Speaker Johnson Quotes

Criticize me if you can, but that won't stop me from saying what i like, my mouth is mine, and not yours.

What was it about English speakers that allowed them to talk into transmitters as if the sky were a diary?

After a noticeable silence, he'd recently published a book of technically baffling poems, with line breaks so arbitrary and frequent as to be useless, arrhythmic. On the page they look like some of Charles Bukowski's skinny, chatty, muttering-stuttering antiverses. Impossibly, Mark's words make music, the faraway strains of an irresistible jazz. It's plain to any reader, within a few lines—well, go read the poems and see, Marcus Ahearn traffics with the ineffable. He makes the mind of the speaker present, in that here-and-now where the reader actually reads—that place. Such a rare thing. Samuel Beckett. Jean Follain, Ionesco—the composer Billy Strayhorn. Mark calls his process "psychic improvisation" and referred me to the painter Paul Klee; the term was Klee's. "You just get out a pen and a notebook and let your mind go long," he told me.

Let Observation with extensive View, Survey Mankind, from China to Peru; Remark each anxious Toil, each eager strife, And watch the busy Scenes of crowded Life; Then say how Hope and Fear, Desire and Hate, O'erspread with Snares the clouded Maze of Fate, Where wav'ring Man, betray'd by vent'rous Pride, To tread the dreary Paths without a Guide; As treach'rous Phantoms in the Mist delude, Shuns fancied Ills, or chases airy Good. How rarely Reason guides the stubborn Choice, Rules the bold Hand, or prompts the suppliant Voice, How Nations sink, by darling Schemes oppress'd, When Vengeance listens to the Fool's Request. Fate wings with ev'ry Wish th' afflictive Dart, Each Gift of Nature, each Grace of Art, With fatal Heat impetuous Courage glows, With fatal Sweetness Elocution flows, Impeachment stops the Speaker's pow'rful Breath, And restless Fire precipitates on Death.

The modern church by and large is focused on self. We see a proliferation of self-help, self-improvement, and generally self-centered books lining the shelves of Christian book stores, and climbing to the top of best-seller lists. Many Pastors have become little more than “life coaches” and motivational speakers. We see men of God who at one time thundered out calls to repentance and holy living, now proclaiming that their people have a “champion” inside them. We see shepherds who should be feeding the sheep, now having to entertain the goats. There has been without a doubt, a shift from the Church at Philadelphia to the Church at Laodicea.

Dangers of Meditation In the chapter on Prayer vs.  Meditation, I told you of my experiences with the Eckankar Mystics, and how everyone there knew of the dangers of meditation.   It has been reported that those who practice Contemplative Prayer often experience the same serious problems as the Hindus when practicing the serpent meditation commonly referred to as Kundalini Meditation.   Emergent Church speaker, Richard Foster, warns other emergents of the same dangers inherent with contemplative prayer in his book.   “I want to give you a word of precaution. In the silent contemplation of God we are entering deeply into the spiritual realm… sometimes it is not the realm of God [emphasis mine] even though it is supernatural… there are various orders of spiritual beings, and some of them are definitely not in cooperation with God and His way! …A prayer of protection should be said beforehand, something to the effect of ‘all dark and evil spirits must now leave’” Richard Foster, Prayer: Finding the Hearts True Home, p. 157

Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune. —Jim Rohn, entrepreneur, author, motivational speaker

Elizabeth Oates wife, mom of five (including three biological and two adopted through foster care), author, blogger, speaker

Without knowing they were infected, he and Johnson attended the last session of the Commons. As they were leaving the chamber, they were seen in a huddle of people who had gathered around the Speaker’s chair with just inches between them. It was the perfect example of why social distancing was important because they could easily have spread the virus to their colleagues. By failing to follow the very rules they had so stridently instructed others to adhere to, they were setting a bad example. And they were also endangering lives.

For pronunciation the best general rule is, to consider those as the most elegant speakers who deviate least from the written words.

He often chooses to lead us deeper into this knowledge by putting His favor on individuals that we would never have thought of as ideal candidates. It’s our job to learn that this is one of His ways. We need to humble ourselves and learn to recognize the favor of God wherever it rests. As a pastor I sometimes invite speakers who come in a rough package but carry a great anointing. I do this to train my congregation to recognize the anointing and to celebrate who people are, not who they aren’t. People want to be doctrinally safe, not relationally safe.

Oh fucking shit! Yeaaah!!!” someone screams to the right of me. My thoughts exactly. Jungle makes me feel like that, it contains ecstatic patterns, vortexes and sound-whorls. Being this close to the speakers gives me the sensation of being tossed around by a sonic tornado. The decibels are giving the mathematic and relentless jungle music substance, flesh. It is here to deliver us.

Wambach's concerns raised questions about the impact that deaf signers could have on Project Nim, and perhaps inadvertently about how Terrace's study might compare with the work done by the Gardners in Nevada, who had expressly designed their experiments to include deaf signers. Simply having Falitz sign at the weekly meetings and interpret for Wambach in the discussions brought a new dimension to their work. Wambach was not particularly critical of Terrace, who was older and far more established than she, but she wanted the staff to have a better understanding of the world of deaf speakers—those who used ASL because they needed a language. Thanks to Wambach, the chimp project began attracting deaf volunteers (including one who is remembered for having love and hate tattooed on his knuckles), who formed a small subculture within Terrace's staff. In an attempt to bridge these two worlds, one night the deaf volunteers arranged to plug up the ears of the hearing staff and take them out to a restaurant for dinner. They were instructed to communicate exclusively in ASL from the moment the plugs were placed in their ears on the way to the restaurant, during the meal, and all the way back to Delafield. The hearing group found the experience to be a terrible struggle. But what made an indelible impression on Johnson was the way that everybody in the restaurant spoke really slowly and loudly to them, treating them as if they were all mentally incapacitated.

The tentacles of the Southern Baptist Convention reach long. Its influence pervades not only all of evangelicalism but also school boards, city councils, and state houses across the country. As I was finalizing this manuscript, the US House of Representatives elected a Southern Baptist as speaker. Mike Johnson, widely described as an election denier and Christian nationalist, is now second in line to the presidency. So, no one should underestimate the impact of this faith group’s theologies and ideologies.

The lies are of a scale and of a nature that in modern political life I think you can only compare to Donald Trump. I don't think anybody has lied or can lie as casually and as cooly and as completely as Boris Johnson does - accept Boris Johnson. We have learned over the last few weeks that his closest colleagues thought he was diabolical. The cabinet secretary that Boris Johnson appointed because he would prove to be, or he was believed to be, a soft touch has described Boris Johnson as being utterly unfit for the job. The advisor that he brought in as a sort of mastermind - having overseen Brexit - Dominick Cummings has described Johnson in terms that you would reserve for your worst enemies. These are the people working closest by him. The only person who's had anything vaguely warm to say about him is Matt Hancock and let me tell you why. They've shaken hands on it. I'd bet my house on some sort of gentleman's... let's rephrase that... I'd bet my house on some sort of charlatan’s agreement behind the scenes that they won't slag each other off because everybody else is telling the truth about them - about Johnson and about Hancock. Hancock's uselessness facilitated and enabled by Johnson's uselessness, by Johnson's moral corruption effectively. And now the lies begin. 5,000 WhatsApp messages. ‘No idea. No, no, no, no idea. Don't know. Don't know technical people. Uh... factory reset. Don't know. Bleep, bleep.’ And then the classic: the flooding of the Zone. With so much manure that it's hard to know where to start. ‘We may have made mistakes’ is one of the latest statements to come out. Turns up 3 hours early so that he doesn't have to walk the gamut of people congregating to remember their lost loved ones and to share their feelings with the man that they consider to be partly responsible for their death. Absolutely extraordinary scenes, truly extraordinary scenes. How does he get away with it? Hugo Keith is a much tougher inquisitor than Lindsay flipping Hoyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons. He's a much tougher inquisitor than any of the interviewers that Boris Johnson deigns to have his toes tickled by on a regular basis. He's a much tougher interviewer or scrutineer than the newspaper editors who have given him half a million pounds a year to write columns or already published articles about why he's the real victim in this story. Philip Johnston in the Daily Telegraph today writing an article before Boris Johnson has given a single syllable of evidence, claiming that Boris Johnson is the real victim of this. I'd love him to go and read that out to the Covid families assembled outside the inquiry. And remember it was Daily Telegraph columnists and former editors that convened at the Club with Jacob Rees-Mogg and others to launch the Save Owen Paterson Society after another one of these charlatans was found to have breached parliamentary standards. Their response of course was not to advise their ally to accept the punishment that was coming his way but to attempt to get him off the hook and rip up the rule book under which he'd been found to be guilty.

Writing was what saved the stutterer. It saved him the trouble of speaking.

Amplification created an entirely new kind of political event: mass rallies oriented around individual speakers.

I am vice president,” wrote John Adams, the first to inhabit the office. “In this I am nothing. But I may be everything.” In January 1961, as Lyndon Johnson left the Senate for the vice presidency, his future held the dim but tantalizing promise of the presidency, of “everything.” But in the meantime LBJ would not resign himself to nothingness. It was not his nature. Throughout his life Johnson had assumed positions with no inherent power base and infused them with irrepressible energy, drive, and ambition: as assistant to President Cecil E. Evans of Southwest Texas State Teachers’ College, as speaker of the “Little Congress” of staff members in the 1940s, and as party whip and leader in the 1950s, power seemed to flow to him and issue from him naturally. In Johnson’s political ascent, power was the constant; public offices were quantities to be stretched, exploited for public and personal gain, and, ultimately, discarded along the climb. If this was arrogance, it was well grounded. Lyndon Johnson was never nothing; and if the vice presidency meant little today, that could not be the case for long. The press accepted Johnson’s bold claim with little skepticism. On the eve of the inauguration, U.S. News & World Report exclaimed that “the vice presidency is to become a center of activity and power unseen in the past.” The magazine foresaw “important assignments” for LBJ in foreign affairs, especially in the explosive Cuban situation. Undoubtedly, President Kennedy would rely heavily upon the negotiating skills of his brilliant second, Lyndon Johnson, “a new kind of vice president.” And LBJ, surely, would demand no less. “The restless and able Mr. Johnson is obviously unwilling to become a ceremonial nonentity,” Tom Wicker rightly predicted in the New York Times. Johnson’s former Senate colleagues agreed, assuring reporters that LBJ “will be very important in the new Administration—and much utilized.” Headlines heralded Washington’s new “Number 2 Man.

APORIA  (APO'RIA) n.s. [a figure in rhetorick, by which the speaker shews, that he doubts where to begin for the multitude of matter, or what to say in some strange and ambiguous thing; and doth, as it were, argue the case with himself. Thus Cicero says, Whether he took them from his fellows more impudently, gave them to a harlot more lasciviously, removed them from the Roman people more wickedly, or altered them more presumptuously, I cannot well declare. Smith’s Rhetorick.

APOSIOPESIS  (APOSIOPE'SIS)   n.s.[   from    after, and rixp  to be silent.] A form of speech, by which the speaker, through some affection, as sorrow, bashfulness, fear, anger, or vehemency, breaks off his speech before it be all ended. A figure, when, speaking of a thing, we yet seem to conceal it, though indeed we aggravate it; or when the course of the sentence begun is so stayed, as thereby some part of the sentence not being uttered, may be understood; as, I might say much more, but modesty commands silence.Smith’sRhetorick.

No southerner had been elected President for more than a century, and it was a bitter article of faith among southern politicians that no southerner would be elected President in any foreseeable future; when members of the House of Representatives gave their Speaker, Sam Rayburn, ruler of the House for more than two decades, a limousine as a present, attached to the back of the front seat was a plaque that read 'To Our Beloved Sam Rayburn - Who Would Have Been President If He Had Come From Any Place but the South.

To be frank, I think the elegant, long sentence is a thing of beauty, a self-contained entity worthy of study all by itself. Consider this sentence by Dylan Thomas from Quite Early One Morning: I was born in a large Welsh town at the beginning of the Great War—an ugly, lovely town (or so it was and is to me), crawling, sprawling by a long and splendid curving shore where truant boys and sandfield boys and old men from nowhere, beachcombed, idled and paddled, watched the dock-bound ships or the ships streaming away into wonder and India, magic and China, countries bright with oranges and loud with lions; threw stones into the sea for the barking outcast dogs; made castles and forts and harbours and race tracks in the sand; and on Saturday afternoons listened to the brass band, watched the Punch and Judy, or hung about on the fringes of the crowd to hear the fierce religious speakers who shouted at the sea, as though it were wicked and wrong to roll in and out like that, white-horsed and full of fishes.

—Mario Murillo, International Speaker and Author of Critical Mass and Vessels of Fire and Glory. To follow and subscribe to Mario’s ministry, please visit MarioMurillo.org.