred silence. So I do not know her and yet I know her. She was . . . (He touches the coffin) . . . not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania—and how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted.

The proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words.

Maybe Christ will come again. Maybe seeds will be planted, maybe there’ll be harvests then, maybe early figs to eat, maybe new life, maybe fresh blood, maybe companionship and love and protection, safety from what’s outside, maybe the door will hold, or maybe . . . Maybe the troubles will come, and the end will come, and the sky will collapse and there will be terrible rains and showers of poison light, or maybe my life is really fine, maybe Joe loves me and I’m only crazy thinking otherwise, or maybe not, maybe it’s even worse than I know, maybe . . . I want to know, maybe I don’t. The suspense, Mr. Lies, it’s killing me.

Like all labels, they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? Not ideology, or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call, who owes me favors. This is what a label refers to. Now to someone who does not understand this, homosexual is what I am because I have sex with men. But really this is wrong. Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me, Henry?

I think about that story a lot now. People in a boat, waiting, terrified, while implacable, unsmiling men, irresistibly strong, seize …. Maybe the person next to you, maybe you, and with no warning at all, with time only for a quick intake of air you are pitched into freezing, turbulent water and salt and darkness to drown.

If I had to choose an auspicious sign for the approach of the new millennium, I would choose this: the sudden nimble leap of the poet/philosopher who lifts himself against the weight of the world, proving that its heaviness contains the secret of lightness, while what many believe to be the life force of the times—loud and aggressive, roaring and rumbling—belongs to the realm of death, like a graveyard of rusted automobiles.

Uncertainty is an acid, corrosive to authority. Once the monopoly on information is lost, so too is our trust. Every presidential statement, every CIA assessment, every investigative report by a great newspaper, suddenly acquired an arbitrary aspect, and seemed grounded in moral predilection rather than intellectual rigor. When proof for and against approaches infinity, a cloud of suspicion about cherry-picking data will hang over every authoritative judgment.

I want you to frame a question, as sharp and clear as possible—one to which you do not yet know the answer, but desperately want to know, and expect someday to know. Pretend to be David Hilbert. The Millennium is approaching. Issue a challenge to the quantum theorists of the 21st century. List the key questions they should seek to answer. Hard questions, but not hopelessly hard, questions whose answers could transform our understanding of how the physical world works. I need to know what the question is. Then, perhaps, I can be more engaged in the search for the answer.

The facts are uncontroversial. Trump spent far less money on advertising than Clinton or his Republican opponents, yet he received a vastly greater volume of media coverage.20 The news business seemed strangely obsessed with this strange man, and lavished on him what may have been unprecedented levels of attention. The question is why. The answer will be apparent to anyone with eyes to see. Donald Trump is a peacock among the dull buzzards of American politics. The one discernible theme of his life has been the will to stand out: to attract all eyes in the room by being the loudest, most colorful, most aggressively intrusive person there. He has clearly succeeded to an astonishing degree. The data on media attention speaks to a world-class talent for self-promotion.21 Again, there can be no question that this allowed Trump to separate himself from his competitors in the Republican primaries. He appeared to be a very important person. Everyone on TV was talking about him.22 Who could say the same about Ted Cruz? Media people pumped the helium that elevated Donald Trump’s balloon, and they did so from naked self-interest. He represented high ratings and improved subscription numbers. Until the turn of the new millennium, the news media had controlled the information agenda. They could decide, on the basis of some elite standard, how much attention you deserved. In a fractured information environment, swept by massive waves of signal and noise, amid newspaper bankruptcies and many more TV news channels, every news provider approaches a story from the perspective of existential desperation. Trump understood the hunger, and knew how to feed the beast.

The most promising way forward, it seems to me, is to follow N. N. Taleb’s “subtractive knowledge” method of analyzing complex questions. Rather than assert what the public is, I explain what the public is not. This resembles the sculptor’s approach of chipping away at the stone until a likeness emerged, or the bond trader’s formula of identifying safe investments by subtracting risk.1 Since the public is an unstable and undetermined entity—a complex system—this negative mode of characterizing its behavior is least likely to fall into the fallacy of personification, of inventing some new Marxian-style “class” with a single consciousness and will. Taleb’s method is also helpful because the term in question, “the public,” has been made to stand for so many things that it had become obscured under layers of confusion and special pleading. So one last metaphor: my task resembles that of the archaeologist, who brushes away foreign matter until the object is restored to its original identity.

For one thing, the end of six thousand years of human existence on earth and the beginning of mankind's seventh millennium of existence may come many years sooner than the year 2000 C.E. It is well that this is so. Today, with the world of mankind in such a deplorable condition and being threatened with destruction from so many angles, there are many students and investigators of these threats to human existence who express substantial doubts that mankind will be able to survive till the year 2000 C.E.

There is a deep reassurance for the frustrated in witnessing the downfall of the fortunate and the disgrace of the righteous. They see in a general downfall an approach to the brotherhood of all. Chaos, like the grave, is a haven of equality. Their burning conviction that there must be a new life and a new order is fueled by the realization that the old will have to be razed to the ground before the new can be built. Their clamor for a millennium is shot through with a hatred for all that exists, and a craving for the end of the world.

A revolution is called for, certainly. But not a political, an economic, or even a technical revolution. We have had enough experience of these during the past century to know that a purely external approach will not suffice. What I propose is a spiritual revolution.

When the human realm seems doomed to heaviness, I feel the need to fly like Perseus into some other space. I am not talking about escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I feel the need to change my approach, to look at the world from a different angle, with different logic, different methods of knowing and proving. The images of lightness I’m looking for shouldn’t let themselves dissolve as dreams do in the reality of the present and future . .

A three-fold approach, reduction of tumor burden without harming the patient, re-regulating the cancer to convert to normal health tissue, and nourishing the patient's recuperative powers, will be the human and clinically effective cancer treatment of the new millennium.

The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss. For this reason, the proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words.

A moment later a second guard approached and whispered to him, after which he said to Lumley-Gotham, "Your son wishes to see you, sir." "Has he been searched?" inquired Lumley-Gotham. "He has been searched," said the other.

The church is assailed by Islamic fundamentalism in the East and secular fundamentalism in the West. I hate going into book stores because the religion section is soiled with volumes filled with ultraliberal, antiorthodox propaganda, wishy-washy nonsense of spiritual fuzzy-wuzzy feelings, biographical ramblings of Christian apostates, and greedy charlatans promising wealth and prosperity as if God were some kind of slot machine. I’m not bothered so much that people write these books, but I’m deeply troubled by the fact that so many people buy them. The world is cold, brutal, and dark, and it is only getting worse. If this is the hour approaching the millennium, I tremor to think what a tribulation might be like! Evidently postmillennialists do not receive email updates from Christian parachurch groups that minister to the persecuted church like Voice of the Martyrs and Barnabas Fund because Christians in Sudan, Iran, and North Korea know full well that the millennium ain’t getting closer from their point of view.

the hour is approaching, when the tribes shall go up to their own country; when Judea, so long a howling wilderness, shall once more blossom like the rose...I think we do not attach sufficient importance to the restoration of the Jews. We do not think enough about it. But certainly, if there is anything promised in the Bible it is this. I imagine that you cannot read the Bible without seeing clearly that there is to be an actual restoration of the Children of Israel...For when the Jews are restored, the fullness of the Gentiles shall be gathered in; and as soon as they return, then Jesus will come upon Mount Zion with his ancients gloriously, and the halcyon days of the millennium shall then dawn; we shall then know every man to be a brother and a friend; Christ shall rule with universal sway.

Under 'rational' assumptions, such texts as those of early Islam can be taken as either literal or symbolic (and the notion of "literal" itself, meaning "as written", adds a further problematic dimension to interpreting something written), but those texts were in fact written as neither literal nor symbolic, but as revelatory. The same is true of Christian and Jewish religious texts, and in fact of most religious texts worldwide. Revelatory texts, to be understood, require an experience of the revelatory itself, and in fact many such texts were intended precisely to provoke the experience necessary for understanding them. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Mind) is in fact a revelatory text, but the content of the revelation is the nature of revelation itself as reflexive understanding, and as such attempts to provoke not only the experience, but the experience of understanding the experience of revelation. There is no guarantee, though, as with any other revelatory text, that it will in fact be understood by any given reader. Other reflexively revelatory texts include Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra and Martin Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning) . All three are considered among the most "difficult" texts in philosophy precisely because approaching them with the usual, rational, interpretive apparatus of philosophy itself will get the reader nowhere. As a projection, though, the rational on its own cannot give any guidance as to what to record content-wise, since it can only account-for something already given. As a result while history is by definition formally rational, its content is tacitly determined by something else. This something else, in the western world, is factually a priori revelation, for the most part in the west revelatory texts associated with the Christian religion and its immediate antecedents, but also with those of Islam, with which we share antecedent revelatory texts and with whom there has been significant mutual influence over the past millennium, and with specific westernisations of eastern revelatory texts. Thus, the underlying assumptions of the most formally rational thinking are inherently revelatory and religious in nature, while our rational interpretation of revelatory texts themselves as either literal or symbolic completely misses the thrust and intent of the very texts that underlie our basic thought processes.

The millennium that is fast approaching is a transcultural event of epic proportions. It is a climax that occurs once every thousand years, a psychic convergence felt by every soul on earth who is living at the time. It is a moment of tremendous blessing for mankind.

Penance (Scripture selection — Joel 2:12-13) The name of Gene Hamilton may be new to you if you are not from the archdiocese of New York or have not read A Priest Forever by Father Benedict Groeschel (published by Our Sunday Visitor in 1998). Gene was a seminarian for that archdiocese at St. Joseph’s Seminary, Dunwoodie. From all accounts he was a fine student, a friendly, sincere young man, eager to be a priest. He was diagnosed with cancer, and the final years of his life were a real cross for him — pain, decline, hopes way up after surgery and treatment only to have them dashed with another outbreak. In his brave struggle a saint emerged, and I use that word purposefully. In his pain, agony, and dwindling strength, a man of deep faith, indomitable hope, and genuine love arose; a seminarian of prayer, who never complained, thought more of the needs and difficulties of others than his own. A man driven by one desire: to be united with Jesus in his passion and death, hopefully, yearning to do so as a priest. There was a lot of longing for a miracle by his family, brother seminarians, friends and admirers; many, including doctors and other medical personnel, told the young man, “You’re going to beat this, Gene.” Dozens who just knew he was too good, too innocent, too pure and holy to die so young and painfully, prayed for his recovery. In January of 1997, Gene Hamilton was too ill to come on the pilgrimage here to Rome with the men from Dunwoodie. Bishop Edwin O’Brien, realistic and thoughtful man that he is, with the late Cardinal John O’Connor, approached the prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, the dicastery of the Holy See under which seminaries come, for permission to ordain

where am I going? This society? The whole human race?” These are questions which many of us today are asking urgently, deeply troubled about what we see happening in our world Our concerns may be quite personal ones, centered around our own particular life situation. They may be general ones, related to the state of things as a whole or both. For this is a strange and difficult time, a time when all the old values and traditions seem to have been cut out from under us without anything clear and definitive having been substituted for them. From every direction and every possible source, we’re being bombarded by the newfangled ideas, values and behaviors of the New Age in which we live. The New Age is an age with many interesting features. One of these is confusion. Great numbers of us no longer seem to have a clear sense of right and wrong, good and bad. Under the impact of too much personal freedom and the flood of new ideas and values, we’re falling apart, frightened, uncertain, lost. After all, how is it possible to have certainty about anything when even the most basic, time-honored values are being called into question? In comparison to earlier times, everything around us today seems upside-down and backwards. A great deal of what was previously considered right is now looked upon as outmoded, irrelevant or just plain dumb. At the same time, much of what used to be considered wrong is now accepted as right, normal and okay. Members of the older generation, like myself, still maintain our vision of what things were like in an earlier, simpler, less perplexing period. But when our generation goes, apart from people of strong religious faith, who will be left that still retains a clear vision of a saner, more stable society? That vision will have gone with the winds of change. This turn-about in basic human values and morals has led to a steady unraveling of civilized standards and behavior, not only in the country but worldwide. Brutality, lust and all manner of other evils flourish around the globe; violence, vice and exploitation seem to have become the new order of the day. And fear hangs over the whole world. Those of us who are even slightly sensitive to the currents and energies around us realize that something is wrong-deeply, awfully wrong. And we carry the collective burden of humanity’s pain and turmoil deep within our hearts. Day by day the fear and uneasiness increases. Often we sense that we’re at the edge of a terrible and dangerous abyss, surrounded by intense darkness. As the end of this millennium approaches, predictions of a worldwide Armageddon-like catastrophe haunt our minds. And how can it be otherwise when we sense deep within ourselves that things have gone so wrong that such a crisis is due? For each day, new and deeper holes appear in the social and moral fabric of mankind, and it seem obvious that when the holes become more than the fabric itself, it’s past repair.” source: Suzanne Haneef, Islam: The Path of God, pages 11-12 (PDF Version) Written by an American Muslim, this work presents a brief yet comprehensive survey of the basic teachings on the significance of Islam's central concept, faith in and submission to God. It introduces the reader to how Muslims feel about various aspects of life, how they worship, and how Muslims living in the West practice their religion. Perhaps you have been hearing a lot about Islam and Muslims in the news and are interested in knowing, justifiably, just what this religion is all about. This is the classic English-language book for introducing Islam to non-Muslims in the West. It is a well-balanced book that does an excellent job of covering the basics of belief, practice, and culture, without overwhelming the reader in minutia. This is generally the first book that I recommend to people who are interested in learning about Islam. read her other book: What Everyone Should Know About Islam and Muslims