Peters Famous Quotes

Raphael continued to stare at me, in no hurry to get started. "You know the best way to get rid of a demon, right?" He asked with a serious face. I caught Ivy rolling her eyes as I shook my head. "Exorcise alot!" Ivy caught my expression of dismay. "It's okay, Beth. He's famous for his bad jokes. We're still waiting for him to grow up." "And like Peter Pan, I hope to avoid that at all costs.

Bill Joy famously pointed out: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.

(From the story The Last Days of a Famous Mime) He said nothing. He was mildly annoyed at her presumption: that he had not thought this many, many times before. With perfect misunderstanding she interpreted his passivity as disdain. Wishing to hurt him, she slapped his face. Wishing to hurt her, he smiled brilliantly.

The shirt was a screen print of a famous Surrealist artwork by René Magritte in which he drew a pipe and then beneath it wrote in cursive Ceci n’est pas une pipe. (“This is not a pipe.”) “I just don’t get that shirt,” Mom said. “Peter Van Houten will get it, trust me. There are like seven thousand Magritte references in An Imperial Affliction.” “But it is a pipe.” “No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s a drawing of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It’s very clever.” “How did you get so grown up that you understand things that confuse your ancient mother?” Mom asked. “It seems like just yes-terday that I was telling seven-year-old Hazel why the sky was blue. You thought I was a genius back then.” “Why is the sky blue?” I asked. “Cuz,” she answered. I laughed.

Philosophy is not confined to philosophers, thank God. Everyone has a philosophy. As Cicero famously said, you have no choice between having a philosophy and not having one, only between having a good one and having a bad one. And not to admit that you have a philosophy at all is to have a bad one. For it is one that does not know itself. So how could it know anything else, especially us?

The French, it seems to me, strike a happy balance between intimacy and reserve. Some of this must be helped by the language, which lends itself to graceful expression even when dealing with fairly basic subjects.... And there's that famously elegant subtitle from a classic Western. COWBOY: "Gimme a shot of red-eye." SUBTITLE: "Un Dubonnet, s'il vous plait." No wonder French was the language of diplomacy for all those years.

Theophilus Hopkins was a moderately famous man. You can look him up in the 1860 Britannica. There are three full columns about his corals and his corallines, his anemones and starfish. It does not have anything very useful about the man. It does not tell you what he was like. You can read it three times over and never guess that he had any particular attitude to Christmas pudding.

It is the kind of stoicism which had been seen as characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry, perhaps nowhere better expressed than in 'The Battle of Maldon' where the most famous Saxon or English cry has been rendered - 'Courage must be the firmer, heart the bolder, spirit must be the greater, as our strength grows less'. That combination of bravery and fatalism, endurance and understatement, is the defining mood of Arhurian legend.

Any time a famous rich kid screws up, people want to know about it. Makes them feel good.

There are many famous people who could read extremely fast. It was said that England’s Samuel Johnson could read almost as fast as he could look at the pages. While in the White House, President Theodore Roosevelt used to read a book every day before breakfast, and he occasionally read three a day. John F. Kennedy was well known for being able to read 1,200 words per minute.

It is ironic, therefore, that while Constantine is famous for being the Emperor who laid the basis for the Christianisation of Europe, it is never noted that there was a price to pay for his embrace of a new faith: it spectacularly compromised Christianity’s future in the east. The

Through these stories, Mariana fell in love with a vision of England and Englishness—an England that had quite possibly never existed beyond the pages of these books: an England of warm summer rain, and wet greenery, and apple blossom; winding rivers and willow trees, and country pubs with roaring fires. The England of the Famous Five, and Peter Pan and Wendy; King Arthur and Camelot; Wuthering Heights and Jane Austen, Shakespeare—and Tennyson.

My friend Peter Diamandis, founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation, famously said: If you can’t win, change the rules. If you can’t change the rules, ignore them.

Peter Drucker famously said, “Half the leaders I have met don’t need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop.

As the business sage Peter Drucker famously noted " We spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do. We don't spend nearly enough time teaching them what to stop.

You’ll be seeing pink elephants, the way you drink.” “I find life thirsty work, old man,” Phineas said equably. “And besides, what have you got against pink elephants?

Mark Hanna, who served as President William McKinley’s chief fund-raiser. (Hanna once famously said, “There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.”)

Be paralyzed whenever you want to write anything. You were so wrong for so many years, so incredibly good at lying to yourself, and given that, how could you possibly think you’ll ever put a pen to paper and say something true?

Well, how was she going to defend herself? Now that she knew what it was, she felt perfectly happy. They thought, or Peter at any rate thought, that she enjoyed imposing herself; liked to have famous people about her; great names; was simply a snob in short. Well, Peter might think so. Richard merely thought it foolish of her to like excitement when she knew it was bad for her heart. It was childish, he thought. And both were quite wrong. What she liked was simply life.

Without the Oxford comma, you can give people the wrong idea. Famously, the London Times newspaper once ran a brief description of a television documentary featuring Peter Ustinov, promising: Highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.

Perhaps you have heard the famous bit of wisdom about how the making of an omelet requires the breaking of eggs? This philosophy, while technically true, does not account for the fact that omelets are universally disappointing to all who eat them - equal parts water and rubber and slime. Who among us would not prefer a good cobbler or spiced pudding? Sophie often thought that Bustleburgh was not unlike the omelet maker who, having grown obsessed with his task, had decided that all eggs everywhere must be broken at any cost. While she acknowledged the convenience of living in a modern city, she wasn't sure it was worth the destruction of so many wondrous things . . . especially if those things included books.

They thought, or Peter at any rate thought, that she enjoyed imposing herself; liked to have famous people about her; great names; was simply a snob in short. Well, Peter might think so. Richard merely thought it foolish of her to like excitement when she knew it was bad for her heart. It was childish, he thought. And both were quite wrong. What she liked was simply life.

Most of us do not like not being able to see what others see or make sense of something new. We do not like it when things do not come together and fit nicely for us. That is why most popular movies have Hollywood endings. The public prefers a tidy finale. And we especially do not like it when things are contradictory, because then it is much harder to reconcile them (this is particularly true for Westerners). This sense of confusion triggers in a us a feeling of noxious anxiety. It generates tension. So we feel compelled to reduce it, solve it, complete it, reconcile it, make it make sense. And when we do solve these puzzles, there's relief. It feels good. We REALLY like it when things come together. What I am describing is a very basic human psychological process, captured by the second Gestalt principle. It is what we call the 'press for coherence.' It has been called many different things in psychology: consonance, need for closure, congruity, harmony, need for meaning, the consistency principle. At its core it is the drive to reduce the tension, disorientation, and dissonance that come from complexity, incoherence, and contradiction. In the 1930s, Bluma Zeigarnik, a student of Lewin's in Berlin, designed a famous study to test the impact of this idea of tension and coherence. Lewin had noticed that waiters in his local cafe seemed to have better recollections of unpaid orders than of those already settled. A lab study was run to examine this phenomenon, and it showed that people tend to remember uncompleted tasks, like half-finished math or word problems, better than completed tasks. This is because the unfinished task triggers a feeling of tension, which gets associated with the task and keeps it lingering in our minds. The completed problems are, well, complete, so we forget them and move on. They later called this the 'Zeigarnik effect,' and it has influenced the study of many things, from advertising campaigns to coping with the suicide of loved ones to dysphoric rumination of past conflicts.

Average Egyptians take pride in their pharaonic history, but there’s also a disconnect, because the tradition of the Islamic past is stronger and more immediate. This is captured perfectly by the design of Egypt’s currency. Every denomination follows the same pattern: On one side of a bill, words are in Arabic, and there’s an image of some famous Egyptian mosque. The other side pairs English text with a pharaonic statue or monument. The implication is clear: the ancients belong to foreigners, and Islam belongs to us.

Meet actual famous trans writer. Feel indicted when famous trans writer says that they think all trans people want to be celebrities. That the drive to celebrity is an endemic problem that fractures trans communities. That we are all so alone for so long, the only way to survive is to nurture a private sense of specialness and uniqueness—all the while fearing that this sense of specialness is our only lifejacket as we swim in a culture where tokenization tells us that we must be the only one, the fiercest, most brutal one, the special one.

The altruistic gene doesn’t help just any randomly chosen individual. In a sense, it helps copies of itself in a different individual. Generally speaking, full siblings share 50 percent of their genes, so if I can help more than two of my sisters, even at the expense of sacrificing myself, then, on average, such behavior will be favored by natural selection. Hence the famous quip by the evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane. When asked whether he would give his life to save a drowning brother, he replied: “No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.

The fact that an educated Roman governor and Consul (the highest possible office in the entire Roman Empire, short of actually being the Emperor) knows so little about Christianity that he has to conduct interrogations to get the basics proves that it was still a little known fringe movement at this time. What’s more, Trajan’s reply mentions no trial precedents or decrees against Christians, highlighting the fact that no trial records existed in Roman archives for famous Christians like Jesus, Peter or Paul. If there had been, Pliny would not had to go into detail describing the trials he conducted.

And then, so quickly that no one (unless they knew, as Peter did) could quite see how it happened, Edmund flashed his sword round with a peculiar twist, the Dwarf’s sword flew out of his grip, and Trumpkin was wringing his empty hand as you do after a “sting” from a cricket-bat. “Not hurt, I hope, my dear little friend?” said Edmund, panting a little and returning his own sword to its sheath. “I see the point,” said Trumpkin drily. “You know a trick I never learned.” “That’s quite true,” put in Peter. “The best swordsman in the world may be disarmed by a trick that’s new to him. I think it’s only fair to give Trumpkin a chance at something else. Will you have a shooting match with my sister? There are no tricks in archery, you know.” “Ah, you’re jokers, you are,” said the Dwarf. “I begin to see. As if I didn’t know how she can shoot, after what happened this morning. All the same, I’ll have a try.” He spoke gruffly, but his eyes brightened, for he was a famous bowman among his own people. All five of them came out into the courtyard. “What’s to be the target?” asked Peter. “I think that apple hanging over the wall on the branch there would do,” said Susan. “That’ll do nicely, lass,” said Trumpkin. “You mean the yellow one near the middle of the arch?” “No, not that,” said Susan. “The red one up above--over the battlement.” The Dwarf’s face fell. “Looks more like a cherry than an apple,” he muttered, but he said nothing out loud.

The malicious erasure of women’s names from the historical record began two or three thousand years ago and continues into our own period. Women take as great a risk of anonymity when they merge their names with men in literary collaboration as when they merge in matrimony. The Lynds, for example, devoted equal time, thought, and effort to the writing of Middletown, but today it is Robert Lynd’s book. Dr. Mary Leakey made the important paleontological discoveries in Africa, but Dr. Louis Leakey gets all the credit. Mary Beard did a large part of the work on America in Midpassage, yet Charles Beard is the great social historian. The insidious process is now at work on Eve Curie. A recent book written for young people states that radium was discovered by Pierre Curie with the help of his assistant, Eve, who later became his wife. Aspasia wrote the famous oration to the Athenians, as Socrates knew, but in all the history books it is Pericles’ oration. Corinna taught Pindar and polished his poems for posterity; but who ever heard of Corinna? Peter Abelard got his best ideas from Heloise, his acknowledged intellectual superior, yet Abelard is the great medieval scholar and philosopher. Mary Sidney probably wrote Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia; Nausicaa wrote the Odyssey, as Samuel Butler proves in his book The Authoress of the Odyssey, at least to the satisfaction of this writer and of Robert Graves, who comment, “no other alternative makes much sense.

They thought, or Peter at any rate thought, that she enjoyed imposing herself; liked to have famous people about her; great names; was simply a snob in short. Well, Peter might think so. Richard merely thought it foolish of her to like excitement when she knew it was bad for her heart. It was childish, he thought. And both were quite wrong. What she liked was simply life. “That's what I do it for," she said, speaking aloud, to life. ... But suppose Peter said to her, "Yes, yes, but your parties—what's the sense of your parties?" all she could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They're an offering; which sounded horribly vague. ... And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?

The person who discovered the answer was a retiring, self-funded scientist named Peter Mitchell who in the early 1960s inherited a fortune from the Wimpey house-building company and used it to set up a research center in a stately home in Cornwall. Mitchell was something of an eccentric. He wore shoulder-length hair and an earring at a time when that was especially unusual among serious scientists. He was also famously forgetful. At his daughter’s wedding, he approached another guest and confessed that she looked familiar, though he couldn’t quite place her. “I was your first wife,” she answered. Mitchell’s ideas were universally dismissed, not altogether surprisingly. As one chronicler has noted, “At the time that Mitchell proposed his hypothesis there was not a shred of evidence in support of it.” But he was eventually vindicated and in 1978 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry—an extraordinary accomplishment for someone who worked from a home lab. The

The nature of the case, and the history of the Mysteries, alike show that this book could be none other than the "Book Pet-Rome;" that is, the "Book of the Grand Interpreter," in other words, of Hermes Trismegistus, the great "Interpreter of the Gods." In Egypt, from which Athens derived its religion, the books of Hermes were regarded as the divine fountain of all true knowledge of the Mysteries. In Egypt, therefore, Hermes was looked up to in this very character of Grand Interpreter, or "Peter-Roma." In Athens, Hermes, as is well known, occupied precisely the same place, and, of course, in the sacred language, must have been known by the same title. The priest, therefore, that in the name of Hermes explained the Mysteries, must have been decked not only with the keys of Peter, but with the keys of "Peter-Roma." Here, then, the famous "Book of Stone" begins to appear in a new light, and not only so, but to shed new light on one of the darkest and most puzzling passages of Papal history.

Indefinite Pessimism Every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age, and almost all peoples throughout history have been pessimists. Even today pessimism still dominates huge parts of the world. An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation: the U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar; the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse. The indefinite pessimist can’t know whether the inevitable decline will be fast or slow, catastrophic or gradual. All he can do is wait for it to happen, so he might as well eat, drink, and be merry in the meantime: hence Europe’s famous vacation mania.

The lives of scientists, considered as Lives, almost always make dull reading. For one thing, the careers of the famous and the merely ordinary fall into much the same pattern, give or take an honorary degree or two, or (in European countries) an honorific order. It could be hardly otherwise. Academics can only seldom lead lives that are spacious or exciting in a worldly sense. They need laboratories or libraries and the company of other academics. Their work is in no way made deeper or more cogent by privation, distress or worldly buffetings. Their private lives may be unhappy, strangely mixed up or comic, but not in ways that tell us anything special about the nature or direction of their work. Academics lie outside the devastation area of the literary convention according to which the lives of artists and men of letters are intrinsically interesting, a source of cultural insight in themselves. If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility; if a historian were to fail (as Ruskin did) to consummate his marriage, we should not suppose that our understanding of historical scholarship had somehow been enriched.

We aren’t simply looking at a demographically induced economic breakdown; we are looking at the end of a half millennium of economic history. At present, I see only two preexisting economic models that might work for the world we’re (d)evolving into. Both are very old-school: The first is plain ol’ imperialism. For this to work, the country in question must have a military, especially one with a powerful navy capable of large-scale amphibious assault. That military ventures forth to conquer territories and peoples, and then exploits said territories and peoples in whatever way it wishes: forcing conquered labor to craft products, stripping conquered territories of resources, treating conquered people as a captive market for its own products, etc. The British Empire at its height excelled at this, but to be honest, so did any other post-Columbus political entity that used the word “empire” in its name. If this sounds like mass slavery with some geographic and legal displacement between master and slave, you’re thinking in the right general direction. The second is something called mercantilism, an economic system in which you heavily restrict the ability of anyone to export anything to your consumer base, but in which you also ram whatever of your production you can down the throats of anyone else. Such ramming is often done with a secondary goal of wrecking local production capacity so the target market is dependent upon you in the long term. The imperial-era French engaged in mercantilism as a matter of course, but so too did any up-and-coming industrial power. The British famously product-dumped on the Germans in the early 1800s, while the Germans did the same to anyone they could reach in the late 1800s. One could argue (fairly easily) that mercantilism was more or less the standard national economic operating policy for China in the 2000s and 2010s (under American strategic cover, no less). In essence, both possible models would be implemented with an eye toward sucking other peoples dry, and transferring the pain of general economic dislocation from the invaders to the invaded. Getting a larger slice of a smaller pie, as it were. Both models might theoretically work in a poorer, more violent, more fractured world—particularly if they are married. But even together, some version of imperialist mercantilism faces a singular, overarching, likely condemning problem: Too many guns, not enough boots.

If Thomas represents an epistemology of faith, which transcends but also includes historical and scientific knowing, we might suggest that Paul represents at this point an epistemology of hope. In 1 Corinthians 15 he sketches his argument that there will be a future resurrection as part of God’s new creation, the redemption of the entire cosmos as in Romans 8. Hope, for the Christian, is not wishful thinking or mere blind optimism. It is a mode of knowing, a mode within which new things are possible, options are not shut down, new creation can happen. There is more to be said about this, but not here. All of which brings us to Peter. Epistemologies of faith and hope, both transcending and including historical and scientific knowing, point on to an epistemology of love—an idea I first met in Bernard Lonergan but that was hardly new with him. The story of John 21 sharpens it up. Peter, famously, has denied Jesus. He has chosen to live within the normal world, where the tyrants win in the end and where it’s better to dissociate yourself from people who get on the wrong side of them. But now, with Easter, Peter is called to live in a new and different world. Where Thomas is called to a new kind of faith and Paul to a radically renewed hope, Peter is called to a new kind of love.15 Here

Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, often regarded as the most famous decorated US army officer of the early twentieth century, wrote a book after World War I aptly called War Is a Racket. Upon retirement in the 1930s, he gave speeches around the country to spread his message—a message that sheds light upon the hidden internal dialogue underlying US military history. In 1935, Butler boldly stated: I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

And, so, what was it that elevated Rubi from dictator's son-in-law to movie star's husband to the sort of man who might capture the hand of the world's wealthiest heiress? Well, there was his native charm. People who knew him, even if only casually, even if they were predisposed to be suspicious or resentful of him, came away liking him. He picked up checks; he had courtly manners; he kept the party gay and lively; he was attentive to women but made men feel at ease; he was smoothly quick to rise from his chair when introduced, to open doors, to light a lady's cigarette ("I have the fastest cigarette lighter in the house," he once boasted): the quintessential chivalrous gent of manners. The encomia, if bland, were universal. "He's a very nice guy," swore gossip columnist Earl Wilson, who stayed with Rubi in Paris. ""I'm fond of him," said John Perona, owner of New York's El Morocco. "Rubi's got a nice personality and is completely masculine," attested a New York clubgoer. "He has a lot of men friends, which, I suppose, is unusual. Aly Khan, for instance, has few male friends. But everyone I know thinks Rubi is a good guy." "He is one of the nicest guys I know," declared that famed chum of famed playboys Peter Lawford. "A really charming man- witty, fun to be with, and a he-man." There were a few tricks to his trade. A society photographer judged him with a professional eye thus: "He can meet you for a minute and a month later remember you very well." An author who played polo with him put it this way: "He had a trick that never failed. When he spoke with someone, whether man or woman, it seemed as if the rest of the world had lost all interest for him. He could hang on the words of a woman or man who spoke only banalities as if the very future of the world- and his future, especially- depended on those words." But there was something deeper to his charm, something irresistible in particular when he turned it on women. It didn't reveal itself in photos, and not every woman was susceptible to it, but it was palpable and, when it worked, unforgettable. Hollywood dirt doyenne Hedda Hoppe declared, "A friend says he has the most perfect manners she has ever encountered. He wraps his charm around your shoulders like a Russian sable coat." Gossip columnist Shelia Graham was chary when invited to bring her eleven-year-old daughter to a lunch with Rubi in London, and her wariness was transmitted to the girl, who wiped her hand off on her dress after Rubi kissed it in a formal greeting; by the end of lunch, he had won the child over with his enthusiastic, spontaneous manner, full of compliments but never cloying. "All done effortlessly," Graham marveled. "He was probably a charming baby, I am sure that women rushed to coo over him in the cradle." Elsa Maxwell, yet another gossip, but also a society gadabout and hostess who claimed a key role in at least one of Rubi's famous liaisons, put it thus: "You expect Rubi to be a very dangerous young man who personifies the wolf. Instead, you meet someone who is so unbelievably charming and thoughtful that you are put off-guard before you know it." But charm would only take a man so far. Rubi was becoming and international legend not because he could fascinate a young girl but because he could intoxicate sophisticated women. p124

At the top of Anonybitch’s feed, there is a video of a boy and a girl making out in a hot tub. Anonybitch is particularly famous for her hot tub videos. She tags them #rubadub. This one’s a little grainy, like it was zoomed in from far away. I click play. The girl is sitting in the boy’s lap, her body draped over his, legs hooked around his waist, arms around his neck. She’s wearing a red nightgown, and it billows in the water like a full sail. The back of her head obscures the boy. Her hair is long, and the ends dip into the hot tub like calligraphy brushes in ink. The boy runs his hands down her spine like she is a cello and he is playing her. I’m so entranced I don’t notice at first that Kitty is watching with me. Both of our heads are tilted, trying to suss out what it is we’re looking at. “You shouldn’t be looking at this,” I say. “Are they doing it?” she asks. “It’s hard to say because of her nightgown.” But maybe? Then the girl touches the boy’s cheek, and there is something about the movement, the way she touches him like she is reading braille. Something familiar. The back of my neck goes icy cold, and I am hit with a gust of awareness, of humiliating recognition. That girl is me. Me and Peter, in the hot tub on the ski trip. Oh my God. I scream. Margot comes racing in, wearing one of those Korean beauty masks on her face with slits for eyes, nose, and mouth. “What? What?” I try to cover the computer screen with my hand, but she pushes it out of the way, and then she lets out a scream too. Her mask falls off. “Oh my God! Is that you?” Oh my God oh my God oh my God. “Don’t let Kitty see!” I shout. Kitty’s wide-eyed. “Lara Jean, I thought you were a goody-goody.” “I am!” I scream.

When you are fully owned by your disbelief, then there is no further discussion that needs to be had between you and the God you once trusted. In fact, your very senses are numb to His presence, your eyes shut, your ears closed, and your body turned away. In this instance you have come to grips with the fact that, if need be, you would stand up in front of the world and say, “I deny Jesus is Lord,” and you would be content with that denial. But before you jump to your feet, first consider that this verbal rejection of Jesus comes with an effect, and that is that as you deny Him, so He denies you. As He said in the book of Matthew, “Whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 10:33 esv). So is it any wonder that in your denial of the One who was sent to save you, you have found more and more animosity toward God and His people? That your heart has hardened more with each passing day? This is the result of Jesus denying you more than it is of you denying Him. The truth is that you own your faith when and only when Christ owns you. William Barley, in The Letters of James and Peter, spoke this better than we ever could when he said, It frequently happens that the value of a thing lies in the fact that someone has possessed it. A very ordinary thing acquires a new value if it has been possessed by some famous person. In any museum we will find quite ordinary things—clothes, a walking-stick, a pen, pieces of furniture—which are only of value because they were possessed and used by some great person. It is the ownership which gives them worth. It is so with the Christian. The Christian may be a very ordinary person, but he acquires a new value and dignity and greatness because he belongs to God. The greatness of the Christian lies in the fact that he is God’s.

They've never been able to ignore you, Ma'am." "I made damn sure they couldn't. I never let them or anyone tell me what to do, except where Peter was concerned." She sighed, her weak chest rising and falling beneath the teal hospital down. "I'd trade my diamonds for a cigarette." Vera reached into her purse and pulled out a package of Gigantes she'd purchased at a tobacconist shop on the way to the hospital. She removed the cellophane wrapper and handed it to the Princess, the ability to anticipate Her Royal Highness's needs never having left her, even after all these years. The Princess didn't thank her, but the delight in her blue eyes when she put one in the good side of her mouth and allowed Vera to light it was thanks enough. The Princess struggled to close her lips around the base, revealing the depths of her weakness but also her strength. She refused to be denied her pleasure, even if it took some time to bring her lips together enough to inhale. Pure bliss came over her when she did before she exhaled. "I don't suppose you brought anything to drink?" "As a matter of fact, I did." Vera took the small bottle of whiskey she'd been given on the plane and held it up. "It isn't Famous Grouse, I'm afraid." "I don't care what it is." She snatched the plastic cup off the bedside table and held it up. "Pour." Vera twisted off the cap and drained the small bottle into the cup. The Princess held it up, whiskey in one hand, the cigarette in the other, and nodded to Vera. "Cheers." She drank with a rapture equal to the one she'd shown with the cigarette, sinking back into the pillows to enjoy the forbidden luxuries. "It reminds me of when we used to get drinks at the 400 Club after a Royal Command Film Performance or some other dry event. Nothing ever tasted so good as that first whiskey after all the hot air of those stuffy officials." "We could work up quite a thirst, couldn't we, Ma'am?" "We sure could." She enjoyed the cigarette, letting out the smoke slowly to savour it before offering Vera a lopsided smile. "We had fun back then, didn't we, Mrs. Lavish?

Anna Chapman was born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, in Volgograd, formally Stalingrad, Russia, an important Russian industrial city. During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, the city became famous for its resistance against the German Army. As a matter of personal history, I had an uncle, by marriage that was killed in this battle. Many historians consider the battle of Stalingrad the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. Anna earned her master's degree in economics in Moscow. Her father at the time was employed by the Soviet embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he allegedly was a senior KGB agent. After her marriage to Alex Chapman, Anna became a British subject and held a British passport. For a time Alex and Anna lived in London where among other places, she worked for Barclays Bank. In 2009 Anna Chapman left her husband and London, and moved to New York City, living at 20 Exchange Place, in the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan. In 2009, after a slow start, she enlarged her real-estate business, having as many as 50 employees. Chapman, using her real name worked in the Russian “Illegals Program,” a group of sleeper agents, when an undercover FBI agent, in a New York coffee shop, offered to get her a fake passport, which she accepted. On her father’s advice she handed the passport over to the NYPD, however it still led to her arrest. Ten Russian agents including Anna Chapman were arrested, after having been observed for years, on charges which included money laundering and suspicion of spying for Russia. This led to the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since 1986. On July 8, 2010 the swap was completed at the Vienna International Airport. Five days later the British Home Office revoked Anna’s citizenship preventing her return to England. In December of 2010 Anna Chapman reappeared when she was appointed to the public council of the Young Guard of United Russia, where she was involved in the education of young people. The following month Chapman began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia called Secrets of the World and in June of 2011 she was appointed as editor of Venture Business News magazine. In 2012, the FBI released information that Anna Chapman attempted to snare a senior member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, in what was termed a “Honey Trap.” After the 2008 financial meltdown, sources suggest that Anna may have targeted the dapper Peter Orzag, who was divorced in 2006 and served as Special Assistant to the President, for Economic Policy. Between 2007 and 2010 he was involved in the drafting of the federal budget for the Obama Administration and may have been an appealing target to the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Agency. During Orzag’s time as a federal employee, he frequently came to New York City, where associating with Anna could have been a natural fit, considering her financial and economics background. Coincidently, Orzag resigned from his federal position the same month that Chapman was arrested. Following this, Orzag took a job at Citigroup as Vice President of Global Banking. In 2009, he fathered a child with his former girlfriend, Claire Milonas, the daughter of Greek shipping executive, Spiros Milonas, chairman and President of Ionian Management Inc. In September of 2010, Orzag married Bianna Golodryga, the popular news and finance anchor at Yahoo and a contributor to MSNBC's Morning Joe. She also had co-anchored the weekend edition of ABC's Good Morning America. Not surprisingly Bianna was born in in Moldova, Soviet Union, and in 1980, her family moved to Houston, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a degree in Russian/East European & Eurasian studies and has a minor in economics. They have two children. Yes, she is fluent in Russian! Presently Orszag is a banker and economist, and a Vice Chairman of investment banking and Managing Director at Lazard.

In 1777, the U.S. Congress ordered a second naval ship built, the Ranger. The Ranger was the most famous of all the ships built on Langdon's Island. She was an 18-gun sloop and was the first American ship to be coppered. Her biography mirrors that of the Raleigh: designed by William Hackett, built by James Hackett on Rising Castle/Langdon's Island, and captured by the British, off Charleston, South Carolina, in 1780. John Paul Jones commanded the vessel, and she captured a number of British ships during her brief career. She also carried news of British general John Burgoyne's surrender at the Battle of Saratoga to Europe and received the first salute ever given to an American ship, off Quiberon Bay in France.12

This is what happened when I cofounded LinkedIn. The key business model innovations for LinkedIn, including the two-way nature of the relationships and filling professionals’ need for a business-oriented online identity, didn’t just happen organically. They were the result of much thought and reflection, and I drew on the experiences I had when founding SocialNet, one of the first online social networks, nearly a decade before the creation of LinkedIn. But life isn’t always so neat. Many companies, even famous and successful ones, have to develop their business model innovation after they have already commenced operations. PayPal didn’t have a business model when it began operations (I was a key member of the PayPal executive team). We were growing exponentially, at 5 percent per day, and we were losing money on every single transaction we processed. The funny thing is that some of our critics called us insane for paying customers bonuses to refer their friends. Those referral bonuses were actually brilliant, because their cost was so much lower than the standard cost of acquiring new financial services customers via advertising. (We’ll discuss the power and importance of this kind of viral marketing later on.) The insanity, in fact, was that we were allowing our users to accept credit card payments, sticking PayPal with the cost of paying 3 percent of each transaction to the credit card processors, while charging our users nothing. I remember once telling my old college friend and PayPal cofounder/ CEO Peter Thiel, “Peter, if you and I were standing on the roof of our office and throwing stacks of hundred-dollar bills off the edge as fast as our arms could go, we still wouldn’t be losing money as quickly as we are right now.” We ended up solving the problem by charging businesses to accept payments, much as the credit card processors did, but funding those payments using automated clearinghouse (ACH) bank transactions, which cost a fraction of the charges associated with the credit card networks. But if we had waited until we had solved this problem before blitzscaling, I suspect we wouldn’t have become the market leader.

First, a little plate of nibbles. Gingersnaps with a chunk of Port Salut drizzled with white truffle honey and chopped chili, a recipe I absconded from Phil's friends Peter and David when we visited them in New York last year." I can feel the mix of sweet heat and creamy cheese on my tongue. "Then, little espresso cups with kari squash soup. Braised short ribs with a pomegranate bourbon glaze, your famous asparagus salad, smashed fingerling potatoes with mascarpone and lobster chunks and chervil, and vanilla panna cotta with mixed berries macerated in elderflower liqueur and chocolate truffles.

Apparently there isn't a professional in Berlin for which you can't get famous.

Apparently there isn't a profession in Berlin for which you can't get famous.

Famous management consultant Peter Drucker used to say “what gets measured gets improved.” To that end, use tools like Toggl or RescueTime to measure how you use your time. Track your usage and record the results for two weeks to identify unproductive trends.

If we fail to recognize that the term ‘God’ always falls short of that towards which the word is supposed to point, we will end up bowing down before our own conceptual creations forged from the raw materials of our self-image, rather than bowing before the one who stands over and above that creation. Hence Meister Eckhart famously prays, ‘God rid me of God’,32 a prayer that acknowledges how the God we are in relationship with is bigger, better and different than our understanding of that God.

Tony Hseih, CEO of Zappos, helped disrupt the retail space by emphasizing mastery, making the “pursuit of growth and learning” central to his corporate philosophy and famously saying: “Failure isn’t a badge of shame. It is a rite of passage.

The famous and infamous have always served as vessels for public sentiment: they’re praised amid prosperity and blamed for misfortune.

Ten things you should never do when you form a group 1.​Work with your friends (they won’t be for long if you do) 2.​Let the singer do his own backing vocals (this is a great opportunity for the band to pull together – ignore it at your peril; see also ‘narcissism’) 3.​Have a couple in the band (they will always conspire against you) 4.​Listen to an A&R man (apart from Pete Tong, everyone I have ever met has been an idiot) 5.​Let your manager open a club/bar (see The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club) 6.​Let the publishing/performance split go unspoken (sort it out as soon as the recording is finished and put it in writing; this is the worst thing you will ever have to do, but the most important, and usually splits most bands before they even start) 7.​Get off the bus (Fatty Molloy did this once and has regretted it ever since) 8.​Think one member is bigger than the group (courtesy Gene Simmons again) 9.​Sign anything that says ‘in perpetuity’ (that means forever, even you won’t live that long) 10.​Let your record company owe you money (see Factory Records) 11.​Ship your gear – always hire (a very famous sub-dance sub-indie outfit once phoned their manager after they’d split and said, ‘Hey, where did all the money go?’ See above!) 12.​Interfere with another group member’s sleep (they will turn very nasty and may call the police) 13.​Interfere with another group member’s girlfriend/wife (this will always end in violence) 14.​Never have a party in your own hotel room (always go to someone else’s) . . . Oh shit, way too many. I’ll stop now.

Third, the idea that venture capitalists get into deals on the strength of their brands can be exaggerated. A deal seen by a partner at Sequoia will also be seen by rivals at other firms: in a fragmented cottage industry, there is no lack of competition. Often, winning the deal depends on skill as much as brand: it’s about understanding the business model well enough to impress the entrepreneur; it’s about judging what valuation might be reasonable. One careful tally concluded that new or emerging venture partnerships capture around half the gains in the top deals, and there are myriad examples of famous VCs having a chance to invest and then flubbing it.[6] Andreessen Horowitz passed on Uber. Its brand could not save it. Peter Thiel was an early investor in Stripe. He lacked the conviction to invest as much as Sequoia. As to the idea that branded venture partnerships have the “privilege” of participating in supposedly less risky late-stage investment rounds, this depends from deal to deal. A unicorn’s momentum usually translates into an extremely high price for its shares. In the cases of Uber and especially WeWork, some late-stage investors lost millions. Fourth, the anti-skill thesis underplays venture capitalists’ contributions to portfolio companies. Admittedly, these contributions can be difficult to pin down. Starting with Arthur Rock, who chaired the board of Intel for thirty-three years, most venture capitalists have avoided the limelight. They are the coaches, not the athletes. But this book has excavated multiple cases in which VC coaching made all the difference. Don Valentine rescued Atari and then Cisco from chaos. Peter Barris of NEA saw how UUNET could become the new GE Information Services. John Doerr persuaded the Googlers to work with Eric Schmidt. Ben Horowitz steered Nicira and Okta through their formative moments. To be sure, stories of venture capitalists guiding portfolio companies may exaggerate VCs’ importance: in at least some of these cases, the founders might have solved their own problems without advice from their investors. But quantitative research suggests that venture capitalists do make a positive impact: studies repeatedly find that startups backed by high-quality VCs are more likely to succeed than others.[7] A quirky contribution to this literature looks at what happens when airline routes make it easier for a venture capitalist to visit a startup. When the trip becomes simpler, the startup performs better.[8]

The basic change was the famous substitution of “Q”, the sound now represented by a hard “C”, into “P”. To give a simple example, the word for “son” in Irish is mac, in Welsh this became map and in modern Welsh is shortened to ap. “Everyone”, or cách, in Old Irish, is paup in Old Welsh. The word for a “feather” in Old Irish, clúmh, became pluf in Old Welsh. Thus the “Q” is substituted for the “P” and hence the identification of “P” and “Q” Celtic and perhaps the origin of the phrase about “minding your ‘p’s’ and ‘q’s’ ”.

General Omar Bradley famously said, “Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.

The second law has a reputation for being recondite, notoriously difficult, and a litmus test of scientific literacy. Indeed, the novelist and former chemist C. P. Snow is famous for having asserted in his The Two Cultures that not knowing the second law of thermodynamics is equivalent to never having read a work by Shakespeare. I actually have serious doubts about whether Snow understood the law himself, but I concur with his sentiments. The second law is of central importance in the whole of science, and hence in our rational understanding of the universe, because it provides a foundation for understanding why any change occurs. Thus, not only is it a basis for understanding why engines run and chemical reactions occur, but it is also a foundation for understanding those most exquisite consequences of chemical reactions, the acts of literary, artistic, and musical creativity that enhance our culture.

As well as myself, there was Paul Swinson, whose father wrote comic songs for the Parlophone label, recorded by the likes of Peter Sellers, and a tall lad whose Mod stylishness was rather spoiled by Hank Marvin-type horn-rimmed spectacles. His name was Stephen Hackett, or Steve Hackett, as he was better known later, when he became famous as a guitarist with Genesis and GTR.

it's rather interesting because one of the greatest economists of the world is a substantial shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway and has been from the very early days after Buffett was in control. His textbook always taught that the stock market was perfectly efficient and that nobody could beat it.But his own money went into Berkshire and made him wealthy. So, like Pascal in his famous wager, he hedged his bet.The iron rule of life is that only twenty percent of the people can be in the top fifth Is the stock market so efficient that people can't beat it? Well, the efficient market theory is obviously roughly right-meaning that markets are quite efficient and it's quite hard for anybody to beat the market by significant margins as a stock picker by just being intelligent and working in a disciplined way.Indeed, the average result has to be the average result. By definition, everybody can't beat the market.

A rightly famous Caltech engineering professor, exhibiting more insight than tact, once expressed his version of this idea as follows: "The principal job of an academic administration is to keep the people who don't matter from interfering with the work of the people that do.

Bunker’s message dovetailed with Dickson’s earlier theory about the world’s vanishing confidence in the Church. The public hasn’t turned against Christians because they act better than the rest of the world, she said. The public has turned against Christians because they act worse than the rest of the world. Bunker argued that much of this bad behavior can be traced back to the Christian victimhood complex, which causes some believers to lash out against enemies real and imagined. Such behavior defies the words of Peter, and the very instruction of Jesus, who famously stated: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

Despite its diminutive stature, the capture of Hill 60 (along with Scimitar Hill and W Hills immediately to its north) will allow the Allied Anzac–Suvla line to push eastward into the Anafarta Range and, crucially, shorten that line. Turkish rifles currently outnumber the Allies’ 75,000 to 50,000, so rounding off and contracting the Allied line is an important defensive strategy that will help secure the ‘bridge’ between the two bridgeheads – Suvla and Anzac – while limiting any immediate threat to the Allies’ Suvla occupation. The problem remains, however, that the Turks hold the high ground and will fight to the death to keep it against those who would try to seize it from them. Who can the Allies call on in their hour of desperate need? Why, none other than the famous 29th Division. No matter that the 29th have been shot and shattered from ship to shore and back again so many times since their tragic landing from River Clyde. No matter that most of the fine soldiers who stood before King George in March stand no more, as no fewer than 30,000 men have now gone through their doomed ranks since the beginning of the campaign, only to be spat out the other side, either dead or wounded. No matter, even, that they can muster fewer than 7500 soldiers capable of holding a rifle. For their arrival on this battlefield, poised as they are to take Scimitar Hill on the left, lifts the army as one.

Peter Drucker is famously quoted as saying that the two basic functions of every business are marketing and innovation.

rooting voyeuristically through my trash after I dumped it on the De Brums’ garbage pile. I was learning what it is like to be famous. I was fed an intoxicating sense of importance, but I also lost all privacy. Being a big fish in a small pond also meant being a big fish in a small fishbowl. It had not occurred to me that what I might crave more than anything on this far-flung islet was solitude. For the first time in my life, I understood that anonymity was a luxury. It was a godsend to be ignored.

He said He was God, in many ways and at many times in the Gospels. If this was not true, that would make Him either an insane fool, if He believed it, or a blasphemous liar, if He didn’t. His miracles, like His holiness, His love, and His wisdom, make it impossible to call Him a lunatic or a liar; therefore we must call Him Lord. This is the “Lord, liar, or lunatic” argument made famous by C. S. Lewis and Josh McDowell. It goes back to St. Thomas, to the early Christian apologists like St. Justin Martyr, and, as St. Thomas shows here, implicitly to Christ Himself.

Companies can develop an innovation strategy that works at the three levels of what I call the “innovation pyramid”: a few big bets at the top that represent clear directions for the future and receive the lion’s share of investment; a portfolio of promising midrange ideas pursued by designated teams that develop and test them; and a broad base of early stage ideas or incremental innovations permitting continuous improvement. Influence flows down the pyramid, as the big bets encourage small wins heading in the same direction, but it also can flow up, because big innovations sometimes begin life as small bits of tinkering—as in the famously accidental development of 3M’s Post-it Notes.

An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation: the U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar; the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse. The indefinite pessimist can’t know whether the inevitable decline will be fast or slow, catastrophic or gradual. All he can do is wait for it to happen, so he might as well eat, drink, and be merry in the meantime: hence Europe’s famous vacation mania.

Ball in the Well As future rulers of the land, the princes of the ancient kingdom of Hastings were required to master various skills like archery and sword play. Their grandfather, Peter decided that they should have only the best teacher and so he was on the constant lookout for such a person. One day, the princes were playing in the garden with their ball, which unfortunately fell into the palace well.   The princes ran to the well and peered inside. All they could see was the bright red ball floating on top of the water far down in the well. The princes were disappointed because they could not continue with their game. Just then, they saw a young man dressed in black clothes passing by. From his dress, they knew immediately that was a sage, a wise and pious man with little concern for the cares of the world. They called out to him. “Sir, can you help us?” When he approached them, Durand, the eldest prince, told him how their ball had fallen into the well and they could not reach it. The man smiled. “You are princes of royal blood and you cannot solve such a simple problem?” he said. “Now watch me.” The princes looked on as the sage plucked a blade of grass, chanted some holy words and threw it into the well.   Amazingly, the blade of grass hit the surface of the ball and remained stuck on it. The sage took a second blade of grass and again after chanting some words, threw it into the well. The second blade of grass stuck to the first blade of grass. The man kept chanting and throwing blades of grass into the well. Each blade stuck to the earlier blade of grass and soon formed a chain leading to the very top of the well. The sage then used this to pull out the ball. The princes stared at him in astonishment.   Later, they told their grandfather what had happened. He then asked them to describe the man who he realised was none other than Sayer, a famous warrior who had given up fighting to become a sage. So their grandfather hastened to find him and never stopped until he persuaded Sayer to come and teach the princes how to shoot and to fight with a sword. Sayer faithfully taught the princes all kinds of warfare and military skills. As a result, the kingdom of Hastings became extremely powerful. In the process, Sayer became one of the most important and powerful men in the land. Moral of story: Once skills are learned they are not easily forgotten.

Most people can't understand why they want to read so much. Likeminded types understand that they wish they had more time to read. When studying famous intellects, a pattern emerges of phases of insatiable reading for several years followed by a personal transformation into great achievements.

one of the famous shew stones of the Elizabethan magician and spy, John Dee, was of Aztec obsidian brought back from the New World by Spanish conquistadores. The Aztecs used the obsidian shew stone in an identical fashion to that used by Dee (and, later, Joseph Smith), as a kind of crystal ball.

Saint Helena,” Dennis said, “also known as the empress Helena was the mother of the Roman emperor Constantine the great. Birthdate not known but thought to be either 246 or 250AD. Died 330AD. Famous for finding the relics from Christ’s crucifixion. She found the nails and rope used to fix him to his cross. She also found the cross on which he was crucified. She found a total of three crosses and had a woman from Jerusalem, who was near death, touch each one. When the woman touched the third cross she was cured.

To peruse Larry Flynt's flagship is to encounter laughable facets of necrophilia, dildo-strapped nuns, ambulatory turds, walking anuses, the perceived discrepancy in penis size between black and white males, vaginas large enough to envelop an entire man, physical intimacies with anthropomorphic pets, lesbian love rituals, the ills and quirks of male homosexuality, the corrosive effect of vaginal discharge upon automobile upholstery, the danger that freshly licked African-american lips will accidentally adhere to some glasslike surface, bar sluts, gang-bangs, wastebasket fetuses, flatulence anal and vaginal, the handicapped, Ku Klux Klansmen, lynching, anal sex, prison romance, naked females whose faces are covered by paper bags, sex crimes of the rich and famous, sex in full-body traction, retards as playthings, practical jokes committed by Saint Peter, suicide, consanguinity, animal husbandry in the connubial sense, erectile dysfunction, voyeurs, panty-sniffewrs, menstruation, STDs and philosopher houseflies delivering piquant sophistries while nibbling on corn-studded nuggets of shit.

Without question, the most famous book ever written about angling is The Compleat Angler published by Izaak Walton in 1653. Since

Sure, there was also a lot of scaffolding, but anyone who has visited any of the great cities of Europe, particularly Italian ones like Venice and Florence, comes to expect a bit of scaffolding – especially over the most famous buildings and especially during peak tourist times. In fact, there was a time I was convinced that the city fathers of Venice kept St. Marks under scaffolding in a deliberate ploy to get tourists back to Venice when their natural inclination after being ripped off unnaturally for a single slice of pizza was to never visit again.

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE: YOU IN? Peter and the other apostles replied: “We must obey God rather than human beings!” Acts 5:29 The English historian Lord Acton wrote, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.” People can’t seem to help themselves. When they get a taste of power, they often abuse it and lord it over everyone else. That includes legislators, chief executives, and even judges (and justices of the Supreme Court). Laws, made under the guise of authority, are sometimes bad laws that oppress the innocent. If a law is unjust and opposed to God’s laws, we need to oppose it. Throughout our history—most famously with the abolitionist movement—Americans have done just that. Like the apostles, we must obey God’s eternal moral law rather than the human-made law of the moment. Our Founding Fathers were suspicious of government power—especially the power of the federal government—because they too understood that power corrupts. We should always view government power suspiciously and reject it when it oversteps its bounds. SWEET FREEDOM IN Action Today, pledge to support candidates for office who actually believe in limited government as set forth in our Constitution and who give paramountcy to God’s eternal law.

What happened to the troubled young reporter who almost brought this magazine down The last time I talked to Stephen Glass, he was pleading with me on the phone to protect him from Charles Lane. Chuck, as we called him, was the editor of The New Republic and Steve was my colleague and very good friend, maybe something like a little brother, though we are only two years apart in age. Steve had a way of inspiring loyalty, not jealousy, in his fellow young writers, which was remarkable given how spectacularly successful he’d been in such a short time. While the rest of us were still scratching our way out of the intern pit, he was becoming a franchise, turning out bizarre and amazing stories week after week for The New Republic, Harper’s, and Rolling Stone— each one a home run. I didn’t know when he called me that he’d made up nearly all of the bizarre and amazing stories, that he was the perpetrator of probably the most elaborate fraud in journalistic history, that he would soon become famous on a whole new scale. I didn’t even know he had a dark side. It was the spring of 1998 and he was still just my hapless friend Steve, who padded into my office ten times a day in white socks and was more interested in alphabetizing beer than drinking it. When he called, I was in New York and I said I would come back to D.C. right away. I probably said something about Chuck like: “Fuck him. He can’t fire you. He can’t possibly think you would do that.” I was wrong, and Chuck, ever-resistant to Steve’s charms, was as right as he’d been in his life. The story was front-page news all over the world. The staff (me included) spent several weeks re-reporting all of Steve’s articles. It turned out that Steve had been making up characters, scenes, events, whole stories from first word to last. He made up some funny stuff—a convention of Monica Lewinsky memorabilia—and also some really awful stuff: racist cab drivers, sexist Republicans, desperate poor people calling in to a psychic hotline, career-damaging quotes about politicians. In fact, we eventually figured out that very few of his stories were completely true. Not only that, but he went to extreme lengths to hide his fabrications, filling notebooks with fake interview notes and creating fake business cards and fake voicemails. (Remember, this was before most people used Google. Plus, Steve had been the head of The New Republic ’s fact-checking department.) Once we knew what he’d done, I tried to call Steve, but he never called back. He just went missing, like the kids on the milk cartons. It was weird. People often ask me if I felt “betrayed,” but really I was deeply unsettled, like I’d woken up in the wrong room. I wondered whether Steve had lied to me about personal things, too. I wondered how, even after he’d been caught, he could bring himself to recruit me to defend him, knowing I’d be risking my job to do so. I wondered how I could spend more time with a person during the week than I spent with my husband and not suspect a thing. (And I didn’t. It came as a total surprise). And I wondered what else I didn’t know about people. Could my brother be a drug addict? Did my best friend actually hate me? Jon Chait, now a political writer for New York and back then the smart young wonk in our trio, was in Paris when the scandal broke. Overnight, Steve went from “being one of my best friends to someone I read about in The International Herald Tribune, ” Chait recalled. The transition was so abrupt that, for months, Jon dreamed that he’d run into him or that Steve wanted to talk to him. Then, after a while, the dreams stopped. The Monica Lewinsky scandal petered out, George W. Bush became president, we all got cell phones, laptops, spouses, children. Over the years, Steve Glass got mixed up in our minds with the fictionalized Stephen Glass from his own 2003 roman à clef, The Fabulist, or Steve Glass as played by Hayden Christiansen in the 2003

Although a partner’s compensation depends in large part on the amount of business he brings to the Firm, no one goes out to knock on doors. The Firm waits for the phone to ring. And ring it does, not because McKinsey sells, but because McKinsey markets. It does this in several different ways, all of them designed to make sure that on the day a senior executive decides she has a business problem, one of the first calls she makes is to the local office of McKinsey. The Firm produces a steady stream of books and articles, some of them extremely influential, such as the famous In Search of Excellence by Peters and Waterman.* McKinsey also publishes its own scholarly journal, The McKinsey Quarterly, which it sends gratis to its clients, as well as to its former consultants, many of whom now occupy senior positions at potential clients. The Firm invites (and gets) a lot of coverage by journalists. Many McKinsey partners and directors are internationally known as experts in their fields.

Peter Minuit Plaza near the Staten Island Ferry terminal. Still, most have no idea that he was the Dutchman who purchased the famous island from the Canarsee band of Indians of the Algonkuin-Delaware Federation in 1626 for $24, beads and chatskas. It would be a story of how a white man got the island for a bargain from the unsuspecting Indian tribe. Details may prove otherwise. A hasty note in a logbook was the only evidence of the sale and the British who came after the Dutch never received official documentation of the transaction; but according to Canarsee legend, there was never a sale. The Indians leased the land to Minuit for $2.40 per year and received an advance payment of twenty-four dollars for the first ten years. Compounded annually at 7.5%, the city of New York owed the Canarsee Indians about seven trillion dollars in back rent.

Peter is a very interesting guy.  He is one of Jesus’ favorite people and a trusted friend.  He saw most of Jesus’ miracles firsthand and was trained by Him.  Peter was a Christian who knew Jesus was God and served Him in full-time Christian ministry, yet we see him make some unbelievable blunders.  He lacked faith, displayed when he sank in the water (Matt 14:31). He was prideful and thought he belonged with Jesus, Moses, and Elijah (Matt 17:4).  He famously denied Jesus three times (Mark 14:29-31), and even after Jesus was raised and the Holy Spirit had come, and Peter had become a mature leader in the Christian church, he had to be called out by the apostle Paul for refusing to even eat with Gentiles.  That one is particularly interesting because it’s exactly what a great deal of modern Christians do.  They refuse to eat with Gentiles.  Translation: Hang out with Democrats, go to rock concerts, have a beer with their coworkers, go to their neighborhood’s Halloween party.

Peterhof (Petrodvorets). Nicknamed the “Russian Versailles,” the elaborate interiors, formal gardens, and beautiful fountains of Peter the Great’s summer palace live up to their moniker. This is St. Petersburg’s most famous imperial residence, located in the suburbs about 40 minutes away.

Reid Hoffman famously said, ‘If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.’ 

Pope Julius II commissioned an architect by the name of Donato Bramante to do the work. Though it wouldn’t be until 1626, another 120 years before the work would be completed. Bramante died in 1514 and four other architects would work on the buildings. Namely Baldassare Peruzzi, Antonio Sangallo, Raphael and of course the most famous of them all, Michaelangelo.

I had several friends from law school who were very enterprising guys, much more so than the average law student. They each started businesses after practicing law at large firms for multiple years. What kind of businesses did they start? They started boutique law firms. This is completely unsurprising if you think about it. They’d spent years becoming good at delivering legal services. It was a field that they understood and could compete in. Their credentials translated too. People learn from what they’re doing and do it again on their own. It’s not just lawyers; the consulting firm Bain and Company was started by seven former partners and managers from the Boston Consulting Group. Myriad boutique investment banks and hedge funds have spun out of large financial organizations. You can see the same pattern in the startup world. After PayPal was acquired by eBay in 2002, its founders and employees went on to found or cofound LinkedIn (Reid Hoffman), YouTube (Steve Chen, Jawed Karim, and Chad Hurley), Yelp (Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman), Tesla Motors (Elon Musk), SpaceX (Musk again), Yammer (David Sacks), 500 Startups (Dave McClure), and many other companies. PayPal’s CEO, Peter Thiel, famously made a $500,000 investment in Facebook that grew to over $1 billion. In this sense, PayPal is one of the most prolific companies of recent times. But if you look at any successful growth company you’ll start to see their alumni show up doing parallel things. Former Apple employees founded or cofounded Android, Palm, Nest, and Handspring, companies that revolve around devices. Former Yahoo! employees founded Ycombinator, Cloudera, Hunch.com, AppNexus, Polyvore, and many other web-oriented companies. Organizations give rise to other organizations like themselves.

Cardano was a lot more than a gambler and part-time mathematician. He was the most famous physician of his age, and the Pope and Europe’s royal and imperial families eagerly sought his counsel. He had no use for court intrigue, however, and declined their invitations. He provided the first clinical description of the symptoms of typhus, wrote about syphilis, and developed a new way to operate on hernias. Moreover, he recognized that “A man is nothing but his mind; if that be out of order, all’s amiss, and if that be well, the rest is at ease.” He was an early enthusiast for bathing and showering. When he was invited to Edinburgh in 1552 to treat the Archbishop of Scotland for asthma, he drew on his knowledge of allergy to recommend bedclothes of unspun silk instead of feathers, a pillowcase of linen instead of leather, and the use of an ivory hair comb. Before leaving Milan for Edinburgh, he had contracted for a daily fee of ten gold crowns for his services, but when he departed after about forty days his grateful patient paid him 1,400 crowns and gave him many gifts of great value.

…I am a storyteller. From barstools to back porches, from kitchen tables to campfires, from podiums to park benches, I have spun my yarns to audiences both big and small, both rapt and bored. I didn’t start out that way. I was just a dreamer, quietly imagining myself as something special, as someone who would “make a difference” in the world. But the fact is, I was just an ordinary person leading an ordinary life. Then, partly by design, partly by happenstance, I was thrust into a series of adventures and circumstances beyond anything I had ever dreamed. It all started when I ran away from home at eighteen and hitchhiked around the country. Then I joined the Army, became an infantry lieutenant, and went to Vietnam. After Vietnam, I tried to become a hippie, got involved with Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), and became a National Coordinator for the organization. I was subsequently indicted for conspiracy to incite a riot at the Republican Convention in 1972—the so-called Gainesville Eight case—and one of my best friends turned out to be an FBI informant who testified against me at the trial. In the early eighties, I was involved with the New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission, which built a memorial for Vietnam veterans in New York City and published the book Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam. In the late eighties, I was part of a delegation of Vietnam veterans who went to the Soviet Union to meet with Soviet veterans of their Afghanistan War. I fell in love with a woman from Russia, married her, and spent nine years living there, during which I fathered two children, then brought my family back to the U.S. and the suburban middle-class life I had left so many years before. The adventures ultimately, inevitably perhaps, ended, and like Samwise Gamgee, I returned to an ordinary life once they were over. The only thing I had left from that special time was the stories… I wrote this book for two reasons. First and foremost, I wrote it for my children. Their experience of me is as a slightly boring “soccer dad,” ordinary and unremarkable. I wanted them to know who I was and what I did before I became their dad. More importantly, I hope the book can be inspiring to the entire younger generation they represent, who will have to deal with the mess of a world that we have left them. The second reason is that when I was young, I had hoped that my actions would “make a difference,” but I’m not so sure if they amounted to “a hill of beans,” as Humphry Bogart famously intoned. If my actions did not change the world, then I dream that maybe my stories can.

biologist Sir Peter Medawar famously described a virus as ‘a piece of bad news wrapped in protein

There was a wonderful example of gaming a human system in the career of Victor Niederhoffer in the Economics Department of Harvard. Victor Niederhoffer was the son of a police lieutenant, and he needed to get A's at Harvard. But he didn't want to do any serious work at Harvard because what he really liked doing was, one, playing world-class checkers; two, gambling in high-stakes card games, at which he was very good, all hours of the day and night; three, being the squash champion of the United States, which he was for years; and, four, being about as good a tennis player as a part-time tennis player could be. This did not leave much time for getting A's at Harvard. So he went into the Economics Department. You'd think he would have chosen French poetry. But remember, this was a guy who could play championship checkers. He thought he was up to outsmarting the Harvard Economics Department. And he was. He noticed that the graduate students did most of the boring work that would otherwise go to the professors, and he noticed that because it was so hard to get to be a graduate student at Harvard, they were all very brilliant and organized and hardworking, as well as much needed by grateful professors. And, therefore, by custom, and as would be predicted from the psychological force called "reciprocity tendency," in a really advanced graduate course, the professors always gave an A. So Victor Niederhoffer signed up for nothing but the most advanced graduate courses in the Harvard Economics Department, and, of course, he got A, after A, after A, after A, and was hardly ever near a class. And, for a while. Some people at Harvard may have thought it had a new prodigy on its hands. That's a ridiculous story, but the scheme will work still. And Niederhoffer is famous: They call his style "Niederhoffering the curriculum.

About three centuries before the birth of Christ, Demosthenes, the most famous Greek orator, said. "What a man wishes, that also will he believe." Demosthenes, parsed out, was thus saying that man displays not only Simple, Pain-Avoiding Psychological Denial but also an excess of optimism even when he is already doing well. The Greek orator was clearly right about an excess of optimism being the normal human condition, even when pain or the threat of pain is absent.

In social proof, it is not only action by others that misleads but also their inaction. In the presence of doubt, inaction by others becomes social proof that inaction is the right course. Thus, the inaction of a great many bystanders led to the death of Kitty Genovese in a famous incident much discussed in introductory psychology courses.

In response to this situation, the Australian philosopher Peter Singer wrote a now famous essay, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” in which he argued that spending money on the trappings of middle-class life rather than on famine relief, or some other form of charitable aid, was not merely stingy but depraved. His argument went like this: If you walk past a shallow pond and see a child drowning, ought you to save the child, even if it would mean muddying your clothes? Most people would say that of course you should—muddy clothes are nothing compared with a dead child. Well, he argued, children are dying all the time, so if we can save them without sacrificing anything of equal importance, particularly something as unimportant as extra clothes, we ought to do it. Most of these children are nowhere near us, but what moral difference does it make if the child is in front of us or far away? If we spend two hundred dollars on clothes that could have bought lifesaving food or medicine, we’re still responsible for a death. And, by extension, if we don’t give much of what we own and earn for the relief of suffering, then we’re responsible for many deaths. This

Like the patient potter, God is willing to mold us again when we resist Him and damage our own lives. The famous Scottish preacher Alexander Whyte used to say that the victorious Christian life was a “series of new beginnings.” No failure in our lives need be fatal or final, although we certainly suffer for our sins. God gave new beginnings to Abraham, Moses, David, Jonah, and Peter when they failed, and He can do the same for us today.

Every nation had its Mysteries and hierophants. Even the Jews had their Peter — Tanaïm or Rabbin, like Hillel, Akiba, and other famous kabalists, who alone could impart the awful knowledge contained in the Merkaba. In India, there was in ancient times one, and now there are several hierophants scattered about the country, attached to the principal pagodas, who are known as the Brahma-âtmas. In Thibet the chief hierophant is the Dalay, or Taley-Lama of Lha-ssa. Among Christian nations, the Catholics alone have preserved this "heathen" custom, in the person of their Pope, albeit they have sadly disfigured its majesty and the dignity of the sacred office.

Instead of Freud's famous Interpretation of Dreams it is a book of dreams that interprets us.

There may still have been an ‘establishment’ of snobbery, church, monarchy, clubland and old-school-tie links in 1961. There was no such thing ten years later, but it suited the comics and all reformers to pretend that there was and to continue to attack this mythical thing. After all, if there were no snobbery, no crusty old aristocrats and cobwebbed judges, what was the moral justification for all this change, change which benefited the reformers personally by making them rich, famous and influential?

It was nip, tuck, and a costly speeding ticket, but he managed to each the library in time...

The famous ritual of Jesus washing the feet of his male disciples (John 13 : 1–11). After taking his clothes off (yes, he strips) and tying a towel around his waist, Jesus does something that only slaves and women did in his culture, something that “real men” never did: he washes other peoples’ feet. More provocatively still, it is this unmanly or womanly act, he teaches, that signals both his own divinity and the way he wants his own disciples to live. As Jennings has it, “Jesus’s ‘divine’ identity thus is expressed in his disregard for the most intimately enforced institutions of worldly society: gender role expectations.” Not everyone, of course, is pleased with such a queer act: “Jesus stripping naked and washing the feet of his friends,” Jennings reminds us, is “something that Peter at least regards as quite unseemly.” Dale Martin makes a very similar point: although “Jesus allows a woman to wash his feet (and we biblical scholars— who know our Hebrew—recognize the hint [foot penis]), when it is his turn, he takes his clothes off, wraps a towel around his waist, and washes the feet of his male disciples, again taking time out for a special seduction of Peter.” Modern readers, then, may be blind to the gendered and sexual meanings of such acts, but the original participants certainly were not, nor are our contemporary gnostic scholars.

Celia Farber, whose 2006 Harper’s article, “Out of Control: AIDS and the Destruction of Medical Science,” laid bare the culture of squalor, corruption, and violence at the vendetta-driven Division of AIDS (DAIDS). “The latter [genuine scientists] are the minority. They look, sound, and behave like scientists. And to varying degrees, they all live in a climate of both economic and reputational persecution. Peter Duesberg is one very famous example but there are others. Fauci’s vendetta system has many ways of crushing the natural scientific impulse—to question and to demand proof. Breathtakingly, because of Fauci’s impact since 1984, this tradition has been all but snuffed out in the US. ‘Everybody is afraid.’ How many times have I heard that line?

Paul transforms a tribal story, of kings, land, and the purity of one group of people, into a global story of God’s grace and peace to all nations. As famously confusing as Paul’s letters are, if we keep this in mind, a lot of what Paul says will make more sense—such as the following.

But there is one art where symmetry has been conspicuously absent: painting. There are a few highly symmetrical famous paintings, above all Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (and Dalí’s Sacrament of the Last Supper) and Perugino’s Christ Giving the Keys of the Kingdom to St. Peter in the Sistine Chapel, but symmetry was never a dominant concern of any genre of painting,

We live in a society were there are lots of in-secure and attention seeking people that are desperate to impress other people and look successful. A method such people use is that they flip into self exaggeration mode about their lives, careers, relationships, intelligent levels, financial levels, jobs and job titles. But the reality is that being these people or doing the jobs most of these people do would not give you a great life, it would not make you famous, a rocket scientists, a millionaire, a Masters Degree graduate, or a PH Degree graduate. If you follow in the footsteps of most people you meet in life you would be bored within 7 days and wonder what all the fuss is about. This is the society we live in. Very few people are modest, humble and honest about their life level.

Step 10: Go on hormones. But do not, under any circumstances, think about becoming a lady. Instead, imagine yourself as a cool and mysterious David Bowie type character. Plan outfits and practice talking as though you have done a lot of acid, so you will be ready for when hormones bestow upon you this new look.