Official Motivational Quotes

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There are no crimes and no criminals in these days. What is the use of having brains in our profession? I know well that I have it in me to make my name famous. No man lives or has ever lived who has brought the same amount of study and of natural talent to the detection of crime which I have done. And what is the result? There is no crime to detect, or, at most, some bungling villainy with a motive so transparent that even a Scotland Yard official can see through it.
Arthur Conan Doyle (A Study in Scarlet (Sherlock Holmes, #1))
That so many of us find it entirely plausible that a vast network of researchers and health officials and doctors worldwide would willfully harm children for money is evidence of what capitalism is really taking from us. Capitalism has already impoverished the working people who generate wealth for others. And capitalism has already impoverished us culturally, robbing unmarketable art of its value. But when we begin to see the pressures of capitalism as innate laws of human motivation, when we begin to believe that everyone is owned, then we are truly impoverished.
Eula Biss (On Immunity: An Inoculation)
After a while, San Lang said softly, “Something like saving the world, it really doesn’t matter how you do it. But, although brave, it’s foolish.” “Yeah,” Xie Lian agreed. Hua Cheng continued, “Although foolish, it’s brave.
Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù (Heaven Official's Blessing)
Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
George Orwell (Animal Farm)
Hero' is not an official status or designation, but if the world recognize you as a hero, it is the highest honor you will ever receive.
Amit Kalantri
Even today there still exists in the South--and in certain areas of the North--the license that our society allows to unjust officials who implement their authority in the name of justice to practice injustice against minorities. Where, in the days of slavery, social license and custom placed the unbridled power of the whip in the hands of overseers and masters, today--especially in the southern half of the nation--armies of officials are clothed in uniform, invested with authority, armed with the instruments of violence and death and conditioned to believe that they can intimidate, maim or kill Negroes with the same recklessness that once motivated the slaveowner. If one doubts this conclusion, let him search the records and find how rarely in any southern state a police officer has been punished for abusing a Negro.
Martin Luther King Jr. (Why We Can't Wait)
I only wish the NRA and its jellyfish, well-paid supporters in legislatures both State and Federal would be careful to recite the whole of it, and then tell us how a heavily armed man, woman, or child, recruited by no official, led by no official, given no goals by any official, motivated or restrained only by his or her personality and perceptions of what is going on, can be considered a member of a well-regulated militia.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage)
Once you let someone stop you from achieving your goals, you've official lost confidence in yourself.
Kris Harte
The moment that you consciously decide to terminate the repetitiveness of diminishing all that you are, because of outside and inside noise, is the moment that you will officially take control of your own narrative.
Robin S. Baker (Esotericism With an Unconventional Soul: Exploring Philosophy, Spirituality, Science, and Mysticism)
To those who feared oppressive taxes, Hamilton made an argument that anticipated “supply-side economics” of the late twentieth century, saying that officials “can have no temptation to abuse this power, because the motive of revenue will check its own extremes. Experience has shown that moderate duties are more productive than high ones.”10
Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton)
To prevent lower-income African Americans from living in neighborhoods where middle-class whites resided, local and federal officials began in the 1910s to promote zoning ordinances to reserve middle-class neighborhoods for single-family homes that lower-income families of all races could not afford. Certainly, an important and perhaps primary motivation of zoning rules that kept apartment buildings out of single-family neighborhoods was a social class elitism that was not itself racially biased. But there was also enough open racial intent behind exclusionary zoning that it is integral to the story of de jure segregation.
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
Protests and looting naturally capture attention. But the real rage smolders in meetings where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting strength or seek to slash the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment. It goes virtually unnoticed, however, because white rage doesn’t have to take to the streets and face rubber bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures, and governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually driven by the most ignoble motivations. White rage recurs in American history. It exploded after the Civil War, erupted again to undermine the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, and took on its latest incarnation with Barack Obama’s ascent to the White House. For every action of African American advancement, there’s a reaction, a backlash. The
Jesmyn Ward (The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race)
As such, I have found that American politics is best understood by braiding two forms of knowledge that are often left separate: the direct, on-the-ground insights shared by politicians, activists, government officials, and other subjects of my reporting, and the more systemic analyses conducted by political scientists, sociologists, historians, and others with the time, methods and expertise to study American politics at scale. On their own, political actors often ignore the incentives shaping their decisions and academic researchers miss the human motivations that drive political decision-making. Together, however, they shine bright light on how and why American politics work the way it does.
Ezra Klein (Why We're Polarized)
Following the emergence of leaked information regarding Alice Calloway, Etgar Allison has suffered considerable loss motivation, energy and interest in his usual pursuits (Wikipedia, YouTube, Kurt Vonnegut). He has been seen to spend long periods of time staring at inanimate objects and will occasionally stop whatever he is doing to lie face down on the floor and sing "One Thousand Miles" by Vanessa Carlton (a song he has described as "all that's left"). In an official statement given earlier today, he described bed as "better that sex" and Alice Calloway as "the horriblest bitch I know".
Ben Brooks (Lolito)
When one is born into a religion that is not too unsuitable for pronouncing the name of the Lord, when one loves that native religion, well-oriented and pure, it is difficult to conceive of a legitimate motive to abandon it before direct contact with God offers the soul to the divine will itself. Beyond this threshold, the change is only legitimate as an act of obedience. In fact history shows how this rarely happens. More often— perhaps always— the soul that reaches the highest spiritual regions is confirmed in the love of the tradition that served as its ladder. If the imperfection of the native religion is too great, or if it appears in a native environment under a form that is too corrupt, or if circumstances prevent that religion from being born or even kills it, the adoption of a strange religion is legitimate. Legitimate and necessary for certain people; not, without a doubt, for all. It is the same for those who have been raised without any religious practice. In all other cases, to change religions is an extremely grave (serious) decision and it is even more serious to push someone else to do so. It is still an infinitely more serious exercise, in this sense, to officially apply such pressure upon conquered lands.
Simone Weil (Waiting for God)
The news filled me with such euphoria that for an instant I was numb. My ingrained self-censorship immediately started working: I registered the fact that there was an orgy of weeping going on around me, and that I had to come up with some suitable performance. There seemed nowhere to hide my lack of correct emotion except the shoulder of the woman in front of me, one of the student officials, who was apparently heartbroken. I swiftly buried my head in her shoulder and heaved appropriately. As so often in China, a bit of ritual did the trick. Sniveling heartily she made a movement as though she was going to turn around and embrace me I pressed my whole weight on her from behind to keep her in her place, hoping to give the impression that I was in a state of abandoned grief. In the days after Mao's death, I did a lot of thinking. I knew he was considered a philosopher, and I tried to think what his 'philosophy' really was. It seemed to me that its central principle was the need or the desire? for perpetual conflict. The core of his thinking seemed to be that human struggles were the motivating force of history and that in order to make history 'class enemies' had to be continuously created en masse. I wondered whether there were any other philosophers whose theories had led to the suffering and death of so many. I thought of the terror and misery to which the Chinese population had been subjected. For what? But Mao's theory might just be the extension of his personality. He was, it seemed to me, really a restless fight promoter by nature, and good at it. He understood ugly human instincts such as envy and resentment, and knew how to mobilize them for his ends. He ruled by getting people to hate each other. In doing so, he got ordinary Chinese to carry out many of the tasks undertaken in other dictatorships by professional elites. Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship. That was why under him there was no real equivalent of the KGB in China. There was no need. In bringing out and nourishing the worst in people, Mao had created a moral wasteland and a land of hatred. But how much individual responsibility ordinary people should share, I could not decide. The other hallmark of Maoism, it seemed to me, was the reign of ignorance. Because of his calculation that the cultured class were an easy target for a population that was largely illiterate, because of his own deep resentment of formal education and the educated, because of his megalomania, which led to his scorn for the great figures of Chinese culture, and because of his contempt for the areas of Chinese civilization that he did not understand, such as architecture, art, and music, Mao destroyed much of the country's cultural heritage. He left behind not only a brutalized nation, but also an ugly land with little of its past glory remaining or appreciated. The Chinese seemed to be mourning Mao in a heartfelt fashion. But I wondered how many of their tears were genuine. People had practiced acting to such a degree that they confused it with their true feelings. Weeping for Mao was perhaps just another programmed act in their programmed lives. Yet the mood of the nation was unmistakably against continuing Mao's policies. Less than a month after his death, on 6 October, Mme Mao was arrested, along with the other members of the Gang of Four. They had no support from anyone not the army, not the police, not even their own guards. They had had only Mao. The Gang of Four had held power only because it was really a Gang of Five. When I heard about the ease with which the Four had been removed, I felt a wave of sadness. How could such a small group of second-rate tyrants ravage 900 million people for so long? But my main feeling was joy. The last tyrants of the Cultural Revolution were finally gone.
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
The harm done by the FDA does not result from defects in the people in charge—unless it be a defect to be human. Many have been able and devoted civil servants. However, social, political, and economic pressures determine the behavior of the people supposedly in charge of a government agency to a far greater extent than they determine its behavior. No doubt there are exceptions, but they are rare—almost as rare as barking cats. That does not mean that effective reform is impossible. But it requires taking account of the political laws governing the behavior of government agencies, not simply berating officials for inefficiency and waste or questioning their motives and urging them to do better. The
Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
Normally, the easiest way to [use money to get more money, i.e. capitalism] is by establishing some kind of formal or de facto monopoly. For this reason, capitalists, whether merchant princes, financiers, or industrialists, invariably try to ally themselves with political authorities to limit the freedom of the market, so as to make it easier for them to do so. From this perspective, China was for most of its history the ultimate anti-capitalist market state. Unlike later European princes, Chinese rulers systematically refused to team up with would-be Chinese capitalists (who always existed). Instead, like their officials, they saw them as destructive parasites--though, unlike the usurers, ones whose fundamental selfish and antisocial motivations could still be put to use in certain ways. In Confucian terms, merchants were like soldiers. Those drawn to a career in the military were assumed to be driven largely by a love of violence. As individuals, they were not good people, but they were also necessary to defend the frontiers. Similarly, merchants were driven by greed and basically immoral; yet if kept under careful administrative supervision, they could be made to serve the public good. Whatever one might think of the principles, the results are hard to deny. For most of its history, China maintained the highest standard of living in the world--even England only really overtook it in perhaps the 1820s, well past the time of the Industrial Revolution.
David Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years)
The United States has not consciously chosen a grand strategy over the last several decades; rather it has made a series of policy decisions that have largely resulted from political motivations while being sold as part of a coherent plan after the fact, or more precisely, as a collection of coherent plans that are advocated for or forgotten about depending on the needs of the moment. Thus, those who want to change American foreign policy should not expect to succeed primarily by making arguments as to why the United States is implementing the wrong grand strategy. Rather, one would have to work to change the incentive structures that lead some ideas to gain currency, and government officials to make certain decisions but not others.
Richard Hanania (Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy: How Generals, Weapons Manufacturers, and Foreign Governments Shape American Foreign Policy)
Since the very beginning of the Communist regime, I had carefully studied books on Marxism and pronouncements by Chinese Communist Party leaders. It seemed to me that socialism in China was still very much an experiment nad had no fixed course of development for the country had yet been decided upon. This, I thought, was why the government's policy was always changing, like a pendulum swinging from left to right and back again. When things went to extremes and problems emerged. Beijing would take corrective measures. Then these very corrective measures went too far and had to be corrected. The real difficulty was, of course, that a state-controlled economy only stifled productivity, and economic planning from Beijing ignored local conditions and killed incentive. When a policy changed from above, the standards of values changed with it. What was right yesterday became wrong today, and visa versa. Thus the words and actions of a Communist Party official at the lower level were valid for a limited time only... The Cultural Revolution seemed to me to be a swing to the left. Sooner or later, when it had gone too far, corrective measures would be taken. The people would have a few months or a few years of respite until the next political campaign. Mao Zedong believed that political campaigns were the motivating force for progress. So I thought the Proletarian Cultural Revolution was just one of an endless series of upheavals the Chinese people must learn to put up with.
Nien Cheng (Life and Death in Shanghai)
CEO Gil Amelio stumbled. Ellison may have been baffled when Jobs insisted that he was not motivated by money, but it was partly true. He had neither Ellison’s conspicuous consumption needs nor Gates’s philanthropic impulses nor the competitive urge to see how high on the Forbes list he could get. Instead his ego needs and personal drives led him to seek fulfillment by creating a legacy that would awe people. A dual legacy, actually: building innovative products and building a lasting company. He wanted to be in the pantheon with, indeed a notch above, people like Edwin Land, Bill Hewlett, and David Packard. And the best way to achieve all this was to return to Apple and reclaim his kingdom. And yet when the cup of power neared his lips, he became strangely hesitant, reluctant, perhaps coy. He returned to Apple officially in January 1997 as a part-time advisor, as he had told Amelio he would. He began to assert himself in some personnel areas, especially in protecting his people who had made the transition from NeXT. But in most other ways he was unusually passive. The decision not to ask him to join the board offended him, and he felt demeaned
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
There is at least one official voice in Europe that expresses understanding of the methods and motives of President Roosevelt,” began a New York Times report in July 1933. “This voice is that of Germany, as represented by Chancellor Adolf Hitler.” The German leader told the Times, “I have sympathy with President Roosevelt because he marches straight toward his objective over Congress, over lobbies, over stubborn bureaucracies.
Jonah Goldberg (Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning)
I hear all the time that peace activists are naive, that it is impossible to talk to extremists--people who have no regard for the lives of innocents... But in my experience in conflict zones the world over, there are always people to talk to. From members of Hamas in Gaza to Baathists under Saddam's Iraq to the Taliban in Afganistan to government officials in Iran, it is a major blunder to label all our perceived enemies as extremists incapable of rational conversation. People join militant groups for many reasons--religious, family, social pressure, revenge for some wrong they experienced, political ideology, poverty. With such diversity of motives, the are always some people who can be enticed to talk about peace. Our goal should be to seek them out, to strengthen the moderates. Unfortunately, our actions have only served to embolden the extremists.
Medea Benjamin (Drone Warfare: Killing By Remote Control)
Leadership means making choices and then rallying the team around those choices. One thing I had learned from my dad’s experience as a senior Indian government official was that few tasks are more difficult than building a lasting institution. The choice of leading through consensus versus fiat is a false one. Any institution-building comes from having a clear vision and culture that works to motivate progress both top-down and bottom-up.
Satya Nadella (Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone)
My life began by flickering out. It may sound strange but it is so. From the very first moment I became conscious of myself, I felt that I was already flickering out. I began to flicker out over the writing of official papers at the office; I went on flickering out when I read truths in books which I did not know how to apply in life, when I sat with friends listening to rumours, gossip, jeering, spiteful, cold, and empty chatter, and watching friendships kept up by meetings that were without aim or affection; I was flickering out and wasting my energies with Minna on whom I spent more than half of my income, imagining that I loved her; I was flickering out when I walked idly and dejectedly along Nevsky Avenue among people in raccoon coats and beaver collars – at parties, on reception days, where I was welcomed with open arms as a fairly eligible young man; I was flickering out and wasting my life and mind on trifles moving from town to some country house, and from the country house to Gorokhovaya, fixing the arrival of spring by the fact that lobsters and oysters had appeared in the shops, of autumn and winter by the special visiting days, of summer by the fêtes, and life in general by lazy and comfortable somnolence like the rest. ... Even ambition – what was it wasted on? To order clothes at a famous tailor's? To get an invitation to a famous house? To shake hands with Prince P.? And ambition is the salt of life! Where has it gone to? Either I have not understood this sort of life or it is utterly worthless; but I did not know of a better one. No one showed it to me.
Ivan Goncharov (Oblomov)
When we look back on what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, during the summer of 2014, it will be easy to think of it as yet one more episode of black rage ignited by yet another police killing of an unarmed African American male. But that has it precisely backward. What we've actually seen is the latest outbreak of white rage. Sure, it is cloaked in the niceties of law and order, but it is rage nonetheless. Protests and looting naturally capture attention. But the real rage smolders in meetings where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting strength or seek to slash the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment. It goes virtually unnoticed, however, because white rage doesn't have to take to the streets and face rubber bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures, and governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually driven by the most ignoble motivations. White rage recurs in American history. It exploded after the Civil War, erupted again to undermine the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, and took on its latest incarnation with Barack Obama's ascent to the White House. For every action of African American advancements, there's a reaction, a backlash.
Carol Anderson (The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race)
They don’t want the Negro who has just moved out of rural Dixie as their neighbor,” a city official told the Chicago Defender in a story that described what it called a “2-Year City Ban on Migrants.” With close to half a million colored people overflowing the black belt by 1950, racial walls that had been “successfully defended for a generation,” in the words of the historian Allan Spear, were facing imminent collapse, but not without a fight. Chicago found itself in the midst of “chronic urban guerilla warfare” that rivaled the city’s violent spasms at the start of the Migration, “when one racially motivated bombing or arson occurred every twenty days,” according to the historian Arnold Hirsch.
Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration)
I hoped to offer U.S. intelligence agencies the opportunity to even place CIA officers in NOC (non-official cover) jobs in our company working under our Libyan contract. With agency officers in place with rock-solid “cover for status”—that’s the lie that explains who you are pretending to be—and “cover for action”—that’s the lie that explains what you’re doing while you’re there—the United States would have direct access to people in the seedy, murky underside of Libya, people whose motives and alliances were now unclear. The goals were a tall order, but don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footprints on the moon, because as my dad would say, you never hit high aiming low.” Excerpt From: Jamie Smith. “Gray Work
Jamie Smith
Willa maintains a vigil. Certain tasks are relegated to women. Mourning, staring into the wastes, waiting for no one to surface. It's a white man who's missing. Usually, that would be enough to keep it in the news, but eight days in, the police release their grief in an official report. The art of blame-casting is a lesser sorcery. History is written in sand, and a broom changes everything. Every woman knows the art of covering up a mess: a carpet, a dustpan, bleach on the boards. What do you do with the cleaning supplies of the world? Use them to wash the blood away, and grind the bones into bread. Swallow the confessions whispered in bed. If events don't make sense, a story grows to cover up the confusion. Motives and mistakes.
Maria Dahvana Headley (The Mere Wife)
Finally, we arrive at the question of the so-called nonpolitical man. Hitler not only established his power from the very beginning with masses of people who were until then essentially nonpolitical; he also accomplished his last step to victory in March of 1933 in a "legal" manner, by mobilizing no less than five million nonvoters, that is to say, nonpolitical people. The Left parties had made every effort to win over the indifferent masses, without posing the question as to what it means "to be indifferent or nonpolitical." If an industrialist and large estate owner champions a rightist party, this is easily understood in terms of his immediate economic interests. In his case a leftist orientation would be at variance with his social situation and would, for that reason, point to irrational motives. If an industrial worker has a leftist orientation, this too is by all mean rationally consistent—it derives from his economic and social position in industry. If, however, a worker, an employee, or an official has a rightist orientation, this must be ascribed to a lack of political clarity, i.e., he is ignorant of his social position. The more a man who belongs to the broad working masses is nonpolitical, the more susceptible he is to the ideology of political reaction. To be nonpolitical is not, as one might suppose, evidence of a passive psychic condition, but of a highly active attitude, a defense against the awareness of social responsibility. The analysis of this defense against consciousness of one's social responsibility yields clear insights into a number of dark questions concerning the behavior of the broad nonpolitical strata. In the case of the average intellectual "who wants nothing to do with politics," it can easily be shown that immediate economic interests and fears related to his social position, which is dependent upon public opinion, lie at the basis of his noninvolvement. These fears cause him to make the most grotesque sacrifices with respect to his knowledge and convictions. Those people who are engaged in the production process in one way or another and are nonetheless socially irresponsible can be divided into two major groups. In the case of the one group the concept of politics is unconsciously associated with the idea of violence and physical danger, i.e., with an intense fear, which prevents them from facing life realistically. In the case of the other group, which undoubtedly constitutes the majority, social irresponsibility is based on personal conflicts and anxieties, of which the sexual anxiety is the predominant one. […] Until now the revolutionary movement has misunderstood this situation. It attempted to awaken the "nonpolitical" man by making him conscious solely of his unfulfilled economic interests. Experience teaches that the majority of these "nonpolitical" people can hardly be made to listen to anything about their socio-economic situation, whereas they are very accessible to the mystical claptrap of a National Socialist, despite the fact that the latter makes very little mention of economic interests. [This] is explained by the fact that severe sexual conflicts (in the broadest sense of the word), whether conscious or unconscious, inhibit rational thinking and the development of social responsibility. They make a person afraid and force him into a shell. If, now, such a self-encapsulated person meets a propagandist who works with faith and mysticism, meets, in other words, a fascist who works with sexual, libidinous methods, he turns his complete attention to him. This is not because the fascist program makes a greater impression on him than the liberal program, but because in his devotion to the führer and the führer's ideology, he experiences a momentary release from his unrelenting inner tension. Unconsciously, he is able to give his conflicts a different form and in this way to "solve" them.
Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism)
The civil machinery which ensured the carrying out of this law, and the military organization which turned numbers of men into battalions and divisions, were each founded on a bureaucracy. The production of resources, in particular guns and ammunition, was a matter for civil organization. The movement of men and resources to the front, and the trench system of defence, were military concerns.” Each interlocking system was logical in itself and each system could be rationalized by those who worked it and moved through it. Thus, Elliot demonstrates, “It is reasonable to obey the law, it is good to organize well, it is ingenious to devise guns of high technical capacity, it is sensible to shelter human beings against massive firepower by putting them in protective trenches.” What was the purpose of this complex organization? Officially it was supposed to save civilization, protect the rights of small democracies, demonstrate the superiority of Teutonic culture, beat the dirty Hun, beat the arrogant British, what have you. But the men caught in the middle came to glimpse a darker truth. “The War had become undisguisedly mechanical and inhuman,” Siegfried Sassoon allows a fictional infantry officer to see. “What in earlier days had been drafts of volunteers were now droves of victims.”378 Men on every front independently discovered their victimization. Awareness intensified as the war dragged on. In Russia it exploded in revolution. In Germany it motivated desertions and surrenders. Among the French it led to mutinies in the front lines. Among the British it fostered malingering.
Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition)
McDougall was a certified revolutionary hero, while the Scottish-born cashier, the punctilious and corpulent William Seton, was a Loyalist who had spent the war in the city. In a striking show of bipartisan unity, the most vociferous Sons of Liberty—Marinus Willett, Isaac Sears, and John Lamb—appended their names to the bank’s petition for a state charter. As a triple power at the new bank—a director, the author of its constitution, and its attorney—Hamilton straddled a critical nexus of economic power. One of Hamilton’s motivations in backing the bank was to introduce order into the manic universe of American currency. By the end of the Revolution, it took $167 in continental dollars to buy one dollar’s worth of gold and silver. This worthless currency had been superseded by new paper currency, but the states also issued bills, and large batches of New Jersey and Pennsylvania paper swamped Manhattan. Shopkeepers had to be veritable mathematical wizards to figure out the fluctuating values of the varied bills and coins in circulation. Congress adopted the dollar as the official monetary unit in 1785, but for many years New York shopkeepers still quoted prices in pounds, shillings, and pence. The city was awash with strange foreign coins bearing exotic names: Spanish doubloons, British and French guineas, Prussian carolines, Portuguese moidores. To make matters worse, exchange rates differed from state to state. Hamilton hoped that the Bank of New York would counter all this chaos by issuing its own notes and also listing the current exchange rates for the miscellaneous currencies. Many Americans still regarded banking as a black, unfathomable art, and it was anathema to upstate populists. The Bank of New York was denounced by some as the cat’s-paw of British capitalists. Hamilton’s petition to the state legislature for a bank charter was denied for seven years, as Governor George Clinton succumbed to the prejudices of his agricultural constituents who thought the bank would give preferential treatment to merchants and shut out farmers. Clinton distrusted corporations as shady plots against the populace, foreshadowing the Jeffersonian revulsion against Hamilton’s economic programs. The upshot was that in June 1784 the Bank of New York opened as a private bank without a charter. It occupied the Walton mansion on St. George’s Square (now Pearl Street), a three-story building of yellow brick and brown trim, and three years later it relocated to Hanover Square. It was to house the personal bank accounts of both Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and prove one of Hamilton’s most durable monuments, becoming the oldest stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton)
While the Texas prison officials remained in the dark about what was going on, they were fortunate that William and Danny had benign motives. Imagine what havoc the two might have caused; it would have been child's play for these guys to develop a scheme for obtaining money or property from unsuspecting victims. The Internet had become their university and playground. Learning how to run scams against individuals or break in to corporate sites would have been a cinch; teenagers and preteens learn these methods every day from the hacker sites and elsewhere on the Web. And as prisoners, Danny and William had all the time in the world. Maybe there's a lesson here: Two convicted murderers, but that didn't mean they were scum, rotten to the core. They were cheaters who hacked their way onto the Internet illegally, but that didn't mean they were willing to victimize innocent people or naively insecure companies.
Kevin D. Mitnick (The Art of Intrusion: The Real Stories Behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders and Deceivers)
But Oppenheimer was still capable of being a critic; he just wanted to stand alone and with far more ambiguity than his fellow scientists. He was consumed with the deep ethical and philosophical dilemmas posed by nuclear weapons, but at times it seemed that, as Thorpe puts it, “Oppenheimer offered to weep for the world, but not help to change it.” In truth, Oppenheimer very much wanted to change the world—but he knew he was barred from pulling on the levers of power in Washington, and he no longer had the spirit for public activism that had motivated him in the 1930s. His excommunication had not freed him to enter the great debates of the day; it had inclined him, rather, to censor himself. Frank Oppenheimer thought his brother felt enormously frustrated that he could not find a way back into official circles. “He wanted to get back into that, I think,” Frank said. “I don’t know why, but I think it’s one of these things where there’s a—when you get the taste of it, it’s hard to not want it.
Kai Bird (American Prometheus)
In any event, should you doubt that your knowledge of Western history is distorted by the work of these distinguished bigots, consider whether you believe any of the following statements: The Catholic Church motivated and actively participated in nearly two millennia of anti-Semitic violence, justifying it on grounds that the Jews were responsible for the Crucifixion, until the Vatican II Council was shamed into retracting that doctrine in 1965. But, the Church still has not made amends for the fact that Pope Pius XII is rightfully known as “Hitler’s Pope.” Only recently have we become aware of remarkably enlightened Christian gospels, long ago suppressed by narrow-minded Catholic prelates. Once in power as the official church of Rome, Christians quickly and brutally persecuted paganism out of existence. The fall of Rome and the ascendancy of the Church precipitated Europe’s decline into a millennium of ignorance and backwardness. These Dark Ages lasted until the Renaissance/Enlightenment, when secular scholars burst through the centuries of Catholic barriers against reason. Initiated by the pope, the Crusades were but the first bloody chapter in the history of unprovoked and brutal European colonialism. The Spanish Inquisition tortured and murdered huge numbers of innocent people for “imaginary” crimes, such as witchcraft and blasphemy. The Catholic Church feared and persecuted scientists, as the case of Galileo makes clear. Therefore, the Scientific “Revolution” occurred mainly in Protestant societies because only there could the Catholic Church not suppress independent thought. ► Being entirely comfortable with slavery, the Catholic Church did nothing to oppose its introduction in the New World nor to make it more humane. Until very recently, the Catholic view of the ideal state was summed up in the phrase, “The divine right of kings.” Consequently, the Church has bitterly resisted all efforts to establish more liberal governments, eagerly supporting dictators. It was the Protestant Reformation that broke the repressive Catholic grip on progress and ushered in capitalism, religious freedom, and the modern world. Each of these statements is part of the common culture, widely accepted and frequently repeated. But, each is false and many are the exact opposite of the truth! A chapter will be devoted to summarizing recent repetitions of each of these statements and to demonstrating that each is most certainly false.
Rodney Stark (Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History)
Smiley himself was one of those solitaries who seem to have come into the world fully educated at the age of eighteen. Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession. The byways of espionage are not populated by the brash and colourful adventurers of fiction. A man who, like Smiley, has lived and worked for years among his country’s enemies learns only one prayer: that he may never, never be noticed. Assimilation is his highest aim, he learns to love the crowds who pass him in the street without a glance; he clings to them for his anonymity and his safety. His fear makes him servile—he could embrace the shoppers who jostle him in their impatience, and force him from the pavement. He could adore the officials, the police, the bus conductors, for the terse indifference of their attitudes. But this fear, this servility, this dependence, had developed in Smiley a perception for the colour of human beings: a swift, feminine sensitivity to their characters and motives. He knew mankind as a huntsman knows his cover, as a fox the wood. For a spy must hunt while he is hunted, and the crowd is his estate. He could collect their gestures and their words, record the interplay of glance and movement, as a huntsman can record the twisted bracken and the broken twig, or as a fox detects the signs of danger.
John le Carré (A Murder of Quality)
Self-defense is a universal exception to the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence. State failure drives the self-defense doctrine through the imminence requirement. Private violence is justified where one faces an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm to which the government cannot respond. The imminence requirement defines that space where the state, regardless of its motives and ambitions, simply cannot help. State failure within the window of imminence is a reality for everyone. But one might expect blacks to be particularly sensitive to it. The window of imminence is often larger in black neighborhoods where various challenges stretch public resources. Certainly state failure is less galling today. Under slavery, Black Codes, and Jim Crow, the state was often just another layer of threat, and reliance on the state for personal security was more obviously an absurd proposition. Today, the malevolent state is thankfully an anachronism. That makes it easier for those ensconced in government bureaucracies to urge reliance on the state and to ignore the continuing failure of government within the window of imminence. But it is sheer hubris for public officials to ignore the inherent limits on state power and claim that they can protect people within a space where that is impossible as a matter of simple physics.
Nicholas Johnson (Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms)
A common problem plagues people who try to design institutions without accounting for hidden motives. First they identify the key goals that the institution “should” achieve. Then they search for a design that best achieves these goals, given all the constraints that the institution must deal with. This task can be challenging enough, but even when the designers apparently succeed, they’re frequently puzzled and frustrated when others show little interest in adopting their solution. Often this is because they mistook professed motives for real motives, and thus solved the wrong problems. Savvy institution designers must therefore identify both the surface goals to which people give lip service and the hidden goals that people are also trying to achieve. Designers can then search for arrangements that actually achieve the deeper goals while also serving the surface goals—or at least giving the appearance of doing so. Unsurprisingly, this is a much harder design problem. But if we can learn to do it well, our solutions will less often meet the fate of puzzling disinterest. We should take a similar approach when reforming a preexisting institution by first asking ourselves, “What are this institution’s hidden functions, and how important are they?” Take education, for example. We may wish for schools that focus more on teaching than on testing. And yet, some amount of testing is vital to the economy, since employers need to know which workers to hire. So if we tried to cut too much from school’s testing function, we could be blindsided by resistance we don’t understand—because those who resist may not tell us the real reasons for their opposition. It’s only by understanding where the resistance is coming from that we have any hope of overcoming it. Not all hidden institutional functions are worth facilitating, however. Some involve quite wasteful signaling expenditures, and we might be better off if these institutions performed only their official, stated functions. Take medicine, for example. To the extent that we use medical spending to show how much we care (and are cared for), there are very few positive externalities. The caring function is mostly competitive and zero-sum, and—perhaps surprisingly—we could therefore improve collective welfare by taxing extraneous medical spending, or at least refusing to subsidize it. Don’t expect any politician to start pushing for healthcare taxes or cutbacks, of course, because for lawmakers, as for laypeople, the caring signals are what makes medicine so attractive. These kinds of hidden incentives, alongside traditional vested interests, are what often make large institutions so hard to reform. Thus there’s an element of hubris in any reform effort, but at least by taking accurate stock of an institution’s purposes, both overt and covert, we can hope to avoid common mistakes. “The curious task of economics,” wrote Friedrich Hayek, “is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”8
Kevin Simler (The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life)
Rule by decree has conspicuous advantages for the domination of far-flung territories with heterogeneous populations and for a policy of oppression. Its efficiency is superior simply because it ignores all intermediary stages between issuance and application, and because it prevents political reasoning by the people through the withholding of information. It can easily overcome the variety of local customs and need not rely on the necessarily slow process of development of general law. It is most helpful for the establishment of a centralized administration because it overrides automatically all matters of local autonomy. If rule by good laws has sometimes been called the rule of wisdom, rule by appropriate decrees may rightly be called the rule of cleverness. For it is clever to reckon with ulterior motives and aims, and it is wise to understand and create by deduction from generally accepted principles. Government by bureaucracy has to be distinguished from the mere outgrowth and deformation of civil services which frequently accompanied the decline of the nation-state—as, notably, in France. There the administration has survived all changes in regime since the Revolution, entrenched itself like a parasite in the body politic, developed its own class interests, and become a useless organism whose only purpose appears to be chicanery and prevention of normal economic and political development. There are of course many superficial similarities between the two types of bureaucracy, especially if one pays too much attention to the striking psychological similarity of petty officials. But if the French people have made the very serious mistake of accepting their administration as a necessary evil, they have never committed the fatal error of allowing it to rule the country—even though the consequence has been that nobody rules it. The French atmosphere of government has become one of inefficiency and vexation; but it has not created and aura of pseudomysticism. And it is this pseudomysticism that is the stamp of bureaucracy when it becomes a form of government. Since the people it dominates never really know why something is happening, and a rational interpretation of laws does not exist, there remains only one thing that counts, the brutal naked event itself. What happens to one then becomes subject to an interpretation whose possibilities are endless, unlimited by reason and unhampered by knowledge. Within the framework of such endless interpretive speculation, so characteristic of all branches of Russian pre-revolutionary literature, the whole texture of life and world assume a mysterious secrecy and depth. There is a dangerous charm in this aura because of its seemingly inexhaustible richness; interpretation of suffering has a much larger range than that of action for the former goes on in the inwardness of the soul and releases all the possibilities of human imagination, whereas the latter is consistently checked, and possibly led into absurdity, by outward consequence and controllable experience.
Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism)
The government has a great need to restore its credibility, to make people forget its history and rewrite it. The intelligentsia have to a remarkable degree undertaken this task. It is also necessary to establish the "lessons" that have to be drawn from the war, to ensure that these are conceived on the narrowest grounds, in terms of such socially neutral categories as "stupidity" or "error" or "ignorance" or perhaps "cost." Why? Because soon it will be necessary to justify other confrontations, perhaps other U.S. interventions in the world, other Vietnams. But this time, these will have to be successful intervention, which don't slip out of control. Chile, for example. It is even possible for the press to criticize successful interventions - the Dominican Republic, Chile, etc. - as long as these criticisms don't exceed "civilized limits," that is to say, as long as they don't serve to arouse popular movements capable of hindering these enterprises, and are not accompanied by any rational analysis of the motives of U.S. imperialism, something which is complete anathema, intolerable to liberal ideology. How is the liberal press proceeding with regard to Vietnam, that sector which supported the "doves"? By stressing the "stupidity" of the U.S. intervention; that's a politically neutral term. It would have been sufficient to find an "intelligent" policy. The war was thus a tragic error in which good intentions were transmuted into bad policies, because of a generation of incompetent and arrogant officials. The war's savagery is also denounced, but that too, is used as a neutral category...Presumably the goals were legitimate - it would have been all right to do the same thing, but more humanely... The "responsible" doves were opposed to the war - on a pragmatic basis. Now it is necessary to reconstruct the system of beliefs according to which the United States is the benefactor of humanity, historically committed to freedom, self-determination, and human rights. With regard to this doctrine, the "responsible" doves share the same presuppositions as the hawks. They do not question the right of the United States to intervene in other countries. Their criticism is actually very convenient for the state, which is quite willing to be chided for its errors, as long as the fundamental right of forceful intervention is not brought into question. ... The resources of imperialist ideology are quite vast. It tolerates - indeed, encourages - a variety of forms of opposition, such as those I have just illustrated. It is permissible to criticize the lapses of the intellectuals and of government advisers, and even to accuse them of an abstract desire for "domination," again a socially neutral category not linked in any way to concrete social and economic structures. But to relate that abstract "desire for domination" to the employment of force by the United States government in order to preserve a certain system of world order, specifically, to ensure that the countries of the world remain open insofar as possible to exploitation by U.S.-based corporations - that is extremely impolite, that is to argue in an unacceptable way.
Noam Chomsky (The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature)
Generally speaking a view of the available economic systems that have been tested historically must acknowledge the immense power of capitalism to generate living standards food housing education the amenities to a degree unprecedented in human civilization. The benefits of such a system while occasionally random and unpredictable with periods of undeniable stress and misery depression starvation and degradation are inevitably distributed to a greater and greater percentage of the population. The periods of economic stability also ensure a greater degree of popular political freedom and among the industrial Western democracies today despite occasional suppression of free speech quashing of dissent corruption of public officials and despite the tendency of legislation to serve the interests of the ruling business oligarchy the poisoning of the air water the chemical adulteration of food the obscene development of hideous weaponry the increased costs of simple survival the waste of human resources the ruin of cities the servitude of backward foreign populations the standards of life under capitalism by any criterion are far greater than under state socialism in whatever forms it is found British Swedish Cuban Soviet or Chinese. Thus the good that fierce advocacy of personal wealth accomplishes in the historical run of things outweighs the bad. And while we may not admire always the personal motives of our business leaders we can appreciate the inevitable percolation of the good life as it comes down through our native American soil. You cannot observe the bounteous beauty of our county nor take pleasure in its most ordinary institutions in peace and safety without acknowledging the extraordinary achievement of American civilization. There are no Japanese bandits lying in wait on the Tokaidoways after all. Drive down the turnpike past the pretty painted pipes of the oil refineries and no one will hurt you.
E.L. Doctorow
A fierce battle was taking place at Tobruk, and nothing thrilled him more than spirited warfare and the prospect of military glory. He stayed up until three-thirty, in high spirits, “laughing, chaffing and alternating business with conversation,” wrote Colville. One by one his official guests, including Anthony Eden, gave up and went to bed. Churchill, however, continued to hold forth, his audience reduced to only Colville and Mary’s potential suitor, Eric Duncannon. Mary by this point had retired to the Prison Room, aware that the next day held the potential to change her life forever. — IN BERLIN, MEANWHILE, HITLER and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels joked about a newly published English biography of Churchill that revealed many of his idiosyncrasies, including his penchant for wearing pink silk underwear, working in the bathtub, and drinking throughout the day. “He dictates messages in the bath or in his underpants; a startling image which the Führer finds hugely amusing,” Goebbels wrote in his diary on Saturday. “He sees the English Empire as slowly disintegrating. Not much will be salvageable.” — ON SUNDAY MORNING, a low-grade anxiety colored the Cromwellian reaches of Chequers. Today, it seemed, would be the day Eric Duncannon proposed to Mary, and no one other than Mary was happy about it. Even she, however, was not wholly at ease with the idea. She was eighteen years old and had never had a romantic relationship, let alone been seriously courted. The prospect of betrothal left her feeling emotionally roiled, though it did add a certain piquancy to the day. New guests arrived: Sarah Churchill, the Prof, and Churchill’s twenty-year-old niece, Clarissa Spencer-Churchill—“looking quite beautiful,” Colville noted. She was accompanied by Captain Alan Hillgarth, a raffishly handsome novelist and self-styled adventurer now serving as naval attaché in Madrid, where he ran intelligence operations; some of these were engineered with the help of a lieutenant on his staff, Ian Fleming, who later credited Captain Hillgarth as being one of the inspirations for James Bond. “It was obvious,” Colville wrote, “that Eric was expected to make advances to Mary and that the prospect was viewed with nervous pleasure by Mary, with approbation by Moyra, with dislike by Mrs. C. and with amusement by Clarissa.” Churchill expressed little interest. After lunch, Mary and the others walked into the rose garden, while Colville showed Churchill telegrams about the situation in Iraq. The day was sunny and warm, a nice change from the recent stretch of cold. Soon, to Colville’s mystification, Eric and Clarissa set off on a long walk over the grounds by themselves, leaving Mary behind. “His motives,” Colville wrote, “were either Clarissa’s attraction, which she did not attempt to keep in the background, or else the belief that it was good policy to arouse Mary’s jealousy.” After the walk, and after Clarissa and Captain Hillgarth had left, Eric took a nap, with the apparent intention (as Colville
Erik Larson (The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz)
Charles Bean, the official historian of Australia’s part in World War I, was unusual in dealing closely with the deeds of the soldiers on the front line, and not just the plans and orders of their leaders. At the end of his account of the Gallipoli landing in the Official History, he asked what made the soldiers fight on. What motive sustained them? At the end of the second or third day of the Landing, when they had fought without sleep until the whole world seemed a dream, and they scarcely knew whether it was a world of reality or of delirium – and often, no doubt, it held something of both; when half of each battalion had been annihilated, and there seemed no prospect before any man except that of wounds or death in the most vile surroundings; when the dead lay three deep in the rifle-pits under the blue sky and the place was filled with stench and sickness, and reason had almost vanished – what was it then that carried each man on? It was not love of a fight. The Australian loved fighting better than most, but it is an occupation from which the glamour quickly wears. It was not hatred of the Turk. It is true that the men at this time hated their enemy for his supposed ill-treatment of the wounded – and the fact that, of the hundreds who lay out, only one wounded man survived in Turkish hands has justified their suspicions. But hatred was not the motive which inspired them. Nor was it purely patriotism, as it would have been had they fought on Australian soil. The love of country in Australians and New Zealanders was intense – how strong, they did not realise until they were far away from their home. Nor, in most cases was the motive their loyalty to the tie between Australia and Great Britain. Although, singly or combined, all these were powerful influences, they were not the chief. Nor was it the desire for fame that made them steer their course so straight in the hour of crucial trial. They knew too well the chance that their families, possibly even the men beside them, would never know how they died. Doubtless the weaker were swept on by the stronger. In every army which enters into battle there is a part which is dependent for its resolution upon the nearest strong man. If he endures, those around him will endure; if he turns, they turn; if he falls, they may become confused. But the Australian force contained more than its share of men who were masters of their own minds and decisions. What was the dominant motive that impelled them? It lay in the mettle of the men themselves. To be the sort of man who would give way when his mates were trusting to his firmness; to be the sort of man who would fail when the line, the whole force, and the allied cause required his endurance; to have made it necessary for another unit to do his own unit’s work; to live the rest of his life haunted by the knowledge that he had set his hand to a soldier’s task and had lacked the grit to carry it through – that was the prospect which these men could not face. Life was very dear, but life was not worth living unless they could be true to their idea of Australian manhood.
John Hirst (The Australians: Insiders and Outsiders on the National Character since 1770)
The ongoing crisis in Ukraine has finally put an end to this fantasy. In annexing Crimea, Moscow decisively rejected the West’s rules and in the process shattered many flawed Western assumptions about its motivations. Now U.S. and European officials need a new paradigm for how to think about Russian foreign policy—and if they want to resolve the Ukraine crisis and prevent similar ones from occurring in the future, they need to get better at putting themselves in Moscow’s shoes.
Anonymous
Banks have been a frequent target for hackers in recent years, with the vast majority of attacks motivated by financial theft. But not all of them. In the past two years, U.S. banks have been targets of a series of politically motivated attacks from Iran, in which a group of Iranian hackers flooded bank websites with so much online traffic - a method called a distributed denial of service attack - that the sites slowed or intermittently collapsed. Hackers who took credit for those attacks said they went after the banks in retaliation for an anti-Islam video that mocked the Prophet Muhammad. U.S. intelligence officials said the group was actually a cover for the Iranian government. Officials claimed Iran was waging the attacks in retaliation for Western economic sanctions and for attacks on its own systems.
Anonymous
The members of the committee were aware of the programmes concerned, having been briefed on them in classified sessions. The question was, in a sense, a trap, aimed at bouncing Clapper into revealing more than he wanted. But for all that, as a member of the executive branch, he is under a solemn duty not to mislead the legislature—or to mislead citizens who are observing its questioning of their government officials. For whatever mixture of motives or confusion, he breached that duty. He apologised later, pleading confusion not deliberate deceit. Though charges that he 'perjured' himself or deliberately lied to Congress are an exaggeration, in his place I think I would have resigned.
Edward Lucas (The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster)
suggest that negligence within that country’s weapons industry and at its nuclear complexes is at least as plausible a scenario as a deliberate transfer by government officials to the terrorist group. Yet there is no conclusive reporting that points to either willful negligence or human error. Either way, there is no way to know if the transfer occurred through official policy, the machinations of a venal or ideologically motivated individual, or simple incompetence. There is almost nothing about the origins of the attack that the president of the United States knows for certain. The world awaits a response from the White House. What happens next?
Benjamin Schwartz (Right of Boom: The Aftermath of Nuclear Terrorism)
The future leader in industry, to endure, must regard himself as a quasi-public official whose duty it is to manage his trust in such a way that it will work hardship on no individual, or group of individuals.
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich (Start Motivational Books))
Motivated by the belief that “[s]ociety must protect itself; as it claims the right to deprive the murderer of his life, so also it may annihilate the hideous serpent of hopeless protoplasm,” official eugenics directed much of its energy toward identifying, representing in monstrous terms, and seeking to control the agglomerate body of America’s and
Angela M. Smith (Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema (Film and Culture Series))
The biggest error made by advocates of government planning, from Marx to Keynes to Obama, is the assumption that bureaucrats and elected officials possess both the detailed knowledge and right motives to be able to solve the economic problems of a nation. While microeconomics correctly assumes that individuals act in their own self-interest, every macroeconomic proposal for government intervention implicitly assumes that public officials act in the public interest, somehow suppressing their individual interests to the greater interests of society.
Dick Armey (Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto)
Through a diversity of Bible-based beliefs, Colonial America firmly founded its culture, laws, and government on the Judeo-Christian worldview. That common faith was clearly expressed in the founding documents of all thirteen American colonies: The Massachusetts Bay Colony’s charter recorded an intent to spread the “knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Savior of mankind, and the Christian faith,” much as the Mayflower Compact cited a commitment to “the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian faith.” Connecticut’s Fundamental Orders officially called for “an orderly and decent Government established according to God” that would “maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus.” In New Hampshire, the Agreement of the Settlers at Exeter vowed to establish a government “in the name of Christ” that “shall be to our best discerning agreeable to the Will of God.” Rhode Island’s colonial charter invoked the “blessing of God” for “a sure foundation of happiness to all America.” The Articles of Confederation of the United Colonies of New England stated, “Whereas we all came into these parts of America with one and the same end and aim, namely, to advance the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ and to enjoy the liberties of the Gospel …” New York’s Duke’s Laws prohibited denial of “the true God and his Attributes.” New Jersey’s founding charter vowed, “Forasmuch as it has pleased God, to bring us into this Province…we may be a people to the praise and honor of his name.” Delaware’s original charter officially acknowledged “One almighty God, the Creator, Upholder and Ruler of the World.” Pennsylvania’s charter officially cited a “Love of Civil Society and Christian Religion” as motivation for the colony’s founding. Maryland’s charter declared an official goal of “extending the Christian Religion.” Virginia’s first charter commissioned colonization as “so noble a work, which may, by the Providence of Almighty God, hereafter tend to the…propagating of Christian Religion.” The charter for the Colony of Carolina proclaimed “a laudable and pious zeal for the propagation of the Christian faith.” Georgia’s charter officially cited a commitment to the “propagating of Christian religion.”27
Rod Gragg (Forged in Faith: How Faith Shaped the Birth of the Nation, 1607–1776)
This is a capitalistic country, it was developed through the use of capital, and we who claim the right to partake of the blessings of freedom and opportunity, we who seek to accumulate riches here, may as well know that neither riches nor opportunity would be available to us if organized capital had not provided these benefits. For more than twenty years it has been a somewhat popular and growing pastime for radicals, self-seeking politicians, racketeers, crooked labor leaders, and on occasion religious leaders, to take pot-shots at “Wall Street, the money changers, and big business.” The practice became so general that we witnessed during the business depression, the unbelievable sight of high government officials lining up with the cheap politicians, and labor leaders, with the openly avowed purpose of throttling the system which has made Industrial America the richest country on earth. The line-up was so general and so well organized that it prolonged the worst depression America has ever known. It cost millions of men their jobs, because those jobs were inseparably a part of the industrial and capitalistic system which form the very backbone of the nation. During
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich (Start Motivational Books))
I’ve finally found my tribe, she thinks. And this is what an effective network is all about—when you can assemble a group of motivated people to solve a big problem, even though the team looks nothing like the official org chart.
Gene Kim (The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data)
connection. In April 1855 my great-granduncle Alexander Carter Jr. and his younger brother, Thomas Marion Carter, left their home in Scioto County, Ohio, and headed west. Starting by steamboat, the two brothers floated down the Ohio River until it joined the Mississippi and then traveled upstream to St. Louis. In St. Louis they found little transportation west, so they walked, hitched rides, and rode horseback to reach St. Joseph, Missouri. There they caught a stagecoach to Council Bluffs, Iowa, riding on top of the stage, with seventeen men and women-a three-day ordeal. On May 14, nineteen days after leaving St. Louis, the brothers crossed the Missouri River and landed on the town site of Omaha, then a community of cotton tents and shanties, where lots were being offered to anyone willing to build on them. They refused this offer and pressed on to their final destination, DeSoto, Washington County, Nebraska Territory, where they found only one completed log house and another under construction. There they homesteaded the town of Blair, Nebraska. For three generations there were Carters in Nebraska, first in Blair and then in Omaha, where I was bom. As a native Nebraskan, I feel a particular affinity for William F. Cody, who lived most of his adult life in Nebraska. My father, George W. Carter, could have seen Buffalo Bill's Wild West when it came to Omaha in August 1908. I wish I had known the old scout personally; I am glad I have come to know him better while writing this book. It is also my fond hope that readers will feel as I do, that Buffalo Bill Cody is well worth knowing. Writing a biography of someone long dead is always a challenge. You must come to understand the person, the motivations, the key events that altered the course of history. And there are the records, the letters, the reminiscences of contemporaries. In Bill. Cody's case the documentation is plentiful but sometimes contradictory. Did Buffalo Bill kill Yellow Hand-the "first scalp for Custer"-for example? There are those who say he did and detractors who say he did not. Who are. we . to ' believe? For the most part, if I found two or three accounts that agreed with each other, particularly if there were official government .records supporting him, I felt sure I could give the credit to Cody.
Robert A. Carter (Buffalo Bill Cody: The Man Behind the Legend)
What swells the costs in enterprises carried on in the interlocking centralized systems of society, whether commercial, official, or non-profit institutional, are all the factors of organization, procedure, and motivation that are not directly determined to the function and to the desire to perform it....
Paul Goodman (People or Personnel: Decentralizing and the Mixed System)
In this investigation, the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference. But the evidence does point to a range of other possible personal motives animating the President’s conduct. These include concerns that continued investigation would call into question the legitimacy of his election and potential uncertainty about whether certain events—such as advance notice of WikiLeaks’s release of hacked information or the June 9, 2016 meeting between senior campaign officials and Russians—could be seen as criminal activity by the President, his campaign, or his family.
The Washington Post (The Mueller Report)
Soon after he fired Comey, however, the President became aware that investigators were conducting an obstruction-of-justice inquiry into his own conduct. That awareness marked a significant change in the President’s conduct and the start of a second phase of action. The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private, the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation. For instance, the President attempted to remove the Special Counsel; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions unrecuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government. Judgments about the nature of the President’s motives during each phase would be informed by the totality of the evidence.
The Washington Post (The Mueller Report)
It was, said Wahlstedt many years later, a revolution. The change in management style “has shown us that the biggest misconception of American manufacturers is the belief that production workers are not dependable and must be motivated and/or constrained to do quality work,” he wrote in the official company history. “We have been amazed by the self-motivation and dedication to quality and productivity that they demonstrate when they are freed to develop and use their full potential.
Bo Burlingham (Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big)
In sum, modern creatives are highly likely to be amateur or professional, intentional or accidental destroyers of the Good – in their net effect if not wholly. This is one of the horrors of our uniquely nihilistic world. Humans have always failed to attain The Good due to our own weaknesses and bad motivation – but we are now in the situation where it is normal (also legally and officially encouraged and rewarded) actively to attack The Good, by many means and on many fronts – so that both creative ability and hard-working conscientiousness do not merely fail to reach their promise and their ideals – but are harnessed to work against The Good. In sum, most modern creatives inflict either more, or less, harmful outcomes overall; and the more effective their creativity, the greater the harm they inflict.
Edward Dutton (The Genius Famine: Why We Need Geniuses, Why They're Dying Out, Why We Must Rescue Them)
Finally, as I’ve emphasized, there is the level of conscious public policy. A Soviet official issuing a planning document, or an American politician calling for job creation, might not be entirely aware of the likely effects of their action. Still, once a situation is created, even as an unintended side effect, politicians can be expected to size up the larger political implications of that situation when they make up their minds what—if anything—to do about it. Does this mean that members of the political class might actually collude in the maintenance of useless employment? If that seems a daring claim, even conspiracy talk, consider the following quote, from an interview with then US president Barack Obama about some of the reasons why he bucked the preferences of the electorate and insisted on maintaining a private, for-profit health insurance system in America: “I don’t think in ideological terms. I never have,” Obama said, continuing on the health care theme. “Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents one million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?”9 I would encourage the reader to reflect on this passage because it might be considered a smoking gun. What is the president saying here? He acknowledges that millions of jobs in medical insurance companies like Kaiser or Blue Cross are unnecessary. He even acknowledges that a socialized health system would be more efficient than the current market-based system, since it would reduce unnecessary paperwork and reduplication of effort by dozens of competing private firms. But he’s also saying it would be undesirable for that very reason. One motive, he insists, for maintaining the existing market-based system is precisely its inefficiency, since it is better to maintain those millions of basically useless office jobs than to cast about trying to find something else for the paper pushers to do.10 So here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement—and he is insisting that a major factor in the form that legislature took is the preservation of bullshit jobs.
David Graeber (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory)
The anti-Trump movement is a conspiracy by the powerful and connected to overturn the will of the American people. Among the co-conspirators are FBI officials illegally exonerating their favorite candidate of violating well-defined federal criminal statutes, first to help her get elected and then to frame Donald J. Trump for “Russia collusion” that never happened. It all began when members of the Obama administration, seeking a Hillary Clinton presidency and continuation of Obama’s platform, used the intelligence community to spy on the campaign of the Republican candidate for president. But once the unelected Deep State got on board, the anti-Trump conspiracy grew from mere dirty politics to an assault on our republic itself. Continuing beyond Election Day and throughout President Trump’s term to date, the LYING, LEAKING, LIBERAL Establishment has sought to nullify the decision of the American people and continue the globalist, open-border oligarchy that the people voted to dismantle in 2016. The perpetrators of this anti-American plot include, but are not limited to, the leadership at the FBI, the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies, the Democrat Party, and perhaps even the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) courts. And let’s not forget the media and entertainment industries that are waging a nonstop propaganda campaign that would render envious their counterparts in the worst totalitarian states of history. Yes, this is a conspiracy, and you and anyone who loves the America described in our founding documents, are among its victims. The rule of law has become irrelevant and politically motivated fiction has become truth.
Jeanine Pirro (Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy)
Life has its own ways of teaching us, its being & it got its ups & downs but We hold the decisions to accept what Life throws at us & We're Life itself.Whatever we stand to change, gives us a life that was chosen.So whatever We choose to be or want, need or aspire; We're sure the benefactors of such Life & We got to be responsible for whatever comes with it.We got to sacrifice almost everything for the kind of life We want & need.We got to always understand that there're pains attached to it.We got to be bruised no matter what, wounded in other to be moulded & mounted on a larger milestone of a desired dream and life of goodness.So Wherever we find ourselves then, We don't quit or give excuses for not moving forward.We just have to embrace the results & stories and then Push On to Rewriting a Matchless story,With Resounding results.The truth is, We were Given this Life, to decide what's best for Us & in it lies death. Death is, not wanting to try but accepting that- It's Over.As a result of this, Possibility Neurons Die & guess what, Failure of self & being,Failure of will comes with it.We're the architects of Our lives, however We see it, Life runs in the directions of Our Choices.
DrRayOzymandias_Official
Pekwa Nicholas Mohlala BA GA MOHLALA IN SCHOONOORD HISTORY SOURCES AND RESEARCHERS Our sources for our ongoing research on the history of Ba Ga Mohlala in Schoonoord The main sources that we use in our ongoing researches on the history of Ba Ga Mohlala in Schoonoord are government official records, archival records, and oral evidence. There are few archival records on the history on the history of Ba Ga Mohlala in general, Banareng, and Batlokwa Ba Lethebe. There are also very few published documents (especially books and others forms of researched publications) on Ba Ga Mohlala in general, Banareng, and Batlokwa Ba Lethebe, and this is one of the principal motivations for the need to record the history of Ba Ga Mohlala in general, Banareng, and Batlokwa Ba Lethebe. Therefore, the bulk of secondary are the available general works of South African History, and most of such works deal scantily with the history of Ba Ga Mohlala, Banareng, and Batlokwa Ba Lethebe, that is because those general works mainly deal with South African tribes in general rather  than Ba Ga Mohlala, Banareng, and Batlokwa Ba Lethebe in particular. As such those sources are used to contextualize the history of Ba Ga Mohlala, Banareng, and Batlokwa Ba Lethebe, and are mostly used to develop theorical framework. Oral evidence forms an important part of our researches. That is because most of the history of clans, and tribes in South Africa, such as Ba Ga Mohlala, Banareng, and Batlokwa Ba Lethebe was not written and it is expected that very few written records do exist on their history. As a result, the few written records which are available are used in conjunction with oral evidence. Most importantly, the other sources which have been mentioned thus far are used to corroborate oral information, and vice versa. Thus, the combination of all these sources result in a more balanced and objective study of the history of Ba Ga Mohlala, Banareng, and Batlokwa Ba Lethebe. Because oral information is one of the core sources of our studies in the history of Ba Ga Mohlala, Banareng, and Batlokwa Ba Lethebe, best practices in oral research are thoroughly  followed in order to achieve the best possible outcome possible. Like any other forms of collecting evidence, and as well as other sources of information, oral evidence has its own problem areas and some benefits, and there are also processes of dealing with those problem areas. There are three main problem areas of oral history. Firstly, the limitations of the interviewee which include, unreliability of memory, deliberate falsification, unfairness through vindictiveness, excessive discretion, superficiality and gossip, oversimplification, distortion of interviewee's role, lack of perspective, distortion due to to personal feelings, self-consciousness, influence of hindsight, and repetition of published evidence. Secondly, the interviewer has limitations which include, unrepresantative sampling, biased questioning, difference and bias towards the intreviews, and interviews as a replacement for reading documents. The third and last problem areas of oral is about the limitations inherent in the nature of intetviewing itself which include, misinterpretation of what the interviewee have said, inability of oral history to verified by others, interview transcripts missing the essence of the interview, impossibility of true communication, and dependence on survivors and those who agree to be interviewed.
Pekwa Nicholas Mohlala
For years, President Obama and his top officials vehemently denounced China for using its surveillance capabilities for economic advantage while insisting that the United States and its allies never do any such thing. The Washington Post quoted an NSA spokesperson saying that the Department of Defense, of which the agency is a part, “ ‘does engage’ in computer network exploitation,” but “does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including ‘cyber’ ” [emphatic asterisks in the original]. That the NSA spies for precisely the economic motive it has denied is proven by its own documents. The agency acts for the benefit of what it calls its “customers,” a list that includes not only the White House, the State Department, and the CIA, but also primarily economic agencies, such as the US Trade Representative and the Departments of Agriculture, Treasury, and Commerce:
Glenn Greenwald (No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State)
Great Sardaar" An ornamental piece of work by the Punjabi industry. Produced by Amritjit Singh Sran and Directed by Ranjeet Bal under the production house Apna Heritage &Sapphire Films presents to you "Great Sardaar" an Action/Drama film starring none other than the budding artist Dilpreet Dhillon and the multi talented Yograj Singh. This movie is an Action/Drama film in which the protagonist ends up with a series of challenges. The movie stars Dilpreet Dhillon as the lead along with Yograj singh who plays the role of (Dilpreet Dhillon) Gurjant's father. After watching the trailer one can surely say there's tasty substance beneath the froth, just enough to keep you hooked. "GREAT SRADAAR" is based on the true events about Major Shaitan Singh, who was awarded the Param Vir Chakra posthumously for his 'C' company's dig-in at Rezang La pass during the Sino-India conflict of 1962. This motivational movie is a Tribute to Sikkhism. It's really healing to see movies that are based on true events. It builds so much more compassion. Dilpreet Dhillon popularly known for his role in "once upon a time in Amritsar" has gained a great fan following. He is considered is one of the popular emerging male playback singer and actor in Punjabi music industry. And when it comes to Yograj Singh, he is not only a former Indian cricketer but also a boon to the Punjabi industry. Since the release of the official trailer on 7th of June,2017 which shows that the movie is action-packed and will leave the audience spellbound and wanting for more, the audience is eagerly waiting for the release of the movie.The trailer rolls by effortlessly and the Director has done an impeccable job. Ranjeet Bal evidently knew what he was doing and has ensured that every minute detail was taken care of particularly considering the genre he was treading. The audience will surely be sitting on the edge of their seats. Visual Effects Director- VFx Star has once again proved that there is nothing that will leave India from evolving in the field of technology. "Great Sardaar" which is set to be released on the 30th of June,2017 will be a very carefully structured story. The main question that will be raised is not what kind of world we live in, or what reality is like, rather what it has done to us.
Great Sardar
Too often, journalists report 'both sides' as if they were equal, even when one side is riddled with lies and motivated by self-interest. Over-reliance on 'official' government and corporate sources, and deference to their word, has taken precedence over critical, investigative reporting that speaks truth to power.
Will Potter (Green Is the New Red: An Insider's Account of a Social Movement Under Siege)
Wearing Nametags- On Others I enjoy reading nametags and calling people by their names before we have officially met or been introduced. It provides an instant icebreaker. Walking up to someone and saying, “Hi Brenda! I’m Susan!” creates a quick connection that might not have happened were her name not displayed.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Communication: 8 Ways to Confirm Clarity & Understanding for Positive Impact(The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #5))
I did not stop to question my motives for trying to protect the demon king. I could not return to my own realm. For better or worse, I was not only stuck in The Thirteenth Gate, but I was officially the unwilling bride of the king of this land. Right now he lay unconscious on his bed, fighting for his life, put there by his own brother, a brother who was now trying to rip the throne from Vindictus's dying hands. I had learned long ago Dante was not someone I wanted to have any power over the people of this land. Vindictus may be ruthless, but he ruled with love. Dante would no doubt rule with the same malice he had shown toward his brother. No, if I was going to be forced to live out the rest of my life in this land, I was most certainly -not- going to bow down to Dante Invectus.
Nicola C. Matthews (Vindictus, The Dark Lord)
Some former Bush officials, however, believed that the Justice Department's failure to pursue the New Black Panther Party case resulted from top Obama administration officials' ideological belief that civil rights laws only apply to protect members of minority groups from discrimination by whites. Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler denied any such motives. She asserted that "the department makes enforcement decisions based on the merits, not the race, gender or ethnicity of any party involved". But an anonymous Justice Department official told the Washington Post that "the Voting Rights Act was passed because people like Bull Connor [a white police commissioner] were hitting people like John Lewis [a black civil rights activist], not the other way around". The Post concluded that the New Black Panther Party case "tapped into deep divisions within the Justice Department that persist today over whether the agency should focus on protecting historically oppressed minorities or enforce laws without regard to race". The Office of Professional Responsibility's report on the case found that several former and current DOJ attorneys told investigators under oath that some lawyers in the Civil Rights Division don't believe that the DOJ should bring cases involving white victims of racial discrimination. The report also found that Voting Section lawyers believed that their boss, appointed by President Obama, wanted them to bring only cases protecting members of American minority groups. She phrased this as having the section pursue only "traditional" civil rights enforcement cases. Her employees understood that by "traditional" she meant only cases involving minority victims.
David E. Bernstein (Lawless: The Obama Administration's Unprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law)
Draining public swimming pools to avoid integration received the official blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971. The city council in Jackson, Mississippi, had responded to desegregation demands by closing four public pools and leasing the fifth to the YMCA, which operated it for whites only. Black citizens sued, but the Supreme Court, in Palmer v. Thompson, held that a city could choose not to provide a public facility rather than maintain an integrated one, because by robbing the entire public, the white leaders were spreading equal harm. “There was no evidence of state action affecting Negroes differently from white,” wrote Justice Hugo Black. The Court went on to turn a blind eye to the obvious racial animus behind the decision, taking the race neutrality at face value. “Petitioners’ contention that equal protection requirements were violated because the pool-closing decision was motivated by anti-integration considerations must also fail, since courts will not invalidate legislation based solely on asserted illicit motivation by the enacting legislative body.” The d
Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together)
In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an official in the U.S. Department of Labor, called the inner cities after the arrival of the southern migrants “a tangle of pathology.” He argued that what had attracted southerners like Ida Mae, George, and Robert was welfare: “the differential in payments between jurisdictions has to encourage some migration toward urban centers in the North,” he wrote, adding his own italics. Their reputation had preceded them. It had not been good. Neither was it accurate. The general laws of migration hold that the greater the obstacles and the farther the distance traveled, the more ambitious the migrants. “It is the higher status segments of a population which are most residentially mobile,” the sociologists Karl and Alma Taeuber wrote in a 1965 analysis of census data on the migrants, published the same year as the Moynihan Report. “As the distance of migration increases,” wrote the migration scholar Everett Lee, “the migrants become an increasingly superior group.” Any migration takes some measure of energy, planning, and forethought. It requires not only the desire for something better but the willingness to act on that desire to achieve it. Thus the people who undertake such a journey are more likely to be either among the better educated of their homes of origin or those most motivated to make it in the New World, researchers have found. “Migrants who overcome a considerable set of intervening obstacles do so for compelling reasons, and such migrations are not taken lightly,” Lee wrote. “Intervening obstacles serve to weed out some of the weak or the incapable.” The South had erected some of the highest barriers to migration of any people seeking to leave one place for another in this country. By the time the migrants made it out, they were likely willing to do whatever it took to make it, so as not to have to return south and admit defeat. It would be decades before census data could be further analyzed and bear out these observations. One myth they had to overcome was that they were bedraggled hayseeds just off the plantation. Census figures paint a different picture. By the 1930s, nearly two out of every three colored migrants to the big cities of the North and West were coming from towns or cities in the South, as did George Starling and Robert Foster, rather than straight from the field. “The move to northern cities was dominated by urban southerners,” wrote the scholar J. Trent Alexander. Thus the latter wave of migrants brought a higher level of sophistication than was assumed at the time. “Most Negro migrants to northern metropolitan areas have had considerable previous experience with urban living,” the Taeuber study observed. Overall, southern migrants represented the most educated segment of the southern black population they left, the sociologist Stewart Tolnay wrote in 1998. In 1940 and 1950, colored people who left the South “averaged nearly two more years of completed schooling than those who remained in the South.” That middle wave of migrants found themselves, on average, more than two years behind the blacks they encountered
Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration)
At stage 1, the relationship begins with passion. You hold your partner in high regard, praise them, give them all your attention and hope or expect them to do the same. You probably,and without realising it, inflate the positives and might feel like they are “the one.” As the relationship progresses to stage 2, you become more sensitive to words and actions that could possibly hold even the slightest hint of negativity. You may fixate on the smallest of things like a late reply to their text or a missed call, and begin to question their motives and interest. This comes from a place of anxiety, a fear of abandonment and low self-worth. The symptoms of BPD will start to flare up and interfere. At stage 3, the relationship can take on a different tone again. You might start testing out your partner,deliberately push them away or behave unacceptably .You might cause arguments for no reason just to see how willing they are to fight for the relationship. Stage 4 rolls around and you will start to distance yourself from the love of your life, letting the relationship spiral downward because at that point, you are convinced that they are going to leave you. This is really painful for you. You don’t want them to leave, and they don’t want to leave you either. When they express confusion, you will hide away your real feelings and pretend that everything is fine. Stage 5 may be where the relationship ends, especially if your partner isn't aware yet that you are Borderline or just what that means ie this is the playing out of symptoms and not what you really want. Borderlines experience intense mood swings, ranging from sadness at the loss of the relationship to anger against the other person. The fear of abandonment becomes a reality and it fuels your emotional lability. There may be attempts by them to resolve things but if the relationship is really over, then we’re at stage 6, where the Borderline might spiral downward and experience a bout of severe depression. They may give into their thoughts of low self-worth and even resort to reckless behaviors and self-harming to seek distraction and relief. If the relationship hasn’t ended, the cycle may start all over again. The occurrence of this cycle and its intensity depends on whether or not you are managing your illness by seeking professional help, and if you have other sources of emotional support. The BPD cycle is not a sure thing to happen for people that have or know someone with BPD, nor is it an official symptom of the condition. However it is really very common and even if not officially a symptom ,it is symptomatic. The idea that people with BPD cannot ‘hold down’ relationships, however, is a misconception and as a matter of fact, many people with BPD do have healthy and successful relationships, especially if they have been in, or are going through therapy. Because of the intensity of their emotions ,Borderlines can be the most loving, caring empathic and fun partners. 6 “SOMEONE…HELP ME, PLEASE.” - DIALECTICAL BEHAVIOR THERAPY “I just got diagnosed.
Siena Da Silva (BORDERLINES: The Essential Guide to Understanding and Living with Complex Borderline Personality Disorder. Know Yourself.Love Yourself and Let Others Love You)
It is a well known fact that one comes, finally, to BELIEVE whatever one repeats to one’s self, whether the statement be true or false. If a man repeats a lie over and over, he will eventually accept the lie as truth. Moreover, he will BELIEVE it to be the truth. Every man is what he is, because of the DOMINATING THOUGHTS which he permits to occupy his mind. Thoughts which a man deliberately places in his own mind, and encourages with sympathy, and with which he mixes any one or more of the emotions, constitute the motivating forces, which direct and control his every movement, act, and deed!
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich: The Original, an Official Publication of The Napoleon Hill Foundation)
The ethnics caught up in the racial struggies oi the post-war period in Chicago were in the unenviable position of people who had the rules changed on them in mid-game. The Poles who settled Calumet Park as Sobieski Park had created their neighborhood enclaves under certain assumptions, all of which got changed when the environmentalist East Coast WASP internationalist establishment took power in 1941. Not only hadn’t they been informed of the rule change, they were doubly vulnerable because compared to their opponents who were further along on the scale of assimilation, they didn’t have a clear sense of themselves as Poles or Catholics or Americans or “white” people. They also feared the sexual mores of the invading black hordes but could not articulate this fear in polite language. As a result, each attempt to explain their position drove them further beyond the pale of acceptable public discourse. More often than not, the only people who were articulating their position were the American Civil Liberties Union and American Friends Service Committee agents sent into their neighborhoods to spy on them. One AFSC spy reported that fear of intermarriage “caused the intensity of feelings” in Trumbull Park.* Black attempts to use the community swimming pool were similarly seen in a sexual light. The ACLU agent who was paid to infiltrate bars in South Deering reported that the real motivation behind Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision mandating desegregation of Southern schools, was to move “niggers into every neighborhood” to intermarry and thereby send the “whole white race . . . downhill.” Deprived of their ethnic designation as Catholic by a Church that was either hostile (as in the case of Catholic intellectuals) or indifferent (as in the case of the bishops and their chancery officials), Chicago ethnics, attempting to be good Americans, chose to become “white” instead, a transformation that not only guaranteed that they would lose their battle in the court of public opinion, but one which also guaranteed that they would go out of existence as well, through the very assimilation process being proposed by their enemies.
E. Michael Jones (The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing)
The curricula proved by irrefutable findings prepare generations for the past, not the future. The official exams only hinder its circumvention where it only differs in the letterhead and the dates of its conduct. This is the utmost betrayal against an entire generation of hidden gems.
Mahdi Mansour
this is what an effective network is all about—when you can assemble a group of motivated people to solve a big problem, even though the team looks nothing like the official org chart.
Gene Kim (The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data)
During the war with Russia, the Jewish community of Poland was threatened with a particularly virulent strain of Polish anti-Semitism. A group of rabble-rousing nationalists claimed that the Jews had never fully assimilated into mainstream Polish society and therefore constituted a fifth column. They made the audacious accusation that the Jews had collaborated with Russia to help in its fight against Poland. Such sentiments reached Radziejow, where locals branded the Jews as traitors. These anti-Semites pointed out that in recent local history, the Jews had petitioned a foreign government, Germany, for their own benefit. Motivated by greed, and under the guise of patriotism, city officials of Radziejow arrested several prominent Jews. These Jews were falsely charged with treason for their alleged collaboration with the Russians during the war. It was irrelevant to the persecutors and prosecutor that the accused Jews were never even involved in politics. This was a age-old scheme used by anti-Semites to extort money from the Jewish community. In this case, the plan was to implement a newly established criminal statute to justify the arrest of Jews and charge them with the capital crime of treason. Government officials
Scott M. Neuman (The Nazi, the Princess, and the Shoemaker: Second Edition)
We did not find counsel’s contention, however, to accord with our reading of the Supreme Court authority addressing separation-of-powers issues. Applying the Court’s framework for analysis, we concluded that Congress can validly regulate the President’s exercise of official duties to prohibit actions motivated by a corrupt intent to obstruct justice. The limited effect on presidential power that results from that restriction would not impermissibly undermine the President’s ability to perform his Article II functions.
The Washington Post (The Mueller Report)
Applying that test here, we concluded that Congress can validly make obstruction-of-justice statutes applicable to corruptly motivated official acts of the President without impermissibly undermining his Article II functions.
The Washington Post (The Mueller Report)
She’s our fucking princess.” “She is not,” Ruhn growled. “The Autumn King has not recognized her, nor will he ever.” “Why?” Dec demanded. “Because she’s his bastard child. Because he doesn’t like her. I don’t fucking know,” Ruhn spat. He couldn’t—wouldn’t—ever tell them his own motivations for it. That deep-rooted fear of what the Oracle’s prophecy might mean for Bryce should she ever be granted a royal title. For if the royal bloodline was to end with Ruhn, and Bryce was officially a princess of their family … She would have to be out of the picture for it to come to pass. Permanently. He’d do whatever was necessary to keep her safe from that particular doom. Even if the world hated him for it.
Sarah J. Maas (House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City, #1))
In addition to wartime strategic interests, a complex combination of motives led to the final decision to issue the Balfour Declaration. Contemporary explanations tended to stress the Biblical romanticism of British officials’ interest in the restoration of the Jewish nation in Palestine and their sympathy for the plight of Jews in eastern Europe. The first scholarly accounts focused more on the political and diplomatic context in which British officials came to see Zionism as an ally. These early interpretations stressed the Balfour Declaration as a product of the activities of the Zionist Organization, or specifically of Dr Chaim Weizmann, the most prominent Zionist spokesman. Weizmann was engaged during the war in biochemical research for Britain’s Ministry of Munitions. His influential contacts and skilful persistence were credited with convincing British officials of the wartime propaganda value that a gesture of support for Zionism would carry in the United States and Russia, where Jews were believed to wield great power.
Martin Bunton (The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Very Short Introduction)
In the second year of the Trump presidency, I attended a dinner of American hedge funders in Hong Kong. I was there as a guest speaker, to survey the usual assortment of global hot spots. A thematic question emerged from the group—was the “Pax Americana” over? There was a period of familiar cross-talk about whether Trump was a calamitous force unraveling the international order or merely an impolitic Republican politician advancing a conventional agenda. I kept interjecting that Trump was ushering in a new era—one of rising nationalist competition that could lead to war and unchecked climate change, to the implosion of American democracy and the accelerated rise of a China that would impose its own rules on the world. Finally, one of the men at the table interrupted with some frustration. He demanded a show of hands—how many around the table had voted for Trump, attracted by the promise of tax cuts and deregulation? After some hesitation, hand after hand went up, until I was looking at a majority of raised hands. The tally surprised me. Sure, I understood the allure of tax cuts and deregulation to a group like that. But these were also people who clearly understood the dangers that Trump posed to American democracy and international order. The experience suggested that even that ambiguous term “Pax Americana” was subordinate to the profit motive that informed seemingly every aspect of the American machinery. I’d come to know the term as a shorthand for America’s sprawling global influence, and how—on balance—the Pax Americana offered some stability amid political upheavals, some scaffolding around the private dramas of billions of individual lives. From the vantage point of these bankers, the Pax Americana protected their stake in international capital markets while allowing for enough risk—wars, coups, shifting energy markets, new technologies—so that they could place profitable bets on the direction of events. Trump was a bet. He’d make it easier for them to do their business and allow them to keep more of their winnings, but he was erratic and hired incompetent people—so much so that he might put the whole enterprise at risk. But it was a bet that enough Americans were willing to make, including those who knew better. From the perspective of financial markets, I had just finished eight years in middle management, as a security official doing his small part to keep the profit-generating ocean liner moving. The debates of seemingly enormous consequence—about the conduct of wars, the nature of national identity, and the fates of many millions of human beings—were incidental to the broader enterprise of wealth being created.
Ben Rhodes (After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made)
Epictetus famously opens the Encheiridion this way: “Some things in the world are up to us, while others are not. Up to us are our faculties of judgment, motivation, desire, and aversion—in short, everything that is our own doing. Not up to us are our body and property, our reputations, and our official positions—in short, everything that is not our own doing.
Nancy Sherman (Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience)
Braw’s book highlights four specific “pastor agents” and the recruiting work of a Stasi official named Joachim Wiegand (still living and interviewed by Braw), who headed up the Stasi’s so-called “Church Department,” formally known as Department XX/4. These pastor agents, states Braw, were “very active,” engaging in regular clandestine meetings with Stasi contacts and “extensive cooperation over many years,” agreeing to “spy on their fellow human beings,” including their own congregants. They had varying motivations. Some did it for the money—a “depressingly” small sum, notes Braw. Others cooperated because they felt they were helping causes like “peace” by curtailing “anti-militarism” in post-war Germany. Regardless, notes Braw, these pastors “betrayed and sold out their friends and acquaintances.
Paul Kengor (The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration)
I wasn’t there. I don’t know what happened. I am no expert on the beginning of literal time. All I know is... there was a world before this current world began a long long long time ago. Let’s figure out piece by piece what could have happened up in Heaven all before Day 1 officially began.
Sunshine Rodgers (The Creation Project)
motives.
Alcoholics Anonymous (Alcoholics Anonymous: The Official "Big Book" from Alcoholic Anonymous)
The Secret Government is an interlocking network of official functionaries, spies, mercenaries, ex-generals, profiteers and superpatriots, who, for a variety of motives, operate outside the legitimate institutions of government. Presidents have turned to them when they can’t win the support of the Congress or the people, creating that unsupervised power so feared by the framers of our Constitution. …”1 —BILL MOYERS, journalist and White House press secretary under President Johnson
John W. Whitehead (Battlefield America: The War On the American People)
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Amanda Flowers
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CriminaloffenseBoa
Throughout history there have been populations that have lived in desperation, and none of them have resorted to the intentional targeting and murder of children as an officially practiced and widely praised mode of achieving political ends. When extremist elements of otherwise legitimate liberation movements such as the Republican Sinn Fein have committed such atrocities, their actions have been unconditionally condemned by the civilized world, and their political objectives have been discredited by their vile crimes. This is not so with the Palestinians. Once upon a time there was a special place in the lowest depths of hell for anyone who would intentionally murder a child. Now that place is in the pantheon of Palestinian heroes. Now that behavior is legitimized as ‘armed struggle’ against Israeli ‘occupation’ by, among others, the United Nations General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Commission, and the European Union. Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the rise of Hamas in 1987, the campaign to destroy Israel has taken on an ugly, fanatic religious tone. Holy obligation reinforces (and is replacing) Palestinian nationalism as the motivation for committing terrorist murder. As we have seen the secular, ‘moderate’ factions of the Palestinian nationalist movement (such as Abbas’s Fatah Party) will shrink into insignificance, and is replaced by terrorist Islamic factions such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Hamas receives financial and material support from the same sources as al Qaeda, and from al Qaeda directly. Islamic Jihad receives financial and material support from Iran, directly and through Hezbollah. These are the same international criminal entities that wage religion-based terror war against the United States. They do it for the same reason and by the same means: to make Islam supreme in the world, by the sword or the suicide bomb.
Brigitte Gabriel (Because They Hate)
Mormon-black relations. This work’s central thesis was that two factors drove Brigham Young to implement the Church’s black ban by 1852. Most important was a developing sense of Mormon “whiteness” wherein Latter-day Saints identified themselves as a divinely “chosen” people, while conversely labeling blacks a biblically cursed race, given their skin color and alleged descent from the accursed biblical counter-figures of Cain, Ham, and Canaan. Further motivating Young was his embrace of black slavery, which he considered divinely sanctioned. Thus as Utah Territorial Governor he called for its legalization—this occurring in February 1852, shortly following Mormon migration to the Great Basin. Utah became the only western territory to approve slavery. Young in calling for this statute claimed a divinely sanctioned link between black servitude and black priesthood denial—the latter practice made public for the first time in his 1852 statement calling for black slavery. The dissertation also drew a number of conclusions relative to the perpetuation of the black priesthood and temple ban. The ban was firmly established by the time of Brigham Young’s death in 1877, given that the Mormon leader repeatedly affirmed its divine legitimacy over the previous quarter century. Further assuring perpetuation of the ban was official LDS embrace of the historical myth that Joseph Smith established the restriction. Such mythmaking received scriptural justification through canonization of the Pearl of Great Price in 1880, a work consisting of the Books of Moses and Abraham. All such developments made the subordinate status of Mormon blacks virtually “irreversible by 1880,” enabling the ban to continue unchanged into the mid-1970s.13
Newell G. Bringhurst (Saints, Slaves, and Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People Within Mormonism, 2nd ed.)
What impressed me most about José Mourinho was his capacity to mould a young team in his image-an aggressive, motivated and winning team-with the available ''raw material'', i. e. human material, and make any player believe that he was the best in the world in his position, when perhaps he wasn't.
Luis Lourenco (José Mourinho - Made in Portugal: the official biography by Luis Lourenço)
Applying that test here, we concluded that Congress can validly make obstruction-of-justice statutes applicable to corruptly motivated official acts of the President without impermissibly undermining his Article II functions.
Robert S. Mueller III (The Mueller Report: The Comprehensive Findings of the Special Counsel)
The khateeb reiterates that his role is vital and positions himself as the spiritual teacher of the recruits. This position is belied somewhat by my earlier description of my encounter with him and his superiors, an impression strengthened by my conversation with other senior army officers. A retired infantry general shared with me how he had confronted the khateeb’s influence in the barracks while he was in services. A particular khateeb under his command during the Kargil war was asked to go to a post nearer the combat zone to motivate the troops. The cleric refused on the grounds that certain requirements of jihad29 had not been fulfilled, so he could not support the effort. “I summoned him and told him, ‘You talk of jihad; God will decide what is jihad. This is a war zone, and I am ordering a district court martial of you, and I will ensure that you are put before a firing squad right over here in front of my office.’” He then had him posted out of the area with immediate effect. The khateeb is told here that he is in no position to adjudicate what jihad is, the implication being that the military, in this case the commanding officer, has the right to adjudicate this over and above religious authority, whose only role is to motivate troops in the name of jihad as and when ordered by the military officer. The khateeb is a spiritual guide, then, with no real official authority, an army person but not regular army personnel. He is a “harmless” person yet one who must be monitored, as evidenced by the colonel’s initial reluctance to let me talk to him. As another retired infantry general jokingly put it, “He [the khateeb] is uneducated but very motivating.” Much like his soldier-class contemporaries, he is regarded by the officer class as somewhat uncouth but nonetheless essential for the training center. He has the specific task of motivating troops and acting as a religious mascot to lend credence to the militarism project. 265/378
Maria Rashid (Dying to Serve: Militarism, Affect, and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army)
Unlike later European princes, Chinese rulers systematically refused to team up with would-be Chinese capitalists (who always existed). Instead, like their officials, they saw them as destructive parasites—though, unlike the usurers, ones whose fundamentally selfish and antisocial motivations could still be put to use in certain ways. In Confucian terms, merchants were like soldiers. Those drawn to a career in the military were assumed to be driven largely by a love of violence. As individuals, they were not good people, but they were also necessary to defend the frontiers. Similarly, merchants were driven by greed and basically immoral; yet if kept under careful administrative supervision, they could be made to serve the public good.29 Whatever one might think of the principles, the results are hard to deny. For most of its history, China maintained the highest standard of living in the world—even England only really overtook it in perhaps the 1820s, well past the time of the Industrial Revolution.
David Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years)
Let’s face it, dear, there are people who walk around like deflated balloons – even with all the potential for greatness, but kinda limpy & dusty. IMPRESS YOURSELF, TODAY! Every day when you go to bed, ask yourself, “Did I do something awesome today?” Am I proud of myself?” & feel the answer deep inside your heart.. Sweetheart, look, most people settle for a life way smaller than they’re actually capable of. Most people cage themselves in “self-doubt” & “what if” fortresses & then complain the view sucks. (Seriously, you want a limited-edition life when you can be the GOLD edition?) Darling listen – this is your official wake-up call! Dust off your inner rockstar, ditch the excuses & unleash your awesomeness! You already have talent & inherited wisdom to be extraordinary, you just gotta use them. So, shed those limiting beliefs like a bad outfit. Move from “just existing” to “extraordinary.” Do a few things to make yourself proud. Expand your horizons & surprise yourself with what you’re capable of. Trust me, the world needs your unique brand of magic. I wish & hope that very soon you get a taste for what it means to expand beyond your limited sense of self. Blessings & may your self-impressed journey begin today!
Rajesh Goyal, राजेश गोयल