Money Controls Everything Quotes

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So in everything: power lies with those who control finance, not with those who know the matter upon which the money is to be spent. Thus, the holders of power are, in general, ignorant and malevolent, and the less they exercise their power the better.
Bertrand Russell (Sceptical Essays (Routledge Classics))
We have two Governments in Washington: one run by the elected people—which is a minor part—and one run by the moneyed interests, which control everything.
Studs Terkel (Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression)
But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people -- white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on -- good honest hard-working people continue -- these are people of modest means -- continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don't care about you at all -- at all -- at all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.
George Carlin
What he realised, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps it is the only real religion-the only felt religion-that is left to us. Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success. Hence the profoundly significant phrase, to make good. The decalogue has been reduced to two commandments. One for the employers-the elect, the money priesthood as it were- 'Thou shalt make money'; the other for the employed- the slaves and underlings'- 'Thou shalt not lose thy job.' It was about this time that he came across The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and read about the starving carpenter who pawns everything but sticks to his aspidistra. The aspidistra became a sort of symbol for Gordon after that. The aspidistra, the flower of England! It ought to be on our coat of arms instead of the lion and the unicorn. There will be no revolution in England while there are aspidistras in the windows.
George Orwell (Keep the Aspidistra Flying)
I love you,” he whispered, rubbing his jaw against her temple. “And you love me. I can feel it when you’re in my arms.” He felt her stiffen slightly and draw a shaky breath, but she either couldn’t or wouldn’t speak. She hadn’t thrown the words back in his face, however, so Ian continued talking to her, his hand roving over her back. “I can feel it, Elizabeth, but if you don’t admit it pretty soon, you’re going to drive me out of my mind. I can’t work. I can’t think. I make decisions and then I change my mind. And,” he teased, trying to lighten the mood by using the one topic sure to distract her, “that’s nothing to the money I squander whenever I’m under this sort of violent stress. It wasn’t just the gowns I bought, or the house on Promenade...” Still talking to her, he tipped her chin up, glorying in the gentle passion in her eyes, overlooking the doubt in their green depths. “If you don’t admit it pretty soon,” he teased, “I’ll spend us out of house and home.” Her delicate brows drew together in blank confusion, and Ian grinned, taking her hand from his chest, the emerald betrothal ring he had bought her unnoticed in his fingers. “When I’m under stress,” he emphasized, sliding the magnificent emerald onto her finger, “I buy everything in sight. It took my last ounce of control not to buy one of these in every color.
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
You can have everything you want. All you need is a plan. And how do we spell plan? B-U-D-G-E-T!
Gail Vaz-Oxlade (Debt-Free Forever: Take Control of Your Money and Your Life)
This seemed to be happening more and more lately out in Greater Los Angeles, among gatherings of carefree youth and happy dopers, where Doc had begun to notice older men, there and not there, rigid, unsmiling, that he knew he'd seen before, not the faces necessarily but a defiant posture, an unwillingness to blur out, like everyone else at the psychedelic events of those days, beyond official envelopes of skin. Like the operatives who'd dragged away Coy Harlingen the other night at that rally at the Century Plaza. Doc Knew these people, he'd seen enough of them in the course of business. They went out to collect cash debts, they broke rib cages, they got people fired, they kept an unforgiving eye on anything that might become a threat. If everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed to end and the faithless money-driven world to reassert its control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch, fondle, and molest, it would be agents like these, dutiful and silent, out doing the shitwork, who'd make it happen. Was it possible, that at every gathering--concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back east, wherever--those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear? 'Gee,' he said to himself out loud, 'I dunno...
Thomas Pynchon (Inherent Vice)
Human beings resemble peregrine falcons: they had the power and the ability to soar up to the skies, free and ethereal and unrestrained, but sometimes they would also, either under duress or of their own free will, accept captivity...She had also observed how a hood would be put on these noble raptors to make sure they would not panic. Seeing was knowing, and knowing was frightening...But underneath that hood where there were no directions, and the sky and the land melted into a swathe of black linen, though comforted, the falcon would still feel nervous, as if in preparation for a blow that could come at any moment. Years later now, it seemed to her that religion – and power and money and ideology and politics – acted like a hood too. All these superstitions and predictions and beliefs deprived human beings of sight, keeping them under control, but deep within weakening their self-esteem to such a point that they now feared anything, everything.
Elif Shafak (10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World)
I guess that's how they were able to do it, in the way they did, all at once, without anyone knowing beforehand. If there had still been portable money, it would have been more difficult. "It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time. "Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control. "I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen? "That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed at home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could point your finger at. ... "Newspapers were censored and some were closed down, for security reasons they said. The roadblocks began to appear, and Identipasses. Everyone approved of that, since it was obvious you couldn't be too careful.
Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1))
Steve Jobs: “When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and you're job is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.” By being open-minded and flexible, you open up the possibility of changing the world around you. As a result, you become more proactive rather than responsive to your emotions.
Charlotte Maloney (Emotional Maturity: Discover How to Control Your Emotions and Be More Mature (The Secrets of Emotional Maturity))
There's a reason that education sucks. And it's the same reason that it will never ever, ever be fixed. It's never going to get any better, don't look for it, be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now. The real owners. The big, wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, and city halls. They got the judges in their back pocket. And they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people, capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interest. That's right. They don't want people who are smart enough to figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don't want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough, to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs, with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now, they're coming for your Social Security money. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something, they'll get it. They'll get it all from you, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club.
George Carlin (Life Is Worth Losing)
One of my favorite words is a French word: sousveillance. It is the opposite of surveillance. Surveillance means to look from above; sousveillance means to look from below. In their dream of nation-states controlling all of our financial futures, they made one major miscalculation. It’s a hell of a lot harder for a few hundred thousand people to watch 7 1/2 billion. But what do you think happens when 7 1/2 billion of us stare back? When the panopticon turns around? When our financial systems, our communication systems, are private, and secrecy is an illusion that can’t be sustained? When crimes committed in the names of states and powerful corporations are vulnerable to hackers and whistleblowers and leakers? When everything eventually comes out? We have a great advantage because the natural balance of the system is one in which individuals can have privacy but the powerful cannot have secrecy anymore.
Andreas M. Antonopoulos (The Internet of Money)
Their little life is entirely controlled by the organization of the world. They think as the world thinks. They take their opinions ready-made from their favorite newspaper. Their very appearance is controlled by the world and its changing fashions. They all conform; it must be done; they dare not disobey; they are afraid of the consequences. That is tyranny, this is absolute control—clothing, hair style, everything, absolutely controlled. The mind of the world! ... Most lives are being controlled by it and governed by it, all their opinions, their language, the way they spend their money, what they desire, where they go, where they spend their holidays; it is all controlled, governed completely ... by this world, the mind of the world, the age of propaganda, the age of advertising, the mass mind, the mass man, the mass individual, without knowing it. Is it not tragic? But that is man in sin ... he is controlled by the mind of the world.
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Do you even feel anything, Chad? Will you for once stop walking around, all in control and f'ing calm? Do you have any idea what you all have done. I lost everything, Chad. Everything, when Kyle died. I lost myself. I had finally begun to build a new life with new friends. With people I thought cared about me. I have started to be just a little bit happy again. Was it too much to ask? Did I ask for too much by just wanting to have a little bit of a life again? Now, it’s all screwed up again and you walk around here like you don’t feel anything about what’s happened.” Chad spun around, and for only the second time since she’d known him, she saw the flash of anger so fierce her breath caught in her throat and she took an involuntary step back, away from him. Jennie knew Chad would never hurt her on purpose, but the anger rolling off of him was palpable. It seemed to force her backwards as if it had a life of its own, a power of its own. “Not feel anything, Jennie? Are you f'ing kidding me? I walk around here every day and I ache every f'ing minute I’m with you. I’m so twisted up with loving you and hating you, I can’t breathe. I can’t keep my hands off you, but I can’t let myself kiss you because I might lose myself in you. I can’t make love to you because I’m afraid you’ll pretend I’m him. I know you want his arms around you, not mine. I know you want it to be his baby inside you, not mine. And I know you can’t love me back, no matter what I do, because you’re still so in love with your husband, you can’t even begin to see me.” Chad didn’t stop and Jennie didn’t try to stop him. “And every day, I have to sit here and wonder how I’ll be a part of my baby’s life. I wonder if you’ll let me be in the delivery room, if you’ll let me help you name the baby. I wonder how much money I’d have to offer the people who live across the street from you to get them to sell me their house, just so I can see my child grow up. If you’ll let me...” Chad stopped as if he’d run out of steam. They stood in uneasy silence for a long time before Chad spoke again. He sounded worn out and bitter and angry, mirroring Jennie’s chaos of emotions. “Am I feeling anything? Yeah. I’m feeling some f'ing sh**, Jen.
Lori Ryan (Negotiation Tactics (Sutton Capital #3))
But for another thing, there's no law of nature which says that control over capital has to be in a few hands―that's like saying that political power has to be in a few hands. Why? There wasn't a law that said that the king and the nobles had to run everything, and there isn't a law that says that corporate owners and managers have to run everything either. These are social arrangements. They developed historically, they can be changed historically
Noam Chomsky (Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky)
Ruby: I’ve decided. I’m putting my Gary on a diet. Rosie: You’re putting him on a diet? How on earth can you control what your twenty-one-year-old son eats? Ruby: Oh it’s easy; I’ll just nail down everything to the floor. Rosie: So what kind of diet is it? Ruby: I don’t know. I bought a magazine, but there are so many stupid diets out there I don’t know which one to pick. Remember that ridiculous one that you and I did last year? The alphabet one where we had to eat foods beginning with a certain letter every day? Rosie: Oh yeah! How long did we do that for?! Ruby: Em . . . that would be 26 days of course Rosie Rosie: Oh . . . right . . . of course. You put on weight on the third day. Ruby: That’s because the third day was the lucky letter “C” . . . Cakes . . . mmmm Rosie: Well we made up for it on the last day. I was bloody starving on “Z” day; I was practically chasing zebras with a kitchen knife around the zoo. Could have eaten the zoo I suppose . . . Ruby: You should have done what I did, I ate like a queen. I became German for the day and ate “ze cakes” and “ze buns.” Oh I don’t know Rosie. I think I’ll just invent a diet of my own and give those stupid magazines a run for their money
Cecelia Ahern (Love, Rosie)
Many people lack discipline when it comes to saving money. What good is having a bunch of stuff if you’re struggling, in debt, or broke most of the time? So many people put up a front like they’ve got it going on, but they know the truth. They spend all of their money trying to look important, and/or keep up an image. Knowledge is everything! Educate yourself about money, investing, and saving. I encourage you to start investing in yourself instead of things! Set yourself up for a better future and start making better choices. Building wealth takes time! Have discipline. Save. Stay consistent. Be brave enough to change your spending habits. Be wise! Don’t allow money to control you. Strive to have a healthy relationship with money!
Stephanie Lahart
Very controlled and intelligent her voice now, controlled and intent, and her eyes still glittering. Yes you do, she says. You’ve fallen in love with someone, and you’re afraid. It’s the usual thing, you don’t like being vulnerable. And I suppose on top of that, she’s not a very suitable person. She has no money, and she puts up these pictures online, maybe you think people are laughing at you. And you’re looking back on how things were when you and I were together, how easy everything was, and everyone was jealous of us, and you just want that back again. For life to be easy.
Sally Rooney (Intermezzo)
The truest truths: Mortal lifetimes were short, inconsequential. Convictions were death sentences. Money couldn’t buy happiness, but nothing could buy happiness, so at least money could buy everything else. In terms of finding satisfaction, all a person was capable of controlling was himself.
Olivie Blake (The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1))
I had heard an amazing story that supported what the Archbishop was saying. When I met James Doty, he was the founder and director of the Center of Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford and the chairman of the Dalai Lama Foundation. Jim also worked as a full-time neurosurgeon. Years earlier, he had made a fortune as a medical technology entrepreneur and had pledged stock worth $30 million to charity. At the time his net worth was over $75 million. However, when the stock market crashed, he lost everything and discovered that he was bankrupt. All he had left was the stock that he had pledged to charity. His lawyers told him that he could get out of his charitable contributions and that everyone would understand that his circumstances had changed. “One of the persistent myths in our society,” Jim explained, “is that money will make you happy. Growing up poor, I thought that money would give me everything I did not have: control, power, love. When I finally had all the money I had ever dreamed of, I discovered that it had not made me happy. And when I lost it all, all of my false friends disappeared.” Jim decided to go through with his contribution. “At that moment I realized that the only way that money can bring happiness is to give it away.” •
Dalai Lama XIV (The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World)
Even when the income disparity is very much greater, people are sticky. Micronesians mostly stay where they were born, even though they are free to live and work in the US without a visa, where the average income is twenty times higher. Niger, next to Nigeria, is not depopulated even though it is six times poorer and there are no border controls between the countries. People like to stay in the communities they were born in, where everything is familiar and easy, and many require a substantial push to migrate – even to another location in the same nation, and even when it would be obviously beneficial. One study in Bangladesh found that a programme that offered subsidies to help rural people migrate to the city for work during the lean season didn’t work, even when workers could make substantially more money through seasonal migration.22 One problem is the lack of affordable housing and other facilities in cities, meaning people end up living illegally in cramped, unregulated spaces or in tents.
Gaia Vince (Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World)
I will say this about the upper echelon in France: they know how to spend money. From what I saw living in America, wealth is dedicated to elevating the individual experience. If you’re a well-off child, you get a car, or a horse. You go to summer camps that cost as much as college. And everything is monogrammed, personalized, and stamped, to make it that much easier for other people to recognize your net worth. …The French bourgeois don’t pine for yachts or garages with multiple cars. They don’t build homes with bowling alleys or spend their weekends trying to meet the quarterly food and beverage limit at their country clubs: they put their savings into a vacation home that all their family can enjoy, and usually it’s in France. They buy nice food, they serve nice wine, and they wear the same cashmere sweaters over and over for years. I think the wealthy French feel comfortable with their money because they do not fear it. It’s the fearful who put money into houses with even bedrooms and fifteen baths. It’s the fearful who drive around in yellow Hummers during high-gas-price months becasue if they’re going to lose their money tomorrow, at least other people will know that they are rich today. The French, as with almost all things, privilege privacy and subtlety and they don’t feel comfortable with excess. This is why one of their favorite admonishments is tu t’es laisse aller. You’ve lost control of yourself. You’ve let yourself go.
Courtney Maum (I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You)
Sister Aziza told us about the Jews. She described them in such a way that I imagined them as physically monstrous: they had horns on their heads, and noses so large they stuck right out of their faces like great beaks. Devils and djinns literally flew out of their heads to mislead Muslims and spread evil. Everything that went wrong was the fault of the Jews. The Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein, who had attacked the Islamic Revolution in Iran, was a Jew. The Americans, who were giving money to Saddam, were controlled by the Jews. The Jews controlled the world, and that was why we had to be pure: to resist this evil influence. Islam was under attack, and we should step forward and fight the Jews, for only if all Jews were destroyed would peace come for Muslims. I
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Infidel)
Your mind, what you learn, how hard you work, and everything you do directly controls how much money you make. It is a lot like working out or playing a video game. When you start, you are likely going to suck at it, get frustrated, and possibly even quit. This is why people consider it too hard and too risky. Well, it’s not. It just has a steep learning curve, and you are likely to fail at first.
Alex Becker (The 10 Pillars of Wealth: Mind-Sets of the World's Richest People)
Putin’s method, Steele said, was unseen. “Nothing was written down. Don’t expect me or anyone to produce a piece of paper saying please X bribe Y with this amount in this way. He’s not going to do this.” He added: “Putin is an ex-intelligence officer. Everything he does has to be deniable.” The oligarchs were brought in to disguise the Kremlin’s controlling role, Steele said, according to The Sunday Times.
Luke Harding (Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win)
The aid program that I am suggesting must not be used by the wealthy nations as a surreptitious means to control the poor nations. Such an approach would lead to a new form of paternalism and a neocolonialism which no self-respecting nation could accept. Ultimately, foreign aid programs must be motivated by a compassionate and committed effort to wipe poverty, ignorance and disease from the face of the earth. Money devoid of genuine empathy is like salt devoid of savor, good for nothing except to be trodden under foot of men. The West must enter into the program with humility and penitence and a sober realization that everything will not always “go our way.” It cannot be forgotten that the Western powers were but yesterday the colonial masters. The house of the West is far from in order, and its hands are far from clean.
Martin Luther King Jr. (Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?)
The most transient visitor to this planet, I thought, who picked up this paper could not fail to be aware, even from this scattered testimony, that England is under the rule of a patriarchy. Nobody in their senses could fail to detect the dominance of the professor. His was the power and the money and the influence. He was the proprietor of the paper and its editor and sub-editor. He was the Foreign Secretary and the judge. He was the cricketer; he owned the racehorses and the yachts. He Was the director of the company that pays two hundred per cent to its shareholders. He left millions to charities and colleges that were ruled by himself. He suspended the film actress in mid-air. He will decide if the hair on the meat axe is human; he it is who will acquit or convict the murderer, and hang him, or let him go free. With the exception of the fog he seemed to control everything. Yet he was angry.
Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own)
In a democracy, the government is the people," Milo explained. "We're people, aren't we?" So we might just as well keep the money and eliminate the middleman. Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry. If we pay the government everything we owe it, we'll only be encouraging governmental control and discouraging other individuals from bombing their own men and planes. We'll be taking away their incentive.
Joseph Heller (Something Happened)
Maybe you don't think it's helpful to hear how big the problem is and how we're making it worse without thinking about it. I agree: the size of the problem and the narrative of personal responsibility is destructive! It makes us feel guilty about everything we do, even though we had no idea and weren't responsible for setting up the cattle industry! It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to find out what type of fish is okay to eat, or which inexpensive cashmere sweater is okay to buy (which is not to say you should eat fish and wear cheap cashmere with abandon). Instead, it should be up to the company to produce cashmere responsible or not to catch and sell fish that shouldn't be caught and sold, since the companies making money from these activities are the experts (theoretically) who control how the product is made. That's a change we can demand companies make. We don't have to buy their products if they are unwilling to at least tell us where they come from.
Tatiana Schlossberg (Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have)
I guess that’s how they were able to do it, in the way they did, all at once, without anyone knowing beforehand. If there had still been portable money, it would have been more difficult. It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time. Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control. I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?
Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)
Life wisdom “When anger is not in control, there appears ‘I’; When desire is fulfilled, there enters ‘I’; When greed overtakes the need, there develops ‘I’; When desire is secured, emotional attachment takes over desire, there gains 'I', When pride is erected due to money, beauty, power, people, youthfulness, there is always 'I', When jealousy crawls over contentment, it gets into the grip of 'I', When good things enter life, ego dominates, and there maintains 'I'. When ‘I or Ego’ comes everything goes, when ‘Ego’ goes everything comes. Overcoming Ego brings peace and happiness
Venu CV
1. What in my life, if taken away, would alter my value or identity? 2. What causes an unhealthy change of attitude, personality, or focus when “it” becomes threatened? 3. What is the thing outside of God that you put everything else on hold for? I sat there in a tsunami of convictions. Rather than the arrogant, hard-edged, I’ve-heard-this-stuff-before reaction, I asked God the three questions. And lo and behold, He had some answers. Not surprisingly, I am unhealthily attached to the very things I’ll be giving up during 7: approval, stuff, appearances, money, recognition, control.
Jen Hatmaker (7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess)
In theory, if some holy book misrepresented reality, its disciples would sooner or later discover this, and the text’s authority would be undermined. Abraham Lincoln said you cannot deceive everybody all the time. Well, that’s wishful thinking. In practice, the power of human cooperation networks depends on a delicate balance between truth and fiction. If you distort reality too much, it will weaken you, and you will not be able to compete against more clear-sighted rivals. On the other hand, you cannot organise masses of people effectively without relying on some fictional myths. So if you stick to unalloyed reality, without mixing any fiction with it, few people will follow you. If you used a time machine to send a modern scientist to ancient Egypt, she would not be able to seize power by exposing the fictions of the local priests and lecturing the peasants on evolution, relativity and quantum physics. Of course, if our scientist could use her knowledge in order to produce a few rifles and artillery pieces, she could gain a huge advantage over pharaoh and the crocodile god Sobek. Yet in order to mine iron ore, build blast furnaces and manufacture gunpowder the scientist would need a lot of hard-working peasants. Do you really think she could inspire them by explaining that energy divided by mass equals the speed of light squared? If you happen to think so, you are welcome to travel to present-day Afghanistan or Syria and try your luck. Really powerful human organisations – such as pharaonic Egypt, the European empires and the modern school system – are not necessarily clear-sighted. Much of their power rests on their ability to force their fictional beliefs on a submissive reality. That’s the whole idea of money, for example. The government makes worthless pieces of paper, declares them to be valuable and then uses them to compute the value of everything else. The government has the power to force citizens to pay taxes using these pieces of paper, so the citizens have no choice but to get their hands on at least some of them. Consequently, these bills really do become valuable, the government officials are vindicated in their beliefs, and since the government controls the issuing of paper money, its power grows. If somebody protests that ‘These are just worthless pieces of paper!’ and behaves as if they are only pieces of paper, he won’t get very far in life.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
I had truly believed that if you worked hard enough, with enough creativity and dedication, it was possible to make your way to a greener pasture where everyone made pieces from a place of love and introspection. I had believed that good art prevails. Events like these remind me of money’s total power to control and leech the substance out of everything. Sure, you can be a star in this world, as long as you keep your patrons interested and are willing to compromise everything to make them more money. Not too many women can succeed at one time…just enough to make the rest of us hungry, to believe it’s possible.
Ling Ling Huang (Immaculate Conception)
We need to reject evil and embrace our faith-whatever it may be. We need to remind ourselves about how things used to be-how it should be. Only by informing others, can we defeat this corrupt system of organized chaos. Remember, everything that is happening now was planned long ago, and it is all happening for a specific purpose. The insane policies that are being made have never been about keeping us safe from terrorists; nor have they been about preserving freedom of speech, or just plain freedom. One thing is for certain: it is not about God, nor is it about Grandma or "apple pie". It is all about money and power and control-plain and simple.
Cass Swenson
Seconds turn into minutes and minutes into hours. It is all still the same. Or it no longer is. If I were to ask what has changed, perhaps nothing, but conceivably everything would be the befitting reply. I no longer feel the same. Loss preceded me, alienating my soul from the body. I feel I am gliding through an alley making a journey from the known towards the unknown. There is a deep abyss inside where sometime back, my heart used to beat and a noisy, rusty old machine has replaced my mind; solitarily creating useless noise. I don’t remember what day it is and since when have I been lying here. It must have been yesterday… or was it day before. I cannot recollect anything except the dull throbbing pain inside my brain. I can see the time, almost 9: 45, difficult to say which time of the day it is. The bigger hand is soon going to overshadow the smaller hand. It looks like a game of cat and mouse; the bigger hand chasing the smaller one. Anyone stronger in terms of physical appearance, money, power, fame or name tramples upon the weak ones - that is the rule of the world. There are only two possible reasons behind it, love or hate. When you love someone you want to control everything that person does and hence, sometimes, knowingly or unknowingly you squash them like melons. While on the other hand in the case of hate, there is no need to specify the reason for walking over someone like that. Hate is a strong reason in itself. I am confused as to what crushed me, was it love or hate? I somehow don’t like the sound of it – love, it in itself smells of treachery, for love is not a pure emotion. Lust and hatred are the only pure emotions. Love is camouflaged, for needs and desires. Desires – they are magical in their own way. They can be innocent. They can be monstrous. But they exist, no matter what, and many such needs and desires make us helpless slaves of the same. We hide these desires either in the realms of our mind or in the dusty corners of our hearts for we are scared…what if someone finds out what we desire. We give them identities so as to not let the real thing show. The only thing visible on the front is a mask we wear to deceive people or that’s what I thought. For I was deceived while I believed I am the deceiver. Or was I not? I debated as my mind once again tried to enter a sleep-induced trance.
Namrata (Time's Lost Atlas)
The most transient visitor to this planet, I thought, who picked up this paper could not fail to be aware, even from this scattered testimony, that England is under the rule of a patriarchy. Nobody in their senses could fail to detect the dominance of the professor. His was the power and the money and the influence. He was the proprietor of the paper and its editor and sub-editor. He was the Foreign Secretary and the Judge. He was the cricketer; he owned the racehorses and the yachts. He was the director of the company that pays two hundred per cent to its shareholders. He left millions to chanties and colleges that were ruled by himself. He suspended the film actress in mid-air. He will decide if the hair on the meat axe is human; he it is who will acquit or convict the murderer, and hang him, or let him go free. With the exception of the fog he seemed to control everything. Yet he was angry.
Virginia Woolf (A Room Of One's Own: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition)
That City of yours is a morbid excrescence. Wall Street is a morbid excrescence. Plainly it's a thing that has grown out upon the social body rather like -- what do you call it? -- an embolism, thrombosis, something of that sort. A sort of heart in the wrong place, isn't it? Anyhow -- there it is. Everything seems obliged to go through it now; it can hold up things, stimulate things, give the world fever or pain, and yet all the same -- is it necessary, Irwell? Is it inevitable? Couldn't we function economically quite as well without it? Has the world got to carry that kind of thing for ever? "What real strength is there in a secondary system of that sort? It's secondary, it's parasitic. It's only a sort of hypertrophied, uncontrolled counting-house which has become dominant by falsifying the entries and intercepting payment. It's a growth that eats us up and rots everything like cancer. Financiers make nothing, they are not a productive department. They control nothing. They might do so, but they don't. They don't even control Westminster and Washington. They just watch things in order to make speculative anticipations. They've got minds that lie in wait like spiders, until the fly flies wrong. Then comes the debt entanglement. Which you can break, like the cobweb it is, if only you insist on playing the wasp. I ask you again what real strength has Finance if you tackle Finance? You can tax it, regulate its operations, print money over it without limit, cancel its claims. You can make moratoriums and jubilees. The little chaps will dodge and cheat and run about, but they won't fight. It is an artificial system upheld by the law and those who make the laws. It's an aristocracy of pickpocket area-sneaks. The Money Power isn't a Power. It's respectable as long as you respect it, and not a moment longer. If it struggles you can strangle it if you have the grip...You and I worked that out long ago, Chiffan... "When we're through with our revolution, there will be no money in the world but pay. Obviously. We'll pay the young to learn, the grown-ups to function, everybody for holidays, and the old to make remarks, and we'll have a deuce of a lot to pay them with. We'll own every real thing; we, the common men. We'll have the whole of the human output in the market. Earn what you will and buy what you like, we'll say, but don't try to use money to get power over your fellow-creatures. No squeeze. The better the economic machine, the less finance it will need. Profit and interest are nasty ideas, artificial ideas, perversions, all mixed up with betting and playing games for money. We'll clean all that up..." "It's been going on a long time," said Irwell. "All the more reason for a change," said Rud.
H.G. Wells (The Holy Terror)
The Thirty-three Rules • Every negotiation is an agreement between two or more parties with all parties having the right to veto—the right to say “no.” • Your job is not to be liked. It is to be respected and effective. • Results are not valid goals. • Money has nothing to do with a valid mission and purpose. • Never, ever, spill your beans in the lobby—or anywhere else. • Never enter a negotiation—never make a phone call—without a valid agenda. • The only valid goals are those you can control: behavior and activity. • Mission and purpose must be set in the adversary’s world; our world must be secondary. • Spend maximum time on payside activity and minimum time on nonpayside activity. • You do not need it. You only want it. • No saving. You cannot save the adversary. • Only one person in a negotiation can feel okay. That person is the adversary. • All action—all decision—begins with vision. Without vision, there is no action. • Always show respect to the blocker. • All agreements must be clarified point by point and sealed three times (using 3+). • The clearer the picture of pain, the easier the decision-making process. • The value of the negotiation increases by multiples as time, energy, money, and emotion are spent. • No talking. • Let the adversary save face at all times. • The greatest presentation you will ever give is the one your adversary will never see. • A negotiation is only over when we want it to be over. • “No” is good, “yes” is bad, “maybe” is worse. • Absolutely no closing. • Dance with the tiger. • Our greatest strength is our greatest weakness (Emerson). • Paint the pain. • Mission and purpose drive everything. • Decisions are 100 percent emotional. • Interrogative-led questions drive vision. • Nurture. • No assumptions. No expectations. Only blank slate. • Who are the decision makers? Do you know all of them? • Pay forward.
Jim Camp (Start with No: The Negotiating Tools that the Pros Don't Want You to Know)
I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I eat and read and study. I can choose how I’m going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life—whether I will see them as curses or opportunities (and on the occasions when I can’t rise to the most optimistic viewpoint, because I’m feeling too damn sorry for myself, I can choose to keep trying to change my outlook). I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts. you need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select what clothes you’re gonna wear every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control. Drop everything else but that. Because if you can’t learn to master your thinking, you’re in deep trouble forever
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
In his book 30 Lessons for Living, gerontologist Karl Pillemer interviewed a thousand elderly Americans looking for the most important lessons they learned from decades of life experience. He wrote: No one—not a single person out of a thousand—said that to be happy you should try to work as hard as you can to make money to buy the things you want. No one—not a single person—said it’s important to be at least as wealthy as the people around you, and if you have more than they do it’s real success. No one—not a single person—said you should choose your work based on your desired future earning power. What they did value were things like quality friendships, being part of something bigger than themselves, and spending quality, unstructured time with their children. “Your kids don’t want your money (or what your money buys) anywhere near as much as they want you. Specifically, they want you with them,” Pillemer writes. Take it from those who have lived through everything: Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays.
Morgan Housel (The Psychology of Money)
All the love that had been accumulating through the lonely years of her childhood was in that kiss-Ian felt it in the soft lips parting willingly for his searching tongue, the delicate hands sliding through the hair at his nape. With unselfish ardor she offered it all to him, and Ian took it hungrily, feeling it moving from her to him, then flowing through his veins and mingling with his until the joy of it was shattering. She was everything he’d ever dreamed she could be and more. With an effort that was almost painful he dragged his mouth from hers, his hand still cupping the rumpled satin of her hair, his other hand holding her pressed to his rigid body, and Elizabeth stayed in his arms, seeming neither frightened nor offended by his rigid erection. “I love you,” he whispered, rubbing his jaw against her temple. “And you love me. I can feel it when you’re in my arms.” He felt her stiffen slightly and draw a shaky breath, but she either couldn’t or wouldn’t speak. She hadn’t thrown the words back in his face, however, so Ian continued talking to her, his hand roving over her back. “I can feel it, Elizabeth, but if you don’t admit it pretty soon, you’re going to drive me out of my mind. I can’t work. I can’t think. I make decisions and then I change my mind. And,” he teased, trying to lighten the mood by using the one topic sure to distract her, “that’s nothing to the money I squander whenever I’m under this sort of violent stress. It wasn’t just the gowns I bought, or the house on Promenade…” Still talking to her, he tipped her chin up, glorying in the gentle passion in her eyes, overlooking the doubt in their green depths. “If you don’t admit it pretty soon,” he teased, “I’ll spend us out of house and home.” Her delicate brows drew together in blank confusion, and Ian grinned, taking her hand from his chest, the emerald betrothal ring he had brought her unnoticed in his fingers. “When I’m under stress,” he emphasized, sliding the magnificent emerald onto her finger, “I buy everything in sight. It took my last ounce of control not to buy one of those in every color.
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel … total loss of all basic motor skills: blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue—severance of all connection between the body and the brain. Which is interesting, because the brain continues to function more or less normally … you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can’t control it. You approach the turnstiles leading into the Circus-Circus and you know that when you get there, you have to give the man two dollars or he won’t let you inside … but when you get there, everything goes wrong: you misjudge the distance to the turnstile and slam against it, bounce off and grab hold of an old woman to keep from falling, some angry Rotarian shoves you and you think: What’s happening here? What’s going on? Then you hear yourself mumbling: “Dogs fucked the Pope, no fault of mine. Watch out! … Why money? My name is Brinks; I was born … born? Get sheep over side … women and children to armored car … orders from Captain Zeep.
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
It is unlikely that those who provide housing, food, medicine or a host of other goods and services, can continue to provide us with the same quantity and quality of these when the costs involved in providing that quantity and quality of goods and services cannot be recovered. . This may not be immediately obvious, a reason why price controls are popular, but the consequences are long-lasting and usually get even worse over time. Homes do not disappear immediately when there is rent control, but they deteriorate over time without being replaced by newer and more suitable ones. Currently available medicines do not disappear when price controls are implemented, but new medicines for the treatment of cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's and others will probably not continue to be developed at the same speed, when the money to pay for their development is no longer there. Present. But everything takes time to be noticed and the memory of most people may be very short-term and they cannot connect the bad consequences they suffer with the popular policies they supported a few years ago.
Thomas Sowell (Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy)
I believe that social media, and the internet as a whole, have negatively impacted our ability to both think long-term and to focus deeply on the task in front of us. It is no surprise, therefore, that Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, prohibited his children from using phones or tablets—even though his business was to sell millions of them to his customers! The billionaire investor and former senior executive at Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, argues that we must rewire our brain to focus on the long term, which starts by removing social media apps from our phones. In his words, such apps, “wire your brain for super-fast feedback.” By receiving constant feedback, whether through likes, comments, or immediate replies to our messages, we condition ourselves to expect fast results with everything we do. And this feeling is certainly reinforced through ads for schemes to help us “get rich quick”, and through cognitive biases (i.e., we only hear about the richest and most successful YouTubers, not about the ones who fail). As we demand more and more stimulation, our focus is increasingly geared toward the short term and our vision of reality becomes distorted. This leads us to adopt inaccurate mental models such as: Success should come quickly and easily, or I don’t need to work hard to lose weight or make money. Ultimately, this erroneous concept distorts our vision of reality and our perception of time. We can feel jealous of people who seem to have achieved overnight success. We can even resent popular YouTubers. Even worse, we feel inadequate. It can lead us to think we are just not good enough, smart enough, or disciplined enough. Therefore, we feel the need to compensate by hustling harder. We have to hurry before we miss the opportunity. We have to find the secret that will help us become successful. And, in this frenetic race, we forget one of the most important values of all: patience. No, watching motivational videos all day long won’t help you reach your goals. But, performing daily consistent actions, sustained over a long period of time will. Staying calm and focusing on the one task in front of you every day will. The point is, to achieve long-term goals in your personal or professional life, you must regain control of your attention and rewire your brain to focus on the long term. To do so, you should start by staying away from highly stimulating activities.
Thibaut Meurisse (Dopamine Detox : A Short Guide to Remove Distractions and Train Your Brain to Do Hard Things (Productivity Series Book 1))
Anne Sexton, who died forty-two years ago today, did her best to respond to the legions of fans who wrote to her. The letter below, from August 1965, finds her dispensing unvarnished advice to an aspiring poet from Amherst. Read more of her correspondence in Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters. Your letter was very interesting, hard to define, making it hard on me somehow to set limits for you, advise or help in any real way. First of all let me tell you that I find your poems fascinating, terribly uneven … precious perhaps, flashes of brilliance … but the terrible lack of control, a bad use of rhyme and faults that I feel sure you will learn not to make in time. I am not a prophet but I think you will make it if you learn to revise, if you take your time, if you work your guts out on one poem for four months instead of just letting the miracle (as you must feel it) flow from the pen and then just leave it with the excuse that you are undisciplined. Hell! I’m undisciplined too, in everything but my work … Everyone in the world seems to be writing poems … but only a few climb into the sky. What you sent shows you COULD climb there if you pounded it into your head that you must work and rework these uncut diamonds of yours. If this is impossible for you my guess is that you will never really make it … As for madness … hell! Most poets are mad. It doesn’t qualify us for anything. Madness is a waste of time. It creates nothing. Even though I’m often crazy, and I am and I know it, still I fight it because I know how sterile, how futile, how bleak … nothing grows from it and you, meanwhile, only grow into it like a snail. Advice … Stop writing letters to the top poets in America. It is a terrible presumption on your part. I never in my life would have the gall (sp?) to write Randall Jarrell out of the blue that way and all my life I have wanted to do so. It’s out of line … it isn’t done. I mean they get dozens of fan letters a day that they have no time to respond to and I’m sure dozens of poems. Meanwhile, these poets (fans of whatever) should be contacting other young poets on their way—not those who have made it, who sit on a star and then have plenty of problems, usually no money, usually the fear their own writing is going down the sink hole … make contact with others such as you. They are just as lonely, just as ready, and will help you far more than the distant Big Name Poet … I’m not being rejecting, Jon, I’m being realistic.
Anne Sexton
When I’m under stress,” he emphasized, sliding the magnificent emerald onto her finger, “I buy everything in sight. It took my last ounce of control not to buy one of those in every color.” Her eyes lifted from his smiling lips, dropped to the enormous jewel on her finger, and then widened in shock. “Oh, but-“ she exclaimed, staring at it and straightening in his arms. “It’s glorious. I do mean that, but I couldn’t let you-really, I couldn’t. Ian,” she burst out anxiously, sending a tremor through him when she called him by name, “I can’t let you do this. You’ve been extravagantly generous already.” She touched the huge stone almost reverently, then gave her head a practical shake. “I don’t need jewels, really I don’t. You’re doing this because of that stupid remark I made about someone offering me jewels as large as my palm, and now you’ve bought one nearly that large!” “Not quite,” he chuckled. “Why, a stone like this would pay for irrigating Havenhurst and all the servants’ wages for years and years and years, and food to-“ She reached to slide it off her finger. “Don’t!” he warned on a choked laugh, linking his hands behind her back. “I-“ he thought madly for some way to stop her objections-“I cannot possibly return it,” he said. “It’s part of a matched set.” “You don’t mean there’s more!” “I’m afraid so, though I meant to surprise you with them tonight. There’s a necklace and bracelet and earrings.” “Oh, I see,” she said, making a visible effort not to stare at her ring. “Well, I suppose…if it was a purchase of several pieces, the ring alone probably didn’t cost as much as it would have…Do not tell me,” she said severely, when his shoulders began to shake with suppressed mirth, “you actually paid full price for all of the pieces!” Laughing, Ian put his forehead against hers, and he nodded. “It’s very fortunate,” she said, protectively putting her fingers against the magnificent ring, “that I’ve agreed to marry you.” “If you hadn’t,” he laughed, “God knows what I would have bought.” “Or how much you would have paid for it,” she chuckled, cuddling in his arms-for the first time of her own volition. “Do you really do that?” she asked a moment later. “Do what?” he gasped, tears of mirth blurring his vision. “Spend money heedlessly when you’re disturbed about something?” “Yes,” he lied in a suffocated, laughing voice. “You’ll have to stop doing it.” “I’m going to try.” “I could help you.” “Please do.” “You may place yourself entirely in my hands.” “I’m very much looking forward to that.” It was the first time Ian had ever kissed a woman while he was laughing.
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
Know What You Believe What are your values today with regard to your work and your career? Do you believe in the values of integrity, hard work, dependability, creativity, cooperation, initiative, ambition, and getting along well with people? People who live these values in their work are vastly more successful and more highly esteemed than people who do not. What are your values with regard to your family? Do you believe in the importance of unconditional love, continuous encouragement and reinforcement, patience, forgiveness, generosity, warmth, and attentiveness? People who practice these values consistently with the important people in their lives are much happier than people who do not. What are your values with regard to money and financial success? Do you believe in the importance of honesty, industry, thrift, frugality, education, excellent performance, quality, and persistence? People who practice these values are far more successful in their financial lives than those who do not, and they achieve their financial goals far faster as well. What about your health? Do you believe in the importance of self-discipline, self-mastery, and self-control with regard to diet, exercise, and rest? Do you set high standards for health and fitness and then work every day to live up to those standards? People who practice these values live longer, healthier lives than people who do not.
Brian Tracy (Goals!: How to Get Everything You Want -- Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible)
A second element in the creation of commercial value is scarcity, the separation of people from whatever they might want or need. In artificial environments, where humans are separated from the sources of their survival, everything obtains a condition of relative scarcity and therefore value. There is the old story of the native living on a Pacific island, relaxing in a house on the beach, picking fruit from the tree and spearing fish in the water. A businessman arrives on the island, buys all the land, cuts down the trees and builds a factory. Then he hires the native to work in it for money so that someday the native can afford canned fruit and fish from the mainland, a nice little cinder-block house near the beach with a view of the water, and weekends off to enjoy it. The moment people move off land which has directly supported them, the necessities of life are removed from individual control. The things people could formerly produce for their survival must now be paid for. You may be living on the exact spot where a fruit tree once fed people. Now the fruit comes from five hundred miles away and costs thirty-five cents apiece. It is in the separation that the opportunity for profit resides. When the basic necessities are not scarce—in those places where food is still wild and abundant, for example—economic value can only be applied to new items. Candy bars, bottled or chemical milk, canned tuna, electrical appliances and CocaCola have all been intensively marketed in countries new to the market system. Because these products hadn’t existed in those places before, they are automatically relatively scarce and potentially valuable.
Jerry Mander (Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television)
follow you. If you used a time machine to send a modern scientist to ancient Egypt, she would not be able to seize power by exposing the fictions of the local priests and lecturing the peasants on evolution, relativity and quantum physics. Of course, if our scientist could use her knowledge in order to produce a few rifles and artillery pieces, she could gain a huge advantage over pharaoh and the crocodile god Sobek. Yet in order to mine iron ore, build blast furnaces and manufacture gunpowder the scientist would need a lot of hard-working peasants. Do you really think she could inspire them by explaining that energy divided by mass equals the speed of light squared? If you happen to think so, you are welcome to travel to present-day Afghanistan or Syria and try your luck. Really powerful human organisations – such as pharaonic Egypt, the European empires and the modern school system – are not necessarily clear-sighted. Much of their power rests on their ability to force their fictional beliefs on a submissive reality. That’s the whole idea of money, for example. The government makes worthless pieces of paper, declares them to be valuable and then uses them to compute the value of everything else. The government has the power to force citizens to pay taxes using these pieces of paper, so the citizens have no choice but to get their hands on at least some of them. Consequently, these bills really do become valuable, the government officials are vindicated in their beliefs, and since the government controls the issuing of paper money, its power grows. If somebody protests that ‘These are just worthless pieces of paper!’ and behaves as if they are only pieces of paper, he won’t get very far in life.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
Animals are the lower intelligent of creatures, yet God illustrates man as one of them. Why? To demonstrate to us how careless, how thoughtless, and sometimes how cruel and low-life we can be without him. Without God, we go through a hard, disappointing, and dreadful life. We are like fearful, untrained, and bitter children that have played all day and are afraid to go to sleep at night, thinking we are going to miss out or be left out of things. A sailor out on a stormy sea needs a strong sail and anchor for the days and a lighthouse for the nights to survive. This is a good illustration of witnessing. We draw from one another’s strength for the day and mediate on it in the nights in accordance with God’s Word. God has faded out of the mind of this generation, we like immature children, believe that the Toyland of material wealth is a sufficient world. Yet houses, cars, and money really do not fulfill. Abraham begot Isaac, and Isaac begot Jacob – a generation of God-fearing men. But in the next generation, God was not the God of Isaac. He had faded and became second place in their lives. Even in the mother’s womb, there was a struggle for honor and success. Jacob stole his brother’s birthright. Morals were decaying, rottenness appeared. The same things have happened with us. Our whole nation is reaping the results of a fading faith and trust, which is producing decaying morals and a decaying country. We are morally out of control. Unless we, like Jacob, who when frightened for his life desired a moral renewal, acknowledge that we are wrong and find God in the process. We must seek God with our whole hearts. The future of this world is in the hands of the believers. God has left everything in the hands of the church. Therefore, we must witness. An evangelical team must go out and bring the people back to the Garden of Eden as God had originally planned. Grace is always available!
Rosa Pearl Johnson
Nothing you've been through has been wasted. I know at times you feel you've wasted time, moments, and years over what you can't regain again — a job, a marriage, a relationship, your health, the sacrifices, your time and service, and giving up something you love for God, that broke your heart. You sit back and wonder, "Will I ever be happy again? Was everything I've been through worth the pain, the tears, the sleepless nights, the embarrassment." The Lord is saying, "It's just preparation." Where you are now is no accident. What has happened to you didn't take God by surprise. He already initiated a plan of escape before you were formed; mistakes, setbacks, disappointments, things outside your control.. The plan was already made! I don't know your story but only you and God know your story. He took you from bad company, He took you from suicide, He took you when you were at your lowest, He took you when nobody wanted you, He took you when your money was low, Why? Because He saw potential in you! As God as my witness it gets lonely at times. Life can be fearful when you don't know what to expect. When you feel everything has been stripped away...When you feel there's no hope... When you wonder how much longer do I have to wait. Who wants to feel rejection or disappointments.. But it's in those moments when we experience the faithfulness of God! I want to encourage whoever I'm speaking to, to hold on! Before Joseph became Prime Minister of Egypt he was in prison for years because of his brothers. He wasn't expecting that... In other words what God has for you is something bigger than you've imagined. It's so much greater and better than what you had at first. It's something you never thought about or even prayed for because nothing you've been through has been wasted. Your situation is going change suddenly because all it did was reposition you for a blessing. God is getting ready to move! You're frustrated because you're on the verge. You're restless because you're on the verge. Your moment is coming sooner than you think!
Susan Samaroo
The population, who are, ultimately, indifferent to public affairs and even to their own interests, negotiate this indifference with an equally spectral partner and one that is similarly indifferent to its own will: the government [Ie pouvoir] . This game between zombies may stabilize in the long term. The Year 2000 will not take place in that an era of indifference to time itself - and therefore to the symbolic term of the millennium - will be ushered in by negotiation. Nowadays, you have to go straight from money to money, telegraphically so to speak, by direct transfer (that is the viral side of the matter). A viral revolution, then, more akin to the Glass Bead Game than to the steam engine, and admirably personified in Bernard Tapie's playboy face. For the look of money is reflected in faces. Gone are the hideous old capitalists, the old-style industrial barons wearing the masks of the suffering they have inflicted. Now there are only dashing playboys, sporty and sexual, true knights of industry, wearing the mask of the happiness they spread all around themselves. The world put on a show of despair after 1968. It's been putting on a big show of hope since 1980. No more tears, alright? Reaganite optimism, the pump ing up of the dollar. Fabius's glossy new look. Patriotic conviviality. Reluctance prohibited. The old pessimism was produced by the idea that things were getting worse and worse. The new pessimism is produced by the fact that everything is getting better and better. Supercooled euphoria. Controlled anaesthesia. I should like to see the equivalent of Bernard Tapie in the world of business emerge in the world of concepts. Buying up failing concepts, swallowing them up, dusting them off (firing all the deadbeats who are in the way), putting them back into circulation with a dynamic virginity, sending them shooting up on the Stock Exchange and then abandoning them afterwards like dogs. Some people do this very well. It is perhaps better to save tired concepts by maintaining them in a super cooled state like unemployed labour, or locking them away in interactive data banks kept alive on a respirator.
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories)
When a country’s economy is in trouble—when it has a balance of trade deficit, for instance, and when its debts are mounting—and when the currency, therefore, is declining in value because everybody can see that the economy is bad, politicians, throughout history, have found a way of making things worse with the imposition of exchange controls. They run to the press and they say, “Listen, all you God-fearing Americans, Germans, Russians, whatever you are, we have a temporary problem in the financial market and it is caused by these evil speculators who are driving down the value of our currency—there is nothing wrong with our currency, we are a strong country with a sound economy, and if it were not for these speculators everything would be OK.” Diverting attention away from the real cause of the problem, which is their own mismanagement of the economy, politicians look to three crowds of people to blame for the regrettable situation. After the speculators come bankers and foreigners. Nobody likes bankers anyway, not even in good times; in bad times, everybody likes them less, because everybody sees them as rich and growing richer off the bad turn of events. Foreigners as a target are equally safe, because foreigners cannot vote. They do not have a say-so in national affairs, and remember, their food smells bad. Politicians will even blame journalists: if reporters did not write about our tanking economy, our economy would not be tanking. So we are going to enact this temporary measure, they say. To stem the scourge of a declining currency, we are going to make it impossible, or at least difficult, for people to take their money out of the country—it will not affect most of you because you do not travel or otherwise spend cash overseas. (See Chapter 9 and the Bernanke delusion.) Then they introduce serious exchange controls. They are always “temporary,” yet they always go on for years and years. Like anything else spawned by the government, once they are in place, a bureaucracy grows up around them. A constituency now arises whose sole purpose is to defend exchange controls and thereby assure their longevity. And they are always disastrous for a country. The free flow of capital stops. Money is trapped inside your country. And the country stops being as competitive as it once was.
Jim Rogers (Street Smarts: Adventures on the Road and in the Markets)
The Inner Critic really wants you to be okay. It really wants you to make it in the world, to have a good job, to make enough money. It really wants you to be loved, to be successful, to be accepted, to have a family. It developed in your early years to protect your vulnerability by helping you to adapt to the world around you and to meet its requirements, whatever they might be. In order to do its job properly, it needed to curb your natural inclinations and to make you acceptable to others by criticizing and correcting your behavior before other people could criticize or reject you. In this way, it reasoned, it could earn love and protection for you as well as save you much shame and hurt. However, the Inner Critic often does not know when to stop. It does not know when enough is enough. It has a tendency to grow until it is out of control and begins to undermine us and to do real damage. Its original intent gets lost in the sands of time. Like a well-trained CIA agent, the Inner Critic has learned how to infiltrate every portion of your life, checking you out in minute detail for weakness and imperfections. Since its main job is to protect you from being too vulnerable in the world, it must know everything about you that might be open to attack from the outside. But, like a renegade CIA agent, at some point the Critic oversteps its bounds, takes matters into its own hands, and begins to operate on its own agenda. The information, which was originally supposed to be for your overall defense and to promote your general well-being, is now being used against you, the very person it was meant to protect. With the Critic’s original aims and purposes forgotten, all that is left for it is the excitement of the chase and the wonderfully triumphant feeling of conquest, as it operates secretly and independently of any outside control. When the Critic starts to outgrow its initial usefulness in this way, there is real trouble. At this point, the Inner Critic makes you feel dreadful about yourself. With your Inner Critic watching your every move, you become self-conscious, awkward, and ever more fearful about making a mistake. You may even stop trying because the Critic tells you that you are going about things all wrong and will undoubtedly fail. Although, underneath all of this, the Critic may want you to be so perfect that you will not fail, its effect is to block any attempts you might make. The Inner Critic kills your creativity. How can you possibly try anything new or different when you know that you will do something wrong?
Hal Stone (Embracing Your Inner Critic: Turning Self-Criticism into a Creative Asset)
As a child, Callum never sympathized much with storybook villains, who were always clinging to some sort of broad, unspecified drive. It wasn’t the depravity that unnerved him, but the desperation of it all; the need, the compulsion, which always destroyed them in the end. That was the distasteful thing about villains, really. Not the manner in which they went about their business, which was certainly gruesome and morally corrupt, but the fact that they desired things so intensely. The heroes were always reluctant, always pushed into their roles, martyring themselves. Callum didn’t like that, either, but at least it made sense. Villains were far too proactive. Must they participate in the drudgery of it all for some interminable cause? Taking over the world was a mostly nonsensical agenda. Have control of these puppets, with their empty heads and their pitchforked mobs? Why? Wanting anything—beauty, love, omnipotence, absolution—was the natural flaw in being human, but the choice to waste away for anything made the whole indigestible. A waste. Simple choices were what registered to Callum as most honestly, the truest truths: fairy-tale peasants need money for dying child, accepts whatever consequence follow. The rest of the story—about rewards of choosing good or the ill-fated outcomes of desperation and vice—we’re always too lofty, a pretty but undeniable lie. Cosmic justice wasn’t real. Betrayal was all too common. For better or worse, people did not get what they deserved. Callum had always tended toward the assassins in the stories, the dutiful soldiers, those driven by personal reaction rather than on some larger moral cause. Perhaps it was a small role to serve on the whole, but at least it was rational, comprehensible beyond fatalistic. Take the huntsman who failed to kill Snow White, for example. An assassin acting on his own internal compass. Whether humanity as a whole won or lost as a result of his choice? Unimportant. He didn’t raise an army, didn’t fight for good, didn’t interfere much with the queen’s other evils. It wasn’t the whole world at stake; it was never about destiny. Callum admired that, the ability to take a moral stance and hold it. It was only about whether the huntsman could live with his decision—because however miserable or dull or uninspired, life was the only thing that mattered in the end. The truest truths: Mortal lifetimes were short, inconsequential. Convictions were death sentences. Money couldn’t buy happiness, but nothing could buy happiness, so at least money could buy everything else. In terms of finding satisfaction, all a person was capable of controlling was himself.
Olivie Blake (The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1))
The point of power is always in the present moment. This is where we begin to make changes. What a liberating idea. We can begin to let the old nonsense go. Right now. The smallest beginning will make a difference. When you were a tiny baby, you were pure joy and love. You knew how important you were; you felt that you were the center of the universe. You had such courage that you asked for what you wanted and you expressed all your feelings openly. You loved yourself totally—every part of your body, including your feces. You knew that you were perfect. And that is the truth of your being. All the rest is learned nonsense and can be unlearned. How often have we said, “That’s the way I am,” or “That’s the way it is.” What we’re really saying is that it is what we “believe to be true for us.” Usually what we believe is only someone else’s opinion that we’ve accepted and incorporated into our own belief system. It fits in with other things that we believe. If we were taught as a child that the world is a frightening place, then everything we hear that fits in with that belief we will accept as true for us—for example: “Don’t trust strangers,” “Don’t go out at night,” “People cheat you,” and so on. On the other hand, if we were taught early in life that the world is a safe and joyous place, then we would believe other things, such as: “Love is everywhere,” “People are so friendly,” and “Money comes to me easily.” Life experiences mirror our beliefs. We seldom sit down and question our beliefs. For instance, I could ask myself: “Why do I believe that it’s difficult for me to learn? Is that really true? Is it true for me now? Where did that belief come from? Do I still believe it simply because a first-grade teacher told me so over and over? Would I be better off if I dropped that belief?” Stop for a moment and catch your thought. What are you thinking right now? If thoughts shape your life and experiences, would you want this thought to become true for you? If it’s a thought of worry, anger, hurt, or revenge, how do you think that this thought will come back for you? If we want a joyous life, we must think joyous thoughts. Whatever we send out mentally or verbally will come back to us in like form. Take a little time to listen to the words you say. If you hear yourself saying something three times, write it down. It has become a pattern for you. At the end of a week, look at the list you’ve made and you’ll see how your words fit your experiences. Be willing to change your words and thoughts and watch your life change. The way to control your life is to control your choice of words and thoughts. No one thinks in your mind but you.
Louise L. Hay (Heal Your Body: The Mental Causes for Physical Illness and the Metaphysical Way to Overcome Them)
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I was getting my knife sharpened at the cutlery shop in the mall,” he said. It was where he originally bought the knife. The store had a policy of keeping your purchase razor sharp, so he occasionally brought it back in for a free sharpening. “Anyway, it was that day that I met this Asian male. He was alone and really nice looking, so I struck up a conversation with him. Well, I offered him fifty bucks to come home with me and let me take some photos. I told him that there was liquor at my place and indicated that I was sexually attracted to him. He was eager and cooperative so we took the bus to my apartment. Once there, I gave him some money and he posed for several photos. I offered him the rum and Coke Halcion-laced solution and he drank it down quickly. We continued to drink until he passed out, and then I made love to him for the rest of the afternoon and early evening. I must have fallen asleep, because when I woke up it was late. I checked on the guy. He was out cold, still breathing heavily from the Halcion. I was out of beer and walked around the corner for another six-pack but after I got to the tavern, I started drinking and before I knew it, it was closing time. I grabbed my six-pack and began walking home. As I neared my apartment, I noted a lot of commotion, people milling about, police officers, and a fire engine. I decided to see what was going on, so I came closer. I was surprised to see they were all standing around the Asian guy from my apartment. He was standing there naked, speaking in some kind of Asian dialect. At first, I panicked and kept walking, but I could see that he was so messed up on the Halcion and booze that he didn’t know who or where he was. “I don’t really know why, Pat, but I strode into the middle of everyone and announced he was my lover. I said that we lived together at Oxford and had been drinking heavily all day, and added that this was not the first time he left the apartment naked while intoxicated. I explained that I had gone out to buy some more beer and showed them the six-pack. I asked them to give him a break and let me take him back home. The firemen seemed to buy the story and drove off, but the police began to ask more questions and insisted that I take them to my apartment to discuss the matter further. I was nervous but felt confident; besides, I had no other choice. One cop took him by the arm and he followed, almost zombie-like. “I led them to my apartment and once inside, I showed them the photos I had taken, and his clothes neatly folded on the arm of my couch. The cops kept trying to question the guy but he was still talking gibberish and could not answer any of their questions, so I told them his name was Chuck Moung and gave them a phony date of birth. I handed them my identification and they wrote everything down in their little notebooks. They seemed perturbed and talked about writing us some tickets for disorderly conduct or something. One of them said they should take us both in for all the trouble we had given them. “As they were discussing what to do, another call came over their radio. It must have been important because they decided to give us a warning and advised me to keep my drunken partner inside. I was relieved. I had fooled the authorities and it gave me a tremendous feeling. I felt powerful, in control, almost invincible. After the officers left, I gave the guy another Halcion-filled drink and he soon passed out. I was still nervous about the narrow escape with the cops, so I strangled him and disposed of his body.
Patrick Kennedy (GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal")
only the dead keep secrets." "it is not easy. Taking a life, even when we knew it was required." "most people want only to be cared for. If I had no softness, I'd get nowhere at all." "a flaw of humanity. The compulsion to be unique, which is at war with the desire to belong to a single identifiable sameness." "someone always gains, just like someone always loses." "most women are less in love with the partners they choose than they are simply desperate for their approval, starving for their devotion. They want most often to be touched as no one else can touch them, and most of them inaccurately assume this requires romance. But the moment we realize we can feel fulfilled without carrying the burdens of belonging to another, that we can experience rapture without being someone's other half, and therefore beholden to their weaknesses, to their faults and failures and their many insufferable fractures, then we're free, aren't we? " " enough, for once, to feel, and nothing else. " " there was no stopping what one person could believe. " " I noticed that if I did certain things, said things in certain way, or held her eye contact while I did them, I could make her... Soften toward me. " " I think I've already decided what I'm going to do, and I just hope it's the right thing. But it isn't, or maybe it is. But I suppose it doesn't matter, because I've already started, and looking back won't help. " " luck is a matter of probabilities. " "you want to believe that your hesitation makes you good, make you feel better? It doesn't. Every single one of us is missing something. We are all too powerful, too extraordinary, and don't you see it's because we're riddled with vacancies? We are empty and trying to fill, lighting ourselves on fire just to prove that we are normal, that we are ordinary. That we, like anything, can burn. " " ask yourself where power comes from, if you can't see the source, don't trust it. " " an assassin acting on his own internal compass. Whether he lived or died as a result of his own choice? Unimportant. He didn't raise an army didn't fight for good, didn't interfere much with the queen's other evils. It was whether or not he could live with his own decision because life was the only thing that truly matters. " " the truest truth : mortal lifetimes were short, inconsequential. Convictions were death sentences. Money couldn't buy happiness, but nothing could buy happiness, so at least money could buy everything else. In term of finding satisfaction, all a person was capable of controlling was himself. " " humans were mostly sensible animals. They knew the dangers of erratic behavior. It was a chronic condition, survival. My intention is as same as others. Stand taller, think smarter, be better. " " she couldn't remember what version of her had put herself into that relationship, into that life, or somehow into this shape, which still looked and felt as it always had but wasn't anymore. " " conservative of energy meant that there must be dozens of people in the world who didn't exist because of she did. " " what replace feelings when there were none to be had? " " the absence of something was never as effective as the present of something. " "To be suspended in nothing, he said, was to lack all motivation, all desire. It was not numbness which was pleasurable in fits, but functional paralysis. Neither to want to live nor to die, but to never exist. Impossible to fight." "apology accepted. Forgiveness, however, declined." "there cannot be success without failure. No luck without unluck." "no life without death?" "Everything collapse, you will, too. You will, soon.
Olivie Blake (The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1))
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Life wisdom “When anger is not in control, there appears ‘I’; When desire is fulfilled, there enters ‘I’; When greed overtakes the need, there develops ‘I’; When desire is secured, emotional attachment takes over desire, there gains 'I', When pride is erected due to money, beauty, power, people, youthfulness, there is always 'I', When jealousy crawls over contentment, it gets into the grip of 'I', When good things enter life, ego dominates, and there maintains 'I'. When ‘I or Ego’ comes everything goes, when ‘Ego’ goes everything comes. Overcoming Ego brings peace and happiness
Venu CV
AND A GOOD DAY So I went out and fired up the car and everything was smooth and I went to the market and I got everything I wanted and the checkline had no line and I had money in my account and I drove home singing and the traffic parted way and all the signals were green and I was happy and I was in control and I smiled at the people and the people smiled at me and I had the world wired.
Michael Andrews (The Poet from The City of The Angels)
Money power controls the levers of power because it controls markets, economies and everything that flows from them. Our reality is obscured by layers of deception. Most of what we think we know is wrong and realising that is our first step to freedom.
Clive Menzies
It is important to understand that while those who work within institutional hierarchy are complicit in the crimes against us all, compartmentalisation and conditioning ensure few understand the implications of their actions and decisions. Whether we’re referring to governments, religion, law, banking, media, commerce, technology, academia or the military-security-intelligence complex, they are all controlled by the same money power because money is key to controlling everything.
Clive Menzies
The ideal woman, in other words, is always optimizing. SHe takes advantage of technology, both in the way she broadcasts her image and in the meticulous improvement of that image itself. Her hair looks expensive. She spends lots of money taking care of her skin, a process that has taken on the holy aspect of a spiritual ritual and the mundane regularity of setting a morning alarm. The work formerly carried out by makeup has been embedded directly into her face: her cheekbones or lips have been plumped up or some lines filled in, and her eyelashes are lengthened every four weeks by a professional wielding individual lashes and glue. The same is true of her body, which no longer requires the traditional enhancements of clothing or strategic underwear; it has been pre-shaped by exercise that ensures there is little to conceal or rearrange. Everything about this woman has been preemptively controlled ot th epinit that she can afford the impression of spontaneity and, more important, the sensation of it
Jia Tolentino (Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion)
Daniel Mas Masumoto: The blade slices into the soil. My muscles tense and push the shovel into the moist ground. Dark and damp, the sweet warm smell of wet earth…I can’t count the thousands of shovelfuls of earth I have moved in my life. But I like to think of the thousands that lie in my future, if I am fortunate. Spring irrigation brings life to the orchards and vineyards. Peaches ripen and the scent of bloom lingers in the air…I guide the water into my fields in an act of renewal, I think of Paul, a farmer and oil painter friend. He enjoys experimenting with green, capturing the subtle nuances of a fresh leaf or the thriving growth of mid-spring or the weak yellow green of a cover crop on bad soil… Paul knows his paintings work when the farmers gravitate toward a few, attracted by the colors, and begin talking about his greens. The true green of a field has depth, like the mysterious colors of a clear by deep lake. Each shade has meaning we interpret differently. Paul says farmers are his best art critics, we know more of greens than anyone else. I’ve lost raisin crops, peach harvests, whole trees and vines. I’ve lost money, my time, and my labor. I’ve lost my temper, my patience, and, at time, hope. Most of the time, it’s due to things beyond my control, like the weather, market prices, or insects or disease. Ironically, the moment I step off my farm I enter a world where it seems that everything, life and nature, is regulated and managed. Homes are built to insulate families from the outside weather. People work in climate controlled environments designed to minimize the impact of weather. In America, a lack of control means failure…I’ve abandoned my attempts to control and compete with nature, but letting go has been a challenge. I’m trying to listen to my farm. Before I had not reason to hear the sounds of nature. The sole strategy of conventional farming seems to be dominance. Now, with each passing week, I venture into fields full of life and change, clinging to a belief in my work and a hope that it’s working.
David Landis Barnhill
Understanding time clearly—how it works and how to take control of it—and understanding your Self and your Self's composition and relation with everything else physical and nonphysical is of high importance if you wish to experience massive wealth “fast.” It is all a matter of expanded consciousness, right state, right thought, and right choice.
David Cameron Gikandi (A Happy Pocket Full of Money, Expanded Study Edition: Infinite Wealth and Abundance in the Here and Now)
The key idea here, which Epicurus takes from Plato, is to bring our desires under control. Unhappiness results when people become too invested in satisfying nonnecessary desires, especially when, as so often happens, such desires become insatiable. For “nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little.”23 Exactly how and why desires become insatiable is an interesting question. In How Much Is Enough? Robert and Edward Skidelsky hypothesize that a proclivity to always want more is rooted in human nature since it is natural to be always comparing ourselves with others, and we do this by reference to various objects of desire—for instance, wealth, income, power, or honors. In premodern societies this tendency is kept in check by religion and traditional mores. These provide a concept of the good life that sets limits to how much of anything it makes sense for a person to want. But capitalism, they argue, “has inflamed our innate tendency to insatiability by releasing it from the bounds of custom and religion within which it was formerly confined.”24 It has done this in several ways: through advertising; by encouraging everyone, not just the better off, to compete for status through buying stuff; by pushing an ideology that applauds incessant striving for more; and by “monetizing” the economy—that is, translating the value of everything into how much it yields or will sell for—a shift that encourages people to want money for its own sake.
Emrys Westacott (The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less)
Inwardly their spirit was utterly commercial, everything was seen by them in terms of money. It was their barrier, their defence, their hope for the future, their support for the present, it raised them above their fellowmen, and with it they warded off evil. The only mental qualities that they respected were those which produced money in substantial quantities, it was their one criterion of success, it was power and it was glory. To say that a man was poor was to label him a rotter, bad at his job, idle, feckless, immoral. If it was somebody whom they really rather liked, in spite of this cancer, they could add that he had been unlucky. They had taken care to insure against this deadly evil in many ways. That it should not overwhelm them through such cataclysms beyond their control as war or revolution they had placed huge sums of money in a dozen different countries; they owned ranches, and estancias, and South African farms, an hotel in Switzerland, a plantation in Malaya, and they possessed many fine diamonds, not sparkling round Linda’s lovely neck to be sure, but lying in banks, stone by stone, easily portable.
Nancy Mitford (The Pursuit of Love)
Years later now, it seemed to Nalan that religion – and power and money and ideology and politics – acted like a hood too. All these superstitions and predictions and beliefs deprived human beings of sight, keeping them under control, but deep within weakening their self-esteem to such a point that they now feared anything, everything.
Elif Shafak (10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World)
MAKING BLISS BRAIN A HABIT I want Bliss Brain to become a habit for you, as it is for the One Percent. Once you experience the neurochemicals of bliss I describe in Chapter 5, and they start to condition your brain, you’ll be hooked for life. Within 8 weeks you’ll build the neural circuits to regulate your negative emotions and control your attention, as we saw in Chapter 6. You’ll turn on the Enlightenment Circuit and downgrade the suffering of Selfing. Within a few months you’ll have created the brain hardware of resilience, creativity, and joy. You’ll transform feeling good from a state to a trait. Then, Bliss Brain isn’t just how you feel. Bliss Brain is who you are. Bliss Brain has become your nature, hardwired into the circuits of the four lobes of your brain. It has become your possession, and one so precious that you would never give it up. No one can ever take it away from you. PERSPECTIVE ON LOCAL LIFE When you flip the switch into Bliss Brain in meditation each day, you find yourself in a place of infinite peace and joy. You’re in a place of pure consciousness. You’re not limited by your body or your history. Experiencing this state feels like the only thing that really matters in life. Local life and local mind have meaning and purpose only when they’re lived from this place of nonlocal mind. Daily morning meditation is what anchors you to the experience of infinite awareness. All the rest of your life is then lived from that place of connection with nonlocal mind. It frames everything, putting local reality into perspective. All the things that seem so important when you’re trapped inside the limits of a local mind seem trivial: money, fame, sex, admiration, opinions, body image, deadlines, goals, achievements, failures, problems, solutions, needs, routines, self-talk, physical ailments, the state of the world, comfort, insults, impulses, discomfort, memories, thoughts, desires, frustrations, plans, timelines, tragedies, events, news, sickness, entertainment, emotions, hurts, games, wounds, compliments, wants, pains, aspirations, past, future, worries, disappointment, urgent items, and demands for your time and attention. All these things fade into insignificance. All that remains is consciousness. The vast universal now, infused with perfection. This becomes the perspective from which you view your local life. It’s the starting point for each day. It becomes the origination point for everything you think and do that day. Your local reality is shaped by nonlocal mind. You are everything. You have everything. You lack nothing. You proceed into your day, creating from this anchor of perfection. What you create reflects this perfection.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
Maybe the world has become too complex, too knowing for outright imperialism, whether by gun or by chequebook. Yet that hardly means that money does not buy power – arguably quite the opposite. Instead, the plausible goal has to be not rule, but domestication. When nations try and impose their will bluntly, through such instruments as sanctions, they typically fail. Instead, the subtler weaponisation of economic power is through conditioning the target towards useful habits, something the Russians call ‘reflexive control’.
Mark Galeotti (The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War)
There’s a reason for that. The government here mismanaged the planning and construction of the Sydney Opera House so badly that the costs and schedule exploded. Little of that was Utzon’s fault. But he was the architect, so he was blamed and fired midconstruction. He left Australia in secret and in disgrace. His reputation was ruined. Instead of being showered with commissions to build more masterpieces, Utzon was marginalized and forgotten. He became what no masterbuilder wants to be or deserves to be. He became a one-building architect.[16] “What you call the costs are not the full costs,” I continued. “Yes, the Sydney Opera House cost a large amount of money, far more than it should have. But the full cost of that building includes all the other architectural treasures that Jørn Utzon never built. Sydney got its masterpiece, but cities around the world were robbed of theirs.” More silence. There are always other costs—costs that never appear on any spreadsheet—when a project spirals out of control. The simplest are what economists call “opportunity costs”: the money unnecessarily burned by bad planning that could have been used to fund something else, including other projects.
Bent Flyvbjerg (How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between)
religion – and power and money and ideology and politics – acted like a hood too. All these superstitions and predictions and beliefs deprived human beings of sight, keeping them under control, but deep within weakening their self-esteem to such a point that they now feared anything, everything.
Elif Shafak (10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World)
Take it from those who have lived through everything: Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays.
Morgan Housel (The Psychology of Money)
That Christmas Club money is all we can control. We can't stop these drug dealers from selling poison in front our houses. Or make the city stop sending our kids to lousy schools. We can't stop folks from blaming us for everything gone wrong in New York, or stop the army from calling our sons to Vietnam after them Vietcong done cut the white soldiers' toenails too short to walk. But the little nickels and dimes we saved up so we can give our kids ten minutes of love at Christmastime, that's ours to control. What's wrong with that?
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
The primary reason for global currency is that governments whose leaders are focused on global power want full control of currency for ordinary citizens. If the currency is controlled, everything the people spend money on can be controlled. With that, the people can be controlled. China already controls who is permitted to participate in society by using a social credit score system that is based on a person’s behavior. Citizens who obey the Chinese communist government are allowed to participate in society. Those who disobey the government are not permitted to do certain things, such as travel on public transportation or send their children to school.
Perry Stone (Artificial Intelligence Versus God: The Final Battle for Humanity)
Our ability to predict recessions isn’t much better. And since big events come out of nowhere, forecasts may do more harm than good, giving the illusion of predictability in a world where unforeseen events control most outcomes. Carl Richards writes: “Risk is what’s left over when you think you’ve thought of everything.
Morgan Housel (The Psychology of Money)
control what you can and let go of everything else.
Jason Zweig (Your Money and Your Brain)
Calls are super-juiced investments that allow you to control a lot of stock with much less money than you would need to buy the stock itself. Until you have to take delivery you can trade the value of the option, which goes up if the underlying goes up. There comes a time when option have to be exercised, though, and if the stock doesn't go up in the interim you lose everything. You don't buy calls to hold them. Owing to the volatility, you have to trade them, and trade them constantly. They are addictive and when you are right they can make you money with greater velocity than any other bet on earth. 21 If you have a edge, you have to be willing to bet the house on it. 31
James J. Cramer (Confessions of a Street Addict)
Welcome to Cancel Things, your ultimate resource for managing and canceling unwanted subscriptions and memberships. We help you save money by cutting services you no longer need. The average person wastes over $1,200 annually on unused subscriptions. Our comprehensive guides and expert advice make it simple to cancel everything from streaming platforms to gym memberships. Take control of your finances, reduce financial stress, and redirect your money towards more meaningful goals with Cancel Things.
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Because the world runs on money and the ones that have it control everything. The less you have, the less people care about you.
Devin Cabrera (Jones 1963)
If a lot of people are suffering because of a few people, why didn’t the majority do something about it a long time ago? Why’d everyone let it get so bad?” “If you drop a lobster in a pot of boiling water,” Zyrha tells him, “it’ll thrash around for its life.” “Wouldn’t we all?” Darrion smirks. “If you drop the lobster in a pot of cool water and slowly raise the temperature, it’ll die without a struggle. It’ll get used to the incremental increases until it’s too late to know it’s dead. You asked how we got here. The temperature had been rising in the Old States for a long time. People were dying left and right without a struggle. A few leaders had control over everything: money, power, the military, health care, schools, utilities, transportation, laws, courts, and the media. They had everything. Everything except the one thing every person in power needs.” “What’s that?” Darrion asks through a strained quiver. “An enemy.” “An enemy,” he repeats. “The question became which one. There were so many to choose from.” Zyrha claps her hands and gives a sarcastic laugh. “Black people. Brown people. Asians. Mexicans. Arabs. Women. The biracial. The multiracial. Old people. Young people. Short people. The overweight, the underweight, the sick, the helpless, the homeless, the unemployed. The asexual, the bisexual, the homosexual, the transgendered. People with special needs. The neurodivergent. Pot-smokers. Immigrants. Socialists. Communists. Atheists. Jews. Muslims. Intellectuals. Influencers. Athletes. Academics. Writers. Pacifists. Celebrities.” Zyrha pauses to draw in a long breath. “They were all contrived of course. They were invented enemies designed to occupy the amygdala—that’s the brain’s fear center—so the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for rational thought and good decision-making—wouldn’t take over. Anyway, there’d been a lot of manufactured enemies, and, frankly, they’d been done to death.
K.A. Riley (Endgame (The Amnesty Games #3))
So many of us survive on this thin edge of barbwire life by looking like we have it all together. Our femme armor is a way we protect ourselves...If your nails are done, you can feel like something is under control, even if everything is falling apart. Your lip insists on respect. Your makeup makes sure you're not clocked as trans. Your presentation is labor that makes you the money you need. Yet my friend Naima Lowe says, "Armor can also be a prison." If only armor insists and wins our rights to be respected in love, when crazy comes, we might not know we are also loved in sweat and tears and mess and undone. One of the biggest pieces of love I have seen are the places where femmes-- mostly poor and working class and disabled-- give each other this love and permission to be messy.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice)
The rise of independently practicing non-physician practitioners has everything to do with money, politics, and control—and nothing to do with better patient care.
Niran Al-Agba (Patients at Risk: The Rise of the Nurse Practitioner and Physician Assistant in Healthcare)
Never take advice, trust, or rely on a hungry person. Hunger has made people kill each other and sell each other. Hunger has made people turn against each other. We have no shame , morals, values, or principles anymore. We don’t have back bone or stand for something, because of hunger we fall for everything. Hunger controls lot of people. Hunger for success or for attention. Hunger to be rich. Hunger for being relevant or to trend. Hunger for being famous. Hunger for power or to be in control. Hunger for being noticed or liked. Hunger for sex or pleasure. Hunger for being loved. Hunger for money. Hunger for being cool, hunger for being credited, Hunger for being looked at as the smartest, wisest, or educated. Hunger for more followers or promos. Hunger for being right. Hunger for being in the circle or table. Hunger for being admired and hunger for friends. A starving person will say and do anything as long it is feeding their hunger. They can mislead, say wrong things, misinform, manipulate, abuse, lie, provoke, insult, intimidate, black mail, rage farm, influence, instigate people if it will feed their hunger. I hate poverty. It has made lot us break the law, support criminals, bad people, bad leaders , bad parties, bad things, bad behavior because whatever we support feeds our hunger.
De philosopher DJ Kyos
I thought the Vedas were a load of humbug and it didn’t matter which way you recited them. Some jobless Brahmin like my father, created them thousands of years ago. Instead of making themselves useful, the Brahmins prayed to the Gods they themselves invented for the rain, the sun, horses, cows and money and many other things. It must have been very cold, from whichever cursed places they came. Otherwise, why would they croak like frogs and appeal to the Gods after putting hundreds of assorted twigs into the fire? Perhaps I was prejudiced. I shouldn’t think that the work they were doing, as Yajnas, was useless. In fact, it served as a perfect tool to mint money and gain material favours. They were no fools-these Brahmins. They knew how to project even the mundane tasks of burning twigs as earth-shaking, scientific discoveries and claimed to tame the forces that controlled the world. And it was funny that the majority of people like the carpenters, masons and farmers who were doing something meaningful, had become supplicant to these jokers croaking under the warm sun, sweat pouring from their faces in front of a raging fire and chanting God knows what. They had a Yajna or a Puja for everything under the sun. If you had leprosy or a common cold, there was a God to whom you had to offer a special puja to appease him. You wanted your pestering wife to elope with your bothersome neighbour, there was a puja for that too. You wanted your cow to have a calf or your wife to have son, the Brahmin would help you. He would just conduct a Puja and a divine calf or son would be born. You curried favour with the Brahmins and your son would become the biggest pundit in the world by the age of sixteen. If not, he would perhaps become rowdy like me, who did not respect Brahmins or rituals. He would become a Rakshasa. I think there are many more Rakshasas among us now. Perhaps, it was because the ‘why?’ virus spread. Couldn’t the Brahmins conduct a puja so that our heads were cleared of sinful thoughts? This is something I have to ponder over when I have time.
Anand Neelakantan (Asura: Tale Of The Vanquished)
The Story of the Dictator and the Idiot. Once upon a time two species along the same homo genus existed. Two types of human kind. One was dominant and the other was submissive. One superior, one inferior. One law enforcing, one law abiding. One authoritarian and one obedient. The Dictator and the Idiot. Fundamentally there was no difference between these two. Both had a low IQ. Both neurotic. Both animalistic in nature. But the one became self-ordained to punish the other, tell them what to do, who to be, how to act, and what he can and can not have. This was the Dictator. The other, the Idiot, believed it all and kept living under the rule of the Dictator, believing everything they had to say. The Dictator occasionally made up rules and procedures for the Idiot to follow, in order for the Idiot not to die, be punished, be locked in a time-out, receive 100 lashes, be sent elsewhere or otherwise face different variations of punishments as imposed by the Dictator. Groups of Idiots were born and soon the Dictator saw an opportunity to create rules regarding the ways in which they can and can not have sex, how often, with whom and where, in order to control the Idiot once more. The Idiots obeyed. The Idiots then sold goods and soon the Dictator made a rule that a portion of their sales must go to him. He made up a word too in the process to call this collection system "tax". Groups of Dictators were also born and eventually evolved throughout history to write further rules, indoctrination, engage in the slave trade, human trafficking, rape, drug trades, the savagery of war, establishment of brothels and the repulsive behaviour displayed by half the population today. At some point, the Dictator creates the self-epithet of "Master" and labels the Idiot "Servant" but nothing much changes. A thousand other bynames came to fruition but none as pure and descriptive. "King, Emperor, Pastor, President, Minister," the list goes on. The Idiot evolves to become a silenced, subdued, indoctrinated servant. To allow punishment upon himself against his will, and to listen to the biased opinion of the Dictator as though it were a universal law. The Idiot follows unquestioningly and uncritically. Listening and doing without much thought. The Dictator evolves to write further religious scriptures in various forms on various continents. He writes laws and federal punishments. The Idiot then abides. The Dictator sentences the idiot to a life in jail for self defence. The Idiot abides. The Dictator takes money from the idiot and calls it Tax. The Idiot abides. The Dictator takes land from the Idiot without payment and gives it to another. The Idiot abides. The Dictator forces the Idiot to pay maintenance to his lazy wife. The Idiot abides. This speaks not of the character of the Dictator, but of the Idiot that carries on in his moronic ways. Stumbling over his own subordinate, defeated mind. The Dictator and the Idiot. An ongoing Sattire, a defeated people.
Anje Kruger
I'd like you to see that we are interfering too drastically. WE can't just assume so completely that Azerbaijan is in the hands of dangerous men and vicious Bolsheviks. I suppose it's all in the way you see Iran. I'd like you to see that Iranians are just as serious about their politics as we are: perhaps more so. The Iranian is a vigorous individual with definite ideas about the right and wrong done to him. It's easy for these journalists to laugh at the idea of political spontaneity among the Iranians because they look on these people as dirty, stupid, childlike natives who stare open-mouthed while the wonders of the west are offered to them. …... They are not like that at all. They want proper government, the same as anybody else. They have certainly tried hard enough to get it, but they haven't had a chance. We have done a great deal to prevent them getting real government. It may shock you, but we have always wanted corrupt administrations. Since the Reuter concessions sixty years ago we have begaved like American gangsters using threats, money, and even war to extort privileges and concessions which amounted to owning the country. At one time we had complete control over the administration, over the entire wealth of the land, the banks, and the army. It's rather silly to say the Iranians are un-political when you realize how quickly we had to hand back those concessions. This country rose to a man against us. We gave in hastily, but we managed to cling desperately to our oil concessions. [MacGregor] I think you are worrying yourself unduly [Essex]. We can't be too bad an influence. We may not be reformers ourselves... but we do not fight people who are really trying to improve the country. You must admit that we did not resist the last Shah, and he certainly reformed the place as best as it could be reformed. [MacGregor] It has become a habit to pass all compliments to Reza Shah,...even though we dethroned him. All reforms and modernizations are supposed to be his idea. Yet he simply took over the power of a popular revolution which we resisted at the time. He took power as a despot and he was little better than his predecessors. These people are getting fed up with despots. They obviously want to achieve some kind of better government, particularly in Azerbaijan.… That revolt in Azerbaijan doesn't have to be a Russian idea. It is really the continuation of five or six revolutions, all of them trying to get rid of corrupt governments. This time they seen to be succeeding. Our idea is to stop it.... Every level of government in Iran is corrupt from top to bottom, including the court, the police, and the parliament. Government is organized corruption. The ministers prey on the population like buzzards; they arragne taxes, laws, finances, famines; everything to the purpose of making money. The last Shah might have wiped out some of it; but that meant he became the biggest grafter of them all. He controlled the little fellows, and took the best of everything for himself. By the end of his rule he owned about a fifth of this entire country. He is not the hero we think he is, and his police regime was as brutal as anything the Germans had. Though we co-operated with him, he was a little tougher than the others and he always held out for more. Once, he threatened to wipe out our oil concession but we brought him off. He could always be bought off, like all the other grafters.
James Aldridge (The Diplomat)
Oakleigh. Never, the wrinkled caretaker had sworn, would Daniel sell his home. Taking him away from the house he'd been born in would kill him. Everything her grandfather had ever valued came from the heritage of the great house, and he had clung to it as if it were his mother. All her life, Elinor had felt ambivalence toward Oakleigh. In her growing-up years, it stood as a symbol for everything her wastrel father had vainly sought. She had known even as a child that the supposed wealth of Oakleigh stood between her weak, fun-loving father and her controlling, demanding grandfather. Her father had felt a desperate need for the shallow, showy comforts money could buy. And for the prestige of a great plantation house. Money wrenched from the sweat of slaves had built Oakleigh, and money was what Oakleigh needed now. As it stood, the house was falling apart. Elinor glanced down at the simple sheet of paper on top of the contract. It was amazingly brief considering the tremendous ramifications it carried. Why had he done it? Why had her grandfather signed over his legal decision-making power to her? Since she'd come back to Bayville,
Carol Rose (Challenge Accepted)
If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough. —MARIO ANDRETTI
Anthony Robbins (MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (Tony Robbins Financial Freedom))
Simone Simmons Simone Simmons works as an energy healer, helping her patients through empowering them rather than creating a dependency on the healer. She specializes in absent healing, mainly with sufferers of cancer and AIDS. She met Diana four years before her death when the Princess came to her for healing, and they became close friends. In 2005, Simone wrote a book titled Diana: The Last Word. I realized Diana had been born with an extraordinary ability, which had only been waiting to be released. By 1996, when she was fully in control of her life for the first time, she was able to give a great deal of consolation and encouragement to so many people. She received scant attention for this at the time. Everyone seemed to concentrate on the negative aspects. Instead of seeing how genuinely caring she was, they accused her of doing it for the publicity. That was utterly untrue. I often joined her when she returned from a day’s work, and she would be so exhausted, she found relief in crying. She was anxious about what she had seen and experienced and was determined to find something she could do to help. Her late-night visits to hospitals were supposed to be private. She knew how frustrating it is to be alone in a hospital; the staff and patients were always very surprised and pleased to see her. She used to make light of it and say, “I just came round to see if anyone else couldn’t sleep!” Although Diana saw the benefits of the formal visits she also made, and she did get excited when money poured in for her charities, she much preferred these unofficial occasions. They allowed her to talk to people and find out more about their illness and how they were feeling about themselves, in a down-to-earth way without a horde of people noting her every word. She wasn’t trying to fill a void or to make herself feel better. To her, it was not a therapy to help other people: It was a commitment born of selflessness. Diana was forever on the lookout for new projects that might benefit from her involvement. Her attention was caught by child abuse and forced prostitution in Asia. We had both seen a television program showing how little children were being kidnapped and then forced to sell themselves for sex. Diana told me she wanted to do everything she could to eradicate this wicked exploitation taking place in India, Pakistan, and most prevalently in Thailand. As it turned out, it was one of her final wishes. She didn’t have any idea of exactly how she was going to do it, and hadn’t got as far as formulating a plan, but she would have found a way. When Diana put her mind to something, nothing was allowed to stand in her way. As she said, “Because I’ve been given the gift to shine a light into the dark corners of this world, and get the media to follow me there, I have to use it,” and use it she did--to draw attention to a problem and in a very practical way to apply her incredible healing gifts to the victims. In her fight against land mines, she did exactly that. If anyone ever doubted her heartfelt concern for the welfare of others, this cause must surely have dispelled it. It needed someone of her fame and celebrity to bring the matter to the world’s attention, and her work required an immense amount of personal bravery. She faced physical peril and endured public ridicule, but Diana would have seen the campaign to get land mines banned as her greatest legacy. Helping others was her calling in life--right to the very end.
Larry King (The People's Princess: Cherished Memories of Diana, Princess of Wales, From Those Who Knew Her Best)
Furi’s breath caught at the sound of Syn’s voice. He came into the room looking like he was going to hurt Ronowski. Was he the one behind the glass all this time? Asshole. “Let’s go Furious.” Syn stood at the door glaring at Ronowski. “Do you not want your husband contacted?” Ronowski continued ignoring Syn’s glare. Furi turned around at the door. “It doesn’t matter. He’s already been contacted … with divorce papers.” Furi left the room and took long strides through the precinct until he was outside. He knew Syn was behind him, though his steps were light, he could sense him there. Furi was so angry he wanted to round on Syn and punch him in the face. This meant Syn knew everything about him. About his husband, how he made additional money, about every fucking thing. He’d taken away Furi’s control. That just wouldn’t do. ‘Nectar of the Most Forbidden Fruit’ Damnit. Furi was mad, and not just a little bit. He was like a man on a mission. Syn watched him fling the doors open and head around the corner. “Furi, can I talk to you?” Syn asked as calmly as he could. Furi turned down a side street and rounded on him fast, his long hair flying over his left shoulder. He grabbed Syn by the collar of his jacket and threw him hard up against the wall. “Ugh, fuck! Furi relax, I can explain,” Syn said, using a soothing tone. “You knew I was going to be picked up. You stood outside that mirror watching me. Did I entertain you? You think I give a fuck about you judging me because I jerk off on camera for money?” Furi growled in his face. “First: I didn’t know you were going to be picked up tonight. Ronowski is my first officer and he deals with that. He reports to me whenever he feels he has something worth investigating further. Second: he didn’t talk to me about you until after I left you this evening. Third: I didn’t even know you worked at Illustra, but now that I do, read my lips; I. Don’t. Give. A. Fuck.” He watched Furi’s eyes, saw them land on Syn's mouth. His face just mere inches from his own. He saw Furi’s anger turn to arousal just as his did. Syn brought his hands up slowly, desperately wanting to bury them in Furi’s hair.
A.E. Via
Csíkszentmihályi, a very brilliant psychologist, believed that what he called Flow was a state of complete absorption which produced the highest level of human happiness. It comes about when you are doing something which is difficult enough to require all your concentration and effort and skill, but not so hard that it defeats you. Because that activity takes everything you have got, you have no time to think about all the existential flies that swarm about your head. You can’t worry about money or love or death or taxes; you are simply thinking about this thing. You are your best, most authentic self. He said that, in this state of Flow, a person is ‘completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.’ He then got a little technical. There are, apparently, nine crucial states of achieving Flow, which include: ‘challenge-skill balance, merging of action and awareness, clarity of goals, immediate and unambiguous feedback, concentration on the task at hand, paradox of control, transformation of time, loss of self-consciousness, and autotelic experience.
Tania Kindersley (The Happy Horse: An Amateur's Guide To Being The Human Your Horse Deserves)
As you will come to see, much is governed by the Golden Rule: he who has the gold makes the rules. There are powerful, influential and enormously wealthy industries that stand to lose a vast amount of money if Americans start shifting to a plant-based diet. Their financial health depends on controlling what the public knows about nutrition and health. Like any good business enterprise, these industries do everything in their power to protect their profits and their shareholders.
T. Colin Campbell
Why do they keep fighting?...Wouldn't it be easier just to stop?...They're stupid and crazy. ...Not crazy. More like- rationally insane. When people fight for ideals, no price is too high, no fight can be surrendered. They aren't fighting for money, or power, or control. Not really. They're fighting to destroy their enemies. So even if they destroy everything around them, it's worth it, because they know that they will have destroyed the traitors. ...But they all call each other traitors. ... Indeed. It's a long tradition here. I'm sure whoever first started questioning their political opponents' patriotism thought they were being quite clever. ...Humans created generals and colonels and majors, people who kept their hands clean while they ordered others to cover themselves in blood.
Paolo Bacigalupi
I became obsessed with looking for alternative ways to live on this planet in a sustainable way. I felt like I had to take control of my life so that I could simply live by my values. So many things that I saw in the world disgusted me. The way in which we who live in affluent countries travel, eat and make money all made me sick. It was like everything I saw myself do in my day-to-day life was detrimental to the environment in some way, and this caused me to fall into a depression unlike any I had ever experienced.
Curtis Allen Stone (The Urban Farmer: Growing Food for Profit on Leased and Borrowed Land)
I love the Constitution, but it placed ridiculously small limits on the power of the federal government. Taken literally, our total powers include coining money, raising money, budgeting for the various federal departments and agencies, declaring war, controlling federal elections, controlling and taxing imports and exports, and a few other minor things I can’t recall at the moment. We can also regulate commerce. But even that probably just meant making commerce regular between the states—prohibiting tariffs between states, which had been a problem before the Constitution, and establishing standards to be common for all states.” “That’s it?” Harlowe smiled, knowing how this would sound. “Taken literally, almost everything we do here is unconstitutional—education, healthcare, social security, housing, labor laws, minimum wages.
Erne Lewis (An Act of Self-Defense)
The 50-inch TCL Roku TV balances picture quality and value for money. And this is also what happens when America’s top TV brand and the world’s most popular streaming services content instantly and from one single place. You have everything on the Roku from live TV to game console or if you wish choose from over 1500 streaming channels. This is also the widest selection any smart TV has ever had. Find that perfect movie or TV show easily across top streaming channels by title, actor or director with the acclaimed Roku ‘Search’ feature. On the Roku, you will find more than 200,000 streaming movies and shows that you can choose from. The Remote is simple and puts control into the users’ hands and lets you instantly choose your preferred content from anywhere. Use the Roku Mobile app on your smartphone or tablet to control your Roku TV. Cast your personal media, videos and photos and even music to the big screen. With a 120 Hz refresh rate, the TV displays images at 1080p. It has a built-in wireless and not one, but three HDMI ports that provide a high definition multimedia interface. Wired calls the TCL Roku TV ‘The First Smart TV worth using’. The TCL TV has a Roku box built into it. It is a smart TV that includes the Roku operating system, which is also the favorite OS for most users. The OS is considered as one of the best compared to all the other products and definitely better than any other smart TVs. Recently, the Roku TV was displayed at the prestigious CES 2018 with a brand new OS. We all know a lot about Roku and there are lots of Roku fans across the United States. The recently released series of Roku OS 8 comes with some new and improved features. All Roku TVs have a ‘Tuner’ input that enables you to plug into an antenna and look for channels. In the new Roku TV, the ‘Tuner’ input is available on the Home screen itself; which makes it very easy to navigate to it without fumbling Once you select the ‘Tuner’ input it takes you to the last tuned channel You will also get a preview of what is playing right now The Roku OS 8 also comes with a Smart Guide where you will get a 14-day preview of what is available on all the channels that the Roku TV has scanned for Scroll through the Smart Guide to find out your next programming on the list The experience is fluid with no judder or lag; users will be able to scan through the Smart Guide very easily All you have to do is use the HD antenna and the Roku TV will pop up all the entertainment information In addition to the Smart Guide, there is also a new feature called ‘More Ways to Watch’ Anytime Roku identifies a content that is on the Smart Guide, which is also available on other Roku channels it is marked with a ‘*’. This indicates that there are more ways to watch a single programming content You also don’t have to wait to watch your favorite programming Wherever you see the ‘*’at any time on the Smart Guide, hit the ‘Ok’ button on your remote and watch it on another Roku channel instantly The pricing for the channel or programming is also displayed If you have a Roku set top box that is connected to a different TV (other than the Roku), there is a new feature in the ‘Search’ where Roku will tell you the channel on which a particular programming is available with the precise timing. The Roku OS 8 has already been pushed out to all the players and TVs. The same OS 8 version is available for Roku Set top boxes as well. If any problem in Roku setup, please call us @+1-877-302-5260
Mike Scott