Samantha Power Quotes

Piety can turn the power-hungry into monsters,’ Ead said. ‘They can twist any teaching to justify their actions.

If one word can mean so many things at the same time then I don't see why I can't.

Strikingly tall, broad, a thick head of silky chestnut hair, olive skin and beautiful almond shaped eyes. His was a strong face, masculine, powerful. I disliked it greatly.

By no means. There is great power in stories.

We decide, on issues large and small, whether we will be bystanders or upstanders.

Hate is giving them too much power.

People who care, act, and refuse to give up may not change THE world, but they can change many individual worlds.

They raise us to be soft as silk, distract us with luxury and wealth beyond measure, so we never rock the boat that carries us. They expect us to be so bored by our power that we let them do the ruling in our stead. Behind every throne is a masked servant who seeks only to make a puppet of the one who sits on it.

I brought you back because I could not find the strength to fight her without you but for that same reason I will do everything in my power to see you safely to the Citadel.

What if magic is just a word for power beyond our understanding, like the gods possess?

The United Staes had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred,

If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”[4]

The wonderful thing about living in a morally bankrupt world is that every human being can be bought in one way or another. Everyone accepts a currency. Money, mercy, the illusion of power – there are always ways to purchase loyalty.

Well, Sonny should make you plenty powerful then.

fact, two-thirds of all of the refugees who had come to the US in the previous decade were women and children—and we knew who they were. Of the millions of refugees admitted to the United States since the landmark Refugee Act of 1980, not one has carried out a lethal act of domestic terrorism.

You have more power than you know, Samantha. You just have to be brave enough to realize it.

I know I don’t yet, but I’ll do everything in my power to try to deserve you.

The Heath brothers stressed that, counterintuitively, big problems 'are most often solved by a sequence of small solutions, sometimes over weeks, sometimes over decades.' 'Shrink the change' became a kind of motto for me and my team, along with President Obama's version of the point: 'Better is good' (p. 517).

Former UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjold may have best summed up the UN's track record and its promise when he said it was created 'not to lead mankind to heaven but to save humanity from hell'" (p. 348).

Trump’s contempt and bigotry, his rage and dishonesty, and his attacks on judges, journalists, minorities, and opposition voices are doing untold damage to the moral and political foundations of American democracy.

A seductive female voice added, “Hello Henry, I’m the deputy director. But you can call me Samantha.” Henry’s response was accusing. “You’re a droid!” “I’m an R9054, one of the most powerful robotic systems devised by Ingermann-Verex, my makers. And I prefer the term humanoid if you don’t mind.” Locking onto her image, Henry noted the strange wrap-round view panel enshrouding the top part of the body shell. Inside, there was a human face seemingly trapped inside an electronic body. Although he’d seen a number of droids with similar face screens, Samantha’s was the most realistic, so he guessed her claims of being top of her range were probably right.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously described the importance of being able “to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time,” while still retaining “the ability to function.” I was quickly becoming practiced at this discomfiting balance.

Knowledge isn’t just powerful; it’s valuable. Know when to use it and when to shut up.

There is great power in stories.

The queen straightened her back and tilted her head back ever so slightly, giving power to her husband’s troops through her own regality.

Piety can turn the power-hungry into monsters,” Ead said. “They can twist any teaching to justify their actions.

I believed that the most important part of decision-making was not the justness of one’s intentions but the effectiveness of one’s actions.

We can't only try diplomacy after countries have done what we want.

When he cares about someone, he cares about them with everything. And he takes, losing someone he cares about, badly.' 'His mom?' 'Holy crap! He told you about his mom? Shit, he does like you. Just do't break his heart now that he's finally got it working, please.' 'I don't think I have the power to do that.' 'Oh, you'd be surprised.

Each of her words was the skip of a stone across a lake, forming ripples of emotion. The Queen of Inys could not cast illusions, but her voice and bearing on this night had turned her into an enchantress.

In a 2008 wedding toast to Cass Sunstein and Samantha Power, Leon Wieseltier put it about as well as possible: Brides and grooms are people who have discovered, by means of love, the local nature of happiness. Love is a revolution in scale, a revision of magnitudes; it is private and it is particular; its object is the specificity of this man and that woman, the distinctness of this spirit and that flesh. Love prefers deep to wide, and here to there; the grasp to the reach…. Love is, or should be, indifferent to history, immune to it—a soft and sturdy haven from it: when the day is done, and the lights are out, and there is only this other heart, this other mind, this other face, to assist in repelling one’s demons or in greeting one’s angels, it does not matter who the president is. When one consents to marry, one consents to be truly known, which is an ominous prospect; and so one bets on love to correct for the ordinariness of the impression, and to call forth the forgiveness that is invariably required by an accurate perception of oneself. Marriages are exposures. We may be heroes to our spouses but we may not be idols.

To this day, when I hear people judge students on the basis of their test scores, I think of my sleep-deprived African-American classmates as we geared up to take English or math tests together. We may have been equal before God, but I had three more hours of sleep, vastly more time to prepare, and many more resources at my disposal than those who were part of the busing program.

Piety can turn the power-hungry into monsters, They can twist any teaching to justify their actions.

Let the storm into you. Hold it inside. See yourself as a force of nature, vast enough to defeat a god, and carry that image for all of your days.

AUTHORITARIAN LEADERS FREQUENTLY MANUFACTURE and demonize “enemies” to shore up support from their political base.

Whenever my own thoughts about the state of the world headed toward a similarly bleak impasse, I would brainstorm with my team about how we might 'shrink the change' we hoped to see (p. 517).

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote movingly about having her own equivalent of a Bat Cave, but in the end, she found consolation by telling herself, “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” I agreed with this, but I still couldn’t get the small things or people out of my head. EVENTS IN MY PERSONAL LIFE required me to understand better where my “bats” were coming from.

Early on in my tenure, I was given a cartoon that circulated widely at the UN. The cartoon showed dozens of people listening to a speech. In the first panel, the speaker asks, “Who wants change?” and all audience members enthusiastically raise their hands. In the second panel, the speaker refines his question, asking, “Who wants to change?” This time, each audience member looks toward the ground, demurring.

And as you grow up, please know that whenever you hear thunder, that will be me. Whenever the Red Sox win in the ninth, that will be me. Whenever you and daddy dance together, know that I am there too. I will always be watching my boys. My boys, whom I love so much that I feel my heart will burst. Love, Mum

After changing shape several times, the ball eventually turned into a huge face. It floated alongside the air-car. This time, time instead of sending him a mental message, the face spoke out aloud and the whole air-car vibrated with its intensity. “If you are foolish enough to renege on your contract, you will be severely punished. For your sake, I hope you wouldn’t do such a thing.” When Tarmy made no attempt to respond, the face turned and pressed itself against the millipede-free window. A moment later, Tarmy felt the fat slug entering his mind, the sign that the face was attempting to use its powers to obtain his response by other means. But as the slug dug deeper, Samantha’s cover stories began springing out of the corners of his mind. Instead of obtaining Tarmy’s agreement, all that the face saw was a burning army transporter surrounded by bodies. Undeterred, the face continued its assault. Samantha had anticipated that Tarmy might come up against an adept, so the mental images of death and destruction flowed unchecked. After failing to break Tarmy’s defences, the face removed the slug and tried reason. “You can’t win, Mr Tarleton, so why don’t you do yourself a favour and cooperate? It will be better for you in the long run. Now, where is the miniature pulse drive engine?” Tarmy realised why the millipedes hadn’t been allowed to attack. It was obvious that the Great Ones were hoping to retrieve the engine. When Tarmy didn’t respond, the face said, “I am prepared to overlook your desertion if you agree to tell us where the engine is and also honour your contract by showing us how to convert the engine into a bomb.

To paraphrase Walter Laqueur, a pioneer in the study of the Allies’ response to the Holocaust, although many people thought that the Jews were no longer alive, they did not necessarily believe they were dead.18

This reminded me of the peril of applying analogies in geopolitics, best encapsulated in Mark Twain’s line: “A cat who sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. But he won’t sit on a cold stove either.

If anybody had the grounds to anticipate systematic brutality, it seems logical that it would be those most immediately endangered.Yet those with the most at stake are in fact often the least prone to recognize their peril.

Social progress, I realize, happens not just through the sort of revolutionary actions that generate Oscar-baiting biopics but through the underestimated power of conversation—through small exchanges of generosity and goodwill, through questions asked in good faith, through love expressed with no preconditions or expectations of return. I have spent a week doing nothing but talk to people. But talking is far from nothing. Words are the literal stuff of change.

Malinda moved so we were eye-level. "Forget the people who've hurt you. You don't have them anymore, but you have two others that'll do anything to you. Mason and Logan would move mountains for you. I see how you are with them. You love them, but you're scared to let yourself be happy. Why? Because that's when they'll leave? Is that what you think? You've got it all wrong. Those two will never leave you." She tapped my chest. Once. Twice. "You. You're the one that's going to hurt them. You have that power, and you don't know it. You could rip those two apart in a second, and they're the ones who are scared of you. Not the other way around. You need to recognize the real situation.

I started calling that girl back . . . The girl who loved living, the girl who danced instead of walking. The girl who had sunfl owers for eyes and fi reworks in her soul. I started playing music again, hoping she would come out. I started looking for beautiful moments to experience, so she would feel safe enough to show herself, because I knew she was in there. And she needed my kindness and my eff ort to come to the surface again.

People have explained U.S. failures to respond to specific genocides by claiming that the United States didn’t know what was happening, that it knew but didn’t care, or that regardless of what it knew, there was nothing useful to be done. I have found that in fact U.S. policymakers knew a great deal about the crimes being perpetrated. Some Americans cared and fought for action, making considerable personal and professional sacrifices. And the United States did have countless opportunities to mitigate and prevent slaughter. But time and again, decent men and women chose to look away. We have all been bystanders to genocide. The crucial question is why.

Alexei’s wide shoulders and chest, coupled with the insanely powerful thighs his worn jeans struggled to contain, should have been Mike’s first clue he was looking at a goalie. And in the case of the Ice Cats, the metric ton of lube soaking into his clothes should probably have been a good hint, too. Alexei Belov was infamous for his pranks.

come on bruv

Putting the potential for damage into someone else's hands is scary. I have to have control, even if it is the power to self-destruct.

A cat who sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. But he won’t sit on a cold stove either.

I alone had the power to change my life. All I had to do was be brave enough to try.

from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If”: If you can meet with triumph and disaster And treat those two imposters just the same

Emotional wounds stop feeling like black holes we must avoid sitting with at all costs for fear that we will be swallowed up in the pain of them forever. They instead offer a golden thread to follow, like a distant trail of stars in the velvet night sky, navigating us towards a more integrated understanding of ourselves. We need to go to the places inside us we try to escape from.

Listen,” he said firmly. “If you hear nothing else, hear this. You work at the White House. There is no other room where a bunch of really smart people of sound judgment are getting together and figuring out what to do. It will be the scariest moment of your life when you fully internalize this: There is no other meeting. You’re in the meeting. You are the meeting. If you have a concern, raise it.

Knowledge is power, isn't it?" "Not necessarily. Knowledge is dangerous. Once you know something, you can never be rid of it. You have to carry it always. Even if it pains you." Liss to Julian & Paige (Pg. 112)

Despite the UN secretary-general’s grand title, he was named in the UN Charter as the administrator of the organization. For this reason, former secretary-general Kofi Annan described the position as “more secretary than general.

Sexism is not confined by border, race, class, sexuality or gender and, to my mind (and Margo Kingston's in Chapter 6), it is inextricably bound up with a mindset of entitlement that also afflicts our relationship with the planet.

In Maya’s group, the “executive branch,” everyone is talking at once. Maya hangs back. Samantha, tall and plump in a purple T-shirt, takes charge. She pulls a sandwich bag from her knapsack and announces, “Whoever’s holding the plastic bag gets to talk!” The students pass around the bag, each contributing a thought in turn. They remind me of the kids in The Lord of the Flies civic-mindedly passing around their conch shell, at least until all hell breaks loose.

I wanted to know for myself. I started from the foundation principle – you’re God’s image and likeness and you were never engineered to be self-sufficient and independent of God’s blessing. That’s how I see my identity and who I am. Your blessing is already poured out. Learn how to change your state of being, meaning raise your vibration to step in your blessing, healing and prosperity. I have accessed a connection to my higher-self/God within and so can you. I may be in the infant stage but learning the processes to raise my vibrations and clear blockages through forgiveness is a start to a whole new bright future. Taking back our power. I can’t wait to continue this journey with a greater sense of wisdom, understanding and wonder as the awakening to a world opens up and what we see is just a beautiful world in transition and humanity with upgrades. Don’t let the darkness get you down, let it be a challenge to help you rise to your full potential

I saw how important it is not to shun those with whom we disagree. As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once said, 'We must always seek the truth in our opponent's error and the error in our own truth.' This is just as important in our domestic politics as in our foreign dealings.

Mum, since when have you ever decided whether or not to do something based on an assumption that you will fail?” I asked. “If I think everyone else will be better than me, then you’re right, I shouldn’t try. But if that is my approach, maybe I should just preemptively admit defeat and retire now.

in life you’ll surround yourself with good company sometimes, however, the best company will be yourself. we might as well learn to accept the quiet, acknowledge the stillness, shake hands with the discomfort and declare it safe. because truth be told, if we aren’t safe alone with ourselves, we probably won't be with anyone else.

There are times when the best medication and therapist simply can’t help a soldier suffering from this new generation of peacekeeping injury. The anger, the rage, the hurt, and the cold loneliness that separates you from your family, friends, and society’s normal daily routine are so powerful that the option of destroying yourself is both real and attractive.

Tané had watched a woman in Cape Hisan embroidering a robe once. The needle dipping in and out, drawing the thread behind it, colors blooming on the silk. Inspired by the memory, Tané had imagined the power in the jewel as a needle, the water as the thread, and herself as a seamster of the sea. Slowly, the waves had leaned toward her and wrapped themselves around her legs.

And here it was 1988, and in Proxmire's words, the Congress had gone sound to sleep: 'We should take a special international prize for gross hypocrisy. The Senate resoundingly passes the ratification of the Genocide Treaty. We thereby tell the world that we recognize this terrible crime. Then what do we do about it? We do nothing about it. We speak loudly but carry no stick at all.

Watch," he whispered hoarsely. "Watch me make love to you." No power in the heavens could have made her look away as he withdrew- all the way so that she saw the passionate sheen of her body's juices glazing his rod. Her eyes widened. Coarse dark hair mingled with soft, chestnut curls, a sight that was incredibly erotic. Even more erotic was when he plunged again, gliding deeper this time, harder. She couldn't tear her gaze away. She was both amazed and stunned at the way male joined female, feeling the walls of her passage yield- soft tender flesh clinging tight and wanton to hard male steel.Everything inside her went wild. Every part of her was melting, every fiber of her being. With a helpless little moan she caught the sides of his head. She wanted to tell him how wonderful he made her feel. But the power of words had once again deserted her. The pleasure was climbing, spiraling high and fast, taking her by storm. Unable to hold back, her hands slipped to his shoulders. She clutched at him; sensation gathered there, in the very center of her body, the place he possessed so fully. Had she surrendered? Or had he? she wondered vaguely. Eyes closed, she flung her head back. Release was close. She could feel it coming, shivering throughout her body. His head dropped low. He kissed the arch of her throat. "Fionna," he said, his tone almost raw. "Fionna!" Her nails bit into his shoulders. The walls of her channel contracted around him, again and again and again, sending spasms of release hurtling through them both.

Without ever discussing it or making a conscious shift, we reflexively engaged one another in meetings. This did not mean we always agreed with one another; some of my most heartfelt arguments were with my fellow female Senior Directors. But we took one another's ideas seriously. This meant never leaving them simply hanging in the air, which typically happened in large group discussions.

Imagine a life where threats are minimal and your fear is contained to not dominate your daily experiences in the world. You can have that. You deserve that. And in order to experience that, we have to venture into what might feel like a hostile terrain of rocky challenges. We are venturing into your chaotic, muddled and beautiful life. The messy and chaotic parts. May you begin with your head held high.

During the period in which newspapers were initially reporting on how asylum-seeking immigrants were having their young children ripped from them, presidential daughter and advisor Ivanka Trump tweeted a photograph of herself beatifically embracing her small son. When Samantha Bee performed a fierce excoriation of Trump’s incivility in both supporting her father’s administration, and posting such a cruel celebration of her own intact family, she called her a “feckless cunt.” It was this epithet, one that Donald Trump had himself used as an insult against women on multiple past occasions, that sent the media into a spiral of shocked alarm and prompted Trump himself to recommend, via Twitter, that Bee’s network, TBS, fire her. But neither Trump’s past use of the word to demean women, nor his possible violation of the First Amendment, provoked as much horror as the feminist comedian’s deployment of a slur that she had used before on her show often in reference to herself. Typically only the incivility of the less powerful toward the more powerful can be widely understood as such, and thus be subject to such intense censure. Which is what made #metoo so fraught and revolutionary. It was a period during which some of the most powerful faced repercussion.

In “A Problem from Hell,” I had highlighted the work of Albert Hirschman, the Princeton economist who published the landmark book The Rhetoric of Reaction in 1991. Hirschman’s thesis was that those who didn’t want to pursue a particular course of action tended to argue that a given policy would be futile (“futility”), that it would likely make matters worse (“perversity”), or that it would imperil some other goal (“jeopardy”).

white people might find that when we decenter our apparent interests, and center Black interests, that all along we were not really centering ourselves but only “whiteness” as a symbol or key to power, wealth, and prestige—mostly for a few white people who despise us only a little less than they do Black people. They are laughing at us. We blame Black “welfare queens” and Mexican “illegal aliens” while the whites who run this country grow richer and richer at our expense. Let’s stick up for the most exploited, the most terrorized, and this might wake us up to the terror and exploitation which we also have been experiencing to a lesser degree.

Imagine if you were sitting at home and you suddenly found that your telephone line had been cut. You couldn’t even call your parents to tell them you were okay. Imagine having to sleep in every layer of clothing you owned to survive without heat. Imagine not being able to send your kids to school because it was safer to keep them in your dark basement than for them to take a short walk down the block. Imagine hearing your child’s tummy growling and not being able to help because the next UN food delivery was not for another week. Imagine getting shot at by people whose weddings you had attended. This is what is happening right now to people like us.

Those who argued that the number of Cambodians killed was in the hundreds of thousands or those who tried to generate press coverage of the horrors did so assuming that establishing the facts would empower the United States and other Western governments to act. Normally, in a time of genocide, op-ed writers, policymakers, and reporters root for a distinct outcome or urge a specific U.S. military, economic, legal, humanitarian, or diplomatic response. Implicit indeed in many cables and news articles, and explicit in most editorials, is an underlying message, a sort of “if I were czar, I would do X or Y.” But in the first three years of KR rule, even the Americans most concerned about Cambodia—Twining, Quinn, and Becker among them—internalized the constraints of the day and the system. They knew that drawing attention to the slaughter in Cambodia would have reminded America of its past sins, reopened wounds that had not yet healed at home, and invited questions about what the United States planned to do to curb the terror. They were neither surprised nor agitated by U.S. apathy. They accepted U.S. noninvolvement as an established background condition. Once U.S. troops had withdrawn from Vietnam in 1973, Americans deemed all of Southeast Asia unspeakable, unwatchable, and from a policy perspective, unfixable. “There could have been two genocides in Cambodia and nobody would have cared,” remembers Morton Abramowitz, who at the time was an Asia specialist at the Pentagon and in 1978 became U.S. ambassador to Thailand. During the Khmer Rouge period, he remembers, “people just wanted to forget about the place. They wanted it off the radar.

I trace the lines of the tattoo on his chest---two tigers facing off with symbols and words. "I thought you didn't like cats. When did you get this?" "Oh, I love cats. Just not my mother's," he says. "As for the tattoo, I think I told you that I practice mixed martial arts. I got this one when my family lived in Thailand, setting up one of the resorts, when I was eighteen and practicing Muay Thai. This design has traditional symbols of Sak Yant---twin tigers, five lines, nine peaks, and eight directions, all deeply rooted in ancient Buddhist and Hindu practices and representing forces like power, strength, fearlessness, protection, and wealth." "You definitely have all those attributes," I say, enraptured by the design and the softness of his skin. Everything about him is so sensual---from his lips to his toes and whatever he's hiding under the towel.

The “United States” does not exist as a nation, because the ruling class of the U.S./Europe exploits the world without regard to borders and nationality.  For instance, multinational or global corporations rule the world.  They make their own laws by buying politicians– Democrats and Republicans, and white politicians in England and in the rest of Europe.  We are ruled by a European power which disregards even the hypocritical U.S. Constitution.  If it doesn’t like the laws of the U.S., as they are created, interpreted and enforced, the European power simply moves its base of management and labor to some other part of the world.   Today the European power most often rules through neocolonial regimes in the so-called “Third World.”  Through political leaders who are loyal only to the European power, not to their people and the interests of their nation, the European power sets up shop in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  By further exploiting the people and stealing the resources of these nations on every continent outside Europe, the European power enhances its domination.  Every institution and organization within the European power has the purpose of adding to its global domination: NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, the military, and the police.   The European power lies to the people within each “nation” about national pride or patriotism.  We foolishly stand with our hands over our hearts during the “National Anthem” at football games while the somber servicemen in their uniforms hold the red, white and blue flag, then a military jet flies over and we cheer.  This show obscures the real purpose of the military, which is to increase European power through intimidation and the ongoing invasion of the globe.  We are cheering for imperialist forces.  We are standing on Native land celebrating the symbols of de-humanizing terrorism.  Why would we do this unless we were being lied to?   The European imperialist power lies to us about its imperialism.  It’s safe to say, most “Americans” do not recognize that we are part of an empire.  When we think of an empire we think of ancient Rome or the British Empire.  Yet the ongoing attack against the Native peoples of “North America” is imperialism.  When we made the “Louisiana Purchase” (somehow the French thought Native land was theirs to sell, and the U.S. thought it was ours to buy) this was imperialism.  When we stole the land from Mexico, this was imperialism (the Mexican people having been previously invaded by the European imperialist power).  Imperialism is everywhere.  Only the lies of capitalism could so effectively lead us to believe that we are not part of an empire.

Do you have any ritual things you do before a race?” My dad did. He always had to wear black boxer shorts and socks. Before every race, he would also have a plain egg omelet for breakfast. I never did learn why. “Yep.” I wait, but he doesn’t expand. “Well…are you gonna tell me what it is?” Arms on the table, he leans forward. “Okay.” He lets out a breath. “I have to eat a bar of Galaxy chocolate before each race.” “Really?” I smile. “Why?” Eyes on me, he rests back in his seat, keeping his hands on the table. “After we first moved to England, I don’t know if it was the pressure or being in a different country or what, but I wasn’t winning races. I was coming in fourth at best. I was panicking because Dad had given up so much by moving us to England, and I was getting frustrated because I knew I was capable of more. “Anyway, on this particular day, I was hungry because I’d forgotten to eat, and my dad was all, ‘You will lose this race on an empty stomach.’ So, he went off to get me something to eat. Anyway, he came back, telling me there was only this shitty vending machine. Then, he held out a bar of Galaxy chocolate, and I was like, ‘What the hell is that? I’m not eating that. It’s women’s chocolate. Men don’t eat Galaxy. They eat Yorkie.’ You remember the adverts?” “I do.” I laugh, loving the way he’s telling the story. He’s so animated with his eyes all lit up. “So, my dad got pissed off and said, ‘Well, they haven’t got any men’s chocolate, so eat the bloody women’s chocolate, and shut the hell up!’” I snort out a laugh. “So, what did you do?” “Sulked for about a minute, and then I ate the fucking bar of Galaxy, and it was the best chocolate I’d ever tasted—not that I admitted that to my dad at the time. Then, I got in my kart and won my first ever race in England.” He smiles fondly, and I can see the memory in his eyes. “And since then, before every race, my dad buys me a bar of Galaxy from a vending machine, and I eat it. It’s my one weird thing.” “But what if there isn’t any Galaxy chocolate in a vending machine? Or worse, there isn’t a vending machine?” He leans forward, a sexy-arse smile on his face. “There’s always a vending machine, Andressa, and there’s always a bar of Galaxy in it.” “Ah.” The power of being Carrick Ryan.

The bag circles the table several times. Each time Maya passes it to her neighbor, saying nothing. Finally the discussion is done. Maya looks troubled. She’s embarrassed, I’m guessing, that she hasn’t participated. Samantha reads from her notebook a list of enforcement mechanisms that the group has brainstormed. “Rule Number 1,” she says. “If you break the laws, you miss recess.…” “Wait!” interrupts Maya. “I have an idea!” “Go ahead,” says Samantha, a little impatiently. But Maya, who like many sensitive introverts seems attuned to the subtlest cues for disapproval, notices the sharpness in Samantha’s voice. She opens her mouth to speak, but lowers her eyes, only managing something rambling and unintelligible. No one can hear her. No one tries. The cool girl in the group—light-years ahead of the rest in her slinkiness and fashion-forward clothes—sighs dramatically. Maya peters off in confusion, and the cool girl says, “OK, Samantha, you can keep reading the rules now.” [...] Maya, for her part, sits curled up at the periphery of the group, writing her name over and over again in her notebook, in big block letters, as if to reassert her identity. At least to herself.

Aidan," she said with a tiny shake of her head, very low. "I..." Her jaw seemed to have locked in place- why, her entire body. She could say no more. She'd certainly lost the power to move. And Aidan... she was heatedly aware of those sapphire eyes roving her features until she longed to scream. "No need to say more," he said very quietly. "I see I am to take my leave now." He released her hands. It came then, when she least expected it... perhaps when she should have most expected it. His lips were rather cold from the frigid air outside. His kiss was not. And it was like nothing she'd ever imagined. She thought immediately of Raven and Rowan, for it was one thing to write about a kiss, having never truly experienced it... And quite another to actually feel it. And feel it she did, a kiss so heated and intense, it burned clear to the very bottom of her soul. The taste of him was like nothing she'd ever expected; the combination of warmth and cold turned to fire with blistering heat. His kiss sent heat blazing to every part of her. His hands stole inside her cloak, closing around her waist and pulling her hard against him. She chafed at the burden of his greatcoat. She itched to rip it open, tear at his shirt until she could feel warm, masculine skin and truly know what it was to feel a man's flesh.

Sweat popped out on his brow. Little by little he advanced. Higher. Deeper. Her flesh yielding beneath his gentle but inevitable penetration. She moaned. "It's not enough. Dammit, it's not enough!" His laugh was triumphant. "Patience, love. Patience." She buried her head against his shoulder. He buried his finger inside her cleft, as far as he could. His thumb slowly circled her velvety pearl, pressed, then circled anew, faster and faster, gaining a tempo he knew would drive her wild. Her hands came up, clenching and unclenching against his chest. He felt the tension strung throughout her body and knew precisely what caused it. Knew precisely how to ease it. "Don't fight it." The words were a low, silken whisper, yet his tone was almost gritty with self-control. "Just let it happen, darling. Just let it happen." She couldn't stop it. He knew that pure sensation burned inside her. She writhed around his finger, her hips seeking, stark and wanton. He knew precisely when the spasms of release seized hold. She cried aloud. Her body contracted around him, again and again. She collapsed against him, spent and satiated, his finger still deep inside her. Aidan, however, was more aroused than he had ever been in his life. Every part of his body, every muscle, every nerve, was taut and on edge, almost to the breaking point. A crimson haze of desire scorched his insides, for though Fionna had gained release, he had not. He could barely think. Powerful arms lifted her, catching her so that she faced him, her bare legs bracketed around his. a long arm swept around her back. "You pleased me, love. And I am glad that I pleased you so much. But the next time we are together like this, it will be a different part of me that will be inside you. The next time it will be this." Reaching between them, he fumbled with his trousers, freeing his rigid erection, curling her fingers around his thick, swollen flesh and sealing it there with the pressure of his own. "And there will be nothing between us, sweet. No barriers of clothing. No barriers of words. Do you understand what I am saying?" Fionna gaped at him, stunned at what he'd said. Stunned at what he was doing. She could feel that rigidly masculine part of him... good heavens, her palm was filled with that rigidly masculine part of him.

Certain things are expected of you when you’re a demon. Take the grotesque bodies, for example. Powerful, lethal, but definitely not beauty pageant material. Which is why the more talented among the demon race normally reverted to a basic human form. Those that couldn’t take human form were destined to a life of servitude or as a meal on legs.

Fionna had dredged the weapon from her reticule. She clung to the grip, but the barrel was wavering. He willed his thoughts into hers. One shot. One shot is all you have. But it was not to be. Colson spied Fionna holding the pistol. He wrenched it from her grasp and turned, searching for Aidan. The pistol was in his hands, pointed at Aidan's chest. Colson threw back his head. "You can't have her, you stupid fool! She's mine!" Colson crowed. Fionna, it appeared, had been totally dismissed. A stupid mistake on Colson's part. Aidan was rather stunned... and wholly proud. It all happened in an instant. Fionna seized her parasol with all the frenzy of a woman protecting her own. She whacked Colson full on in the belly the way she'd once tried to do with Aidan. This time she succeeded. This time with a power borne of fury and fire. Colson grunted with pain. His eyes went wide with shock. He clutched his belly and began to slump... Just as Fionna's knee came up. His jaw cracked like the sound of a pistol. There was no sweeter sound on earth. No sweeter feeling than Fionna clinging to him with all her might. "Aidan! Aidan, I knew you would come. I knew it!" Aidan's laugh was breathless with love and laughter. "Remind me, sweet, never to cross you when you're holding a parasol.

Earlier, Susanne’s husband had detected a certain ticking in her, a bomb. He’d packed their children into the car and set out for a night of pizza and a double feature at the second-run movie theatre, leaving her alone to explode, splattering the house with a combination of things she’d ingested as a teen-ager, certain films and punk-rock records that confirmed what she’d guessed: one dies alone. Best to have her family out of the way. Best to have them hidden in a dark cinema when the desire to chop her hair roughly and live on cigarettes surged. These bursts of freedom, while infrequent, were dangerous. Their self-indulgence could tear holes in evenings, marriages, families. She’d been lost in the roar of the vacuum—a device that had the power to put her under a spell, into a trancelike state from which she could most easily contemplate the nature of the universe, the purpose of love, the purpose of death, and a fantasy she sometimes had of being bound nude to a parking meter in the city.

It seemed a waste to have this power and not use it to make the world better somehow. When she had been the small and weak one, how often had she wished that the strong would stand up for her? Now, she was the strong.

What good was she? A former gymnast who floated like a balloon? She felt strangely jealous. None of them had asked for this, but the other women had gotten amazing and useful powers. She didn’t get a super power; she got a disability.

Agency. Self-determination. Dignity. Solidarity. We could not discount the potential impact of even one such altered perspective on a young girl, her family, and, eventually, on an entire community.

The world is filled with broken places. Pick your battles, and go win some.

Extremists with malicious tendencies…have always been with us, but today our culture is saturated with misinformation and conspiracy theories. Even when falsehoods don’t contribute to bloodshed, they frighten people and turn us against one another. The decline and respect for objective truth and facts, means we lack a stable underpinning on which to base our debates and ultimately out decisions. When I was a journalist starting out in Bosnia, I viewed the conflict there as a last gasp of ethnic chauvinism and demagoguery from a bygone era. Unfortunately, it now seems more like a harbinger of the way today’s autocrats and opportunists conjure up internal or external threats in order to expand their own power. Those of us who reject these tactics have yet to figure out how to assuage the fears of those who have been shaken or radicalized by false claims. While my generation was often told about the impending triumph of democracy and human rights, today’s youth are bombarded with commentary forecasting the retreat of liberal democracy or even its demise. A growing mistrust in democratic institutions breeds cynicism about politics and America’s future and encourages an inward focus.

The scenes reminded me of a Macedonian satirist’s brilliant summation of the ethos behind the killing: “Why should I be a minority in your state when you can be a minority in mine?

I'm thoroughly enchanted to meet the world's most beautiful cooking face." Wrong thing to say. My spine went rigid. "Believe me, I can carry my own pots and pans.

We want to travel back in time, but we can’t, and so we want to go to a new place instead. Place is what we have instead of time. No. Not true. Money is what we have now, instead of place or time.” He exhales. “Time is money. Place is money. Love, love is money. And power is money. You’ll see.

No woman should be made to fear she wasn't enough.

Sophie, you look absolutely amazing," he said, spinning me around. "France has done wonders for you." "Chef, you know me. I'm not just a pretty cooking face," I said, glaring at Nicolas. "Oh, I know," he said. "What did the brigade call you?" "Scary Spice," I answered, and he let out a roar of a laugh. "Never mess with a woman wielding an oyster knife," he said, chuckling and shaking his head. "I remember you saying that." "What can I say? I held my own," I said.

if my tweets get on your god damn nerves, block me first, kill me with your powerful brain

Behold, its living power in our midst. Isn't it wonderful, how words and paper can enthral us so? The Mime Order

Right up to this very moment, white people as a group have not wanted to share or relinquish anything meaningful to Black people in terms of power, money, or social status.  The most we might say is that we “accept” or “like” them, as long as they “like” us and are nice to us.  I put those words in quotation marks because i wonder: how can you like someone if deep down you believe they should be stuck in a perpetually inferior political, economic and social position? How can whites truly accept people—that is, welcome them into our sphere of affairs—when we think they have had nothing to offer but their meagre existence?  This is like forcing someone to make a great big meal for our party, and after they’ve cooked in the kitchen for hours and hours, we start to think it might be nice if they would come to our party; but then we think their presence might make us feel uncomfortable because we know we wouldn’t have asked or forced one of our party guests to cook all those hours as we did with this person.  We might be looking at all that food and wondering how this tired person feels being invited to share a meal that they prepared in the first place.

Never underestimate the power of love, Veronica, for it makes even the smartest of men do the most foolish things.

This Black feminist uprising is not about violence.  It’s about safety.  The dangerous structures of oppressive thought are destroyed when voices of people who are free from the control of these structures are amplified.  When we have listened to them and internalized what they have taught us, and when we have turned away from the racist patriarchy and tuned out its voices, we have already destroyed their power over us.  No gun is necessary.  Yet this is what they fear more than anything: that we will stop listening to them and stop obeying them, and instead begin to listen to the people whose voices and lives they have tried the hardest to silence and trample.  When we turn off our televisions, or at least begin to watch white racist commercials and programming by white racist networks through the educated perspective of Black feminism, amerika no longer controls us.  As soon as we begin to see these things for what they really are—the emptiness they create, the pain they inflict, the anxiety and hate they profit from—they know we won’t freely choose these things.  It is not in the nature of human beings to choose things which are inhumane.

Lord Alexander Clarke stood before her, looking quite regal in his frock coat and top hat. She couldn’t breathe. “You’re supposed to be on that boat,” she said, her voice trembling. “Going to London.” “London is no longer my home.” “But Lady Judith—” He stopped her. “She did not want to stay here.” “You were supposed to marry.” He shook his head. “I did not love her, nor did she love me.” She brushed her hands over her yellow apron, streaking dirt down the front of it as he stepped closer to her. The pounding of her heart seemed to echo in her ears. “Why do you Waldrons keep running?” “Micah and I—” she whispered. “We had to finish our journey.” He reached for her hand, and her heart leaped as he wrapped his strong fingers over hers and placed them on his heart. “The trail ends right here, Miss Waldron. With you and me.” “If you don’t call me ‘Samantha’—” He leaned forward and drowned her words with his kiss. Her body warmed in his embrace, her skin fluttering at his touch. Strong and tender. Powerful and passionate. Alex Clarke hadn’t gone to London. He was here, and he wanted to be with her.

The thorn in our relationship, I eventually discovered, was a lack of touch. On every other level, Daniel and I matched perfectly, but we were complete opposites with respect to our need for touch. I was insatiable, desiring warmth and affection at every opportunity. Daniel, on the other hand, could happily take his dog to a cabin in the woods and live in isolation