Proving Others Wrong Quotes

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.

Don’t concern yourself with being right in others’ eyes. And don’t secretly hope that their lives will fall apart so that your opinion will be vindicated. Instead, concentrate on obeying God in your own life and, when possible, helping others to obey Him as well. You don’t have to prove others wrong to continue on the course you know God has shown you.

There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics…Cretins don’t even talk; they sort of slobber and stumble…Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation…Fools don’t claim that cats bark, but they talk about cats when everyone else is talking about dogs. They offend all the rules of conversation, and when they really offend, they’re magnificent…Morons never do the wrong thing. They get their reasoning wrong. Like the fellow who says that all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, therefore cats bark…Morons will occasionally say something that’s right, but they say it for the wrong reason…A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars…There are lunatics who don’t bring up the Templars, but those who do are the most insidious. At first they seem normal, then all of a sudden…

I know that when people pull apart, they usually employ misunderstanding as a weapon, deliberately getting hold of the stick's wrong end, impaling themselves on its point in order to prove the perfidy of the other.

People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right—especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong.

I can't bury another friend." "You won't." "If anything ever happened to you, Rowan-" "Don't" he breathed. "Don't even say it. We dealt with that enough the other night." He lifted a hand - hesitated, and then brushed back a strand of hair that had fallen across her face. His callused fingers scrapped against her cheekbone, then caressed the shell of her ear. It was foolish to even start down that road, when every other man she'd let in had left some wound, in one way or another, accidentally or not. There was nothing tender in his face. Only a predator's glittering gaze. "When we get back," he said, "remind me to prove you wrong about every thought that just went through your head." She lifted an eyebrow. "Oh?" He gave her a sly smile that made thinking impossible. Exactly what he wanted - to distract her from the horrors of tomorrow. "I'll even let you decide how I tell you: with words"- his eyes flickered once to her mouth- "or with my teeth and tongue.

Let it crumble! Let the rocks revile me and flowers wilt at my coming. Your whole universe is not enough to prove me wrong. You are the king of gods, king of stones and stars, king of the waves of the sea. But you are not the king of man.

It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions. Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made he (man) is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one...that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain. The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

He wants you back," slurred Beth. "Excuse me?" "He's in love with you and want you to be his one and only. And some other bullshit about you not being in second place and proving you wrong.

‎"The warrior who trusts his path doesn't need to prove the other is wrong.

They couldn’t prove themselves right, so they channeled their energies into proving the other side wrong.

Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed," he said. "And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realize just that, as they trot out their excuses." "Excuses, eh?" Well, if this ain't cynicism, what is?" Erens snorted. "Yes, excuses," he said, with what Erens thought might just have been a trace of bitterness. "I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you're supposed to argue about, come later. They're the least important part of the belief. That's why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place." He looked at Erens. "You've attacked the wrong thing.

Being right is based upon knowledge and experience and is often provable. Knowledge comes from the past, so it's safe. It is also out of date. It's the opposite of originality. Experience is built from solutions to old situations and problems. The old situations are probably different from the present ones, so that old solutions will have to be bent to fit new problems (and possibly fit badly). Also the likelihood is that, if you've got the experience, you'll probably use it. This is lazy. Experience is the opposite of being creative. If you can prove you're right you're set in concrete. You cannot move with the times or with other people. Being right is also being boring. Your mind is closed. You are not open to new ideas. You are rooted in your own rightness, which is arrogant. Arrogance is a valuable tool, but only if used very sparingly. Worst of all, being right has a tone of morality about it. To be anything else sounds weak or fallible, and people who are right would hate to be thought fallible. So: it's wrong to be right, because people who are right are rooted in the past, rigid-minded, dull and smug. There's no talking to them.

I brought you this." Gale holds up a sheath. When I take it, I notice it holds a single, ordinary arrow. "It's supposed to be symbolic. You firing the last shot of the war." "What if I miss?" I say. "Does Coin retrieve it and bring it back to me? Or just shoot Snow through the head herself?" "You won't miss." Gale adjusts the sheath on my shoulder. We stand there, face-to-face, not meeting each other's eyes. "You didn't come see me in the hospital." He doesn't answer, so finally I just say it. "Was it your bomb?" "I don't know. Neither does Beetee," he says. "Does it matter? You'll always be thinking about it." He waits for me to deny it; I want to deny it, but it's true. Even now I can see the flash that ignites her, feel the heat of the flames. And I will never be able to separate that moment from Gale. My silence is my answer. "That was the one thing I had going for me. Taking care of your family," he says. "Shoot straight, okay?" He touches my cheek and leaves. I want to call him back and tell him that I was wrong. That I'll figure out a way to make peace with this. To remember the circumstances under which he created the bomb. Take into account my own inexcusable crimes. Dig up the truth about who dropped the parachutes. Prove it wasn't the rebels. Forgive him. But since I can't, I'll just have to deal with the pain.

There's a sick joke that the reason we have not been contacted by an alien civilization is that civilizations tend to destroy themselves when they reach our stage. But I have sufficient faith in the good sense of public to believe that we might prove this wrong.

When that time come, nobody will care for each other. You don't have to prove me wrong, you'll need that energy.

[Charlotte Brontë] once told her sisters that they were wrong - even morally wrong - in making their heroines beautiful as a matter of course. They replied that it was impossible to make a heroine interesting on any other terms. Her answer was, 'I will prove to you that you are wrong; I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours.

To me it proves that life and time are not in sync. It’s as if time was all wrong and the wife’s life was lived on the wrong bank of the river or, worse yet, on two banks, with neither being the right one. None of us may want to claim to live life in two parallel lanes but all have many lives, one tucked beneath or right alongside the other. Some lives wait their turn because they haven’t been lived at all, while others die before they’ve lived out their time, and some are waiting to be relived because they haven’t been lived enough. Basically, we don’t know how to think of time, because time doesn’t really understand time the way we do, because time couldn’t care less what we think of time, because time is just a wobbly, unreliable metaphor for how we think about life. Because ultimately it isn’t time that is wrong for us, or we for time. It may be life itself that is wrong.

I lay there wrapped in Carter’s arms and it was the most comfortable I had ever been. For about five minutes. This just proved that everything they did in the movies was a load of bullshit. His arm was under my neck on the pillow which tilted my head at an awkward angle. I could already feel the beginnings of a kink. I was starting to sweat like a whore in church with his other arm heavily draped over my waist and his legs tangled with mine. With my sweaty ass and his itchy leg hair, it felt like I had a hundred mosquito bites on my legs. It would be wrong to kick him now, right? I shifted my body just the tiniest bit. I didn't want him to think I didn't want to cuddle, but I was going insane trying to lie perfectly still. . . . "Out with it, Claire," Carter mumbled close to my ear. Shit. Now it was going to get awkward. We just now had sex for the first time in years and I was going to tell him to get away from me so I could sleep. I am the most unromantic person in the world. . . . "My neck is killing me and I'm so hot right now my skin could start a blanket fire," I rambled. Carter was quiet. Too quiet. Shit, I hurt his feelings. "Oh, thank fucking God," he said as he pulled both of his arms out from around me. "My arm fell asleep and my legs were getting a cramp.

In the beginning, though, I have to admit that I did have a chip on my shoulder. I did want to prove everyone wrong. But after I went through the process and came out the other side, it wasn't about anyone else.

If human nature were not base, but thoroughly honourable, we should in every debate have no other aim than the discovery of truth; we should not in the least care whether the truth proved to be in favour of the opinion which we had begun by expressing, or of the opinion of our adversary. That we should regard as a matter of no moment, or, at any rate, of very secondary consequence; but, as things are, it is the main concern. Our innate vanity, which is particularly sensitive in reference to our intellectual powers, will not suffer us to allow that our first position was wrong and our adversary’s right. The way out of this difficulty would be simply to take the trouble always to form a correct judgment. For this a man would have to think before he spoke. But, with most men, innate vanity is accompanied by loquacity and innate dishonesty. They speak before they think; and even though they may afterwards perceive that they are wrong, and that what they assert is false, they want it to seem thecontrary. The interest in truth, which may be presumed to have been their only motive when they stated the proposition alleged to be true, now gives way to the interests of vanity: and so, for the sake of vanity, what is true must seem false, and what is false must seem true.

You go first," Four says. Eric shrug. "Edward." Four leans against the door frame and nods. The moonlight makes his eyes bright. He scans the group of transfer initiates briefly, without calculation and says, "I want the Stiff." .... Heat rushes into my cheeks and I don't know whether to be angry at the people laughing at me or flattered by the fact that he chose me first. "Got something to prove?" asks Eric, with his trademark smirk. "Or you just picking the weak ones, so that if you lose, you'll have someone to blame it on?" Four shrugs. "Something like that." Angry. I should be angry. I scowl at my hands. Whatever Four's strategy is, it's based on the idea that I am weaker than the other initiates. And it gives me a bitter taste in my mouth. i have to prove him wrong-- I have to.

The man who is striving to solve a problem defined by existing knowledge and technique is not, however, just looking around. He knows what he wants to achieve, and he designs his instruments and directs his thoughts accordingly. Unanticipated novelty, the new discovery, can emerge only to the extent that his anticipations about nature and his instruments prove wrong. . . . There is no other effective way in which discoveries might be generated.

Prove the nay-sayers wrong... Leave being average to others... You could be the one who changes the way the world spins

Testing the wrong person can prove a massive failure for the antagonist.

You are metaphysicians. You can prove anything by metaphysics; and having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician wrong—to his own satisfaction. You are anarchists in the realm of thought. And you are mad cosmos-makers. Each of you dwells in a cosmos of his own making, created out of his own fancies and desires. You do not know the real world in which you live, and your thinking has no place in the real world except in so far as it is phenomena of mental aberration.

The modern evil, we have said, greatly turns on this: that people do not see that the exception proves the rule. Thus it may or may not be right to kill a murderer; but it can only conceivably be right to kill a murderer because it is wrong to kill a man.

Many people will tell you to ignore these doubters. Others will tell you to listen and then prove them wrong, which worked for me in those first shows. But I’m going to recommend something better that I learned much later: Don’t invite them into the conversation. You already know what you want to dedicate yourself to, so you don’t need to ask for their approval. There’s no need to seek external approval when you already have internal approval.

There is a thought among some brands of theology that souls are waiting up in heaven to be born. Now how in the world anybody comes up with that is beyond me, and how you can be so sure of that is also beyond me. I always like to go back to Snoopy's theological writings, which he called, "Has It Ever Occurred to You That You Might Be Wrong." And that's the way I feel. These things fascinate me, and I like to talk about them with other people, and hear what they think. But I'm always a little bit leery of people who are sure that they're right about things that nobody's ever been able to prove, and never will be able to prove.

Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right. In the general experience, everybody has been wrong so often, and it has taken in most instances such a weary while to find out how wrong, that the authority is proved to be fallible.

you cant con a con artist. isn't that what they always say? once I thought it was true. absorbed it a with all of her other teachings and my baby food. but I've proved the adage wrong, haven't I? I learned from the best. no- not her. him.

I was no chief and never had been, but because I had been more deeply wronged than others, this honor was conferred upon me, and I resolved to prove worthy of the trust.

Things are complicated. Don’t judge someone as good or bad. If you have already judged, don’t waste your energy in trying to prove that your judgement is right.

We are not satisfied to be right, unless we can prove others to be quite wrong.

Dear Camryn, I know you're scared. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little scared, too, but I have to believe that this time around everything will be fine. And it will be. We've been through so much together. More than most people in such a short time. But no matter what, the one thing that has never changed is that we're still together. Death couldn't take me away from you. Weakness couldn't make me look at you in a bad light. Drugs and all the shit that comes with them couldn't take you away from me. I think it's more safe to say that we're indestructable. Maybe all of this has been a test. Yeah, I think about that a lot and I've convinced myself of it. A lot of people take Fate for granted. Some have everything they've ever wanted right at their fingertips, but they abuse it. Others walk right past their only opportunity because they never open their eyes long enough to see that it's there. But you and I, even before we met, took all the risks, made our own decisions without listening to everybody around us telling us, in so many ways, that what we're doing is wrong. Hell no, we did it our way, no matter how reckless, or crazy or unconventional. It's like the more we pushed and the more we fought, the harder the obstacles. Because we had to prove we were the real deal. And I know we've done just that. Camryn, I want you to read this letter to yourself once a week. It doesn't matter what day or what time, just read it. Every time you open it, I want you to see that another week has passed and you're still pregnant. That I'm still in good health. That we're still together. I want you to think about the three of us, you, me and our son or daughter, traveling Europe and Soth America. Because we're going to do it. I promise you that. You're everything to me, and I want you to stay strong and not let your fear of the past taint the path to our future. Everything will work out this time, Camryn, everything will, I swear to you. Just trust me. Until next week... Love, Andrew

For nine years, I thought it was vengeance that would save me, and it took you- my strong, beautiful wife- to prove that I was wrong and that love was my salvation. You are my redemption," he whispered. "You are my benediction.

It took me a long time to learn that proving people wrong is purposeless, fighting stupidity is futile, and formal recognition prevents people from underestimating you—and thereby from ceding to you surprise and other tactical advantages.

The mind is a mass of contradictions and conflicts. We lie to make others trust us. We hide our true selves in the pursuit of intimacy. We chase happiness in ways that drive happiness away. When we’re wrong we fight the hardest to prove we’re right.” Caught

Men are not born equal in themselves, so I think it beneath a man to postulate that they are. If I thought myself as good as Sokrates I should be a fool; and if, not really believing it, I asked you to make me happy by assuring me of it, you would rightly despise me. So why should I insult my fellow-citizens by treating them as fools and cowards? A man who thinks himself as good as everyone else will be at no pains to grow better. On the other hand, I might think myself as good as Sokrates, and even persuade other fools to agree with me; but under a democracy, Sokrates is there in the Agora to prove me wrong. I want a city where I can find my equals and respect my betters, whoever they are; and where no one can tell me to swallow a lie because it is expedient, or some other man's will.

My life's goal is not trying to prove others wrong. My sole focus is on proving myself right." ~Elissa Gabrielle

You are metaphysicians. You can prove anything by metaphysics; and having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician wrong—to his own satisfaction.

The wrong way to go about this is to say: Well, researchers have ‘proved’ that animals only understand fifty words or something similarly absurd. Or that communication with other species is an illusion. Communication is not the preserve of humans; it is the one thing that is truly universal.

I used to be so obsessed with making the right choice. Then, after I found out what was happening to us, I thought it proved that none of our choices in here meant anything. But I was wrong. Every single choice we made told us something about ourselves, about each other.’ She turns back to him, moves his hands in emphasis with her words. ‘Peregrine tried to tell us, but I didn’t understand. I do now. That was the point. For me to know every you. And for you to know every me. Because there’s only the two of us here, we needed to be everything to each other. And no one can be that. Not in just one life.’ Her voice shakes. ‘But we’ve lived so many, and I know you, as well as I know myself. And I know that every single version of us would choose the journey. Whatever it costs.

We found each other. Killed our way across the mountains to get to each other. Turns out, a good number of Illyrian males wanted to prove they were stronger, smarter than us. Turns out they were wrong.

There are doubtless those who would wish to lock up all those who suspected of terrorist and other serious offences and, in the time-honored phrase, throw away the key. But a suspect is by definition a person whom no offence has been proved. Suspicions, even if reasonably entertained, may prove to be misplaced, as a series of tragic miscarriages of justice has demonstrated. Police officers and security officials can be wrong. It is a gross injustice to deprive of his liberty for significant periods a person who has committed no crime and does not intend to do so. No civilized country should willingly tolerate such injustices.

To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it — the life of that man is one long sin against mankind. […] Inquiry into the evidence of a doctrine is not to be made once for all, and then taken as finally settled. It is never lawful to stifle a doubt; for either it can be honestly answered by means of the inquiry already made, or else it proves that the inquiry was not complete. “But,” says one, “I am a busy man; I have no time for the long course of study which would be necessary to make me in any degree a competent judge of certain questions, or even able to understand the nature of the arguments.” Then he should have no time to believe.

CHRONO-SYNCLASTIC INFUNDIBULA—Just imagine that your Daddy is the smartest man who ever lived on Earth, and he knows everything there is to find out, and he is exactly right about everything, and he can prove he is right about everything. Now imagine another little child on some nice world a million light years away, and that little child’s Daddy is the smartest man who ever lived on that nice world so far away. And he is just as smart and just as right as your Daddy is. Both Daddies are smart, and both Daddies are right.    Only if they ever met each other they would get into a terrible argument, because they wouldn’t agree on anything. Now, you can say that your Daddy is right and the other little child’s Daddy is wrong, but the Universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.    The reason both Daddies can be right and still get into terrible fights is because there are so many different ways of being right. There are places in the Universe, though, where each Daddy could finally catch on to what the other Daddy was talking about. These places are where all the different kinds of truths fit together as nicely as the parts in your Daddy’s solar watch. We call these places chrono-synclastic infundibula.    The Solar System seems to be full of chrono-synclastic infundibula. There is one great big one we are sure of that likes to stay between Earth and Mars. We know about that one because an Earth man and his Earth dog ran right into it.    You might think it would be nice to go to a chrono-synclastic infundibulum and see all the different ways to be absolutely right, but it is a very dangerous thing to do. The poor man and his poor dog are scattered far and wide, not just through space, but through time, too.    Chrono (kroh-no) means time. Synclastic (sin-class-tick) means curved toward the same side in all directions, like the skin of an orange. Infundibulum (in-fun-dib-u-lum) is what the ancient Romans like Julius Caesar and Nero called a funnel. If you don’t know what a funnel is, get Mommy to show you one.

Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle. That principle is of great antiquity; it is as old as Socrates; as old as the writer who said, 'Try all things, hold fast by that which is good'; it is the foundation of the Reformation, which simply illustrated the axiom that every man should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him, it is the great principle of Descartes; it is the fundamental axiom of modern science. Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic position, which if a man keep whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him. The results of the working out of the agnostic principle will vary according to individual knowledge and capacity, and according to the general condition of science. That which is unproved today may be proved, by the help of new discoveries, tomorrow. The only negative fixed points will be those negations which flow from the demonstrable limitation of our faculties. And the only obligation accepted is to have the mind always open to conviction. That it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can provide evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts and in my opinion, is all that is essential to agnosticism.

In general it's a good idea to avoid people who take themselves too seriously. As individuals, we have only so much seriousness to go round, and people who take themselves very seriously don't have enough seriousness left over to take other people seriously. Instead they tend to look down on them, and are secretly pleased when they get stuff wrong, because they just prove to the too-serious types that they were right not to take them too seriously to begin with.

By lunchtime, the rest of the school was still talking about last night’s epic howler at Hell Hall, but Mal had no interest. The party was the past; she’d moved on. She had bigger things to worry about now. All she could think about was how her mother wanted the Dragon’s Eye back. And how Maleficent wouldn’t see her as anything other than her father’s daughter—in other words, a pathetic, soft human—until Mal could prove her wrong. Mal kept reliving last night’s conversation over and over, so that she missed her first few classes and sleepwalked through the rest. She arrived for her one-on-one after-school seminar with Lady

It’s funny to consider how important things like that felt to me then. Proving people wrong. Fighting stupidity. Wanting formal recognition. It took me a long time to learn that proving people wrong is purposeless, fighting stupidity is futile, and formal recognition prevents people from underestimating you—and thereby from ceding to you surprise and other tactical advantages.

There is a story they tell, about a girl dared by her peers to venture to a local graveyard after dark. This was her folly: when they told her that standing on someone’s grave at night would cause the inhabitant to reach up and pull her under, she scoffed. Scoffing is the first mistake a woman can make. I will show you, she said. Pride is the second mistake. They gave her a knife to stick into the frosty earth, as a way of proving her presence and her theory. She went to that graveyard. Some storytellers say that she picked the grave at random. I believe she selected a very old one, her choice tinged by self-doubt and the latent belief that if she were wrong, the intact muscle and flesh of a newly dead corpse would be more dangerous than one centuries gone. She knelt on the grave and plunged the blade deep. As she stood to run she found she couldn’t escape. Something was clutching at her clothes. She cried out and fell down. When morning came, her friends arrived at the cemetery. They found her dead on the grave, the blade pinning the sturdy wool of her skirt to the ground. Dead of fright or exposure, would it matter when the parents arrived? She was not wrong, but it didn’t matter any more. Afterwards, everyone believed that she had wished to die, even though she had died proving that she could live. As it turns out, being right was the third, and worst, mistake.

Jesus thrown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn't committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me. Of course they never shown me my papers. That's why I sign myself now. I said long ago, you get you a signature and sign everything you do and keep a copy of it. Then you'll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the punishment and see do they match and in the end you'll have something to prove you ain't been treated right. I call myself the Misfit because I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment.

Here it comes,” I say gleefully. “The levelheaded reason for why they stay in the house.” “Watch, the ghost won’t let them leave,” Logan guesses. He guesses wrong. On the screen, the characters argue about whether they should go, and one of the girls announces, “We’re doing important work here, guys! We’re proving the existence of paranormal entities! Science needs this. Science needs us.” I burst out laughing, shuddering against Logan’s rock-hard chest. “Did you hear that, Johnny? Science needs them.” “I fucking hate you,” he grumbles. “Five bucks…” I say in a singsong voice. His hand slides down to pinch my butt, making me squeak in surprise. “Go ahead and gloat. You win the battle by getting five bucks out of me, but I win the war.” I sit up. “How do you figure?” “Because you still have to sit through the rest of this movie, and you’re going to hate every second of it. I, on the other hand, am enjoying it immensely.” The jerk is absolutely right. Unless…

Man is made up of opposing characteristics. History demonstrates vividly the fact that it always moves in the worst possible direction. Either man is not capable of directing history, or else he does direct it, but only by pushing it down the most terrible, wrong path there is. There is not a single example to prove the opposite. People are not capable of governing others. They are only capable of destroying. And materialism—naked and cynical—is going to complete the destruction. Despite the fact that God lives in every soul, that every soul has the capacity to accumulate what is eternal and good, as a mass people can do nothing but destroy. For they have come together not in the name of an ideal, but simply for the sake of a material notion. Mankind has hurried to protect the body (perhaps on the strength of that natural and unconscious gesture which served as the beginning of what is called progress) and has given no thought to protecting the soul. The church (as opposed to religion) has not been able to do so. In the course of the history of civilization, the spiritual half of man has been separated further and further from the animal, the material, and now in an infinite expanse of darkness we can just make out, like the lights of a departing train, the other half of our being as it rushes away, irrevocably and for ever. Spirit and flesh, feeling and reason can never again be made one. It's too late. For the moment we are crippled by the appalling disease of spiritual deficiency; and the disease is fatal. Mankind has done everything possible to annihilate itself, starting with its own moral annihilation—physical death is merely the result. Everyone can be saved only if each saves himself.

Anything of importance will remain. Anything useless will disappear. It is not the Warrior’s responsibility, however, to judge the dreams of others, and he does not waste time criticizing other people’s decisions. In order to have faith in his own path, he does not need to prove that someone else’s path is wrong.

Until I was twenty I was sure there was a being who could see everything I did and who didn't like most of it. He seemed to care about minute aspects of my life, like on what day of the week I ate a piece of meat. And yet, he let earthquakes and mudslides take out whole communities, apparently ignoring the saints among them who ate their meat on the assigned days. Eventually, I realized that I didn't believe there was such a being. It didn't seem reasonable. And I assumed that I was an atheist. As I understood the word, it meant that I was someone who didn't believe in a God; I was without a God. I didn't broadcast this in public because I noticed that people who do believe in a god get upset to hear that others don't. (Why this is so is one of the most pressing of human questions, and I wish a few of the bright people in this conversation would try to answer it through research.) But, slowly I realized that in the popular mind the word atheist was coming to mean something more - a statement that there couldn't be a God. God was, in this formulation, not possible, and this was something that could be proved. But I had been changed by eleven years of interviewing six or seven hundred scientists around the world on the television program Scientific American Frontiers. And that change was reflected in how I would now identify myself. The most striking thing about the scientists I met was their complete dedication to evidence. It reminded me of the wonderfully plainspoken words of Richard Feynman who felt it was better not to know than to know something that was wrong.

Every day, hundreds of observations and experiments pour into the hopper of the scientific literature. Many of them don't have much to do with evolution - they're observations about the details of physiology, biochemistry, development, and so on - but many of them do. And every fact that has something to do with evolution confirms its truth. Every fossil that we find, every DNA molecule that we sequence, every organ system that we dissect, supports the idea that species evolved from common ancestors. Despite innumerable possible observations that could prove evolution untrue, we don't have a single one. We don't find mammals in Precambrian rocks, humans in the same layers as dinosaurs, or any other fossils out of evolutionary order. DNA sequencing supports the evolutionary relationships of species originally deduced from the fossil record. And, as natural selection predicts, we find no species with adaptations that only benefit a different species. We do find dead genes and vestigial organs, incomprehensible under the idea of special creation. Despite a million chances to be wrong, evolution always comes up right. That is as close as we can get to a scientific truth.

Most people go through life assuming that we’re right about everything all the time and that people who don’t see things our way are wrong. We mistake how we want the world to be with how it actually is. The subject doesn’t matter: we’re right about politics, other people, our memories; you name it. We mistake what we believe for the true facts. Of course, we can’t be right about everything all the time. Everyone makes mistakes or misremembers some things. But we still want to feel right all the time, and ideally get other people to reinforce that feeling. Hence, we channel inordinate amounts of energy to proving to others—or ourselves—that we’re right. When this happens, we’re less concerned with outcomes and more concerned with protecting our egos.

Eight dragons in one small cave, all thinking at the same time. How was she going to get through this? “Let’s go around and introduce ourselves,” Tsunami said. “I mean, maybe it’s unnecessary, but that’s what Sunny said to do. And then she said I probably wouldn’t listen to her anyway, so I am proving her wrong, so there. I’m Tsunami, if anyone didn’t know. I was going to give myself a title like Commander of Recruitment, but then for some reason everyone voted that I would be terrible at recruiting, whatever that is all about, so they made me Head of School instead. So I’m pretty much the boss. And I’m running your first small group-discussion class, which was Glory’s big idea, so I figure we’ll figure it out together. Any questions?” “Yeah,” said Carnelian. “Are we stuck with this group?” “That’s not quite how I would put it,” said Tsunami. “But yes.” “What if we would prefer to be in a group with other IceWings?” Winter asked. “Such as my sister?” “That’s not how the winglets are set up,” Tsunami said. “But you’ll be in some bigger group classes with her and have plenty of time to make other friends as well.” “I love our winglet,” Kinkajou volunteered. “When do we eat?” Umber asked. “Just kidding. Pretending to be Clay.” He grinned, then shot a look at Qibli. Did he think that was funny? I hope that was funny. Did I sound like an idiot?

When Lemaître defends the idea that the universe is expanding, and Einstein does not believe it, one of the two is wrong; the other, right. All of Einstein’s results, his fame, his influence on the scientific world, his immense authority, count for nothing. The observations prove him wrong, and it’s game over. An obscure Belgian priest is right. It is for this reason that scientific thinking has power.

Trust does not emerge simply because a seller makes a rational case why the customer should buy a product or service, or because an executive promises change. Trust is not a checklist. Fulfilling all your responsibilities does not create trust. Trust is a feeling, not a rational experience. We trust some people and companies even when things go wrong, and we don’t trust others even though everything might have gone exactly as it should have. A completed checklist does not guarantee trust. Trust begins to emerge when we have a sense that another person or organization is driven by things other than their own self-gain. With trust comes a sense of value—real value, not just value equated with money. Value, by definition, is the transference of trust. You can’t convince someone you have value, just as you can’t convince someone to trust you. You have to earn trust by communicating and demonstrating that you share the same values and beliefs. You have to talk about your WHY and prove it with WHAT you do.

I pray that the world never runs out of dragons. I say that in all sincerity, though I have played a part in the death of one great wyrm. For the dragon is the quintessential enemy, the greatest foe, the unconquerable epitome of devastation. The dragon, above all other creatures, even the demons and the devils, evokes images of dark grandeur, of the greatest beast curled asleep on the greatest treasure hoard. They are the ultimate test of the hero and the ultimate fright of the child. They are older than the elves and more akin to the earth than the dwarves. The great dragons are the preternatural beast, the basic element of the beast, that darkest part of our imagination. The wizards cannot tell you of their origin, though they believe that a great wizard, a god of wizards, must have played some role in the first spawning of the beast. The elves, with their long fables explaining the creation of every aspect of the world, have many ancient tales concerning the origin of the dragons, but they admit, privately, that they really have no idea of how the dragons came to be. My own belief is more simple, and yet, more complicated by far. I believe that dragons appeared in the world immediately after the spawning of the first reasoning race. I do not credit any god of wizards with their creation, but rather, the most basic imagination wrought of unseen fears, of those first reasoning mortals. We make the dragons as we make the gods, because we need them, because, somewhere deep in our hearts, we recognize that a world without them is a world not worth living in. There are so many people in the land who want an answer, a definitive answer, for everything in life, and even for everything after life. They study and they test, and because those few find the answers for some simple questions, they assume that there are answers to be had for every question. What was the world like before there were people? Was there nothing but darkness before the sun and the stars? Was there anything at all? What were we, each of us, before we were born? And what, most importantly of all, shall we be after we die? Out of compassion, I hope that those questioners never find that which they seek. One self-proclaimed prophet came through Ten-Towns denying the possibility of an afterlife, claiming that those people who had died and were raised by priests, had, in fact, never died, and that their claims of experiences beyond the grave were an elaborate trick played on them by their own hearts, a ruse to ease the path to nothingness. For that is all there was, he said, an emptiness, a nothingness. Never in my life have I ever heard one begging so desperately for someone to prove him wrong. This is kind of what I believe right now… although, I do not want to be proved wrong… For what are we left with if there remains no mystery? What hope might we find if we know all of the answers? What is it within us, then, that so desperately wants to deny magic and to unravel mystery? Fear, I presume, based on the many uncertainties of life and the greatest uncertainty of death. Put those fears aside, I say, and live free of them, for if we just step back and watch the truth of the world, we will find that there is indeed magic all about us, unexplainable by numbers and formulas. What is the passion evoked by the stirring speech of the commander before the desperate battle, if not magic? What is the peace that an infant might know in its mother’s arms, if not magic? What is love, if not magic? No, I would not want to live in a world without dragons, as I would not want to live in a world without magic, for that is a world without mystery, and that is a world without faith. And that, I fear, for any reasoning, conscious being, would be the cruelest trick of all. -Drizzt Do’Urden

The contents of this letter threw Elizabeth into a flutter of spirits in which it was difficult to determine whether pleasure or pain bore the greatest share. The vague and unsettled suspicions which uncertainty had produced of what Mr. Darcy might have been doing to forward her sister's match which she had feared to encourage as an exertion of goodness too great to be probable and at the same time dreaded to be just from the pain of obligation were proved beyond their greatest extent to be true He had followed them purposely to town he had taken on himself all the trouble and mortification attendant on such a research in which supplication had been necessary to a woman whom he must abominate and despise and where he was reduced to meet frequently meet reason with persuade and finally bribe the man whom he always most wished to avoid and whose very name it was punishment to him to pronounce. He had done all this for a girl whom he could neither regard nor esteem. Her heart did whisper that he had done it for her. But it was a hope shortly checked by other considerations and she soon felt that even her vanity was insufficient when required to depend on his affection for her—for a woman who had already refused him—as able to overcome a sentiment so natural as abhorrence against relationship with Wickham. Brother-in-law of Wickham Every kind of pride must revolt from the connection. He had to be sure done much. She was ashamed to think how much. But he had given a reason for his interference which asked no extraordinary stretch of belief. It was reasonable that he should feel he had been wrong he had liberality and he had the means of exercising it and though she would not place herself as his principal inducement she could perhaps believe that remaining partiality for her might assist his endeavours in a cause where her peace of mind must be materially concerned. It was painful exceedingly painful to know that they were under obligations to a person who could never receive a return. They owed the restoration of Lydia her character every thing to him. Oh how heartily did she grieve over every ungracious sensation she had ever encouraged every saucy speech she had ever directed towards him. For herself she was humbled but she was proud of him. Proud that in a cause of compassion and honour he had been able to get the better of himself. She read over her aunt's commendation of him again and again. It was hardly enough but it pleased her. She was even sensible of some pleasure though mixed with regret on finding how steadfastly both she and her uncle had been persuaded that affection and confidence subsisted between Mr. Darcy and herself.

In the final analysis, what stands out about Thucydides is not his weaknesses but his strengths as a historian. We note his omissions, but no account of the Peloponnesian War or of fifth-century Greece in general is more complete. Some scholars worry over his cut-and-dried heroes and villains. But is there much evidence to suggest that these assessments were fundamentally wrong? Others argue that his speeches are biased distortions, but no one can prove that any are outright fabrications.

The more consciousness there is in such a sufferer who in despair wills to be himself, the more his despair intensifies and becomes demonic. It usually originates as follows. A self that in despair wills to be itself is pained in some distress or other that does not allow itself to be taken away from or separated from his concrete self. So now he makes precisely this torment the object of all his passion, and finally it becomes a demonic age. By now, even if God in heaven and all the angels offered to help him out of it- no, he does not want that, now it is too late. Once he would gladly have given everything to be rid of this agony, but he was kept waiting; now it is too late, now he would rather rage against everything and be the wronged victim of the whole world and of all life, and it is of particular significance to him to make sure that he has his torment on hand and that no one takes it away from him- for then he would not be able to demonstrate and prove to himself that he is right. This eventually becomes such a fixation that for an extremely strange reason he is afraid of eternity, afraid that it will separate him from his, demonically understood, infinite superiority over other men, his justification, demonically understood, for being what he is.

The more consciousness there is in such a sufferer who in despair wills to be himself, the more his despair intensifies and becomes demonic. It usually originates as follows. A self that in despair wills to be itself is pained in some distress or other that does not allow itself to be taken away from or separated from his concrete self. So now he makes precisely this torment the object of all his passion, and finally it becomes a demonic rage. By now, even if God in heaven and all the angels offered to help him out of it- no, he does not want that, now it is too late. Once he would gladly have given everything to be rid of this agony, but he was kept waiting; now it is too late, now he would rather rage against everything and be the wronged victim of the whole world and of all life, and it is of particular significance to him to make sure that he has his torment on hand and that no one takes it away from him- for then he would not be able to demonstrate and prove to himself that he is right. This eventually becomes such a fixation that for an extremely strange reason he is afraid of eternity, afraid that it will separate him from his, demonically understood, infinite superiority over other men, his justification, demonically understood, for being what he is.

A Judge personality strongly believes in right and wrong, which is great, but they also believe they are the ones who decide right and wrong and lord it over others to maintain authority and power. Right and wrong are less a moral code than they are a collar and leash they attach to others so they can lead them around. When a Judge personality is religious, they’ll use the Bible to gain control of others. The Bible becomes a book of rules they use to prove they are right rather than a book that introduces people to God.

The thesis of the book,” he writes in response, “when correctly interpreted, is essentially trivial. . . . To ‘prove’ such a mathematical result by a costly and prolonged numerical study of many kinds of business profit and expense ratios is analogous to proving the multiplication table by arranging elephants in rows and columns, and then doing the same for numerous other kinds of animals. The performance, though perhaps entertaining, and having a certain pedagogical value, is not an important contribution either to zoölogy or mathematics.

There is no guarantee that life will be easy for anyone. We grow and learn more rapidly by facing and overcoming challenges. You are here to prove yourself, to develop, and to overcome. There will be constant challenges that cause you to think, to make proper judgments, and to act righteously. You will grow from them. However, there are some challenges you never need to encounter. They are those associated with serious transgression. As you continue to avoid such tragedy, your life will be simpler and happier. You will see others around you who don’t make that choice, who do things that are wrong and evil and bring sadness. Thank your Father in Heaven that your pattern of life is different and that you have been helped to make choices guided by the Holy Ghost. That prompting will keep you on the right path.

He stared at me. “Every person exists in their own shallow bowl, and they can’t see over the rim,” he explained. “But they think that their world is the world—the truth. When in reality, no two bowls are identical, and all people are stuck trapped in their own.” Listening to my love, I felt as if we were transported back to the trail, staring at the inky field of ghostly stars. My hair dangling off our bed and onto the hardwood floor, almost upside down, I challenged him, intoxicated. “No that’s silly. We see the color of the walls, the same.” “There is no way to prove that your blue is my blue,” he said. And sobering, I began seeing how my love’s allegory was a hard truth, very dark—how our shallow bowls, differences of perspective, account for all declarations of others’ “wrongness” (one’s own rightness), and the sense of being wronged.

Say what you like,” we shall be told, “the apocalyptic beliefs of the first Christians have been proved to be false. It is clear from the New Testament that they all expected the Second Coming in their own lifetime. And, worse still, they had a reason, and one which you will find very embarrassing. Their Master had told them so. He shared, and indeed created, their delusion. He said in so many words, ‘this generation shall not pass till all these things be done.’ And he was wrong. He clearly knew no more about the end of the world than anyone else.” “It is certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible.

In all conflicts between groups, there are three elements. One: the certitude that our group is morally superior, possibly even chosen by God. All others should follow our example or be at our service. In order to bring peace to the world, we have to impose our set of beliefs upon others, through manipulation, force, and fear, if necessary. Two: a refusal or incapacity to see or admit to any possible errors or faults in our group. The undeniable nature of our own goodness makes us think we are infallible; there can be no wrong in us. Three: a refusal to believe that any other group possesses truth or can contribute anything of value. At best, others may be regarded as ignorant, unenlightened, and possessing only half—truths; at worst, they are seen as destructive, dangerous, and possessed by evil spirits: they need to be overpowered for the good of humanity. Society and cultures are, then, divided into the “good” and the “bad”; the good attributing to themselves the mission to save, to heal, to bring peace to a wicked world, according to their own terms and under their controlling power. Such is the story of all civilizations through the ages as they spread over the earth by invading and colonizing. Differences must be suppressed; “savages” must be civilized. We must prove by all possible means that our culture, our power, our knowledge, and our technology are the best, that our gods are the only gods! This is not just the story of civilizations but also of all wars of religion, inquisitions, censorships, dictatorships; all things, in short, that are ideologies. An ideology is a set of ideas translated into a set of values. Because they are held to be absolutely true, these ideas and values need to be imposed on others if they are not readily accepted. A political system, a school of psychology, and a philosophy of economics can all be ideologies. Even a place of work can be an ideology. Religious sub—groups, sects, are based upon ideological principles. Religions themselves can become ideologies. And ideologues, by their nature, are not open to new ideas or even to debate; they refuse to accept or listen to anyone else’s reality. They refuse to admit any possibility of error or even criticism of their system; they are closed up in their set of ideas, theories, and values. We human beings have a great facility for living illusions, for protecting our self—image with power, for justifying it all by thinking we are the favoured ones of God.

Above all else, the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He must remain capable of saying: “There’s no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we’ll correct that when we come to it.” The mentat-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our universe is merely part of larger phenomena. But the expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop.

His grip on the wheel tightened as we left the limits of DC and reached the beltway. Through the blur of rain pelting the windows, we could just make out the shapes of the new highway lights and cameras that would be installed over the next few months. Right now, though, our only real sources of light were the car itself and the glow of the capital's light pollution. "Did I really always side with him?" I wondered aloud "I swear I didn't mean to...." Chubs risked a quick glance at me, then fixed his eyes back on the road. "It's not about choosing sides. I shouldn't have ever said that. I'm sorry. You know how I get when my blood sugar is low. He's Lee–he's funny and nice and he dresses like a walking hug." He does wear a lot of flannel," I said. But you're those things, too. Don't make that face just to try to prove me wrong. You are." "I don't feel that way," he admitted. "But I always got that you guys had something different. I respect that. I've never been... It's harder for me to open up to people." The headlights caught the raindrops sliding off the windshield and made them glow like shooting tars. He was making it sound like one friendship was better or more important than the other. That wasn't true. They were just different. The love was exactly the same. They only difference was that Liam had lost a little sister; a part of me had always felt like he wanted to prove to himself that he could save at least one of us. "I always understood you," I told him. "Just like you always understood me.

A diagnosis is intimate. It is a conclusion. If it is given after years of uncertainty, it can seem liberating. It affirms that all the worries were not unnecessary, that there was, in fact, something wrong; it proves that your own perception of reality is the right one and that you can be trusted. It can put one at ease. If a diagnosis describes a progressive condition, it can also be a source of unease. It conjures images of the future. It is a road map to a place you don’t want to visit. A diagnosis has its own gravitational field. It can shape identity, like other weighty concepts—gender, sexual orientation. One who has never been diagnosed is free without knowing it. What happens when a diagnosis vanishes suddenly? Something is gone, but it was never there, and that which remains is the same as before.

Women's constant thought is, not to lay down broad principles of right and wrong; not to place the whole world in harmony with some great scheme of justice; not to consider the future of nations; not to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before; but to deceive, influence, sway and please men. Normally, their weakness makes masculine protection necessary to their existence and to the exercise of their overpowering maternal instinct, and so their whole effort is to obtain this protection in the easiest way possible. The net result is that feminine morality is a morality of opportunism and imminent expediency, and that the normal woman has no respect for, and scarcely any conception of abstract truth. Thus is proved the fact noted by Schopenhauer and many other observers: that a woman seldom manifests any true sense of justice or of honor.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous" i Tell me it was for the hunger & nothing less. For hunger is to give the body what it knows it cannot keep. That this amber light whittled down by another war is all that pins my hand to your chest. i You, drowning                         between my arms — stay. You, pushing your body                          into the river only to be left                          with yourself — stay. i I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after backhanding mother, then taking a chainsaw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls. And so I learned that a man, in climax, was the closest thing to surrender. i Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade.                    Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn. Say autumn despite the green                    in your eyes. Beauty despite daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn                    mounting in your throat. My thrashing beneath you                    like a sparrow stunned with falling. i Dusk: a blade of honey between our shadows, draining. i I wanted to disappear — so I opened the door to a stranger’s car. He was divorced. He was still alive. He was sobbing into his hands (hands that tasted like rust). The pink breast cancer ribbon on his keychain swayed in the ignition. Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? I was still here once. The moon, distant & flickering, trapped itself in beads of sweat on my neck. I let the fog spill through the cracked window & cover my fangs. When I left, the Buick kept sitting there, a dumb bull in pasture, its eyes searing my shadow onto the side of suburban houses. At home, I threw myself on the bed like a torch & watched the flames gnaw through my mother’s house until the sky appeared, bloodshot & massive. How I wanted to be that sky — to hold every flying & falling at once. i Say amen. Say amend. Say yes. Say yes anyway. i In the shower, sweating under cold water, I scrubbed & scrubbed. i In the life before this one, you could tell two people were in love because when they drove the pickup over the bridge, their wings would grow back just in time. Some days I am still inside the pickup. Some days I keep waiting. i It’s not too late. Our heads haloed             with gnats & summer too early to leave any marks.             Your hand under my shirt as static intensifies on the radio.             Your other hand pointing your daddy’s revolver             to the sky. Stars falling one by one in the cross hairs.             This means I won’t be afraid if we’re already             here. Already more than skin can hold. That a body             beside a body must ma

A system of justice does not need to pursue retribution. If the purpose of drug sentencing is to prevent harm, all we need to do is decide what to do with people who pose a genuine risk to society or cause tangible harm. There are perfectly rational ways of doing this; in fact, most societies already pursue such policies with respect to alcohol: we leave people free to drink and get inebriated, but set limits on where and when. In general, we prosecute drunk drivers, not inebriated pedestrians. In this sense, the justice system is in many respects a battleground between moral ideas and evidence concerning how to most effectively promote both individual and societal interests, liberty, health, happiness and wellbeing. Severely compromising this system, insofar as it serves to further these ideals, is our vacillation or obsession with moral responsibility, which is, in the broadest sense, an attempt to isolate the subjective element of human choice, an exercise that all too readily deteriorates into blaming and scapegoating without providing effective solutions to the actual problem. The problem with the question of moral responsibility is that it is inherently subjective and involves conjecture about an individuals’ state of mind, awareness and ability to act that can rarely if ever be proved. Thus it involves precisely the same type of conjecture that characterizes superstitious notions of possession and the influence of the devil and provides no effective means of managing conduct: the individual convicted for an offence or crime considered morally wrong is convicted based on a series of hypotheses and probabilities and not necessarily because he or she is actually morally wrong. The fairness and effectiveness of a system of justice based on such hypotheses is highly questionable particularly as a basis for preventing or reducing drug use related harm. For example, with respect to drugs, the system quite obviously fails as a deterrent and the system is not organised to ‘reform’ the offender much less to ensure that he or she has ‘learned a lesson’; moreover, the offender does not get an opportunity to make amends or even have a conversation with the alleged victim. In the case of retributive justice, the justice system is effectively mopping up after the fact. In other words, as far as deterrence is concerned, the entire exercise of justice becomes an exercise based on faith, rather than one based on evidence.

After all, Malthus was wrong. Marx was wrong. Democracy did not die during the Great Depression as the Communists predicted. And Khrushchev did not 'bury' us. We buried him. Neville Chute's On the Beach proved as fanciful as Dr. Strangelove and Seven Days in May. Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb never exploded. It fizzled. The Clash of 79 produced Ronald Reagan and an era of good feelings. The Club of Rome notwithstanding, we did not run out of oil. The world did not end at the close of the second millennium, as some prophesied and others hoped. Who predicted the disappearance of the Soviet Empire? Is it not possible that today's most populous nations -China, India, and Indonesia- could break into pieces as well? Why do predictions of the Death of the West not belong on the same shelf as the predictions of 'nuclear winter' and 'global warming'? Answer: the Death of the West is not a prediction of what is going to happen, it is a depiction of what is happening now. First World nations are dying.

Dear Young Black Males, Please listen to me closely. You have to start making smart choices in your life because, if you don’t, the judge won’t have any problems locking you up and throwing away the key. FYI: They’re charging minors as adults in some cases nowadays. Trust me, they don’t care about your life. They will wash you up in a heartbeat, simply because you’re a black male. Following the crowd will get you caught up. Trying to play the hard role will get you caught up. Trying to show out for others just to make a name for yourself will get you caught up. Stealing, robbing, selling drugs, etc…it will all catch up with you sooner or later. The statics for black males in prison is alarming. Give yourself a chance! Find another way! No matter what upbringing you’ve had, it’s up to you to make a change. You can’t live your life making excuses for why you do what you do. Prove them all wrong! Prove to yourself that you’re better than the life that was dealt to you. Rise up my brothas! You’re much better than that.

In courtrooms all across this city, Maya had seen people get verdicts they’d wanted, and she’d seen just as many get ones they didn’t. But the verdicts had nothing to do with truth. No verdict ever changed a person’s opinion. Juries weren’t gods. The people who went into those courtrooms looking for divine revelation came out bearing the fruits of bureaucratic negotiation. Maya wanted to tell Lou that this need for vindication had become the mire of their whole petty country. Every day, they woke up fervently hoping for the headline that would prove, definitively, that their guys were the virtuous ones and the other guys were the absolute worst. But news of that certainty would forever elude them. Every new revelation that seemed to damn the people with whom they disagreed would be followed by a new rationalization. For every failed prediction, there would come a mitigating circumstance. They would double down on their most weakly held convictions because the alternative felt unbearable, and the bums across the aisle would follow suit. She wanted to say that the only thing worse than being wrong was having a bottomless need to prove that you never were. But she didn’t tell Lou any of that. Instead, Maya told Lou what he wanted to hear. She did it because she was the last person on earth who should be instructing Lou Silver on how to live out his days. And she did it because he’d asked her an honest question, and he deserved to hear from her an honest answer. “Mr. Silver,” she said, running her fingers through her hair, “I’m not sure of much of anything anymore.

To the extent the divine source and inalienability of our rights are purported to be factual, history has proved our Founding Fathers plainly wrong: Every right has, in fact, been alienated by governments since the beginning of time. Within a generation of the establishment of our nation, the Founding Fathers rescinded virtually every right they previously declared unalienable. John Adams, one of the drafters of the Declaration of Independence, alienated the right to speak freely and express dissenting views when, as president, he enforced the Alien and Sedition Acts against his political opponents—with Hamilton’s support. (Perhaps Hamilton’s God had not given “sacred rights” to Jeffersonians!) Another of the drafters, Jefferson himself, alienated the most basic of rights—to the equal protection of the laws, based on the “truth” that “all men are created equal”—when he helped to write (and strengthen) Virginia’s “Slave Code,” just a few years after drafting the Declaration of Independence. The revised code denied slaves the right to liberty and to the pursuit of happiness by punishing attempted escape with “outlawry” or death. Jefferson personally suspected that “the blacks … are inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind.” In other words, they were endowed by their Creator not with equality but with inferiority. There is no right that has not been suspended or trampled during times of crisis and war, even by our greatest presidents. ... I wish there were an intellectually satisfying argument for the divine source of rights, as our Founding Fathers tried to put forth. Tactically, that would be the strongest argument liberals could make, especially in America, where many hold a strong belief in an intervening God. But we cannot offer this argument, because many liberals do not believe in concepts like divine hands. We believe in separation of church and state. We are pragmatists, utilitarians, empiricists, secularists, and (God forgive me!) moral relativists. We are skeptical of absolutes (as George Bernard Shaw cynically quipped: “The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.”).

I don't worry about how other people perceive me. I figure out what I want, and I work very hard to make it happen. Simple recipe. I didn't achieve any goals by having it given to me on a silver platter, through fibbing or exaggeration, nor through favours. When you work hard, the universe almost always brings people to you - synergy. The universe will reflect the energy you give it. Stop worrying about what other people think of you, or worrying about the limit(s) they have, in their heads, about your potential. The universe will bring you into your purpose organically. Nothing out of force tastes as good as what you have worked your ass off to achieve, and for which the universe synergistically opens up for you, and brings into your world. As well it is not about proving other people wrong; first and foremost prove your own negative inner voice wrong. The inner voice that internalized the negative energies of others. Sometimes we are our own biggest hurdle. And as a subsequent outcome of rewiring your inner voice, you'll leave others speechless at contesting their limitations of you...seeing the supernova you are.

The guard locks the gates of the turbeh, letting the heavy sound of the lock fall into the dark interior, as though leaving the name of the key inside. Dispirited, like me, he sits down on the stone beside me and closes his eyes. Just when I think he has dozed off in his part of the shade, the guard lifts his hand and points to a moth fluttering above the entrance to the tomb, having come out of our clothes or the Persian carpets in the turbeh. "You see," he says to me casually, "the moth is way up there by the white wall of the doorway, and it is visible only because it moves. From here it almost looks like a bird in the sky. That's probably how the moth sees the wall, and only we know it is wrong. But it doesn't know that we know. It doesn't even know we exist. You try to communicate with it if you can. Can you tell it anything in a way it understands; can you be sure it understood you completely?" "I don't know," I replied. "Can You?" "Yes," the old man said quietly, and with a clap of his hands he killed the moth, then profered its crushed body on the palm of his hand. "Do you think it didn't understand what I told it?" "You can do the same thing with a candle, extinguish it with your two fingers to prove you exist," I commented. "Certainly, if a candle is capable of dying... Now, imagine," he went on, "that there is somebody who knows about us what we know about the moth. Somebody who knows how, with what, and why this space that we call the sky and assume to be boundless, is bounded-- somebody who cannot approach us to let us know that he exists except in one way-- by killing us. Somebody, on whose garments we are nourished, somebody who carries our death in his hand like a tongue, as a means of communicating with us. By killing us, this anonymous being informs us about himself. And we, through our deaths, which may be no more than a warning to some wayfarer sitting alongside the assassin, we, I say, can at the last moment perceive, as through an opened door, new fields and other boundaries. This sixth and highest degree of deathly fear (where there is no memory) is what holds and links us anonymous participants in the game. The hierarchy of death is, in fact, the only thing that makes possible a system of contacts between the various levels of reality in an otherwise vast space where deaths endlessly repeat themselves like echoes within echoes...

Ah! Gentle, gracious Dove, And art thou grieved in me, That sinners should restrain thy love, And say, “It is not free: It is not free for all: The most, thou passest by, And mockest with a fruitless call Whom thou hast doomed to die.” They think thee not sincere In giving each his day, “ Thou only draw’st the sinner near To cast him quite away, To aggravate his sin, His sure damnation seal: Thou show’st him heaven, and say’st, go in And thrusts him into hell.” O HORRIBLE DECREE Worthy of whence it came! Forgive their hellish blasphemy Who charge it on the Lamb: Whose pity him inclined To leave his throne above, The friend, and Saviour of mankind, The God of grace, and love. O gracious, loving Lord, I feel thy bowels yearn; For those who slight the gospel word I share in thy concern: How art thou grieved to be By ransomed worms withstood! How dost thou bleed afresh to see Them trample on thy blood! To limit thee they dare, Blaspheme thee to thy face, Deny their fellow-worms a share In thy redeeming grace: All for their own they take, Thy righteousness engross, Of none effect to most they make The merits of thy cross. Sinners, abhor the fiend: His other gospel hear— “The God of truth did not intend The thing his words declare, He offers grace to all, Which most cannot embrace, Mocked with an ineffectual call And insufficient grace. “The righteous God consigned Them over to their doom, And sent the Saviour of mankind To damn them from the womb; To damn for falling short, “Of what they could not do, For not believing the report Of that which was not true. “The God of love passed by The most of those that fell, Ordained poor reprobates to die, And forced them into hell.” “He did not do the deed” (Some have more mildly raved) “He did not damn them—but decreed They never should be saved. “He did not them bereave Of life, or stop their breath, His grace he only would not give, And starved their souls to death.” Satanic sophistry! But still, all-gracious God, They charge the sinner’s death on thee, Who bought’st him with thy blood. They think with shrieks and cries To please the Lord of hosts, And offer thee, in sacrifice Millions of slaughtered ghosts: With newborn babes they fill The dire infernal shade, “For such,” they say, “was thy great will, Before the world was made.” How long, O God, how long Shall Satan’s rage proceed! Wilt thou not soon avenge the wrong, And crush the serpent’s head? Surely thou shalt at last Bruise him beneath our feet: The devil and his doctrine cast Into the burning pit. Arise, O God, arise, Thy glorious truth maintain, Hold forth the bloody sacrifice, For every sinner slain! Defend thy mercy’s cause, Thy grace divinely free, Lift up the standard of thy cross, Draw all men unto thee. O vindicate thy grace, Which every soul may prove, Us in thy arms of love embrace, Of everlasting love. Give the pure gospel word, Thy preachers multiply, Let all confess their common Lord, And dare for him to die. My life I here present, My heart’s last drop of blood, O let it all be freely spent In proof that thou art good, Art good to all that breathe, Who all may pardon have: Thou willest not the sinner’s death, But all the world wouldst save. O take me at my word, But arm me with thy power, Then call me forth to suffer, Lord, To meet the fiery hour: In death will I proclaim That all may hear thy call, And clap my hands amidst the flame, And shout,—HE DIED FOR ALL

It is experience of ourselves, and finding what we are, that God commonly makes use of as the means of bringing us off from all dependence on ourselves. But men never get acquaintance with themselves so fast, as in the most earnest way of seeking [salvation]. They that are in this way have more to engage them to think of their sins, and strictly to observe themselves, and have much more to do with their own hearts, than others. Such a one has much more experience of his own weakness, than another that does not put forth and try his strength; and will therefore sooner see himself dead in sin. Such a one, though he hath a disposition continually to be flying to his own righteousness, yet finds rest in nothing; he wanders about from one thing to another, seeking something to ease his disquieted conscience; he is driven from one refuge to another, goes from mountain to hill, seeking rest and finding none; and therefore will the sooner prove that there is no rest to be found, nor trust to be put, in any creature whatsoever. "It is therefore quite a wrong notion that some entertain, that the more they do, the more they shall depend on it. Whereas the reverse is true; the more they do, or the more thorough they are in seeking, the less will they be likely to rest in their doings, and the sooner will they see the vanity of all that they do. [from "Pressing into the Kingdom of God"]

The Scientific Revolution proposed a very different formula for knowledge: Knowledge = Empirical Data × Mathematics. If we want to know the answer to some question, we need to gather relevant empirical data, and then use mathematical tools to analyse the data. For example, in order to gauge the true shape of the earth, we can observe the sun, the moon and the planets from various locations across the world. Once we have amassed enough observations, we can use trigonometry to deduce not only the shape of the earth, but also the structure of the entire solar system. In practice, that means that scientists seek knowledge by spending years in observatories, laboratories and research expeditions, gathering more and more empirical data, and sharpening their mathematical tools so they could interpret the data correctly. The scientific formula for knowledge led to astounding breakthroughs in astronomy, physics, medicine and countless other disciplines. But it had one huge drawback: it could not deal with questions of value and meaning. Medieval pundits could determine with absolute certainty that it is wrong to murder and steal, and that the purpose of human life is to do God’s bidding, because scriptures said so. Scientists could not come up with such ethical judgements. No amount of data and no mathematical wizardry can prove that it is wrong to murder. Yet human societies cannot survive without such value judgements.

What is that other universe?" she said. "One of uncountable billions of parallel worlds. The witches have known about them for centuries, but the first theologians to prove their existence mathematically were excommunicated fifty or more years ago. However, it's true; there's no possible way of denying it. "But no one thought it would ever be possible to cross from one universe to another. That would violate fundamental laws, we thought. Well, we were wrong; we learned to see the world up there. If light can cross, so can we. And we had to learn to see it, Lyra, just as you learned to use the alethiometer. "Now that world, and every other universe, came about as a result of possibility. Take the example of tossing a coin: it can come down heads or tails, and we don't know before it lands which way it's going to fall. If it comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal. "But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart. I'm using the example of tossing a coin to make it clearer. In fact, these possibility collapses happen at the level of elementary particles, but they happen in just the same way: one moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don't exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which they did happen. "And I'm going to that world beyond the Aurora," he said, "because I think that's where all the Dust in this universe comes from. You saw those slides I showed the Scholars in the retiring room. You saw Dust pouring into this world from the Aurora. You've seen that city yourself. If light can cross the barrier between the universes, if Dust can, if we can see that city, then we can build a bridge and cross. It needs a phenomenal burst of energy. But I can do it. Somewhere out there is the origin of all the Dust, all the death, the sin, the misery, the destructiveness in the world. Human beings can't see anything without wanting to destroy it, Lyra. That's original sin. And I'm going to destroy it. Death is going to die.

It seemed quite logical to the Librarian that, since there were aisles where the shelves were on the outside then there should be other aisles in the space between the books themselves, created out of quantum ripples by the sheer weight of words. There were certainly some odd sounds coming from the other side of some shelving, and the Librarian knew that if he gently pulled out a book or two he would be peeking into different libraries under different skies. Books bend space and time. One reason the owners of those aforesaid little rambling, poky secondhand bookshops always seem slightly unearthly is that many of them really are, having strayed into this world after taking a wrong turning in their own bookshops in worlds where it is considered commendable business practice to wear carpet slippers all the time and open your shop only when you feel like it. You stray into L-space at your peril. Very senior librarians, however, once they have proved themselves worthy by performing some valiant act of librarianship, are accepted into a secret order and are taught the raw arts of survival beyond the Shelves We Know. The Librarian was highly skilled in all of them, but what he was attempting now wouldn’t just get him thrown out of the Order but probably out of life itself. All libraries everywhere are connected in L-space. All libraries. Everywhere. And the Librarian, navigating by booksign carved on shelves by past explorers, navigating by smell, navigating even by the siren whisperings of nostalgia, was heading purposely for one very special one. There was one consolation. If he got it wrong, he’d never know it.

Well, what happened to your scruples in the woodcutter’s cottage? You knew I thought you’d already left when I went inside.” “Why did you stay,” he countered smoothly, “when you realized I was still there?” In confused distress Elizabeth raked her hair off her forehead. “I knew I shouldn’t do it,” she admitted. “I don’t know why I remained.” “You stayed for the same reason I did,” he informed her bluntly. “We wanted each other.” “I was wrong,” she protested a little wildly. “Dangerous and-foolish!” “Foolish or not,” he said grimly, “I wanted you. I want you now.” Elizabeth made the mistake of looking at him, and his amber eyes captured hers against her will, holding them imprisoned. The shawl she’d been clutching as if it was a lifeline to safety slid from her nerveless hand and dangled at her side, but Elizabeth didn’t notice. “Neither of us has anything to gain by continuing this pretense that the weekend in England is over and forgotten,” he said bluntly. “Yesterday proved that it wasn’t over, if it proved nothing else, and it’s never been forgotten-I’ve remembered you all this time, and I know damn well you’ve remembered me.” Elizabeth wanted to deny it; she sensed that if she did, he’d be so disgusted with her deceit that he’d turn on his heel and leave her. She lifted her chin, unable to tear her gaze from his, but she was too affected by the things he’d just admitted to her to lie to him. “All right,” she said shakily, “you win. I’ve never forgotten you or that weekend. How could I?” she added defensively. He smiled at her angry retort, and his voice gentled to the timbre of rough velvet. “Come here, Elizabeth.” “Why?” she whispered shakily. “So that we can finish what we began that weekend.” Elizabeth stared at him in paralyzed terror mixed with violet excitement and shook her head in a jerky refusal. “I’ll not force you,” he said quietly, “nor will I force you to do anything you don’t want to do once you’re in my arms. Think carefully about that,” he warned, “because if you come to me now, you won’t be able to tell yourself in the morning that I made you do this against your will-or that you didn’t know what was going to happen. Yesterday neither of us knew what was going to happen. Now we do.” Some small, insidious voice in her mind urged her to obey, reminded her that after the public punishment she’d taken for the last time they were together she was entitled to some stolen passionate kisses, if she wanted them. Another voice warned her not to break the rules again. “I-I can’t,” she said in a soft cry. “There are four steps separating us and a year and a half of wanting drawing us together,” he said. Elizabeth swallowed. “Couldn’t you meet me halfway?” The sweetness of the question was almost Ian’s undoing, but he managed to shake his head. “Not this time. I want you, but I’ll not have you looking at me like a monster in the morning. If you want me, all you have to do is walk into my arms.” “I don’t know what I want,” Elizabeth cried, looking a little wildly at the valley below, as if she were thinking of leaping off the path. “Come here,” he invited huskily, “and I’ll show you.” It was his tone, not his words, that conquered her. As if drawn by a will stronger than her own, Elizabeth walked forward and straight into his arms that closed around her with stunning force. “I didn’t think you were going to do it,” he whispered gruffly against her hair.

In terms of the Trinity, I believe in the Father and the Holy Ghost but not really Jesus that much. Yes, Jesus was pretty badass because he stood up for what he believed in and was definitely an alpha and a man of his convictions, and all that respectable shit, and he took a hell of a beating in the end, but his message was wrong. All that turn the other cheek and love thy neighbor nonsense; be a lamb and so on. It’s silly and doesn’t work. The God of the Old Testament, the Father, that guy makes a lot more sense to me. He had it in him to be mean and spiteful. I get that I was made in the image of a guy who’d fuck over a nobody like Job basically for fun and to prove a point to a rival. I get that I was made in the image of a guy who’d kick two shitheads out of the Garden of Eden for disobeying Him. I get the idea of Him laying waste to entire cities with fireballs or whatever because He didn’t very much like the type of people that lived there (though Sodom and Gomorrah seem like just the sort of places I’d like to hang out). If God is love, it ain’t Jesus’. The Father’s love, tough love, is what works. Sometimes there’s difficulty distinguishing it from hate, and that’s why it applies to the way I live my life. Jesus’ message just makes people nice, makes them pussies, and while I’m thankful for it because it’s given me the upper hand throughout my life in very Christian America, believing in it, really, would be idiotic for anyone like me, a winner. And I believe in the Holy Ghost too mostly because I’ve felt Him working through me while doing really cool shit, like playing football and writing good songs or whatever. He’s what people mean when they say God-given talent, which I have a lot of.

Throughout this long development, from 600 B.C. to the present day, philosophers have been divided into those who wished to tighten social bonds and those who wished to relax them. With this difference others have been associated. The disciplinarians have advocated some system of dogma, either old or new, and have therefore been compelled to be, in a greater or less degree, hostile to science, since their dogmas could not be proved empirically. They have almost invariably taught that happiness is not the good, but that “nobility” or “heroism” is to be preferred. They have had a sympathy with the irrational parts of human nature, since they have felt reason to be inimical to social cohesion. The libertarians, on the other hand, with the exception of the extreme anarchists, have tended to be scientific, utilitarian, rationalistic, hostile to violent passion, and enemies of all the more profound forms of religion. This conflict existed in Greece before the rise of what we recognize as philosophy, and is already quite explicit in the earliest Greek thought. In changing forms, it has persisted down to the present day, and no doubt will persist for many ages to come. It is clear that each party to this dispute—as to all that persist through long periods of time—is partly right and partly wrong. Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes co-operation impossible.

In every area of thought we must rely ultimately on our judgments, tested by reflection, subject to correction by the counterarguments of others, modified by the imagination and by comparison with alternatives. Antirealism is always a conjectural possibility: the question can always be posed, whether there is anything more to truth in a certain domain than our tendency to reach certain conclusions in this way, perhaps in convergence with others. Sometimes, as with grammar or etiquette, the answer is no. For that reason the intuitive conviction that a particular domain, like the physical world, or mathematics, or morality, or aesthetics, is one in which our judgments are attempts to respond to a kind of truth that is independent of them may be impossible to establish decisively. Yet it may be very robust all the same, and not unjustified. To be sure, there are competing subjectivist explanations of the appearance of mind-independence in the truth of moral and other value judgments. One of the things a sophisticated subjectivism allows us to say when we judge that infanticide is wrong is that it would be wrong even if none of us thought so, even though that second judgment too is still ultimately grounded in our responses. However, I find those quasi-realist, expressivist accounts of the ground of objectivity in moral judgments no more plausible than the subjectivist account of simpler value judgments. These epicycles are of the same kind as the original proposal: they deny that value judgments can be true in their own right, and this does not accord with what I believe to be the best overall understanding of our thought about value. There is no crucial experiment that will establish or refute realism about value. One ground for rejecting it, the type used by Hume, is simply question-begging: if it is supposed that objective moral truths can exist only if they are like other kinds of facts--physical, psychological, or logical--then it is clear that there aren't any. But the failure of this argument doesn't prove that there are objective moral truths. Positive support for realism can come only from the fruitfulness of evaluative and moral thought in producing results, including corrections of beliefs formerly widely held and the development of new and improved methods and arguments over time. The realist interpretation of what we are doing in thinking about these things can carry conviction only if it is a better account than the subjectivist or social-constructivist alternatives, and that is always going to be a comparative question and a matter of judgment, as it is about any other domain, whether it be mathematics or science or history or aesthetics.

While it has been clear that right and wrong is nonexistent, I can't say that the concept of 'right or wrong' isn't needed. Because of ignorance, we still need authorities to set up rules and say 'vandalism is wrong, killing is wrong, et cetera.' People ask, "So, vandalism isn't wrong? Killing isn't wrong?" I answer, "Uneducated people say that vandalism is wrong. More educated people say that vandalism destroys the things that many people have spent their lives making. Uneducated people say that killing is wrong. More educated people say that killing takes away the only thing that matters which is lives." The more educated people are, the freer they will be, and the words 'right or wrong' won't be needed anymore. There was a bomb again in Brussels yesterday. I laughed. In the past, we had tyrannies because people didn't know what they could do and what they couldn't do. Now, we have democracy. Do we deserve democracy? Do we deserve freedom? No, we don't deserve freedom. We certainly don't deserve democracy. People are still voting for Donald Trump. And people still bomb other people. And socioeconomic gap is still high. Ignorance is still prevalent, so, if you ask me, "Do we deserve democracy? Do we deserve freedom? Do we deserve the world without authority, the world of truth, the world of peace?" I answer, "No, we don't." So, when you hear your president shouting 'Peace!', your government speaking 'Freedom!', ask them 'Are you educated?' Someone asks, "So, instead of 'right or wrong', you will now set up the rules about what we can do and we can't do?" I answer, "No. When will you understand? I stand for the world without authority, the world of truth, the world of peace. OK, forget the truth, forget my book, forget my paper. Let me expand science for you. You will let your fellow humans who are more educated than you set up the rules for you. When all the people are finally educated, please come back and reread my book and my paper, and when you finally understand them, please live in the world of no authority, the world of truth, the world of peace. Me? I probably have been gone by then." There is, however, a problem with how many educated people there are in the world. In my paper, I prove that right and wrong is nonexistent by showing that everything that exists is not wrong and is not right because everything that exists is the result of the thing(s) that happened before it and everything that exists can’t be right because future doesn’t exist. I wrote that terrorism is caused by capitalism (democracy) and capitalism (democracy) is caused by death. This paper was rejected. When educated people fail, there goes all your hope in the world.

Paradox is any self-contradictory proposition that, when investigated, may prove to be well-founded or true. Once understood, it opens the gateway to higher wisdom. But how can contradictory principles both be true? As the Buddhist Riddle of Five Truths puts it: “It is right. It is wrong. It is both right and wrong. It is neither right nor wrong. All exist simultaneously.” Charles Dickens expressed the paradox of his era, equally true today, when he wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,” going on to describe that time as one of belief and incredulity, light and darkness, hope and despair. Two opposing statements can each be true depending on the observer: it’s true that spiders are merciless killers from the viewpoint of tiny insects caught in their webs—but for most humans, nearly all spiders are harmless creatures. A story of the Sufi sage Mullah Nasruddin expresses the nature of paradox when he’s asked to arbitrate between two men with opposing views. Hearing the first man, he remarks, “You’re right.” When he hears the second man, he also says, “You’re right.” When a bystander points out, “They can’t both be right,” the mullah scratches his head and says, “You’re right.” Let’s go deeper and consider four central sets of paradoxical truths: * Time is real. It moves from past to present to future. * There is no time, no past, no future—only the eternal present. * You possess free will and can thus take responsibility for your choices. * Free will is an illusion—your choices are influenced, even predetermined, by all that preceded them. * You are, or possess, a separate inner self existing within a body. * No separation exists—you are a part of the same Consciousness shining through billions of eyes. * Death is an inevitable reality you’ll meet at the end of life. * The death of the inner self is an illusion. Life is eternal. Must you choose one assertion and reject the other? Or is there a way to meaningfully resolve and even reconcile such apparent contradictions?

According to H.G. Wells, you either adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative. It is not necessary to change, after all survival is not mandatory This generation might seem arrogant to the older generation due to some reasons. The older generation believes an older person or someone of higher authority is always right and being sceptical is an insult, lol Our generation is full of people who are so skeptical, they wanna know why this is this and that is that, they don't just hear and believe, they hear, hear from other sides, look at it critically and express their opinions based on their conviction. This generation is full of people who are somewhat confident cos they study, they observe and due to these, they are equipped with better information and like you know, knowledge is power. You know right from wrong, you know truth from lies. When you are with those in authority and have this knowledge, an ignorant person of higher authority would be scared of you, feel threatened and might resort to maltreating and frustrating you, defaming your character etc The older generation and the younger generation are usually having misunderstanding because the older generation are being deceived by pride, the younger generation due to their advanced education do not wanna give merit to whom it isn't due. While the older generation postulates that respect is not earned but compulsory for them to be accorded, the younger generation believes respect must be earned. lol The older generation rules by fiction but the younger generation lives by facts. The older generation uses age to oppress, the younger generation uses their knowledge to defend. The older generation believes they can never be wrong, the younger generation wants fair hearing, demands for it, if denied, they take it by force due to the confidence they've built around themselves. The older generation is unfair to the younger generation, there was once a time they were listened to without doubts and opposition, this is the time for the younger generation to be listened to due to advancement in education and exposure. The younger generation, due to their quest for higher knowledge through research, etc, they have realized the consequences of being ignorant and with their power of conviction, they are not letting the older generation have their autocratic ways affect them. To the younger generation, one should be able to prove whatever he says, no more latent heresies and this is what the older generation don't wanna hear of. The older generation wants to continue enslaving the younger generation but the younger generation is more equipped than the older generation and as such, not letting that happen. Technology advances every day, the younger generation are ever ready to adapt to the changes but the older generation is not ready for that, they wanna remain stagnant and still have the say of the day. Like George Bernard Shaw once said, the reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man

Are you sure you don't remember? Your mind seems to be working just fine to me." "You know what? Just forget it. Whatever it was, I forgive you. Give me my backpack so I can go back to the office. We're about to get busted anyway, just standing here." "If you really do forgive me, then you wouldn't still be going to the office." He tightens his hold on the strap of my backpack. "Ohmysweetgoodness, Galen, why are we even having this conversation? You don't even know me. What do you care if I change my schedule?" I know I'm being rude. The guy offered to carry my things and walk me to class. And depending on which version of the story I believe, he either asked me out on Monday already, or he did it indirectly a few seconds ago. None of it makes any sense. Why me? Without any effort, I can think of at least ten girls who beat me out in looks, personality, and darker foundation. And Galen could pull any of them. "What, you don't have a question for my question?" I ask after a few seconds. "It just seems silly for you to change your schedule over a disagreement about when the Titanic-" I throw my hands up at him. "Don't you see how weird this is for me?" "I'm trying to, Emma. I really am. But I think you've had a tough couple of weeks, and it's taking a toll on you. You said every time you're around me something bad happens. But you can't really know for sure that's true, unless you spend more time with me. You should at least acknowledge that." Something is wrong with me. Those cafeteria doors must have really worked me over. Otherwise, I wouldn't be pushing Galen away like this. Not with him pleading, not with the way he's leaning toward me, not with the way he smells. "See? You're taking it personally, when there's really nothing personal about it," I whisper. "It's personal to me, Emma. It's true, I don't know you well. But there are some things I do know about you. And I'd like to know more." A glass full of ice water wouldn't cool my cheeks. "The only thing you know about me is that I'm life threatening in flip-flops." That I won't meet his eyes obviously bothers him, because he lifts my chin with the crook of his finger. "That's not all I know," he says. "I know your biggest secret." This time, unlike at the beach, I don't swat his hand away. The electric current in my feet prove that we're really standing so close to each other that our toes touch. "I don't have any secrets," I say, mesmerized." He nods. "I finally figured that out. That you don't actually know about your secret." "You're not making any sense." Or I just can't concentrate because I accidentally looked up at his lips. Maybe he did talk me into swimming... The door to the front office swings open, and Galen grabs my arm and ushers me around the corner. He continues to drag me down the hall, toward world history. "That's it?" I say, exasperated. "You're just going to leave it at that?" He stops us in front of the door. "That depends on you," he says. "Come with me to the beach after school, and I'll tell you." He reaches for the knob, but I grab his hand. "Tell me what? I already told you that I don't have any secrets. And I don't swim." He grins and opens the door. "There's plenty to do at the beach besides swim." Then he pulls me by the hand so close I think he's going to kiss me. Instead, he whispers in my ear, "I'll tell you where your eye color comes from." As I gasp, he puts a gentle hand on the small of my back and propels me into the classroom. Then he ditches me.

Porridge is our soup, our grits, our sustenance, so it's pretty much the go-to for breakfast. For the first time, I ate with a bunch of other Taiwanese-Chinese kids my age who knew what the hell they were doing. Even at Chinese school, there were always kids that brought hamburgers, shunned chopsticks, or didn't get down with the funky shit. They were like faux-bootleg-Canal Street Chinamen. That was one of the things that really annoyed me about growing up Chinese in the States. Even if you wanted to roll with Chinese/Taiwanese kids, there were barely any around and the ones that were around had lost their culture and identity. They barely spoke Chinese, resented Chinese food, and if we got picked on by white people on the basketball court, everyone just looked out for themselves. It wasn't that I wanted people to carry around little red books to affirm their "Chinese-ness," but I just wanted to know there were other people that wanted this community to live on in America. There was on kid who wouldn't eat the thousand-year-old eggs at breakfast and all the other kids started roasting him. "If you don't get down with the nasty shit, you're not Chinese!" I was down with the mob, but something left me unsettled. One thing ABCs love to do is compete on "Chinese-ness," i.e., who will eat the most chicken feet, pig intestines, and have the highest SAT scores. I scored high in chick feet, sneaker game, and pirated good, but relatively low on the SAT. I had made National Guild Honorable Mention for piano when I was around twelve and promptly quit. My parents had me play tennis and take karate, but ironically, I quit tennis two tournaments short of being ranked in the state of Florida and left karate after getting my brown belt. The family never understood it, but I knew what I was doing. I didn't want to play their stupid Asian Olympics, but I wanted to prove to myself that if I did want to be the stereotypical Chinaman they wanted, I could. (189) I had become so obsessed with not being a stereotype that half of who I was had gone dormant. But it was also a positive. Instead of following the path most Asian kids do, I struck out on my own. There's nature, there's nurture, and as Harry Potter teaches us, there's who YOU want to be. (198) Everyone was in-between. The relief of the airport and the opportunity to reflect on my trip helped me realize that I didn't want to blame anyone anymore, Not my parents, not white people, not America. Did I still think there was a lot wrong with the aforementioned? Hell, yeah, but unless I was going to do something about it, I couldn't say shit. So I drank my Apple Sidra and shut the fuck up. (199)

Equal protection under the law is not a hard principle to convince Americans of. The difficulty comes in persuading them that it has been violated in particular cases, and of the need to redress the wrong. Prejudice and indifference run deep. Education, social reform, and political action can persuade some. But most people will not feel the sufferings of others unless they feel, even in an abstract way, that 'it could have been me or someone close to me'. Consider the astonishingly rapid transformation of American attitudes toward homosexuality and even gay marriage over the past decades. Gay activism brought these issues to public attention but attitudes were changed during tearful conversations over dinner tables across American when children came out to their parents (and, sometimes, parents came out to their children). Once parents began to accept their children, extended families did too, and today same-sex marriages are celebrated across the country with all the pomp and joy and absurd overspending of traditional American marriages. Race is a wholly different matter. Given the segregation in American society white families have little chance of seeing and therefore understanding the lives of black Americans. I am not black male motorist and never will be. All the more reason, then, that I need some way to identify with one if I am going to be affected by his experience. And citizenship is the only thing I know we share. The more differences between us are emphasized, the less likely I will be to feel outrage at his mistreatment. Black Lives Matter is a textbook example of how not to build solidarity. There is no denying that by publicizing and protesting police mistreatment of African-Americans the movement mobilized supporters and delivered a wake-up call to every American with a conscience. But there is also no denying that the movement's decision to use this mistreatment to build a general indictment of American society, and its law enforcement institutions, and to use Mau-Mau tactics to put down dissent and demand a confession of sins and public penitence (most spectacularly in a public confrontation with Hillary Clinton, of all people), played into the hands of the Republican right. As soon as you cast an issue exclusively in terms of identity you invite your adversary to do the same. Those who play one race card should be prepared to be trumped by another, as we saw subtly and not so subtly in the 2016 presidential election. And it just gives that adversary an additional excuse to be indifferent to you. There is a reason why the leaders of the civil rights movement did not talk about identity the way black activists do today, and it was not cowardice or a failure to be "woke". The movement shamed America into action by consciously appealing to what we share, so that it became harder for white Americans to keep two sets of books, psychologically speaking: one for "Americans" and one for "Negroes". That those leaders did not achieve complete success does not mean that they failed, nor does it prove that a different approach is now necessary. No other approach is likely to succeed. Certainly not one that demands that white Americans agree in every case on what constitutes discrimination or racism today. In democratic politics it is suicidal to set the bar for agreement higher than necessary for winning adherents and elections.