Never Undermine Anyone Quotes

Domination was and is at the heart of penis politics: a man maintaining power over a woman through gender or sex-based control…. Andrew (Cuomo) was the master of the art of penis politics. In Washington, he’d given me a job and then worked to undermine me in it. He made me feel as if I were no good at my job and, thus, totally dependent on him to keep it…. I had never seen anyone push so hard, day, noon, and night… But I was soon to learn that, as Andrew pushed up and up, some of us would be pushed aside.

Childless people are always expected to explain themselves, although it would never occur to anyone to ask a woman why she became a mother (and to insist on getting good reasons)

You must hiss at people who intend to undermine your individuality with their false pride and intellectual stupidity. You must frighten them away, lest they should do you harm. Act like you have a lot of venom inside you, but never inject them into anyone.

Metaphysics, said the late nineteenth-century idealist philosopher Bradley, is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct; but metaphysics has changed in the meantime, and is now the finding of bad reasons for what we cannot possibly believe however hard we try. All I can say is that the disbelief in the reality of consciousness or personal identity has never prevented anyone from copyrighting his book in which that unreality is argued; and I very much doubt that any author of such a book has ever been completely indifferent as to the bank account into which its royalties were paid.

Have you lost your teeny tiny mind, you too-tall, too-skinny, too-crazy jerk?” “Oh, look who’s talking, Miss Let’s Blunder Around the Time Stream and Hang the Consequences! Thanks to you, we’ve got a dead Marc and a live Marc in the same timeline . . . in the same house! Thanks to you, I got chomped on by a dim, blonde, undead, selfish, whorish, blood-sucking leech when I was minding my own business in the past.” “Don’t you call me dim!” “Um. Everyone. Perhaps we should—” Tina began. “Wait, when did this happen?” Marc asked. He had the look of a man desperately trying to buy a vowel. “Past, an hour ago? Past, last year? Help me out.” “Oh, biiiiig surprise!” Laura threw her (perfectly manicured) hands in the air. “Let me guess, you were soooo busy banging your dead husband that you haven’t had time to tell anybody anything.” “I was getting to it,” I whined. “Then after not telling anyone anything and not being proactive—or even active!—you grow up to destroy the world and bring about eternal nuclear winter or whatever the heck that was and how do you deal with your foreknowledge of terrible events to come? Have sex!” “An affirmation of life?” Sinclair suggested. Never, I repeat, never had I loved him more. I was torn between slugging my sister and blowing my husband. Hmm. Laura might have a point about my priorities . . . but jeez. Look at him. Yum. “—even do it and what do you have to say for yourself? Huh?” “You’re just uptight, repressed, smug, antisex, and jealous, you Antichristing morally superior, fundamentally evil bitch.” Laura and Marc gasped. My husband groaned.

McMaster said he had been completely in the dark about this. The secretary of state had not consulted or even informed him in advance. He had learned from press reports! In a news conference in Qatar, Tillerson had said the agreement “represents weeks of intensive discussions” between the two governments so it had been in the works for a while. Porter said Tillerson had not gone through the policy process at the White House and had not involved the president either. Clearly Tillerson was going off on his own. “It is more loyal to the president,” McMaster said, “to try to persuade rather the circumvent.” He said he carried out direct orders when the president was clear, and felt duty bound to do so as an Army officer. Tillerson in particular did not. “He’s such a prick,” McMaster said. “He thinks he’s smarter than anyone. So he thinks he can do his own thing.” In his long quest to bring order to the chaos, Priebus arranged for each of the key cabinet members to regularly check in. Tillerson came to his office at 5:15 p.m. on Tuesday, July 18. McMaster had not been invited but joined the meeting anyway. He took a seat at the conference table. The national security adviser’s silent presence was ominous and electric. Tell me, Priebus asked Tillerson, how are things going? Are you on track to achieve your primary objectives? How is the relationship between the State Department and the White House? Between you and the president? “You guys in the White House don’t have your act together,” Tillerson said, and the floodgates gushed open. “The president can’t make a decision. He doesn’t know how to make a decision. He won’t make a decision. He makes a decision and then changes his mind a couple of days later.” McMaster broke his silence and raged at the secretary of state. “You don’t work with the White House,” McMaster said. “You never consult me or anybody on the NSC staff. You blow us off constantly.” He cited examples when he tried to set up calls or meetings or breakfasts with Tillerson. “You are off doing your own thing” and communicate directly with the president, Mattis, Priebus or Porter. “But it’s never with the National Security Council,” and “that’s what we’re here to do.” Then he issued his most dramatic charge. “You’re affirmatively seeking to undermine the national security process.” “That’s not true,” Tillerson replied. “I’m available anytime. I talk to you all the time. We just had a conference call yesterday. We do these morning calls three times a week. What are you talking about, H.R.? I’ve worked with you. I’ll work with anybody.” Tillerson continued, “I’ve also got to be secretary of state. Sometimes I’m traveling. Sometimes I’m in a different time zone. I can’t always take your calls.” McMaster said he consulted with the relevant assistant secretaries of state if the positions were filled. “I don’t have assistant secretaries,” Tillerson said, coldly, “because I haven’t picked them, or the ones that I have, I don’t like and I don’t trust and I don’t work with. So you can check with whoever you want. That has no bearing on me.” The rest of the State Department didn’t matter; if you didn’t go through him, it didn’t count.

Another explanation, of course, might be that minority students, well aware of how much they had previously benefited from preferences, realized that without those preferences they stood little chance of getting in to the most selective campuses. UC could have responded to the charge of being “unwelcoming” with something like the following rebuttal: “We welcome students of all races and ethnicities. Every student will be judged according to his accomplishments, and anyone who meets our standard—equally high for all—will win admission. UC has never discriminated and never will.” Instead, UC continued throwing its weight behind the argument that the only way to “welcome” minority students is to make sure that they get in whether or not they match the academic qualifications of white and Asian students.

Why do people that ask for “evidence” never ask for rational explanation? What is more reliable? – analytic reason, or the unreliable, fallible, limited, frequently delusional human senses where it is guaranteed that they are showing us only phenomena and never noumena (i.e. things in themselves). You cannot understand reality as a phenomenon, although this is in fact exactly what science tries to do. You can understand reality only as a noumenon – as an intelligible thing in itself – and that’s exactly what ontological mathematics is all about. Anyone that obsesses over phenomenal evidence is an opponent of noumenal truth, which is never subject to phenomenal evidence.

The Web has become critical to all of our lives as well as the world economy, and yet the decisions on how it is designed have never been voted upon by anyone. Those decisions were made by engineers and executives at Google, Facebook, and Amazon (plus a few others) and imposed upon the public with no regulatory scrutiny. The result is what President Obama calls “a Wild West” world without privacy or security that leaves every citizen vulnerable to criminal, corporate, and government intrusion. As Obama wrote in The Economist, “a capitalism shaped by the few and unaccountable to the many is a threat to all.

In spite of ups and downs, the union between Jacques and Marguerite remained essential and indestructible. Nothing could undermine it over the forty-eight years of their life together. According to Avital Ronell, ‘Marguerite never considered anyone to be a rival. She always had something nice to say about the women who were close or too close to Jacques, which does not mean that she did not suffer because of them.

Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state's monopoly of armed violence. What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity, the man in complete submission to the commodity, whose job it is to ensure that a given product of human labor remains a commodity, with the magical property of having to be paid for, instead of becoming a mere refrigerator or rifle — a passive, inanimate object, subject to anyone who comes along to make use of it. In rejecting the humiliation of being subject to police, the blacks are at the same time rejecting the humiliation of being subject to commodities. The Watts youth, having no future in market terms, grasped another quality of the present, and that quality was so incontestable and irresistible that it drew in the whole population — women, children, and even sociologists who happened to be on the scene. Bobbi Hollon, a young black sociologist of the neighborhood, had this to say to the Herald Tribune in October: 'Before, people were ashamed to say they came from Watts. They'd mumble it. Now they say it with pride. Boys who used to go around with their shirts open to the waist, and who'd have cut you to pieces in half a second, showed up here every morning at seven o'clock to organize the distribution of food. Of course, it's no use pretending that food wasn't looted.... All that Christian blah has been used too long against blacks. These people could loot for ten years and they wouldn't get back half the money those stores have stolen from them over all these years.... Me, I'm only a little black girl.' Bobbi Hollon, who has sworn never to wash off the blood that splashed on her sandals during the rioting, adds: 'Now the whole world is watching Watts.

Perhaps I could help,” Marcus suggested pleasantly, stopping beside her. “If you would tell me what you’re looking for.” “Something romantic. Something with a happy ending. There should always be a happy ending, shouldn’ there?” Marcus reached out to finger a trailing lock of her hair, his thumb sliding along the glowing satin filaments. He had never thought of himself as a particularly tactile man, but it seemed impossible to keep from touching her when she was near. The pleasure he derived from the simplest contact with her set all his nerves alight. “Not always,” he said in reply to her question. Lillian let out a bubbling laugh. “How very English of you. How you all love to suffer, with your stiff…stiff…” She peered at the book in her hands, distracted by the gilt on its cover. “…upper lips,” she finished absently. “We don’t like to suffer.” “Yes, you do. At the very least, you go out of your way to avoid enjoying something.” By now Marcus was becoming accustomed to the unique mixture of lust and amusement that she always managed to arouse in him. “There’s nothing wrong with keeping one’s enjoyments private.” Dropping the book in her hands, Lillian turned to face him. The abruptness of the movement resulted in a sharp wobble, and she swayed back against the shelves even as he moved to steady her with his hands at her waist. Her tip-tilted eyes sparkled like an array of diamonds scattered over brown velvet. “It has nothing to do with privacy,” she informed him. “The truth is that you don’t want to be happy, bec—” She hiccupped gently. “Because it would undermine your dignity. Poor Wes’cliff.” She regarded him compassionately. At the moment, preserving his dignity was the last thing on Marcus’s mind. He grasped the frame of the bookcase on either side of her, encompassing her in the half circle of his arms. As he caught a whiff of her breath, he shook his head and murmured, “Little one…what have you been drinking?” “Oh…” She ducked beneath his arm and careened to the sideboard a few feet away. “I’ll show you…wonderful, wonderful stuff…this.” Triumphantly she plucked a nearly empty brandy bottle from the edge of the sideboard and held it by the neck. “Look what someone did…a pear, right inside! Isn’ that clever?” Bringing the bottle close to her face, she squinted at the imprisoned fruit. “It wasn’ very good at first. But it improved after a while. I suppose it’s an ac”—another delicate hiccup— “acquired taste.” “It appears you’ve succeeded in acquiring it,” Marcus remarked, following her. “You won’ tell anyone, will you?” “No,” he promised gravely. “But I’m afraid they’re going to know regardless. Unless we can sober you in the next two or three hours before they return. Lillian, my angel…how much was in the bottle when you started?” Showing him the bottle, she put her finger a third of the way from the bottom. “It was there when I started. I think. Or maybe there.” She frowned sadly at the bottle. “Now all that’s left is the pear.” She swirled the bottle, making the plump fruit slosh juicily at the bottom. “I want to eat it,” she announced. “It’s not meant to be eaten. It’s only there to infuse the—Lillian, give the damned thing to me.

Those who undermine you today will never understand how you became a success. If anyone doubts your success, remember what you contributed, and let your accomplishments speak for themselves.

I was not really sure what my father did in the army. His job seemed mainly to involve two activities: One was rushing to his station to signal an alert drill daily at 9:00 p.m...The other activity was catching runaway soldiers...I could not get the adults to explain why anyone wanted to run away. Where were they going? There were soldiers everywhere. They were used as a general workforce, sweeping the streets, driving cars, hauling stuff around. Others were always marching somewhere. Often they would waylay schoolkids near a store and ask them to go in to buy something. They were afraid to go in themselves because they might be spotted by a patrol on the lookout for soldiers absent from their unit without leave. The soldiers didn't look particularly happy, but neither did they seem so unhappy they might be thinking of running off into the forest. As I found out later, they were running away because of dedovshchina ("bullying"). Bullying of raw recruits by older soldiers reached such a level that in 1982 the minister of defense had to issue a secret order, "On Combating Nonregulation Relations," thereby recognizing it as a widespread practice. Hazing became a self-replicating system. You joined the army, got beaten up, your money was taken from you, and you were forced to scrub floors and do the laundry of the "older" soldiers, who joined the army just a year and a half before you. After all these humiliations, you just waited for your turn to beat up the rookies, because that was just the way it was, a necessary part of army life, something that transformed a civilian wimp into a real man. The system was often tacitly endorsed by officers, who saw it as a self-regulating system of training and discipline. For example, some rural idiot joins the army, fails to understand elementary commands, looks scruffy, and is generally hopeless. So then the staff sergeant punches him a couple of times in the middle of the chest ("in the soul"), which really huts (you cannot punch him in the face, because the marks would show), and he immediately comes to his senses and starts behaving like a seasoned soldier. Needless to say, such an idiotic practice did nothing to improve discipline, and fundamentally undermined respect for the army. Soldiers returning home after two years of national service luridly described the bullying to those yet to be conscripted. It closely resembled the revelations of people returning from prison. Mothers listened in horror and then had no wish to send their sons off to the army. Periodically, after yet another unfortunate young man, unable any longer to bear the hazing, committed suicide or shot his abusers, the army would launch another anti-bullying campaign, which never did any good. The practice is institutionalized and can only be combated by changing the institution, primarily by creating an army in which professional servicemen and servicewomen are paid a salary to defend the county. What is not needed is an army that depends on hapless youths taken from their families (for two years in the U.S.S.R., and nowadays for one) who are forced to spend their time in an institution that is a bizarre form of survival school. Curiously, the army takes a certain pride in this constant imbecility, as I began to notice as I grew older. It was regularly remarked that our soldiers and officers were so inured to carrying out ridiculous orders-for example, with my own eyes I saw soldiers painting grass green before inspection-that, under fire, they would perform miracles of discipline. Because they lived in such poverty and were so used to hardship, there could be no doubt that in the event of war the pampered Americans, with their luxurious barracks and individual apartments for officers, would be defeated.