Spencer James Quotes

In many ways Churchill remained a nineteenth-century man, and by no means a common man. He fit the mold of what Henry James called in English Hours “persons for whom the private machinery of ease has been made to work with extraordinary smoothness.

In many ways Churchill remained a nineteenth-century man, and by no means a common man. He fit the mold of what Henry James called in English Hours “persons for whom the private machinery of ease has been made to work with extraordinary smoothness.

Between twenty and thirty I gradually became more and more agnostic and irreligious, yet I cannot say that I ever lost that 'indefinite consciousness' which Herbert Spencer describes so well, of an Absolute Reality behind phenomena.

Spencer Tracy, when asked for advice on acting, said, “Know your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.” James Cagney said, “Walk in, plant your feet, look the other fellow in the eye and…tell the truth.” With all due respect to both of these giant talents, I would have to say there’s something more. The true creation of a being, a character other than one’s self, for me is comparable to a mystical or spiritual experience. To stand in another person’s shoes. To see as he sees, to hear as he hears. To know what he knows, and to do all this with a sense of control, a mastering of the dramatic moment, there must be more than a “natural talent” at work.

Because you see me. And I desperately need someone who will see the man behind my title.

Damnation. Damnable, damned, damningly damnation.

Every one asks me what I ‘think’ of everything,” said Spencer Brydon; “and I make answer as I can—begging or dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn’t matter to any of them really,” he went on, “for, even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver way so silly a demand on so big a subject, my ‘thoughts’ would still be almost altogether about something that concerns only myself.

This is not the way this is supposed to work, you know. Once these stays come off, they’re supposed to bloody remain off for at least a half hour, do you understand me? We should make this a rule from now on.

Jay would return to New York one day. When he did, he would make something of himself--not by way of luck or happenstance, but by means of his own industry. One day he would make New York his own. This indisputabe fact was his inescapable destiny. Only, he wasn't quite ready for that--not yet.

Every experience has its own horizon; every experience has its core of actual and determinate cognition, its own content of immediate determinations which give themselves; but beyond this core of determinate quiddity, of the truly given as "itself here," it has its own horizon. This implies that every experience refers to the possibility . . . of obtaining, little by little as experience continues, new determinations of the same thing . . . And this horizon in its indeterminateness is copresent from the beginning as a realm (Spielraum) of possibilities, as the prescription of the path to a more precise determination, in which only experience itself decides in favor of the determinate possibility it realizes as opposed to others. [Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. James Spencer Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 32.]

When 'consciousness' is unawares transferred from great things to small' - which Spencer regarded as the prime cause of laughter-the result will be either a comic or an aesthetic experience, depending on whether the person's emotions are of the type capable of participating in the transfer or not. The artist, reversing the parodist's technique, walks on a tightrope, as it were, along the line where the exalted and the trivial planes meet; he 'sees with equal eye, as God of all, / A hero perish or a sparrow fall'. The scientist's attitude is basically similar in situations where he suddenly discovers the connection between a banal event and a general law of nature - Newton's apple or the boiling kettle of James Watt.

[James M. Buchanan] directed hostility toward college students, public employees, recipients of any kind of government assistance, and liberal intellectuals. His intellectual lineage went back to such bitter establishment opponents of Populism as the social Darwinists Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. The battle between "the oppressed and their oppressors," as one People's Party publication had termed it in 1892, was redefined in his milieu: "the working masses who produce" became businessmen, and "the favored parasites who prey and fatten on the toil of others" became those who gained anything from government without paying proportional income taxes. "The mighty struggle" became one to hamstring the people who refused to stop making claims on government.

A fierce battle was taking place at Tobruk, and nothing thrilled him more than spirited warfare and the prospect of military glory. He stayed up until three-thirty, in high spirits, “laughing, chaffing and alternating business with conversation,” wrote Colville. One by one his official guests, including Anthony Eden, gave up and went to bed. Churchill, however, continued to hold forth, his audience reduced to only Colville and Mary’s potential suitor, Eric Duncannon. Mary by this point had retired to the Prison Room, aware that the next day held the potential to change her life forever. — IN BERLIN, MEANWHILE, HITLER and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels joked about a newly published English biography of Churchill that revealed many of his idiosyncrasies, including his penchant for wearing pink silk underwear, working in the bathtub, and drinking throughout the day. “He dictates messages in the bath or in his underpants; a startling image which the Führer finds hugely amusing,” Goebbels wrote in his diary on Saturday. “He sees the English Empire as slowly disintegrating. Not much will be salvageable.” — ON SUNDAY MORNING, a low-grade anxiety colored the Cromwellian reaches of Chequers. Today, it seemed, would be the day Eric Duncannon proposed to Mary, and no one other than Mary was happy about it. Even she, however, was not wholly at ease with the idea. She was eighteen years old and had never had a romantic relationship, let alone been seriously courted. The prospect of betrothal left her feeling emotionally roiled, though it did add a certain piquancy to the day. New guests arrived: Sarah Churchill, the Prof, and Churchill’s twenty-year-old niece, Clarissa Spencer-Churchill—“looking quite beautiful,” Colville noted. She was accompanied by Captain Alan Hillgarth, a raffishly handsome novelist and self-styled adventurer now serving as naval attaché in Madrid, where he ran intelligence operations; some of these were engineered with the help of a lieutenant on his staff, Ian Fleming, who later credited Captain Hillgarth as being one of the inspirations for James Bond. “It was obvious,” Colville wrote, “that Eric was expected to make advances to Mary and that the prospect was viewed with nervous pleasure by Mary, with approbation by Moyra, with dislike by Mrs. C. and with amusement by Clarissa.” Churchill expressed little interest. After lunch, Mary and the others walked into the rose garden, while Colville showed Churchill telegrams about the situation in Iraq. The day was sunny and warm, a nice change from the recent stretch of cold. Soon, to Colville’s mystification, Eric and Clarissa set off on a long walk over the grounds by themselves, leaving Mary behind. “His motives,” Colville wrote, “were either Clarissa’s attraction, which she did not attempt to keep in the background, or else the belief that it was good policy to arouse Mary’s jealousy.” After the walk, and after Clarissa and Captain Hillgarth had left, Eric took a nap, with the apparent intention (as Colville

Waterman describes one attack in vivid, angry detail: A party of whites, in April 1871, pursued a band of Indians with dogs. They located them in a cave across a narrow gulch, and shot a number of them, finally entering the cave itself. Here they found a lot of dried meat, and some small children. The hero of the occasion, being a humane man, a person of fine sensibilities and delicacy of feeling, could not bear to kill these babies - at any rate, not with the heavy 56-calibre Spencer rifle he was carrying. ‘It tore them up too bad.’ So he shot them with his 38-calibre Smith and Wesson revolver. The

an LDS edition of the King James Bible was published in 1979,

The death provoked a vast outpouring of grief, and Senator George Spencer of Alabama said, “I have never known a man more universally mourned.” “Poor Rawlins has gone to a happier office!” sighed Adolph Borie. “A noble fellow, truly, he was so pure zealous and earnest.” On the day of the funeral, the route from the War Department to the Congressional Cemetery was crowded with mourners tipping their hats or bowing in homage as the cortege rolled by. It was a remarkable tribute to a man never elected to office who had thrived in Grant’s shadow. No organization chart could evoke the influence he had wielded as Grant’s trusted counselor. A month later, James Wilson sent an appreciation of him to Orville Babcock: The death of Rawlins is more deeply regretted by the thinking and knowing men of the country than it otherwise would have been, on account of the fact that it had come to be recognized by them, that he was the President’s best friend & most useful counsellor when engaged in renouncing rascality, which the President’s unsuspicious nature has not dreamed of being near. You and I know how necessary, the bold, uncompromising, & honest character of our dead friend, was to our living one—and how impossible it is for any stranger to exercise as good an influence over him, as one who has known him from the time of his obscurity till the day he became the foremost man of the nation. The long and short of it is that Rawlins, was his Mentor—or if I may say it, his conscience keeper.

offered me new perspectives: the works of Ken Blanchard, of Tom Friedman and of Seth Godin, The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham, Good to Great by Jim Collins, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi, E-Myth by Michael Gerber, The Tipping Point and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, Chaos by James Gleick, Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson, M.D., The Monk and the Riddle by Randy Komisar, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni, Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, FISH! By Stephen Lundin, Harry Paul, John Christensen and Ken Blanchard, The Naked Brain by Richard Restack, Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, The Black Swan by Nicholas Taleb, American Mania by Peter Whybrow, M.D., and the single most important book everyone should read, the book that teaches us that we cannot control the circumstances around us, all we can control is our attitude—Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. I

Denny leaned back in her chair. She put her hands together and rested her chin on them. Then she glanced at Spence out of the corner of her eye and smiled. “What’s that look for?” he asked. “Nothing,” she said, giggling a little. “Now, come on,” said Spence. “You’re laughing at me, and I want to know why.” Denny grinned slyly. “No reason, Wilton.” Spence slugged her playfully in the arm. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Well, how about if I call you Denise?” “There’s nothing wrong with Denise.” “There’s nothing wrong with Wilton either.” “Oh, no? Is that why you write W. James Spencer on all your school papers?” “How do you know what I write on my school papers?” Denny shrugged. “Just noticed.” “Oh, yeah?” said Spence, puffing out his chest. “What else have you noticed about me?” Denny rolled her eyes. “That you’re in love with yourself,” she answered. Spence leaned over and whispered into her ear, “Sounds like maybe I’m not the only one.” Denny blushed and turned her shoulder to Spence. “You’re impossible,” she whispered. Spence leaned back and chuckled.

My brothers Rob, Bob, Tom, Paul, Ralph, Phil, Noah, William, Nick, Dennis, Christopher, Frank, Simon, Saul, Jim, Henry, Seamus, Richard, Jeremy, Walter, Jonathan, James, Arthur, Rex, Bertram, Vaughan, Daniel, Russel, and Angus; and the triplets Herbert, Patrick, and Jeffrey; identical twins Michael and Abraham, Lawrence and Peter, Winston and Charles, Scott and Samuel; and Eric, Donovan, Roger, Lester, Larry, Clinton, Drake, Gregory, Leon, Kevin and Jack — all born on the same day, the twenty-third of May, though at different hours in separate years — and the caustic graphomaniac, Sergio, whose scathing opinions appear with regularity in the front-of-book pages of the more conservative monthlies, not to mention on the liquid crystal screens that glow at night atop the radiant work stations of countless bleary-eyed computer bulletin-board subscribers (among whom our brother is known, affectionately, electronically, as Surge); and Albert, who is blind; and Siegfried, the sculptor in burning steel; and clinically depressed Anton, schizophrenic Irv, recovering addict Clayton; and Maxwell, the tropical botanist, who, since returning from the rain forest, has seemed a little screwed up somehow; and Jason, Joshua, and Jeremiah, each vaguely gloomy in his own “lost boy” way; and Eli, who spends solitary wakeful evenings in the tower, filing notebooks with drawings — the artist’s multiple renderings for a larger work? — portraying the faces of his brothers, including Chuck, the prosecutor; Porter, the diarist; Andrew, the civil rights activist; Pierce, the designer of radically unbuildable buildings; Barry, the good doctor of medicine; Fielding, the documentary-film maker; Spencer, the spook with known ties to the State Department; Foster, the “new millennium” psychotherapist; Aaron, the horologist; Raymond, who flies his own plane; and George, the urban planner who, if you read the papers, you’ll recall, distinguished himself, not so long ago, with that innovative program for revitalizing the decaying downtown area (as “an animate interactive diorama illustrating contemporary cultural and economic folkways”), only to shock and amaze everyone, absolutely everyone, by vanishing with a girl named Jana and an overnight bag packed with municipal funds in unmarked hundreds; and all the young fathers: Seth, Rod, Vidal, Bennet, Dutch, Brice, Allan, Clay, Vincent, Gustavus, and Joe; and Hiram, the eldest; Zachary, the Giant; Jacob, the polymath; Virgil, the compulsive whisperer; Milton, the channeler of spirits who speak across time; and the really bad womanizers: Stephen, Denzil, Forrest, Topper, Temple, Lewis, Mongo, Spooner, and Fish; and, of course, our celebrated “perfect” brother, Benedict, recipient of a medal of honor from the Academy of Sciences for work over twenty years in chemical transmission of “sexual language” in eleven types of social insects — all of us (except George, about whom there have been many rumors, rumors upon rumors: he’s fled the vicinity, he’s right here under our noses, he’s using an alias or maybe several, he has a new face, that sort of thing) — all my ninety-eight, not counting George, brothers and I recently came together in the red library and resolved that the time had arrived, finally, to stop being blue, put the past behind us, share a light supper, and locate, if we could bear to, the missing urn full of the old fucker’s ashes.

It goes without saying that this method of communal parking duties would be an impossibility in a country where stealing was common. If they tried this in South Africa, for example, everyone’s car would be stolen every day and it would end up as some sort of car roulette. Everyone would have a different car every day. In Libya, stealing is punishable by death, or something nearly as extreme, like leg removal. (I had better Google that.)

He sat back on his haunches to survey his work. The nomads were so incredibly graceful and peaceful, and the desert was so still, I was having a real experience here! Everything about their mannerisms and movements seemed in tune with the atmosphere of the desert: they oozed poise and serenity. This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and time enough.

As soon as I was in the open desert the atmosphere changed completely. Anyone who has been in sand dunes will tell you that it is an experience so magical, so personal, yet so otherworldly, that it is never forgotten. The hairdryer heat, the stillness and the beauty of the contrasting horizon; dazzling, clear blue sky turning to pristine yellow/white sand produces a feeling of such vast immenseness that you cannot help but feel humbled. As I was riding I imagined an overhead camera view of me on the bike, the camera slowly pulling further and further back, a snaking tyre trail disturbing the patterns in the sand behind me, until I disappeared like a grain of sand in the ever- changing dune landscape. I defy anyone not to feel small and insignificant in this environment.

All fingers are fingers, all are useful, but none look the same.

I am convinced that one of the biggest challenges we face as Christians is also one of the most mundane: distraction

But there was another group of British leaders, more sober and less sentimental, who deplored Eyre’s behavior on a distant island far from the scrutiny of Parliament, and again some of the greatest names rallied to this version of the cause: Charles Darwin, the geneticist; Herbert Spencer, the moral philosopher; Thomas Huxley, the scientist; John Bright, the powerful Quaker reformer; and again above all, John Stuart Mill, perhaps the wisest and most brilliant man in the world at that time.

The stench of death and blood hit me hard. In the room's corner, blood had pooled and hardened over parts of the slated wood floor near the bedroom window. There was also blood spattered against the corner walls. The room was sparse, filled with the essentials of an old man. The bed looked slept in. A small painting in an ornate frame hung on the wall above it. It was a print from one of William Turner’s works, an English painter from the early 1980s. It depicted a ship, capsized with its crew in lifeboats struggling against a powerful storm.

Through his opened bedroom window, he noticed that the night sky had turned a crimson red. The moon, punctured by hues of cerulean blue, hung precariously over the withering willow trees that lined the riverbank, located several hundred yards away. The storm predicted by the forecasters was heading his way.

Bible vs. Koran “Therefore, when ye meet the unbelievers in fight, smite at their necks; at length, when ye have thoroughly subdued them, bind a bond firmly on them: thereafter is the time for either generosity or ransom, until the war lays down its burdens. . . . But those who are slain in the Way of Allah, He will never let their deeds be lost.” —Koran 47:4 “And he sent messengers ahead of him, who went and entered a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him; but the people would not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw it, they said, ‘Lord, do you want us to bid fire come down from heaven and consume them?’ But he turned and rebuked them. And they went on to another village.” —Luke 9:52–56

Theism and materialism, so indifferent when taken retrospectively, point, when we take them prospectively, to wholly different outlooks of experience. For, according to the theory of mechanical evolution, the laws of redistribution of matter and motion, tho they are certainly to thank for all the good hours which our organisms have ever yielded us and for all the ideals which our minds now frame, are yet fatally certain to undo their work again, and to redissolve everything that they have once evolved. You all know the picture of the last state of the universe which evolutionary science foresees. I cannot state it better than in Mr. Balfour's words: That is the sting of it, that in the vast driftings of the cosmic weather, tho many a jeweled shore appears, and many an enchanted cloud-bank floats away, long lingering ere it be dissolved—even as our world now lingers, for our joy-yet when these transient products are gone, nothing, absolutely NOTHING remains, of represent those particular qualities, those elements of preciousness which they may have enshrined. Dead and gone are they, gone utterly from the very sphere and room of being. Without an echo; without a memory; without an influence on aught that may come after, to make it care for similar ideals. This utter final wreck and tragedy is of the essence of scientific materialism as at present understood. The lower and not the higher forces are the eternal forces, or the last surviving forces within the only cycle of evolution which we can definitely see. Mr. Spencer believes this as much as anyone; so why should he argue with us as if we were making silly aesthetic objections to the 'grossness' of 'matter and motion,' the principles of his philosophy, when what really dismays us is the disconsolateness of its ulterior practical results? No the true objection to materialism is not positive but negative. It would be farcical at this day to make complaint of it for what it IS for 'grossness.' Grossness is what grossness DOES—we now know THAT. We make complaint of it, on the contrary, for what it is NOT—not a permanent warrant for our more ideal interests, not a fulfiller of our remotest hopes. The notion of God, on the other hand, however inferior it may be in clearness to those mathematical notions so current in mechanical philosophy, has at least this practical superiority over them, that it guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. A world with a God in it to say the last word, may indeed burn up or freeze, but we then think of him as still mindful of the old ideals and sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that, where he is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things. This need of an eternal moral order is one of the deepest needs of our breast. And those poets, like Dante and Wordsworth, who live on the conviction of such an order, owe to that fact the extraordinary tonic and consoling power of their verse. Here then, in these different emotional and practical appeals, in these adjustments of our concrete attitudes of hope and expectation, and all the delicate consequences which their differences entail, lie the real meanings of materialism and spiritualism—not in hair-splitting abstractions about matter's inner essence, or about the metaphysical attributes of God. Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope. Surely here is an issue genuine enough, for anyone who feels it; and, as long as men are men, it will yield matter for a serious philosophic debate.

Titled by year, Good News of 1939, 1940 became Maxwell House Coffee Time to begin the 1940–41 season, though the Good News title was still used for a few broadcasts. Maxwell House Coffee. CAST: Hosts: James Stewart, 1937; Robert Taylor, early to mid-1938; Robert Young, beginning in fall 1938; various hosts, 1939–40; Dick Powell, ca. 1940. Frank Morgan, resident comic. Fanny Brice as Baby Snooks beginning Dec. 23, 1937. Hanley Stafford as Daddy. Also many MGM film stars including Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Mickey Rooney, Alice Faye, Spencer Tracy, Lionel Barrymore, Clark Gable,

Their repertoire of covers was rich and, depending on audience reaction, they would plunder material by Buddy Holly, James Brown, The Everly Brothers, Gene Vincent, Little Richard, Ricky Nelson, Shirley Bassey, Bill Haley, The Spencer Davis Group and The Yardbirds.