Russell Peters Quotes

13. Boretar was basking in the warm June sun as the Russell family prepared to depart. The black BMW’s boot was packed with the suitcases and the roof box was filled with tennis rackets and other sports gear. The bike stand on the rear of the car was already loaded with the children’s bikes. Peter made one final check of the house to ensure that all doors and windows were locked and secure. Then he shouted to his wife Mary, “We’re ready to go, where are the children?

On December 7, 2059, Emilio Sandoz was released from the isolation ward of Salvator Mundi Hospital in the middle of the night and transported in a bread van to the Jesuit residence at Number 5 Borgo Santo Spirito, a few minutes' walk across St. Peter's Square from the Vatican.

It was the sort of situation that would be ever so charming and warmly human in a film with Peter Ustinov and Maggie Smith but that sort of film is only charming because they leave out so many details, and real life is all the details they leave out.

The classical example of multiple inheritance conflict is called the 'Nixon Diamond.' It arises from the observation that Nixon was both a Quaker (and hence a pacifist) and a Republican (and hence not a pacifist).

Difficult days are ahead. Sin is on the increase. Paul foresaw that members of the Church would endure persecution (see 2 Timothy 3:1–13; D&C 112:24–26). Peter counseled, ‘If any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed; but let him glorify God on this behalf’ (1 Peter 4:16). As Jesus descended below all things in order to rise above all things, He expects us to follow His example. Yoked with Him, each of us can rise above all of our challenges, no matter how difficult they may be (see Matthew 11:29–30).

Sometimes I really do feel that Peter Griffin is right about the clouds plotting against us.

There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment... ... There are other things of less importance. There is the instance of the Gadarene swine where it certainly was not very kind to the pigs to put devils into them and make them rush down the hill to the sea. You must remember that He was omnipotent, and He could have made the devils simply go away; but he chooses to send them into the pigs. Then there is the curious story of the fig-tree, which always rather puzzled me. You remember what happened about the fig-tree. 'He was hungry; and seeing a fig-tree afar off having leaves, He came if haply He might find anything thereon; and when He came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the time for figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: "No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever,"...and Peter... saith unto Him: "Master, behold the fig-tree which thou cursedst is withered away".' This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in matter of wisdom or in matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects.

We have been conditioned since birth with the belief that satisfaction of these inner needs comes through our interaction with the world. We seek inner fulfillment through what we have or what we do, through the experiences the world provides, and through the ways others behave toward us. This is the meme that governs so much of our thinking and behavior: the meme that says whether or not we are content with life depends on what we have and what we do. Prevalent as this meme may be, it seldom provides any lasting satisfaction. A person may gather a great deal of wealth, but is he really more secure? More than likely, he will soon find new sources of insecurity. Are my investments safe? Will the stock market crash? Can I trust my friends? Should I employ “security” companies to protect my possessions?

Free won’t is true freedom of will. Freedom from the will of ego-mind.

The freedom to choose not to choose. Choosing nothing instead of something.

Many people would rather die than think; and that is what they do. Bertrand Russell

For me, it’s standard. I don’t feel irresponsible for telling kids not to vote; I feel like I deserve a Blue Peter badge for not telling them to riot. For not telling them that they are entitled to destroy the cathedrals of tyranny erected to mock them in the heart of their community. That they should rise up and destroy the system that imprisons them, ignores them, condemns and maligns them. By any means necessary.

As American culture changes, the scandal of Christianity is increasingly right up front, exactly where it was in the first century. The shaking of American culture will get us back to the question Jesus asked his disciples at Caesarea Philippi: “Who do you say that I am?” As the Bible Belt recedes, those left standing up for Jesus will be those who, like Simon Peter of old, know how to answer that question. Once Christianity is no longer seen as part and parcel of patriotism, the church must offer more than “What would Jesus do?” moralism and the “I vote values” populism to which we’ve grown accustomed. Good.

The materialistic consciousness of our culture … is the root cause of the global crisis; it is not our business ethics, our politics or even our personal lifestyles. These are symptoms of a deeper underlying problem. Our whole civilization is unsustainable. And the reason that it is unsustainable is that our value system, the consciousness with which we approach the world, is an unsustainable mode of consciousness.

This is where it begins to get mind-bending. The colors we experience are just appearances in the mind. The light itself does not have color; it is simply energy with a particular frequency, the color coming from the representation of that frequency in the mind. The same is true of every other quality we experience. We seem to be experiencing the world directly, but in truth all that we experience is a representation of the world out there appearing in our field of knowing.

Heavenly Father: We ask that we may be able to understand and put into practice your truths. We ask that the judgment that is soon coming upon the entire earth will not catch us by surprise. We ask that when judgment falls upon the world, we will have already been judged because we submitted to your mighty hand. May we be among the righteous who with difficulty are saved because the trials, tribulations, and afflictions that we have suffered according to your will have brought forth excellent fruit in our lives. May you bring us to maturity in Christ. We ask this in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

There's only so much evidence a small Jack Russell can dispose of.

Peter wrote that if we are slandered it should not be because of our evil-doing but because of what the Bible defines as “good” (1 Pet. 3:13–17). And that good includes speaking to outsiders “with gentleness and respect” as we bear witness to Christ and while having “a good conscience” (1 Pet. 3:15–16). What matters is not just what happens to “the culture,” but what happens to you.

When one feels as though one is under constant existential threat, one cannot maintain the bonds of trust in others needed to build community or the kind of curiosity that can lead to finding ways to serve one another. Confidence in the kingdom of Christ, trust that our ultimate survival is assured in Christ, can enable us then not just to serve our Lord but to stop looking for substitutes for him. Some are panicked about rising secularism and what they fear will be hostility to the church, but act in ways that tie the witness of the church to forms of power that actually fuel secularization. Some of you are tempted toward cynicism, then, when you see people you thought you knew taking positions you never could imagine them taking, because of politics or culture. The first group sometimes speaks as though the church will collapse if "the culture" collapses. And members of the second group sometimes think that the church will not survive the scandals of what passes for Christian "influence" at the moment. Wherever you fit in this spectrum, though, we should all heed exactly what happened at Caesarea Philippi. Jesus rebuked Peter for seeking to adopt the way of Herod and of Caesar and of Baal—power apart from the cross. In fact, Jesus said this was Satan (Matt. 16:23). What Jesus builds is different altogether—a church that cannot be stopped with Caesar’s cross.

Our assumption that we are directly interacting with physical reality closely parallels the way we respond to the image on a computer screen. Moving a computer’s mouse appears to move the cursor around the screen. In reality, the mouse is sending a stream of data to the central processor, which calculates a new position for the cursor and then updates the image on the screen. In early computers there was a noticeable delay between issuing a command and seeing the effects on the screen. Today computers are so fast they can recalculate the image on a screen in a fraction of a second, and there is no visible delay between the movement of the mouse and the cursor on the screen. We experience moving the cursor across the screen. Our experience of daily life is similar. When I kick a stone, my intention to move my foot is communicated to my body, and my foot in the physical world moves to meet the physical stone. But I do not experience the interaction directly. The brain receives the information sent back by the eyes and body and updates my image of reality appropriately.

Religion, like Watergate, is a scandal that will not go away.

Did the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father or from the Son? The Father and the Son, however, are of one accord. Their desire is to send the Holy Spirit to bond us with them. The Lord Jesus as the only mediator of the New Covenant, sends his Spirit with the goal that we can be cleansed by the power of God and come to know the Father.

John the Baptist came to prepare the way for those who desire to serve the Lord. This is a way where even a fool will not get lost (Isaiah 35:8). This is a highway of holiness where no demon can prosper. This is a way where we do not lose our hard-earned investments to the Enemy, because we have learned to invest in heavenly treasure that is beyond his reach. This is a way where the tables turn, and we are not the food and the prey of the Enemy. Rather, the Enemy is our food and our prey!

If we submit to his authority and do his will, we will come under his covering. In Revelation 19:8, the white robes of fine linen are the righteousness of the saints. All we have to do is eat the clean food that the Lord provides, for man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4).

Our only means of safety is to be joined directly to the Lord in the realm of the Holy of Holies. We must turn our backs upon our own desires and upon our own works. If we are willing to give up our own lives, he will live his life in and through us (Mark 8:35).

The greeting among the early Christians was “Jesus is Lord.” The reply was “Yes, he is Lord indeed!” This is the beginning of the gospel. This is the gospel that declares that the Lord Jesus is our new king. We may accept him or reject him, but he is the sovereign King. The word gospel does not just mean “good news,” however. It means we have a new king and do not have to serve Satan, the old despot, any longer.

When the rain (of blessing) falls, it waters all the seeds in the garden. When fertilizer is applied, it fertilizes everything growing in the field. If thorns and briers are in our hearts, prosperity will cause them to prosper also. Everything will come up together. For this reason, the Lord starts us out in a desert (spiritual or otherwise). He wants to make sure no weeds are left in our hearts. Each time we receive something new and excellent from God, it will be accompanied by a test. We have not just received a new gift or talent or capacity from God; we have also received a test on how we will use it. We can use it according to the will of God for the kingdom of God and the good of others, or we can use it for personal gain and foment our own pride and arrogance.

The primary definition of grace is the power of God to change and transform us, linking us to the presence of God. And those who are led by the Spirit of God are not under the law (Galatians 5:18). Therefore, the center of the Scriptures,

If our new house or our new car or our new job is competing for first place in our lives, then these things may become idols to us. We need temperance in all things. As we walk with him, the Lord will temper us so we can live in the world but not be of the world,

Towards the end of October 1946, I had the good fortune to be present at a confrontation in Cambridge which marked a water-shed in the history of modern philosophy. The Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club had invited Karl Popper to speak. […] After Popper's declaration that he did not believe in puzzle-solving and his affirmation that there were genuine philosophical problems, Wittgenstein started to challenge him to name a 'philosophical' problem. I cannot now recall the precise sequence of events, but after Popper tried to name one or two philosophical problems and Wittgenstein kept countering by saying that he did not know what he would 'mean' by his statements, the drama occurred. Popper was sitting on one side of the fireplace, and Wittgenstein on the other. Both were facing the audience. In the middle, in a big armchair, there was Bertrand Russell. Suddenly Wittgenstein, who had been playing and fidgeting with the poker in the fire, took the red-hot poker out of the fire and gesticulated with it angrily in front of Popper's face. Thereupon, Russell – who had so far not spoken a word – took the pipe out of his mouth and said very firmly in his high-pitched, somewhat scratchy voice: 'Wittgenstein, put down that poker at once!' Wittgenstein complied and soon after got up and walked out, slamming the door. Looking back now after nearly forty years, one can see the real significance of that incident. It prefigured the clash of philosophical opinions which has developed ever since the gradual decline of Positivism has turned into a rout.

the Reagan–Bush strategy in 1980 culminated in the Iran-Contra Affair, as advisors answerable to the President decided to ignore Congress and do what they could to aid the Contras in Nicaragua while at the same time providing weapons to Iran in exchange for the hostages. Once again, a sitting President’s policy—being effected at the highest levels of international diplomacy, with many lives at stake not to mention the nation’s foreign policy direction—was subverted by a political challenger to gain advantage in an election. In other countries, going behind the president’s back and cutting a secret, separate deal with a foreign power would be called treason; in the America of the 1960s and ’70s, it was business as usual.

What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? Books that influenced me the most: The Transformed Cell by Steven A. Rosenberg Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say? Are there any quotes you think of often or live your life by? Well, assuming it’s a big billboard, I’d lobby for the following: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”—Bertrand Russell “For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”—John F. Kennedy “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”—Albert Einstein “If you set a goal, it should meet these two conditions: 1) It matters; 2) You can influence the outcome.”—Peter Attia

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

Art is long, life is short’, goes the old adage, and arranging a limited number of paintings to represent the numerous developments and styles of Western art is by all standards a Herculean task.

Evangelist Billy Graham, with whom Richard Nixon had prayed and agonized so often throughout the Presidency, once said, “I think there was definitely demon power involved. He took all those sleeping pills, and through history, drugs and demons have gone together.

Bertrand Russell wrote that pure mathematics is the field in which we don’t know what we’re talking about or to what extent what we say is true or false.

At length, returning home with her new baby, she got an unpleasant surprise: ‘Bertie administered the shock of telling me he had now transferred his affections to Peter Spence.’ Margery (‘Peter’) Spence was an Oxford student who had come to look after John and Kate during the holidays. The Russells tried a foursome holiday in south-west France, each partner with his or her lover (1932). But the previous year Russell had become an earl on the death of his childless brother, and this made a difference. He became more lordly in his ways, Peter was anxious for a regular union, and so he took her to live with him in the family home. ‘At first’, said a shocked Dora, ‘I could not believe that Bertie would do such a thing to me.’ She added that it was ‘inevitable’ that ‘such a man’ should ‘hurt many people on his way’; but his ‘tragic flaw’ was that he felt ‘so little regret’: ‘Though he loved the multitudes and suffered with their suffering, he still remained aloof from them because the aristocrat in him lacked the common touch.

In non-US settings with single public payers, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and many European countries, the payer perspective may be the most relevant for healthcare decisions and would typically include a broader array of medical costs, benefits, and harms. As noted above, the US private payer perspective omits an important proportion of medical costs borne by patients, namely, out-of-pocket costs (co-payments and deductibles), as well as time costs incurred by patients and informal (unpaid) caregivers and their transportation costs. In the United States, we call the perspective that includes medical costs borne by both payers and patients the healthcare sector perspective. This is one of two Reference Case analyses recommended here (Recommendations 2–3). Because some interventions also impose significant time costs on patients and informal caregivers, analysts or decision makers may wish to include these costs as well, a perspective we call the healthcare sector with time cost perspective. Quantifying time costs may be relatively straightforward for some interventions but more challenging for others (Russell 2009). Some interventions to improve health may have important consequences outside of the healthcare sector. For example, a successful intervention to treat substance abuse might reduce costs in the criminal justice system. A successful intervention for autism may positively affect educational attainment. Public health interventions may have particularly broad consequences across non-healthcare sectors, including the environment and the criminal justice system. For interventions that have important non-healthcare sector consequences, we recommend that the analyst include such consequences when feasible. We call the perspective that includes all consequences across sectors the societal perspective (Recommendation 4). Thus, the societal

The growing interest in medieval-period reconstruction is vividly legible in the music, cinema listings and television schedules of the late 1960s and early 70s. Besides the BBC Tudor series mentioned earlier – which led to a spin-off cinema version, Henry VIII and his Six Wives, in 1972 – there was Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), centred on Henry’s first wife Anne Boleyn, starring Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold; the Thomas More biopic A Man for All Seasons (1966); Peter O’Toole as Henry II in Anthony Harvey’s The Lion in Winter (1968); David Hemmings as Alfred the Great (1969); the hysterical convent of Russell’s The Devils (1971); and future singer Murray Head in a melodramatic retelling of Gawain and the Green Knight (1973). In the same period HTV West made a series of often repeated mud-and-guts episodes of Arthur of the Britons (1972–3), and visionary Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini unveiled his earthy adapations of the Decameron (1970) and The Canterbury Tales (1971). From the time of the English Civil War, Ken Hughes cast Richard Harris in his erratic portrait of Cromwell (1970); and the twenty-three-year-old doomed genius Michael Reeves made his Witchfinder General in 1968, in which the East Anglian farmland becomes a transfigured backdrop to a tale of superstition and violent religious persecution in 1645. Period reconstruction, whether in film, television or music, has been a staple of British culture, innate to a mindset that always finds its identity in the grain of the past.