Notable Short Quotes

And taking pride in your beauty is a damning act. Because you allow yourself to believe that the only thing notable about yourself is something with a very short shelf life.

In The Gulag Archipelago, for example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn remarks that Shakespeare’s evildoers, Macbeth notably among them, stop short at a mere dozen corpses because they have no ideology.

A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also a schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man.

The Laundry field operations manual is notably short on advice for how to comport one’s self when being held prisoner aboard a mad billionaire necromancer’s yacht, other than the usual stern admonition to keep receipts for all expenses incurred in the line of duty.

Life on earth is far too short, and we were each created with such notable talents that it’d be a travesty to while them away on work we don’t love.

The animals we raise for food today are eaten not because they are notably delectable or nutritious or a pleasure to be around, but because they were the ones first domesticated in the Stone Age.

God created the heavens, while the devil created doubt. Here is a short list of Lucifer's other notable inventions: matches, the lighter, the flamethrower, and George Burns.

There was no point in fighting with Celia once she got mean," Evelyn says, "If things got too tense, I tended to back off before they came to a head. I would tell her I loved her and I couldn't live without her, and then I'd take my top off, and that usually ended the conversation. For all her posturing, Celia had one thing in common with almost every straight man in America: she wanted nothing more than to get her hands on my chest." "Did it stick with you, though?" I ask, "Those words?" "Of course it did. Look, I'd be the first person to say back when I was young that all I was was a nice pair of tits. The only currency I had was my sexuality, and I used it like money. I wasn't well educated when I got to Hollywood, I wasn't book-smart, I wasn't powerful, I wasn't a trained actress. What did I have to be good at other than being beautiful? And taking pride in your beauty is a damning act. Because you allow yourself to believe that the only thing notable about yourself is something with a very short shelf life.

Shortly after I started hitting some notable milestones on my Spiritual journey, I went into a thrift store that benefits veterans, My eyes were quickly drawn to a dusty and tattered image of Christ laying mixed in with some other things on a shelf. I picked it up, And on it was written these words: "If you accept it... I would give you the gift of seeing yourself as I see you..." The truth and love of that image and simple words stopped me in my tracks and opened my heart. Since then I have received a wonderful gift, to know myself as an Eternal Spiritual Being, a Child of our Loving Father in Heaven. ...And no I didn't buy it, I received the message loud and clear, So I left it there, in hopes that the image and words would speak to someone else's Soul in the same way they had spoken to mine.

Middle paths in tragedy are in notably short supply.

And taking pride in your beauty is a damning act. Because you allow yourself to believe that the only thing notable about yourself is something with a very short shelf-life.

The most notable feature about anecdotes involving toilet practices is that they always—really, always—involve people from one country being appalled by the habits of those from another.

The great are deceived if they imagine they have appropriated ambition and vanity to themselves. These notable qualities flourish as notably in a country church and churchyard as in the drawing room or in the closet. Schemes have indeed been laid in the vestry, which would hardly disgrace the conclave. Here is a ministry, and here is an opposition. Here are plots and circumventions, parties and factions equal to those which are to be found in courts. Nor are the women here less practiced in the highest feminine arts than their fair superiors in quality and fortune. Here are prudes and coquettes; here are dressing and ogling, falsehood, envy, malice, scandal -- in short everything which is common to the most splendid assembly or politest circle.

On Easter we wrap up pretty, little decorated eggs symbolizing life and renewal. We do this because of the intangibility of a promised gift, which is the eventual resurrection of the body, restored to its finest forever state. Easter celebrates life and the idea of its eternal value, most notably the life of the gift-giver who demands nothing in return. He is your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

What did I have to be good at other than being beautiful? And taking pride in your beauty is damning act. Because you allow yourself to believe that the only thing notable about yourself is something with a very short shelf life.

What did I have to be good at other than being beautiful? And taking pride in your beauty is a damning act. Because you allow yourself to believe that the only thing notable about yourself is something with a very short shelf life.

What isn’t natural, in my opinion, is staying in a job just because you can’t think of anything else to do or because it’s too risky to leave it. Life on earth is far too short, and we were each created with such notable talents that it’d be a travesty to while them away on work we don’t love.

Funnel The family story tells, and it was told true, of my great-grandfather who begat eight genius children and bought twelve almost-new grand pianos. He left a considerable estate when he died. The children honored their separate arts; two became moderately famous, three married and fattened their delicate share of wealth and brilliance. The sixth one was a concert pianist. She had a notable career and wore cropped hair and walked like a man, or so I heard when prying a childhood car into the hushed talk of the straight Maine clan. One died a pinafore child, she stays her five years forever. And here is one that wrote- I sort his odd books and wonder his once alive words and scratch out my short marginal notes and finger my accounts. back from that great-grandfather I have come to tidy a country graveyard for his sake, to chat with the custodian under a yearly sun and touch a ghost sound where it lies awake. I like best to think of that Bunyan man slapping his thighs and trading the yankee sale for one dozen grand pianos. it fit his plan of culture to do it big. On this same scale he built seven arking houses and they still stand. One, five stories up, straight up like a square box, still dominates its coastal edge of land. It is rented cheap in the summer musted air to sneaker-footed families who pad through its rooms and sometimes finger the yellow keys of an old piano that wheezes bells of mildew. Like a shoe factory amid the spruce trees it squats; flat roof and rows of windows spying through the mist. Where those eight children danced their starfished summers, the thirty-six pines sighing, that bearded man walked giant steps and chanced his gifts in numbers. Back from that great-grandfather I have come to puzzle a bending gravestone for his sake, to question this diminishing and feed a minimum of children their careful slice of suburban cake.

Indeed, Australia is a large net importer of seafood. This is because much of Australia’s waters are, like much of Australia itself, essentially desert. (A notable exception is the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland, which is sumptuously fecund.) Because the soil is poor, it produces little in the way of nutrient-rich runoff.

The connectivity of the cloud and the prevalence of tablets and smartphones have eroded the traditional online/offline divide. Within a short time we will most probably stop thinking of it as 'online.' We will simply be connected, all the time, everywhere, and the online world will be notable only by its absence when that connection breaks.

I’d be the first person to say back when I was young that all I was was a nice pair of tits. The only currency I had was my sexuality, and I used it like money. I wasn’t well educated when I got to Hollywood, I wasn’t book-smart, I wasn’t powerful, I wasn’t a trained actress. What did I have to be good at other than being beautiful? And taking pride in your beauty is a damning act. Because you allow yourself to believe that the only thing notable about yourself is something with a very short shelf life.

He would expose, remorselessly, those hypocrites and cynics who publicly denied the catastrophe of climate change while secretly short-selling that very same position and hedging all their bets; the millionaires and billionaires who preached self-reliance while accepting vast handouts in the form of subsidies and easy credit, and who bemoaned red tape while building contractual fortresses to shield their capital from their ex-wives; the tax-dodging economic parasites who treated state treasuries like casinos and dismantled welfare programmes out of spite, who secured immensely lucrative state contracts through illegitimate back channels and grubby, endlessly revolving doors, who eroded civil standards, who demolished social norms, and whose obscene fortunes had been made, in every case, on the back of institutions built with public funding, enriched by public patronage, and rightfully belonging to the public, most notably, the fucking Internet; the confirmed sociopaths who were literally vampiric with their regular transfusions of younger, healthier blood; the cancerous polluters who consumed more, and burned more, and wasted more than half the world’s population put together; the crypto-fascist dirty tricksters who pretended to be populists while defrauding and despising the people, who lied with impunity, who stole with impunity, who murdered with impunity, who invented scapegoats, who incited suicides, who encouraged violence and provoked unrest, and who then retreated into a private sphere of luxury so well insulated from the lives of ordinary people, and so well defended against them, that it basically amounted to a form of secession.

but does it serve any useful purpose to know that Pompey was the first to exhibit the slaughter of eighteen elephants in the Circus, pitting criminals against them in a mimic battle? He, a leader of the state and one who, according to report, was conspicuous among the leaders28 of old for the kindness of his heart, thought it a notable kind of spectacle to kill human beings after a new fashion. Do they fight to the death? That is not enough! Are they torn to pieces? That is not enough! Let them be crushed by animals of monstrous bulk! Better would it be that these things pass into oblivion lest hereafter some all-powerful man should learn them and be jealous of an act that was nowise human.29 O, what blindness does great prosperity cast upon our minds! When he was casting so many troops of wretched human beings to wild beasts born under a different sky, when he was proclaiming war between creatures so ill matched, when he was shedding so much blood before the eyes of the Roman people, who itself was soon to be forced to shed more. he then believed that he was beyond the power of Nature. But later this same man, betrayed by Alexandrine treachery, offered himself to the dagger of the vilest slave, and then at last discovered what an empty boast his surname30 was.

The danger, of course, is that it is not always easy to distinguish between a default that was inevitable—in the sense that a country is so highly leveraged and so badly managed that it takes very little to force it into default—and one that was not—in the sense that a country is fundamentally sound but is having difficulties sustaining confidence because of a very temporary and easily solvable liquidity problem. In the heat of a crisis, it is all too tempting for would-be rescuers (today notably multilateral lenders such as the IMF) to persuade themselves that they are facing a confidence problem that can be solved with short-term bridge loans, when in fact they are confronting a much more deeply rooted crisis of solvency and willingness to pay

The ACE study group concluded: “Although widely understood to be harmful to health, each adaptation [such as smoking, drinking, drugs, obesity] is notably difficult to give up. Little consideration is given to the possibility that many long-term health risks might also be personally beneficial in the short term. We repeatedly hear from patients of the benefits of these ‘health risks.’ The idea of the problem being a solution, while understandably disturbing to many, is certainly in keeping with the fact that opposing forces routinely coexist in biological systems. . . . What one sees, the presenting problem, is often only the marker for the real problem, which lies buried in time, concealed by patient shame, secrecy and sometimes amnesia—and frequently clinician discomfort.

Nearly all the bull markets had a number of well-defined characteristics in common, such as (1) a historically high price level, (2) high price/earnings ratios, (3) low dividend yields as against bond yields, (4) much speculation on margin, and (5) many offerings of new common-stock issues of poor quality. Thus to the student of stock-market history it appeared that the intelligent investor should have been able to identify the recurrent bear and bull markets, to buy in the former and sell in the latter, and to do so for the most part at reasonably short intervals of time. Various methods were developed for determining buying and selling levels of the general market, based on either value factors or percentage movements of prices or both. But we must point out that even prior to the unprecedented bull market that began in 1949, there were sufficient variations in the successive market cycles to complicate and sometimes frustrate the desirable process of buying low and selling high. The most notable of these departures, of course, was the great bull market of the late 1920s, which threw all calculations badly out

The move to London was followed by two results of great importance for Elizabeth Barrett. In the first place, her health, which had never been strong, broke down altogether in the London atmosphere, and it is from some time shortly after the arrival in Gloucester Place that the beginning of her invalid life must be dated. On the other hand, residence in London brought her into the neighbourhood of new friends; and although the number of those admitted to see her in her sick-room was always small, we yet owe to this fact the commencement of some of her closest friendships, notably those with her distant cousin, John Kenyon, and with Miss Mitford, the authoress of ‘Our Village,’ and of a correspondence on a much fuller and more elaborate scale than any of the earlier period. To this, no doubt, the fact of her confinement to her room contributed not a little; for being unable to go out and see her friends, much of her communication with them was necessarily by letter. At the same time her literary activity was increasing. She began to contribute poems to various magazines, and to be brought thereby into connection with literary men; and she was also employed on the longer compositions which went to make up her next volume of published verse.

Look at what I wrote at the beginning of this memoir. Have I caught anything at all of the extraordinary night when Paul Dempster was born? I am pretty sure that my little sketch of Percy Boyd Staunton is accurate, but what about myself? I have always sneered at autobiographies and memoirs in which the writer appears at the beginning as a charming, knowing little fellow, possessed of insights and perceptions beyond his years, yet offering these with false naivete to the reader, as though to say, 'What a little wonder I was, but All Boy.' Have the writers any notion or true collection of what a boy is? I have and I have reinforced it by forty-five years of teaching boys. A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man. Oh these autobiographies in which the writer postures and simpers as a David Copperfield or a Huck Finn! False, false as harlots' oaths! Can I write truly of my boyhood? Or will that disgusting self-love which so often attaches itself to a man's idea of his youth creep in and falsify the story? I can but try. And to begin I must give you some notion of the village in which Percy Boyd Staunton and Paul Dempster and I were born.

The introduction to the original book as I found it in Greece contains many interesting points, since it shows that educators in foreign countries, notably in Germany, had come to the same conclusion with our best American teachers. The editor of the little Greek reading-book says: "In editing this work we have made use not only of Homer's 'Odyssey,' but also of that excellent reader which is used in the public schools of Germany, Willman's 'Lesebuch aus Homer.' We have divided the little volume into three parts, the first of which gives a short resumé of the war against Troy and the destruction of that city, the second the wanderings of Odysseus till his arrival in Ithaca, the third his arrival and the killing of the wooers. We have no apology to make in presenting this book to the public as a school-book, since many people superior to us have shown the need of such books in school-work. The new public schools, as is well known, have a mission of the highest importance. They do not aim, as formerly, at absolute knowledge pounded into the heads of children in a mechanical way. Their aim is the mental and ethical development of the pupils. Reading and writing lead but half way to this goal. With all nations the readers used in the public schools are a collection of the noblest thoughts of their authors." The Greek editor had never read the inane rat and cat stories of American school "readers" when he wrote that.

Even in those natural sciences which appeared to be directly relevant to society and its concerns, the social and political element was often crucial. In our period this was plainly the case in those fields of biology which touched directly on social man, and all those which could be linked with the concept of 'evolution' and the increasingly politicized name of Charles Darwin. Both carried a high ideological charge. In the form of racism, whose central role in the nineteenth century cannot be overemphasized, biology was essential to a theoretically egalitarian bourgeois ideology, since it passed "the blame for visible human inequalities from society to 'nature'. The poor were poor because born inferior. Hence biology was not only potentially the science of the political right, but the science of those who suspected science, reason and progress. Few thinkers were more sceptical of the mid-nineteenth-century verities, including science, than the philosopher Nietzsche. Yet his own writings, and notably his most ambitious work, The Will to Power, can be read as a variant of Social Darwinism, a discourse conducted in the language of 'natural selection', in this instance selection destined to' produce a new race of 'superman' who will dominate human inferiors as man in nature dominates and exploits brute creation. And the links between biology and ideology are indeed particularly evident in the interplay between 'eugenics' and the new science of 'genetics', which virtually came into existence around 1900, receiving its name from William Bateson shortly thereafter (1905).

There are three key things that matter in having a voice: audibility, credibility, and consequence. Audibility means that you can be heard, that you have not been pressed into silence or kept out of the areas of where you can speak or write or denied the education to do so or in the age of social media, been harassed and threatened and driven off the platform as so many have. Credibility means that when you get into those arenas, people are willing to believe you, by which I don't mean that women never lie, but that stories should be measured on their own terms and context, rather than patriarchy's insistence that women are categorically unqualified to speak. Emotional, rather than rational. Vindictive, incoherent, delusional, manipulative. Unfit to be heeded. Those things often shouted over a women in the process of saying something challenging. Though now death threat are used as a short-cut, and some of those threats are carried out. Notably with women who leave their abusers, because silencing can be conversational or can be premeditated murder. To be a person of consequence is to matter. If you matter, you have rights, and your words serve those rights. And give you the power to bear witness, make agreements, set boundaries. If you have consequence, your words possess the authority to determine what does and does not happen to you. The power that underlies the concept of consent as part of equality in self-determination. Even legally, women's words have lacked consequence. And only in a few scattered places on earth, could women vote before the 20th century, and not so many decades ago, women rarely became lawyers and judges.

Sung was a land which was famous far and wide, simply because it was so often and so richly insulted. However, there was one visitor, more excitable than most, who developed a positive passion for criticizing the place. Unfortunately, the pursuit of this hobby soon lead him to take leave of the truth. This unkind traveler once claimed that the king of Sung, the notable Skan Askander, was a derelict glutton with a monster for a son and a slug for a daughter. This was unkind to the daughter. While she was no great beauty, she was definitely not a slug. After all, slugs do not have arms and legs - and besides, slugs do not grow to that size. There was a grain of truth in the traveler's statement, in as much as the son was a regrettable young man. However, soon afterwards, the son was accidentally drowned when he made the mistake of falling into a swamp with his hands and feet tied together and a knife sticking out of his back. This tragedy did not encourage the traveler to extend his sympathies to the family. Instead, he invented fresh accusations. This wayfarer, an ignorant tourist if ever there was one, claimed that the king had leprosy. This was false. The king merely had a well-developed case of boils. The man with the evil mouth was guilty of a further malignant slander when he stated that King Skan Askander was a cannibal. This was untrue. While it must be admitted that the king once ate one of his wives, he did not do it intentionally; the whole disgraceful episode was the fault of the chef, who was a drunkard, and who was subsequently severely reprimanded. .The question of the governance, and indeed, the very existence of the 'kingdom of Sung' is one that is worth pursuing in detail, before dealing with the traveler's other allegations. It is true that there was a king, his being Skan Askander, and that some of his ancestors had been absolute rulers of considerable power. It is also true that the king's chief swineherd, who doubled as royal cartographer, drew bold, confident maps proclaiming that borders of the realm. Furthermore, the king could pass laws, sign death warrants, issue currency, declare war or amuse himself by inventing new taxes. And what he could do, he did. "We are a king who knows how to be king," said the king. And certainly, anyone wishing to dispute his right to use of the imperial 'we' would have had to contend with the fact that there was enough of him, in girth, bulk, and substance, to provide the makings of four or five ordinary people, flesh, bones and all. He was an imposing figure, "very imposing", one of his brides is alleged to have said, shortly before the accident in which she suffocated. "We live in a palace," said the king. "Not in a tent like Khmar, the chief milkmaid of Tameran, or in a draughty pile of stones like Comedo of Estar." . . .From Prince Comedo came the following tart rejoinder: "Unlike yours, my floors are not made of milk-white marble. However, unlike yours, my floors are not knee-deep in pigsh*t." . . .Receiving that Note, Skan Askander placed it by his commode, where it would be handy for future royal use. Much later, and to his great surprise, he received a communication from the Lord Emperor Khmar, the undisputed master of most of the continent of Tameran. The fact that Sung had come to the attention of Khmar was, to say the least, ominous. Khmar had this to say: "Your words have been reported. In due course, they will be remembered against you." The king of Sung, terrified, endured the sudden onset of an attack of diarrhea that had nothing to do with the figs he had been eating. His latest bride, seeing his acute distress, made the most of her opportunity, and vigorously counselled him to commit suicide. Knowing Khmar's reputation, he was tempted - but finally, to her great disappointment, declined. Nevertheless, he lived in fear; he had no way of knowing that he was simply the victim of one of Khmar's little jokes.

Few grown humans can normally survive a fall of much more than twenty-five or thirty feet, though there have been some notable exceptions—none more memorable perhaps than that of a British airman in World War II named Nicholas Alkemade. In the late winter of 1944, while on a bombing run over Germany, Flight Sergeant Alkemade, the tail gunner on a British Lancaster bomber, found himself in a literally tight spot when his plane was hit by enemy flak and quickly filled with smoke and flames. Tail gunners on Lancasters couldn’t wear parachutes because the space in which they operated was too confined, and by the time Alkemade managed to haul himself out of his turret and reach for his parachute, he found it was on fire and beyond salvation. He decided to leap from the plane anyway rather than perish horribly in flames, so he hauled open a hatch and tumbled out into the night. He was three miles above the ground and falling at 120 miles per hour. “It was very quiet,” Alkemade recalled years later, “the only sound being the drumming of aircraft engines in the distance, and no sensation of falling at all. I felt suspended in space.” Rather to his surprise, he found himself to be strangely composed and at peace. He was sorry to die, of course, but accepted it philosophically, as something that happened to airmen sometimes. The experience was so surreal and dreamy that Alkemade was never certain afterward whether he lost consciousness, but he was certainly jerked back to reality when he crashed through the branches of some lofty pine trees and landed with a resounding thud in a snowbank, in a sitting position. He had somehow lost both his boots, and had a sore knee and some minor abrasions, but otherwise was quite unharmed. Alkemade’s survival adventures did not quite end there. After the war, he took a job in a chemical plant in Loughborough, in the English Midlands. While he was working with chlorine gas, his gas mask came loose, and he was instantly exposed to dangerously high levels of the gas. He lay unconscious for fifteen minutes before co-workers noticed his unconscious form and dragged him to safety. Miraculously, he survived. Some time after that, he was adjusting a pipe when it ruptured and sprayed him from head to foot with sulfuric acid. He suffered extensive burns but again survived. Shortly after he returned to work from that setback, a nine-foot-long metal pole fell on him from a height and very nearly killed him, but once again he recovered. This time, however, he decided to tempt fate no longer. He took a safer job as a furniture salesman and lived out the rest of his life without incident. He died peacefully, in bed, aged sixty-four in 1987. —

From Life, Volume III, by Unspiek, Baron Bodissey: I am constantly startled and often amused by the diverse attitudes toward wealth to be found among the peoples of the Oikumene. Some societies equate affluence with criminal skill; for others wealth represents the gratitude of society for the performance of valuable services. My own concepts in this regard are easy and clear, and I am sure that the word ‘simplistic’ will be used by my critics. These folk are callow and turgid of intellect; I am reassured by their howls and yelps. For present purposes I exclude criminal wealth, the garnering of which needs no elaboration, and a gambler’s wealth which is tinsel. In regard, then, to wealth: Luxury and privilege are the perquisites of wealth. This would appear a notably bland remark, but is much larger than it seems. If one listens closely, he hears deep and far below the mournful chime of inevitability. To achieve wealth, one generally must thoroughly exploit at least three of the following five attributes: Luck. Toil, persistence, courage. Self-denial. Short-range intelligence: cunning, improvisational ability. Long-range intelligence: planning, the perception of trends. These attributes are common; anyone desiring privilege and luxury can gain the precursory wealth by making proper use of his native competence. In some societies poverty is considered a pathetic misfortune, or noble abnegation, hurriedly to be remedied by use of public funds. Other more stalwart societies think of poverty as a measure of the man himself. The critics respond: What an unutterable ass is this fellow Unspiek! I am reduced to making furious scratches and crotchets with my pen! — Lionel Wistofer, in The Monstrator I am poor; I admit it! Am I then a churl or a noddy? I deny it with all the vehemence of my soul! I take my bite of seed-cake and my sip of tea with the same relish as any paunchy plutocrat with bulging eyes and grease running from his mouth as he engulfs ortolans in brandy, Krokinole oysters, filet of Darango Five-Horn! My wealth is my shelf of books! My privileges are my dreams! — Sistie Fael, in The Outlook … He moves me to tooth-chattering wrath; he has inflicted upon me, personally, a barrage of sheer piffle, and maundering insult which cries out to the Heavens for atonement. I will thrust my fist down his loquacious maw; better, I will horsewhip him on the steps of his club. If he has no club, I hereby invite him to the broad and convenient steps of the Senior Quill-drivers, although I must say that the Inksters maintain a superior bar, and this shall be my choice since, after trouncing the old fool, I will undoubtedly ask him in for a drink. — McFarquhar Kenshaw, in The Gaean

What is certain is that the immutable classes, the nobility, the clergy, the bourgeoisie, the people, had loftier souls at that time. You can prove it: society has done nothing but deteriorate in the four centuries separating us from the Middle Ages. "True, a baron then was usually a formidable brute. He was a drunken and lecherous bandit, a sanguinary and boisterous tyrant, but he was a child in mind and spirit. The Church bullied him, and to deliver the Holy Sepulchre he sacrificed his wealth, abandoned home, wife, and children, and accepted unconscionable fatigues, extraordinary sufferings, unheard-of dangers. "By pious heroism he redeemed the baseness of his morals. The race has since become moderate. It has reduced, sometimes even done away with, its instincts of carnage and rape, but it has replaced them by the monomania of business, the passion for lucre. It has done worse. It has sunk to such a state of abjectness as to be attracted by the doings of the lowest of the low. ...cupidity was repressed by the confessor, and the tradesman, just like the labourer, was maintained by the corporations, which denounced overcharging and fraud, saw that decried merchandise was destroyed, and fixed a fair price and a high standard of excellence for commodities. Trades and professions were handed down from father to son. The corporations assured work and pay. People were not, as now, subject to the fluctuations of the market and the merciless capitalistic exploitation. Great fortunes did not exist and everybody had enough to live on. Sure of the future, unhurried, they created marvels of art, whose secret remains for ever lost. "All the artisans who passed the three degrees of apprentice, journeyman, and master, developed subtlety and became veritable artists. They ennobled the simplest of iron work, the commonest faience, the most ordinary chests and coffers. Those corporations, putting themselves under the patronage of Saints—whose images, frequently besought, figured on their banners—preserved through the centuries the honest existence of the humble and notably raised the spiritual level of the people whom they protected. ...The bourgeoise has taken the place forfeited by a wastrel nobility which now subsists only to set ignoble fashions and whose sole contribution to our 'civilization' is the establishment of gluttonous dining clubs, so-called gymnastic societies, and pari-mutuel associations. Today the business man has but these aims, to exploit the working man, manufacture shoddy, lie about the quality of merchandise, and give short weight. ...There is one word in the mouths of all. Progress. Progress of whom? Progress of what? For this miserable century hasn't invented anything great. "It has constructed nothing and destroyed everything...

MY DEAR MISS BROOKE,—I have your guardian's permission to address you on a subject than which I have none more at heart. I am not, I trust, mistaken in the recognition of some deeper correspondence than that of date in the fact that a consciousness of need in my own life had arisen contemporaneously with the possibility of my becoming acquainted with you. For in the first hour of meeting you, I had an impression of your eminent and perhaps exclusive fitness to supply that need (connected, I may say, with such activity of the affections as even the preoccupations of a work too special to be abdicated could not uninterruptedly dissimulate); and each succeeding opportunity for observation has given the impression an added depth by convincing me more emphatically of that fitness which I had preconceived, and thus evoking more decisively those affections to which I have but now referred. Our conversations have, I think, made sufficiently clear to you the tenor of my life and purposes: a tenor unsuited, I am aware, to the commoner order of minds. But I have discerned in you an elevation of thought and a capability of devotedness, which I had hitherto not conceived to be compatible either with the early bloom of youth or with those graces of sex that may be said at once to win and to confer distinction when combined, as they notably are in you, with the mental qualities above indicated. It was, I confess, beyond my hope to meet with this rare combination of elements both solid and attractive, adapted to supply aid in graver labors and to cast a charm over vacant hours; and but for the event of my introduction to you (which, let me again say, I trust not to be superficially coincident with foreshadowing needs, but providentially related thereto as stages towards the completion of a life's plan), I should presumably have gone on to the last without any attempt to lighten my solitariness by a matrimonial union. Such, my dear Miss Brooke, is the accurate statement of my feelings; and I rely on your kind indulgence in venturing now to ask you how far your own are of a nature to confirm my happy presentiment. To be accepted by you as your husband and the earthly guardian of your welfare, I should regard as the highest of providential gifts. In return I can at least offer you an affection hitherto unwasted, and the faithful consecration of a life which, however short in the sequel, has no backward pages whereon, if you choose to turn them, you will find records such as might justly cause you either bitterness or shame. I await the expression of your sentiments with an anxiety which it would be the part of wisdom (were it possible) to divert by a more arduous labor than usual. But in this order of experience I am still young, and in looking forward to an unfavorable possibility I cannot but feel that resignation to solitude will be more difficult after the temporary illumination of hope. In any case, I shall remain,     Yours with sincere devotion,      EDWARD CASAUBON

I’m having my lunch when I hear a familiar hoarse shout, ‘Oy Tony!’ I whip round, damaging my neck further, to see Michael Gambon in the lunch queue. … Gambon tells me the story of Olivier auditioning him at the Old Vic in 1962. His audition speech was from Richard III. ‘See, Tone, I was thick as two short planks then and I didn’t know he’d had a rather notable success in the part. I was just shitting myself about meeting the Great Man. He sussed how green I was and started farting around.’ As reported by Gambon, their conversation went like this: Olivier: ‘What are you going to do for me?’ Gambon: ‘Richard the Third.’ Olivier: ‘Is that so. Which part?’ Gambon: ‘Richard the Third.’ Olivier: ‘Yes, but which part?’ Gambon: ‘Richard the Third.’ Olivier: ‘Yes, I understand that, but which part?’ Gambon: ‘Richard the Third.’ Olivier: ‘But which character? Catesby? Ratcliffe? Buckingham’s a good part …’ Gambon: ‘Oh I see, beg your pardon, no, Richard the Third.’ Olivier: ‘What, the King? Richard?’ Gambon: ‘ — the Third, yeah.’ Olivier: “You’ve got a fucking cheek, haven’t you?’ Gambon: ‘Beg your pardon?’ Olivier: ‘Never mind, which part are you going to do?’ Gambon: ‘Richard the Third.’ Olivier: ‘Don’t start that again. Which speech?’ Gambon: ‘Oh I see, beg your pardon, “Was every woman in this humour woo’d.”‘ Olivier: ‘Right. Whenever you’re ready.’ Gambon: ‘ “Was ever woman in this humour woo’d –” ‘ Olivier: ‘Wait. Stop. You’re too close. Go further away. I need to see the whole shape, get the full perspective.’ Gambon: ‘Oh I see, beg your pardon …’ Gambon continues, ‘So I go over to the far end of the room, Tone, thinking that I’ve already made an almighty tit of myself, so how do I save the day? Well I see this pillar and I decide to swing round it and start the speech with a sort of dramatic punch. But as I do this my ring catches on a screw and half my sodding hand gets left behind. I think to myself, “Now I mustn’t let this throw me since he’s already got me down as a bit of an arsehole”, so I plough on … “Was ever woman in this humour woo’d –”‘ Olivier: ‘Wait. Stop. What’s the blood?’ Gambon: ‘Nothing, nothing, just a little gash, I do beg your pardon …’ A nurse had to be called and he suffered the indignity of being given first aid with the greatest actor in the world passing the bandages. At last it was done. Gambon: ‘Shall I start again?’ Olivier: ‘No. I think I’ve got a fair idea how you’re going to do it. You’d better get along now. We’ll let you know.’ Gambon went back to the engineering factory in Islington where he was working. At four that afternoon he was bent over his lathe, working as best as he could with a heavily bandaged hand, when he was called to the phone. It was the Old Vic. ‘It’s not easy talking on the phone, Tone. One, there’s the noise of the machinery. Two, I have to keep my voice down ’cause I’m cockney at work and posh with theatre people. But they offer me a job, spear-carrying, starting immediately. I go back to my work-bench, heart beating in my chest, pack my tool-case, start to go. The foreman comes up, says, “Oy, where you off to?” “I’ve got bad news,” I say, “I’ve got to go.” He says, “Why are you taking your tool box?” I say, “I can’t tell you, it’s very bad news, might need it.” And I never went back there, Tone. Home on the bus, heart still thumping away. A whole new world ahead. We tend to forget what it felt like in the beginning.

Indeed, in many agricultural regions — including northern China, southern India (as well as the Punjab), Mexico, the western United States, parts of the Middle East, and elsewhere — water may be much more of a constraint to future food production than land, crop yield potential, or most other factors. Developing and distributing technologies and practices that improve water management is critical to sustaining the food production capability we now have, much less increasing it for the future. Water-short Israel is a front-runner in making its agricultural economy more water-efficient. Its current agricultural output could probably not have been achieved without steady advances in water management — including highly efficient drip irrigation, automated systems that apply water only when crops need it, and the setting of water allocations based on predetermined optimum water applications for each crop. The nation’s success is notable: between 1951 and 1990, Israeli farmers reduced the amount of water applied to each hectare of cropland by 36 percent. This allowed the irrigated area to more than triple with only a doubling of irrigation water use.37 Whether

Green Card Immigration and Nationalization by Green Card Organization One of the most highly sought-after visa programs ran anywhere in the world is the United State Green Card Lottery program, and for most people around the world, it is a symbol of their dreams come through - one day, to move to America. For this reason, the United State Green Card program is always filled with millions of applicants fighting for a Green Card. However, out of all these people, only about 50,000 people to make the cut yearly. Migration of people from one country to another is mainly for some reasons which range from economic motivations to reuniting with loved ones living abroad. Often in most scenario, for an immigrant to be a citizen of the new country, it is required for such to renounce their homeland and permanently leave their home country. Under the United States legal system, naturalization is the process through which an immigrant acquires U.S. citizenship. This is a major requirement for someone who was not born a citizen of the U.S. and or did not acquire citizenship shortly after birth but wishes to acquire citizenship of the united states. A person who becomes a U.S. citizen through naturalization enjoys all the freedoms and protections of citizenship just like every other citizens of the States, such as the right to vote and be voted for, to hold political offices and register, the right to hold and use a U.S. passport, and the right to serve as a jury in a court of law among other numerous benefits. Year in, year out, people apply from different nations of the world for the Green Card program. However, many people are disqualified from the DV lottery program, because they unsuccessfully submit their applications in a manner that does not comply with the United States governments requirements. It should be noted that The United States of America stands with a core principle of diversity and of giving every different person irrespective of background, race or color the same chances at success and equal opportunities. In order to forestall the rate at which intending immigrants were denied the Green Card, The Green Card Organization was established for the sole aim of providing help for those who desire to immigrate and provide them the best shot at success, and throughout the last 8 years of the existence of the Green Card Organization, the organization have helped countless number of people make their dream come through (their dream of being a part of our incredible country) GOD BLESS AMERICA! It is important to note that a small amount of mistake ranging from inconsistent information supplied or falsified identity in the application forms a major cause for automatic disqualification, therefore, it is crucial and important to make sure that the Green Card application is submitted correctly and timely. A notable remark that ought to be nurtured in the mind of every applicant is that the United States do not take a No for any mistake on your application. Therefore, the Green Card Organization is here to help simplify the processes involved for you and guarantee that your application will be submitted correctly and guarantee you 100% participation. A task that since the inception of the organization, has been their priority and has achieved her success in it at its apex.

Here are a few notable things that can spark inflammation and depress the function of your liver: Alcohol overload—This is relatively well-known. Your liver is largely responsible for metabolizing alcohol, and drinking too much liquid courage can send your liver running to cry in a corner somewhere. Carbohydrate bombardment—Starches and sugar have the fastest ability to drive up blood glucose, liver glycogen, and liver fat storage (compared to their protein and fat macronutrient counterparts). Bringing in too many carbs, too often, can elicit a wildfire of fat accumulation. In fact, one of the most effective treatments for reversing NAFLD is reducing the intake of carbohydrates. A recent study conducted at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and published in the journal Cell Metabolism had overweight test subjects with high levels of liver fat reduce their ratio of carbohydrate intake (without reducing calories!). After a short two-week study period the subjects showed “rapid and dramatic” reductions of liver fat and other cardiometabolic risk factors. Too many medications—Your liver is the top doc in charge of your body’s drug metabolism. When you hear about drug side effects on commercials, they are really a direct effect of how your liver is able to handle them. The goal is to work on your lifestyle factors so that you can be on as few medications as possible along with the help of your physician. Your liver will do its best to support you either way, but it will definitely feel happier without the additional burden. Too many supplements—There are several wonderful supplements that can be helpful for your health, but becoming an overzealous natural pill-popper might not be good for you either. In a program funded by the National Institutes of Health, it was found that liver injuries linked to supplement use jumped from 7 percent to 20 percent of all medication/supplement-induced injuries in just a ten-year time span. Again, this is not to say that the right supplements can’t be great for you. This merely points to the fact that your liver is also responsible for metabolism of all of the supplements you take as well. And popping a couple dozen different supplements each day can be a lot for your liver to handle. Plus, the supplement industry is largely unregulated, and the additives, fillers, and other questionable ingredients could add to the burden. Do your homework on where you get your supplements from, avoid taking too many, and focus on food first to meet your nutritional needs. Toxicants—According to researchers at the University of Louisville, more than 300 environmental chemicals, mostly pesticides, have been linked to fatty liver disease. Your liver is largely responsible for handling the weight of the toxicants (most of them newly invented) that we’re exposed to in our world today. Pesticides are inherently meant to be deadly, but just to small organisms (like pests), though it seems to be missed that you are actually made of small organisms, too (bacteria

In short, anyone headed to California had to be either highly motivated or highly desperate. Some were both. John Sutter had made it to California from Switzerland in 1839. Fleeing creditors and leaving his wife behind, Sutter had managed to curry favor with the Mexican authorities and started life anew with some land in northern California. From his base on the Rios de los Americanos—American River even before it became one—Sutter had looked to erect a sawmill. A few miles north of the base, Sutter’s hired overseer, James Marshall, had spotted an area that appeared to be the most suitable place. During a routine check of the construction, Marshall saw sparkles in the ground below the trickling water. His camp was notably startled but dismissed the small find of yellow, metallic flakes. After a few days, Marshall took his discovery downriver to his boss. After some investigation using scales and nitric acid, Sutter was convinced: It was gold.

Suppose that the conventionally measured global economic output, now at about $31 trillion, were to expand at a healthy 3 percent annually. By 2050 it would in theory reach $138 trillion. With only a small leveling adjustment of this income, the entire world population would be prosperous by current standards. Utopia at last, it would seem! What is the flaw in the argument? It is the environment crumbling beneath us. If natural resources, particularly fresh water and arable land, continue to diminish at their present per-capita rate, the economic boom will lose steam, in the course of which—and this worries me even if it doesn’t worry you—the effort to enlarge productive land will wipe out a large part of the world’s fauna and flora. “The appropriation of productive land—the ecological footprint—is already too large for the planet to sustain, and it’s growing larger. A recent study building on this concept estimated that the human population exceeded Earth’s sustainable capacity around the year 1978. By 2000 it had overshot by 1.4 times that capacity. If 12 percent of land were now to be set aside in order to protect the natural environment, as recommended in the 1987 Brundtland Report, Earth’s sustainable capacity will have been exceeded still earlier, around 1972. In short, Earth has lost its ability to regenerate—unless global consumption is reduced, or global production is increased, or both.

Scheele was both an extraordinary and extraordinarily luckless fellow. A poor pharmacist with little in the way of advanced apparatus, he discovered eight elements- chlorine, fluorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen, and oxygen- and got credit for none of them. In every case, his finds were either overlooked or made it into publication after someone else had made the same discovery independently. He also discovered many useful compounds, among them ammonia, glycerin, and tannic acid, and was the first to see the commercial potential of chlorine as a bleach- all breakthroughs that made other people extremely wealthy. Scheele’s one notable shortcoming was a curious insistence on tasting a little of everything he worked with, including such notoriously disagreeable substances as mercury, prussic acid (another of his discoveries), and hydrocyanic acid. Scheele’s rashness eventually caught up with him. In 1786, aged just forty-three, he was found dead at his workbench surrounded by an array of toxic chemicals, any one of which could have accounted for the stunned and terminal look on his face. Were the world just and Swedish-speaking, Scheele would have enjoyed universal acclaim. Instead credit has tended to lodge with more celebrated chemists, mostly from the English-speaking world. Scheele discovered oxygen in 1772, but for various heartbreakingly complicated reasons could not get his paper published in a timely manner. Instead credit went to Joseph Priestley, who discovered the same element independently, but latterly, in the summer of 1774. Even more remarkable was Scheele’s failure to receive credit for the discovery of chlorine. Nearly all textbooks still attribute chlorine’s discovery to Humphry Davy, who did indeed find it, but thirty-six years after Scheele had.

I have since learned that at other latitudes and at other times, the same Communist powers created similar traps for making people believe and hope in illusions. This led to the misery of countless peoples: in France, in America, in Egypt, and perhaps most notably, in Armenia. Tens of thousands died there in 1947 under the spell of Stalin’s propaganda, which had painted the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia as the land of milk and honey. The Soviets… promised that the ancestral culture and religion would be respected and that the newcomers would shortly see a new generation rise and flourish in social justice.

Chris Argyris, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, wrote a lovely article in 1977,191 in which he looked at the performance of Harvard Business School graduates ten years after graduation. By and large, they got stuck in middle management, when they had all hoped to become CEOs and captains of industry. What happened? Argyris found that when they inevitably hit a roadblock, their ability to learn collapsed: What’s more, those members of the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good at it. I am talking about the well-educated, high-powered, high-commitment professionals who occupy key leadership positions in the modern corporation.… Put simply, because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure.… [T]hey become defensive, screen out criticism, and put the “blame” on anyone and everyone but themselves. In short, their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it the most.192 [italics mine] A year or two after Wave, Jeff Huber was running our Ads engineering team. He had a policy that any notable bug or mistake would be discussed at his team meeting in a “What did we learn?” session. He wanted to make sure that bad news was shared as openly as good news, so that he and his leaders were never blind to what was really happening and to reinforce the importance of learning from mistakes. In one session, a mortified engineer confessed, “Jeff, I screwed up a line of code and it cost us a million dollars in revenue.” After leading the team through the postmortem and fixes, Jeff concluded, “Did we get more than a million dollars in learning out of this?” “Yes.” “Then get back to work.”193 And it works in other settings too. A Bay Area public school, the Bullis Charter School in Los Altos, takes this approach to middle school math. If a child misses a question on a math test, they can try the question again for half credit. As their principal, Wanny Hersey, told me, “These are smart kids, but in life they are going to hit walls once in a while. It’s vital they master geometry, algebra one, and algebra two, but it’s just as important that they respond to failure by trying again instead of giving up.” In the 2012–2013 academic year, Bullis was the third-highest-ranked middle school in California.194

The personal case histories were the most encouraging. A prominent Los Angeles public relations executive has been living with MM for fourteen years, rides horses, and has an altogether active life on drug maintenance. An Arizona man survived MM and with his wife set up a foundation and website for other families bewildered by the diagnosis. I learned, for the first time, that Frank McGee, host of the Today show from 1971 to 1974, suffered from MM and kept it from everyone despite his ever more gaunt appearance. When he died after putting in another full week on the air his producers and friends were stunned. Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, was another MM casualty, which led many to believe that he had established the high-profile multiple myeloma treatment center in Little Rock, Arkansas. This is a full-immersion process in which MM is the singular target under the commanding title of Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy. There is a Walton auditorium on the institute’s University of Arkansas medical school campus, but the institute itself was founded by Bart Barlogie, a renowned MM specialist from the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The institute has an impressive record, running well ahead of the national average for survival for those who are dealing with MM. One number is especially notable. The institute has followed 1,070 patients for more than ten years, and 783 have never had a relapse of the disease. Sam Walton was treated by Dr. Barlogie at MD Anderson before the Little Rock institute was founded, but the connection ended there. Walton, who’d had an earlier struggle with leukemia, didn’t survive his encounter with multiple myeloma, dying in April 1992, a time when life expectancy for a man his age with this cancer was short. I was unaware of all of this when I was diagnosed. I took comfort in the repeated reassurances of specialists that great progress in treating MM with a new class of drugs, your own body’s reengineered immunology system, was rapidly improving chances of a longer survival than the published five to ten years. As I began to respond to treatment the favored and welcome line was, “You’re gonna die but from something else.

The night was vibrating with new potential, the beautiful after-haze of adrenaline and bad ideas fully embraced. Ugly thoughts crept in, forcing me to write off a growing list of concerning data: My old dealer gone mad and roaming the sewers; Egbert’s hand—notably short on its middle and ring fingers—reaching out to me with three tiny pill baggies; gas-masked kids dodging conscious thought like a plague; a trafficked tranny more concerned with evading cops than finding love.

Hannah tells me that you helped protect her from the Hispanics during the riot.” “The Hispanics? Oh, the protest, right.” “Call it what you like, son. This place was crawling with spics, and I am grateful that you took care of my only child.” “Well,” I shrugged. “I guess that’s what boyfriends do.” Spics?? “Only good boyfriends,” Hannah said, still tightly holding my left hand. I could never predict when she’d pour on the affection and when she’d act distant. Were all girlfriends this complicated? “I helped pass that law, you understand,” Mr. Walker said. “I’m an advisor to the senator, and it’s about time someone notable, someone of prestige, took a stand on the influx of hispanics into our once great city. The Hispanics were rioting because of that law, because they’re afraid of justice.” “Oh yeah?” I said. I knew nothing about politics or laws. But I had a feeling I disagreed with him. “But I’ll discontinue this tangent before I begin to preach,” he smiled. “Hannah is giving me the warning look.” “Thank you, Daddy,” Hannah said. “The spics destroyed your car,” he said. “Hannah informed me, and then I read the report in the newspaper.” “That was a good car,” I nodded. “I will miss it.” “Well, let me see what I can do to help,” he said. “I’m a financial consultant to many of our nation’s finest automobile manufacturers, including Mission Motorcycles. You have heard of them?” “I don’t know much about any cars. Or motorcycles,” I admitted. “Well, it just so happens, they owed me a favor and agreed to give me a short-term loan on one of their new electric bikes,” he said. And it was then that I realized we were standing beside a gleaming black, silver, and orange motorcycle. I hadn’t noticed before because our school parking lot always looks like a luxury car showcase, and I’d grown numb to the opulence. A sleek black helmet hung from each handle. Mr. Walker placed his palm on the seat and said, “This bike is yours. Until you get a new car.” “Wow,” I breathed. A motorcycle!! “Isn’t it sexy?” Hannah smiled. “It looks like it’s from the future.” “It does,” I agreed. “I’m almost afraid to touch it, like it’ll fly off. But sir, there’s no way…” “Please don’t be so ungrateful as to refuse, son. That’s low class, and that’s not the Walkers. You are in elite company. Dating my daughter has advantages, as I’m sure she’s told you. You just keep performing on the football field.” “Oh…right,” I said. “I’m gratified I can help,” Mr. Walker said and shook my hand again. “I’m expecting big things from you. Don’t let me down. It’s electric, so you’ll need to charge it at night. Fill out the paperwork in the storage compartment and return them signed to Hannah tomorrow. If you wreck it, I’ll have you drowned off Long Beach. I wish I could stay, but I’m late for a meeting with the Board of Supervisors. Hannah, tell your mother I’ll be out late,” he said and got into the back seat of a black sedan that whisked him away.