Sinister Mark Quotes

Benjamin Blaine,” he muttered. Glad that asshole is locked up for the rest of his miserable life. But Jack was not naïve; he knew that there were thousands like Blaine, across America, spurred to action by the sinister rhetoric of a racist president. Either way, they were equally as dangerous, perhaps more so.

He wrote it exactly and the sinister part only showed as the light feathering of a smooth swell on a calm day marking the reef beneath.

Why? Who are you running from?” Jay laughs, dark and sinister, “Not running. Hunting.

The trowel looked rather sinister, made out of some kind of black metal with a red sheen. It carried the wear marks of having been used as a planting tool, but also had a razor edge that seemed wholly unnecessary for gardening purposes. “Blood cult?” Jason read unhappily from the item description. “Who gardens with an evil trowel?

He stood in the doorway of her office. He was, as always, the consummate scoundrel. He leaned against the doorframe, smiling—almost smirking—at her, as if he knew how rapidly her heart had started beating. If that was how they were going to do this… She simply raised an eyebrow in his direction. “Oh,” she said with a sniff. “It’s you.” “You’re not fooling anyone,” he said. She could feel the corner of her mouth twitch up. Last time she’d seen him, he’d kissed her so thoroughly she had not yet recovered. “I’m not?” “I heard it most distinctly,” he told her. “You might have said ‘It’s you,’ but there was a distinct exclamation mark at the end. In fact, I think there were two.” “Oh, dear.” Free looked down, fluttering her eyelashes demurely. “Is my punctuation showing once more?” His eyes darkened and he took a step into her office. “Don’t hide it on my account,” he growled. “You have the most damnably beautiful punctuation that I have ever seen.

To weep not for the way things had once been but for the way things had been supposed to go and did not. People believed that they were haunted by bad memories, but that wasn’t the truth. The most sinister hauntings were from unrealized futures.

According to the biographical notes, Monsieur Julian Carax was twenty-seven, born with the century in Barcelona, and currently living in Paris; he wrote in French and worked at night as a professional pianist in a hostess bar. The blurb, written in the pompous, moldy style of the age, proclaimed that this was a first work of dazzling courage, the mark of a protean and trailblazing talent, and a sign of hope for the future of all of European letters. In spite of such solemn claims, the synopsis that followed suggested that the story contained some vaguely sinister elements slowly marinated in saucy melodrama, which, to the eyes of Monsieur Roquefort, was always a plus: after the classics what he most enjoyed were tales of crime, boudoir intrigue, and questionable conduct. One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep. She laughed nervously. She had around her a burning aura of loneliness. "You remind me a bit of Julian," she said suddenly. "The way you look and your gestures. He used to do what you are doing now. He would stare at you without saying a word, and you wouldn't know what he was thinking, and so, like an idiot, you'd tell him things it would have been better to keep to yourself." "Someone once said that the moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever." I gulped down the last of my coffee and looked at her for a few moments without saying anything. I thought about how much I wanted to lose myself in those evasive eyes. I thought about the loneliness that would take hold of me that night when I said good-bye to her, once I had run out of tricks or stories to make her stay with me any longer. I thought about how little I had to offer her and how much I wanted from her. "You women listen more to your heart and less to all the nonsense," the hatter concluded sadly. "That's why you live longer." But the years went by in peace. Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don't stop at your station.

Tell me about love when you've been with someone for years, cared for them when they're ill, put up with them when they're miserable or grumpy, taken the sharp side of their tongue and still come back. Tell me about love when you've acted quite appallingly, and the other person has still accepted you.

To pragmatists, the letter Z is nothing more than a phonetically symbolic glyph, a minor sign easily learned, readily assimilated, and occasionally deployed in the course of a literate life. To cynics, Z is just an S with a stick up its butt. Well, true enough, any word worth repeating is greater than the sum of its parts; and the particular word-part Z can, from a certain perspective, appear anally wired. On those of us neither prosaic nor jaded, however, those whom the Fates have chosen to monitor such things, Z has had an impact above and beyond its signifying function. A presence in its own right, it’s the most distant and elusive of our twenty-six linguistic atoms; a mysterious, dark figure in an otherwise fairly innocuous lineup, and the sleekest little swimmer ever to take laps in a bowl of alphabet soup. Scarcely a day of my life has gone by when I’ve not stirred the alphabetical ant nest, yet every time I type or pen the letter Z, I still feel a secret tingle, a tiny thrill… Z is a whip crack of a letter, a striking viper of a letter, an open jackknife ever ready to cut the cords of convention or peel the peach of lust. A Z is slick, quick, arcane, eccentric, and always faintly sinister - although its very elegance separates it from the brutish X, that character traditionally associated with all forms of extinction. If X wields a tire iron, Z packs a laser gun. Zap! If X is Mike Hammer, Z is James Bond. If X marks the spot, Z avoids the spot, being too fluid, too cosmopolitan, to remain in one place. In contrast to that prim, trim, self-absorbed supermodel, I, or to O, the voluptuous, orgasmic, bighearted slut, were Z a woman, she would be a femme fatale, the consonant we love to fear and fear to love.

Twilight was coming on, and so was a storm. In the eerie light beneath the clouds, even the thoroughly modern houses along the road looked as ancient and as sinister as the weathered Pictish stone that stood a hundred feet away, guarding the crossroads it had marked for a thousand years. It seemed a good night to be inside with the shutters fastened.

Though somewhat deaf upon ordinary occasions, her ear for bad news was as sharp as a kite’s scent for carrion; for Dorothy, otherwise an industrious, faithful, and even affectionate creature, had that strong appetite for collecting and retailing sinister intelligence which is often to be marked in the lower classes. Little accustomed to be listened to, they love the attention which a tragic tale ensures to the bearer, and enjoy, perhaps, the temporary equality to which misfortune reduces those who are ordinarily accounted their superiors. Dorothy

TTime and again the need arises for one fierce sword of character to stand face to face with the inhumans and bigots, and announce with an earth-shaking fervor - from this moment on, you are only inches away from extinction - at night look closely to every shadow - and by the light of day know that I am just one step behind you - mark me - one sinister move, one malicious deed and I will swoop down on you like god's thunder - from this moment on, I own your evil heart, and I will crush it, if you hurt the people anymore.

This river is famed in atrocious song and verse; the most prevalent motif is one which attempts to make of the river an ersatz father figure. Actually, the Mississippi River is a treacherous and sinister body of water whose eddies and currents yearly claim many lives. I have never known anyone who would even venture to stick his toe in its polluted waters, which seethe with sewage, industrial waste, and deadly insecticides. Even the fish are dying. Therefore, the Mississippi as Father-God-Moses-Daddy-Phallus-Pops is an altogether false motif began, I would imagine, by that dreary fraud, Mark Twain. This failure to make contact with reality is, however, characteristic of almost all of America’s “art.” Any connection between American art and American nature is purely coincidental, but this is only because the nation as a whole has no contact with reality. That is only one of the reasons why I have always been forced to exist on the fringes of its society, consigned to the Limbo reserved for this who do know reality when they see it.

Internal Bondage BIBLE READING: Mark 5:1-13 We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. When we are under the influence of our addiction, its hold may seem to have supernatural force. We may give up on living and throw ourself into self-destructive behaviors with reckless abandon. People may also give up on us. They may distance themselves from us, as though we were already dead. Whether our “insanity” is self-induced or has a more sinister origin, there is power available to restore us to sanity and wholeness.

Nevertheless they come up with their own history of creation, the Dreaming. The first man was Ber-rook-boorn. He was made by Baiame, the uncreated, who was the beginning of everything, and who loved and took care of all living things. In other words, a good man, this Baiame. Friends called him the Great Fatherly Spirit. After Baiame established Ber-rook-boorn and his wife in a good place, he left his mark on a sacred tree—yarran—nearby, which was the home of a swarm of bees. “ ‘You can take food from anywhere you want, in the whole of this country that I have given you, but this is my tree,’ he warned the two people. ‘If you try to take food from there, much evil will befall you and those who come after you.’ Something like that. At any rate, one day Ber-rook-boorn’s wife was collecting wood and she came to the yarran tree. At first she was frightened at the sight of the holy tree towering above her, but there was so much wood lying around that she did not follow her first impulse—which was to run away as fast as her legs could carry her. Besides, Baiame had not said anything about wood. While she was gathering the wood around the tree she heard a low buzzing sound above her head, and she gazed up at the swarm of bees. She also saw the honey running down the trunk. She had only tasted honey once before, but here there was enough for several meals. The sun glistened on the sweet, shiny drops, and in the end Ber-rook-boorn’s wife could not resist the temptation and she climbed up the tree. “At that moment a cold wind came from above and a sinister figure with enormous black wings enveloped her. It was Narahdarn the bat, whom Baiame had entrusted with guarding the holy tree. The woman fell to the ground and ran back to her cave where she hid. But it was too late, she had released death into the world, symbolized by the bat Narahdarn, and all of the Ber-rook-boorn descendants would be exposed to its curse. The yarran tree cried bitter tears over the tragedy that had taken place. The tears ran down the trunk and thickened, and that is why you can find red rubber on the bark of the tree nowadays.” Andrew puffed happily on his cigar.

You must know something.” “And why is Archer Cross here?” That was from Jenna. His voice had apparently changed over the summer, since he actually said the words instead of squeaking them. “He’s an Eye.” “Didn’t he try to kill you?” Nausicaa had drifted up, and she narrowed her eyes at me. “And if so, why exactly were you holding his hand earlier?” Conversations like this usually ended in pitchforks and torches, so I held my hands out in what I hoped was an “everyone just calm the heck down” gesture. But then Jenna spoke up. “Sophie doesn’t know anything,” she said, nudging my behind her. That might’ve been more effective if Jenna weren’t so short. “And whatever reason we’re here, the Council had nothing to do with it.” Jenna didn’t add that that was because the entire Council, with the exception of Lara Casnoff and my dad, was dead. “She’s just freaked out as the rest of us, so back. Off.” From the expressions on the other kids’ faces, I guessed Jenna had bared her fangs, and maybe even given a flash of red eyes. “What’s going on here?” a familiar voice brayed. Great. Like this night didn’t suck out loud enough already. The Vandy-who had been a cross between school matron and prison guard at Hex Hall-shoved her way through the crowd, breathing hard. Her purple tattoos, marks of the Removal, were nearly black against her red face. “Downstairs, now!” As the group began moving again, she glared at Jenna and me. “Show your fangs again, Miss Talbot, and I’ll wear them as earrings. Is that understood?” Jenna may have muttered, “Yes, ma’am,” but her tone said something totally different. We jogged down the stairs to join the rest of the students lining up to go into the ballroom. “At least one thing at Hex Hall hasn’t changed,” Jenna said. “Yeah, apparently the Vandy’s powers of bitchery are a constant. I find that comforting.” Less comforting was the creeptasticness of the school at night. During the day, it had just been depressing. Now that it was dark, it was full-on sinister. The old-fashioned gas lamps on the walls had once burned with a cozy, golden light. Now, a noxious green glow sputtered inside the milky glass, throwing crazy shadows all over the place.

Violent Storm" Those who have chosen to pass the night Entertaining friends And intimate ideas in the bright, Commodious rooms of dreams Will not feel the slightest tremor Or be wakened by what seems Only a quirk in the dry run Of conventional weather. For them, The long night sweeping over these trees And houses will have been no more than one In a series whose end Only the nervous or morbid consider. But for us, the wide-awake, who tend To believe the worst is always waiting Around the next corner or hiding in the dry, Unsteady branch of a sick tree, debating Whether or not to fell the passerby, It has a sinister air. How we wish we were sunning ourselves In a world of familiar views And fixed conditions, confined By what we know, and able to refuse Entry to the unaccounted for. For now, Deeper and darker than ever, the night unveils Its dubious plans, and the rain Beats down in gales Against the roof. We sit behind Closed windows, bolted doors, Unsure and ill at ease While the loose, untidy wind, Making an almost human sound, pours Through the open chambers of the trees. We cannot take ourselves or what belongs To us for granted. No longer the exclusive, Last resorts in which we could unwind, Lounging in easy chairs, Recalling the various wrongs We had been done or spared, our rooms Seem suddenly mixed up in our affairs. We do not feel protected By the walls, nor can we hide Before the duplicating presence Of their mirrors, pretending we are the ones who stare From the other side, collected In the glassy air. A cold we never knew invades our bones. We shake as though the storm were going to hurl us down Against the flat stones Of our lives. All other nights Seem pale compared to this, and the brilliant rise Of morning after morning seems unthinkable. Already now the lights That shared our wakefulness are dimming And the dark brushes against our eyes.

They would, of course, use their new power only for the good. But power is insidious. It does not do what you want or expect, or stay only where it has been applied. It seeps into dark cracks and corners. It is pursued by those who should not have it; it turns even those who appear able to wield it for the good into something more sinister than they were before.

Craftmasonry itself came to an abrupt end in the beginning of the eighteenth century to be replaced by Freemasonry which tragically developed both an enlightened and a sinister stream. The enlightened stream inspired the writing of the American Constitution while the black adepts misused their occult knowledge for financial and political gain.

production, Hugo Marshall did not look up from the books. Instead he waited silently, listening to boots marking a path upon the carpet. He wasn’t a servant; he refused to be treated as one. After a moment, his patience was rewarded. “Fix it, please,” the Duke of Clermont muttered. Hugo raised his head. An untutored observer would focus on the Duke of Clermont, apparently in full command, resplendent in a waistcoat so

Wilson’s weakness was to be over-literal, or to assume that his opponents were. One treatise, The Uttermost Pit, demonstrated with considerable geological learning that there could not be space within the mineral bowels of the Earth for any chambers big enough to contain all the damned souls of the ages. A third, Going to Gehenna, purported to show that the biblical references to the infernal domain were in point of fact to real places of sinister repute, and not to anywhere metaphysical. Wilson lost no opportunity to argue, with any evidence he found to hand, that there could not be any hell or Hades, and so none should fear them.

Dewey was a stern critic of capitalism and private property rights, which he condemned as a relic of early American principles reinforced in current times by the political party structure. On March 18, 1931, in The New Republic, Dewey wrote: “I do not mean that the whole alliance of the [political] parties with organized business is consciously sinister and corrupt, though it is easily demonstrable that this is somewhat true. I mean rather that both old parties represent that stage of American life when the American people as a whole felt that society was to advance by means of industrial inventions and their application; by the development of manufacturing, of railways and commerce. It was that stage of American life when all but a few took for granted the natural control of industry and trade by the profit motive and the necessity of accumulating money capital. This idea may once have played a part in the development of the country. It has now ceased to be anything but an obstruction. . . .”47

... It strikes me that if I'm in such a febrile and imaginative mood I ought to take advantage of it with some serious writing exercises or at least a few ideas for stories, if only to demonstrate that I'm not treating this here commonplace book solely as a journal to record my most recent attacks of jitters! Maybe I should roll my sleeves up and attempt as least an opening practice paragraph or two of this confounded novel I'm pretending to be writing. Let's see how it looks. Marblehead: An American Undertow By Robert D. Black Iron green, the grand machinery of the Atlantic grates foam gears against New England with the rhythmic thunder of industrial percussion. A fine dust of other lands and foreign histories is carried in suspension on its lurching, slopping mechanism: shards of bright green glass from Ireland scoured blunt and opaque by brine, or sodden splinters of armada out of Spain. The debris of an older world, a driftwood of ideas and people often changed beyond all recognition by their passage, clatters on the tideline pebbles to deposit unintelligible grudges, madnesses and visions in a rank high-water mark, a silt of fetid dreams that further decompose amid the stranded kelp or bladder-wrack and pose risk of infection. Puritans escaping England's murderous civil war cast broad-brimmed shadows onto rocks where centuries of moss obscured the primitive horned figures etched by vanished tribes, and after them came the displaced political idealists of many nations, the religious outcasts, cults and criminals, to cling with grim determination to a damp and verdant landscape until crushed by drink or the insufferable weight of their accumulated expectations. Royalist cavaliers that fled from Cromwell's savage interregnum and then, where their puritanical opponents settled the green territories to the east, elected instead to establish themselves deep in a more temperate South, bestowing their equestrian concerns, their courtly mannerisms and their hairstyles upon an adopted homeland. Heretics and conjurors who sought new climes past the long shadow of the stake; transported killers and procurers with their slates wiped clean in pastures where nobody knew them; sour-faced visionaries clutching Bunyan's chapbook to their bosoms as a newer and more speculative bible, come to these shores searching for a literal New Jerusalem and finding only different wilderness in which to lose themselves and different game or adversaries for the killing. All of these and more, bearing concealed agendas and a hundred diverse afterlives, crashed as a human surf of Plymouth Rock to fling their mortal spray across the unsuspecting country, individuals incendiary in the having lost their ancestral homelands they were without further longings to relinquish. Their remains, ancient and sinister, impregnate and inform the factory-whistle furrows of oblivious America.

... It strikes me that if I'm in such a febrile and imaginative mood I ought to take advantage of it with some serious writing exercises or at least a few ideas for stories, if only to demonstrate that I'm not treating this here commonplace book solely as a journal to record my most recent attacks of jitters! Maybe I should roll my sleeves up and attempt as least an opening practice paragraph or two of this confounded novel I'm pretending to be writing. Let's see how it looks. Marblehead: An American Undertow By Robert D. Black Iron green, the grand machinery of the Atlantic grates foam gears against New England with the rhythmic thunder of industrial percussion. A fine dust of other lands and foreign histories is carried in suspension on its lurching, slopping mechanism: shards of bright green glass from Ireland scoured blunt and opaque by brine, or sodden splinters of armada out of Spain. The debris of an older world, a driftwood of ideas and people often changed beyond all recognition by their passage, clatters on the tideline pebbles to deposit unintelligible grudges, madnesses and visions in a rank high-water mark, a silt of fetid dreams that further decompose amid the stranded kelp or bladder-wrack and pose risk of infection. Puritans escaping England's murderous civil war cast broad-brimmed shadows onto rocks where centuries of moss obscured the primitive horned figures etched by vanished tribes, and after them came the displaced political idealists of many nations, the religious outcasts, cults and criminals, to cling with grim determination to a damp and verdant landscape until crushed by drink or the insufferable weight of their accumulated expectations. Royalist cavaliers that fled from Cromwell's savage interregnum and then, where their puritanical opponents settled the green territories to the east, elected instead to establish themselves deep in a more temperate South, bestowing their equestrian concerns, their courtly mannerisms and their hairstyles upon an adopted homeland. Heretics and conjurors who sought new climes past the long shadow of the stake; transported killers and procurers with their slates wiped clean in pastures where nobody knew them; sour-faced visionaries clutching Bunyan's chapbook to their bosoms as a newer and more speculative bible, come to these shores searching for a literal New Jerusalem and finding only different wilderness in which to lose themselves and different game or adversaries for the killing. All of these and more, bearing concealed agendas and a hundred diverse afterlives, crashed as a human surf on Plymouth Rock to fling their mortal spray across the unsuspecting country, individuals incendiary in that having lost their ancestral homelands they were without further longings to relinquish. Their remains, ancient and sinister, impregnate and inform the factory-whistle furrows of oblivious America.

shoulder. “If your young man is innocent he’ll be all right. British justice is deservedly respected all the world over.” “But the p’lice, they’re something chronic; they’ll worm anything out of you,” blubbered Nellie. “Don’t get any wrong ideas about our excellent police force into your head,” Mr. Slocomb admonished her. “They are the friends of the innocent. Of course this is very unfortunate for your young man, but surely——” “There ’e is, my poor Bob, in a nasty cell! Oh, sir, d’you think they’ll let me see ’im?” “Well, really——” began Mr. Slocomb; but the conversation was interrupted by a strident call. “Nellie! Nellie! What are you about? Pull yourself together, girl! We have to dine even if...” Mrs. Bliss, the proprietress of the Frampton, flowingly clothed in black satin, paused in the doorway. “Dear me, Mr. Slocomb; you must be wondering what’s come to me, shouting all over the house like this! But really, my poor nerves are so jangled I hardly know where I am! To think of dear Miss Pongleton, always so particular, poor soul, lying there on the stairs—dear, dear, dear!” Nellie had slipped past Mrs. Bliss and scuttled back to the kitchen. Mr. Slocomb noticed that Mrs. Bliss’s black satin was unrelieved by the usual loops of gold chain and pearls, and concluded that this restraint was in token of respect to the deceased. “Yes, indeed, Mrs. Bliss, you must be distraught. Indeed a terrible affair! And this poor girl is in great distress about young Bob Thurlow, but I would advise you to keep her mind on her work, Mrs. Bliss; work is a wonderful balm for harassed nerves. A dreadful business! I only know, of course, the sparse details which I have just read in the evening Press.” “You’ve heard nothing more, Mr. Slocomb? Nellie’s Bob is a good-for-nothing, we all know”—Mrs. Bliss’s tone held sinister meaning—“but I’m sure none of us thought him capable of this!” “We must not think him so now, Mrs. Bliss, until—and unless—we are reluctantly compelled to do so,” Mr. Slocomb told her in his most pompous manner. “And Bob was always so good to poor Miss Pongleton’s Tuppy. The little creature is very restless; mark my words, he’s beginning to pine! Now I wonder, Mr. Slocomb, what I ought to do with him? What would you advise? Perhaps poor Miss Pongleton’s nephew, young Mr. Basil, would take him—though in lodgings, of course, I hardly know. There’s many a landlady would think a dog nothing but a nuisance, and little return for it, but of course what I have done for the poor dear lady I did gladly——” “Indeed, Mrs. Bliss, we have always counted you as one of Tuppy’s best friends. And as you say, Bob Thurlow was good to him, too; he took him for walks, I believe?” “He always seemed so fond of the poor little fellow; who could believe ... Well! well! And they say dogs know! What was that saying Mr. Blend was so fond of at one time—before your day, I daresay it would be: True humanity shows itself first in kindness to dumb animals. Out of one of his scrap-books. Well, the truest sayings sometimes go astray! But I must see after that girl; and cook’s not much better, she’s so flustered she’s making Nellie ten times worse. She can’t keep her tongue still a moment!” Mrs. Bliss bustled away, and Mr. Slocomb, apparently rather exasperated by her chatter, made his escape as soon as she had removed herself from the doorway. As Mrs. Bliss returned to the kitchen she thought: “Well, I’m glad he’s here; that’s some comfort; always so helpful—but goodness knows what the dinner will be like!” CHAPTER TWO THE FRUMPS DINNER at the Frampton that evening was eaten to the accompaniment of livelier conversation than usual, and now and again from one of the little tables an excited voice would rise to a pitch that dominated the surrounding talk until the owner of the voice, realizing her unseemly assertiveness on this solemn evening, would fall into lowered tones or awkward silence. The boarders discussed the murder callously. One’s

Sex is the glue of relationships, Caitlin, and it's what life is all about. It's the opposite of death, of giving up, of getting swamped by... What's out there. See it as symbolic.

It was not till he was close upon us that I saw the man. He was little and elderly, with bowed shoulders and poorly dressed. I doubt whether I would have noticed him at all if it had not been for the sinister distinguishing mark on his left breast, the yellow star with Juif printed across it…. I stopped dead in my tracks, stunned. He passed us by without looking at us, but it was a full minute before I recovered the use of my legs. In all my life I have never felt so deeply humiliated.

A purely sinister smirk shapes his upper lip and I swear his eyes turn black.

We face today an especially sinister emergence, not just more police violence, mass incarceration, and a death penalty, but the rise of the U.S. “carceral” or “penal state.” Here

grotesque creature arrived, scuttling across the ceiling, its features sharp among the shadow it was clearly made of. It was as big as a Dragon Shifter, its hulking form falling from the ceiling and landing with a thump at Lavinia’s side. I fought the urge to recoil as the shadows sank into the thing’s skin, a man slowly appearing from the darkness, his face a picture of handsome cruelty. A demonic smile curved his lips and a sinister emptiness stirred in his gaze. He was naked, his powerful body marked with scars of shadow which seemed to pulse like living veins against his tanned skin. “Hello, Father,” he purred, his voice a wicked seduction.

When Congress passed Obamacare it attempted by statute to confer fundamental legislative powers on the executive branch, and even sought to prohibit future Congresses from altering its unconstitutional act. Specifically, Congress created the fifteen-member Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), which ostensibly is responsible for controlling Medicare costs. The board submits a proposal to Congress, which automatically becomes law, and the Department of Health and Human Services must implement it, unless the proposal is affirmatively blocked by Congress and the president. Even then, it can be stopped only if the elected branches agree on a substitute. Obamacare also attempts to prohibit citizens from challenging the board’s decisions in court. Moreover, Obamacare seeks to tie the hands of future Congresses by forbidding Congress from dissolving the board outside of a seven-month period in 2017, and only by a supermajority three-fifths vote of both houses. If Congress does not act in that time frame, Congress is prohibited from even altering a board proposal.42 Apart from all the rest, the abuse of power by one Congress and president in attempting to reorganize the federal government and redraft fundamentally the Constitution outside of the amendment processes, with the intention of binding all future Congresses in perpetuity and leaving citizens with no political or legal recourse, is simply sinister. But it underscores the Statists’ contempt for the Constitution and self-government.

One rule I hope I always manage to stick to is this: never deal out “like for like.” Though the temptation will at times be intense, it will only be returned with even greater force. Hatred only breeds more hatred. Bless don’t curse. Curses contain a sinister sticky substance that stains the curser as much as the one being cursed. Be honest. Yes, say if something has hurt you, but do not retaliate with vengefulness. Let love be the inner guide. Fear is the poison of the soul. It manifests in violence, either literal violence or violent thoughts, and both can kill.

Richard paused. He drew his hand across his eyes, shuddering. “Milward saw the scratch. He cried out that the cards were marked! Suddenly everyone seemed to be gathered about our table—all talking! Jack had his hand on my shoulder; he and Dare were running through the pack. But all the while I could look at no one but Tracy—Andover. He seemed so sinister, so threatening, in those black clothes of his.

Nothing sinister marked his features, but then again monsters generally moved through the world unobtrusively, camouflaged by banality until their deeds manifested in the form of dead bodies or broken souls.

In one of his first exploits, he called into Nokia from his own mobile phone and pretended to be a senior executive at the company. By studying the organizational chart and learning some detailed facts about the company, he was able to persuade someone in the IT department of his falsified identity. Mitnick claimed that he lost his copy of Nokia’s top mobile phone’s source code and needed it sent right away or he would be in big trouble. With this ruse, he was able to trick his mark into action. The loyal and unsuspecting employee complied, and within 15 minutes, Mitnick had the most important and confidential intellectual property of a multinational conglomerate.

Their society was deeply marked by the years under corrupt Ottoman rule. Rumanians had a saying: “The fish grows rotten from the head.” In Rumania almost everything was for sale: offices, licenses, passports. Indeed, a foreign journalist who once tried to change money legally instead of on the black market was thrown into jail by police who thought he must be involved in a particularly clever swindle. Every government contract produced its share of graft. Although Rumania was a wealthy country, rich in farmland and, by 1918, with a flourishing oil industry, it lacked roads, bridges and railways because the money allocated by government had been siphoned off into the hands of families such as Brătianu’s own. Rumanians tended to see intrigues everywhere. In Paris they hinted darkly that the Supreme Council had fallen under the sway of Bolshevism or, alternatively, that it had been bribed by sinister capitalist forces.280

People believed that they were haunted by bad memories, but that wasn’t the truth. The most sinister hauntings were from unrealized futures.

Considering how shaky was his moral outlook and how marked his tendency to weave low plots at the drop of a hat, you would have expected Bingley's headquarters to have been one of those sinister underground dens lit by stumps of candles stuck in the mouths of empty beer bottles such as abound, I believe, in places like Whitechapel and Limehouse. But no. Number 5 Ormond Crescent turned out to be quite an expensive-looking joint with a nice little bit of garden in front of it well supplied with geraniums, bird baths and terracotta gnomes, the sort of establishment that might have belonged to a blameless retired Colonel or a saintly stockbroker. Evidently his late uncle hadn't been just an ordinary small town grocer, weighing out potted meats and raisins to a public that had to watch the pennies, but something on a much more impressive scale. I learned later that he had owned a chain of shops, one of them as far afield as Birmingham, and why the ass had gone and left his money to a chap like Bingley is more than I can tell you, though the probability is that Bingley, before bumping him off with some little-known Asiatic poison, had taken the precaution of forging the will.

If this statement of intent weren’t incriminating enough, the Panel laid out yet more evidence of the sinister and nefarious plot: “The number of journalists embarked on the ships gives further power to the conclusion that the flotilla’s primary purpose was to generate publicity.”75 It must be a first, and surely marks a nadir, in the annals of the United Nations that a report bearing its imprimatur vilified the victims of a murderous assault because they sought to cast light on an ongoing crime against humanity.76