Spokesman Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Spokesman. Here they are! All 200 of them:

Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using Escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter. just so a Party-spokesman might have labeled departure from the misery of the Fuhrer's or any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery .... Not only do they confound the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter; but they would seem to prefer the acquiescence of the "quisling" to the resistance of the patriot.
J.R.R. Tolkien (Tolkien On Fairy-stories)
The philosopher is not the spokesman of his age, but an angel imprisoned in time.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila (Escolios a una texto implícito: Selección)
To be an effective criminal defense counsel, an attorney must be prepared to be demanding, outrageous, irreverent, blasphemous, a rogue, a renegade, and a hated, isolated, and lonely person - few love a spokesman for the despised and the damned.
Clarence Darrow
Sometimes it seems to me that all the world, all life, everything, had taken up residence inside of me and was clamoring for me to be the spokesman. 
Jack London (Martin Eden)
She recalled him as a forceful and witty speaker with a ready repartee and a penetrating voice. He had once, for example, put down a spokesman for the pesticide industry with a remark that people still quoted at parties: "And I presume on the eighth day God called you and said, 'I changed my mind about insects!
John Brunner (The Sheep Look Up)
In a way, Old Man Cronin, the cemetery caretaker, had become the dead’s spokesman — someone had to stick up for them.
Jonathan Dunne (Billy's Experiment: An Old Castle Novel)
The authority of the Führer is not limited by checks and controls, by special autonomous bodies or individual rights, but it is free and independent, all-inclusive and unlimited,” said Ernst Huber, an official party spokesman, in 1933.
Leonard Peikoff (The Cause of Hitler's Germany)
Judas became the spokesman of all those who through the centuries would protest the ornamentation of the Christian cult and would feel that, when the best of gold and jewels were given to the God Who made them, there was some slight made to the poor - not because they were interested in the poor, but because they were envious of that wealth.
Fulton J. Sheen (Life of Christ)
Independence has made us Soft
Houari Boumediene (The battle against underdevelopment: Being the text of his keynote address to the United Nations' General Assembly, in the special session on problems ... and development (Spokesman pamphlet ; no. 42))
Kittering looked up from the display. ‘I am mistaken as a spokesman for an entire species. Very non-cosmopolitan.
Adrian Tchaikovsky (Eyes of the Void (The Final Architecture, #2))
And that’s why I’m sitting here, with the South West Trains spokesman on a loop inside my head, because times are changing – because life is change – and the person I loved most is still dead.
Ella Risbridger
Lord Vetinari, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, poked at the ink in his inkwell. There was ice in it. "Don't you even have a proper fire?" said Hughnon Ridcully, High Priest of Blind Io and unofficial spokesman for the city's religious establishment. "I mean, I'm not one for stuffy rooms, but it's freezing in here!" "Brisk, certainly," said Lord Vetinari. "It's odd, but the ice isn't as dark as the rest of the ink. What causes that, do you think?" "Science, probably," said Hughnon vaguely.
Terry Pratchett (The Truth: Stage Adaptation)
The Beat spokesman, surprisingly, seemed to be satisfied with the ethics that we have inherited.
Paul Goodman (Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System)
After learning the foreign language Gibberish, I became a dream spokesman.
Jarod Kintz (Who Moved My Choose?: An Amazing Way to Deal With Change by Deciding to Let Indecision Into Your Life)
Barak later reported to Pasternak, that he might one day be the government spokesman in Jerusalem.
Herman Wouk (The Glory: A Novel (Hope and Glory Book 2))
Blaming the library for exposure to pornography is like blaming the lake if your child walks up to it alone, falls in and then drowns. – David Sawyer, Spokesman-Review, 18 December 2000
Tatyana Eckstrand
As mentioned earlier, officials in the Hillary Clinton campaign also met with Kislyak, according to a Kremlin spokesman. However, almost no one accused Clinton of “colluding” with Russia.
Gregg Jarrett (The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump)
[Taliban spokesman on Malala Yousafzai] Malala Yousafzai targeted and criticized Islam. She was against Islam and we tried to kill her, and if we get a chance again we will definitely try to kill her, and we will feel proud killing her.
Shahidullah Shahid
Jeremiah is frequently misunderstood as a doomsday spokesman or a pitiful man who had a grudge and sat around crying; but his public and personal grief was for another reason and served another purpose. Jeremiah embodies the alternative consciousness of Moses in the face of the denying king.9 He grieves the grief of Judah because he knows what the king refuses to know.
Walter Brueggemann (Prophetic Imagination)
Evans made himself their spokesman. "Charlie and Joe," he offered. "Remember us? We brought a friend back with us this time." Girls evidently didn't count in this little subdivision of the underworld; a miscalculation many a shady character has made.
Cornell Woolrich (Marihuana)
The word qur’an means “recitation.” It was not designed for private perusal, but like most scriptures, it was meant to be read aloud, and the sound was an essential part of the sense. Poetry was important in Arabia. The poet was the spokesman, social historian, and cultural authority of his tribe, and over the years the Arabs had learned how to listen to a recitation and had developed a highly sophisticated critical ear.
Karen Armstrong (Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time (Eminent Lives))
How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone's ever writing them there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person! Style, taste, individual philosophy, subjectivity, cultural background, real experience, psychology, talent, tricks of the trade: all the elements that make what I write recognizable as mine seem to me a cage that restricts my possibilities. If I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes... Who would move this hand? The anonymous throng? The spirit of the times? The collective unconscious? I do not know. It is not in order to be the spokesman for something definable that I would like to erase myself. Only to transmit the writable that waits to be written, the tellable that nobody tells.
Italo Calvino (If on a Winter's Night a Traveler)
- "Surely you have considered terrorist activity?" There was another pause. Then the spokesman said, in the quiet tones of someone who has had enough and who is going to quit after this and raise chickens somewhere, "Yes, I suppose we must. All we need to do is find some terrorists who are capable of taking an entire nuclear reactor out of its can while it's running and without anyone noticing. It weighs about a thousand tons and is forty feet high. So they'll be quite strong terrorists. Perhaps you'd like to ring them up, sir, and ask them questions in that supercilious, accusatory way of yours." -- The BBC interviews a nuclear spokesperson (Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens)
Terry Pratchett
Wozniak, always a teddy bear even when annoyed, hired another design firm and even agreed to stay on Apple’s retainer as a spokesman.
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
Miller might be gay, but he’s hardly a spokesman for our ever-expanding alphabet of genders and sexuality.
Jay Hogan (Against the Grain (Auckland Med., #4))
Politics needs a certain mental ability,” explained Ahmad Saati, the university’s spokesman. “Very few women have this kind of mind.” I
Geraldine Brooks (Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women)
Nestor is the spokesman for the status quo, for the tradition-hallowed belief that institutional power equates with unquestioned authority.
Caroline Alexander (The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War)
In all countries, most of the time, official spokesman and official liar are the same thing!
Mehmet Murat ildan
On this subject, U.S. Air Force spokesman James W. Moseley argued, “Those tabloid papers and cult magazines have been raving about this stuff for years, and it’s just not true!
Gene Steinberg (Attack of the Rockoids)
(who was arguing with a spokesman for the bulldozer drivers about whether or not Arthur Dent constituted a mental health hazard, and how much they should get paid if he did)
Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide, #1))
he mused, thinking of his son as the spokesman of the new generation which had swept away all the old landmarks, and with them the sign-posts and the danger-signal.
Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)
The spokesman smiled. "Ah, but, Kruppe, Gifts are not easily attained, nor are Virtues, nor are Doubts easily overcome, and Hungers are ever the impetus to climbing.
Steven Erikson
Let it be, that our outward circumstances in life have no bearing on whether or not we have joy and peace, simply because our joy and peace are found in the Person and presence of Jesus.
Eric William Gilmour (Into The Cloud: Becoming God's Spokesman)
A soldier lives . . . ”   A soldier lives a soldier dies a military chaplain sighs   a flag is folded someone cries a general tells the truth or lies   a politician simplifies a voice vote echoes only ayes   reporters ask for hows and whys a spokesman has to improvise   some doctrine somehow still applies negotiators compromise   or don’t as one more soldier dies.   —Robert West
Dave Eggers (The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013 (The Best American Series))
o step into the pulpit is to enter onto holy ground. To stand behind an open Bible demands no trifling with sacred things. To be a spokesman for God requires utmost concern and care in handling and proclaiming the Word. Rightly does Scripture warn, "Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness" (James 3:1).
Steven J. Lawson (The Expository Genius of John Calvin (A Long Line of Godly Men Series Book 1))
The bottom line is that NHS GPs have no bloody right to comment on vaccinations. Ever. They are interested parties. A GP's remarks about vaccination are as valuable as those of a drug company spokesman.
Vernon Coleman (Anyone Who Tells You Vaccines Are Safe And Effective Is Lying. Here's The Proof.)
(Rejection of the racial equality clause was a particularly bitter grievance for members of the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and their spokesman, W. E. B. Du Bois.)
Arthur Herman (1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder)
I mean, if we try to explain Jesus’s handling of his Bible in terms of how many Christians today feel the Bible “ought” to be read, Jesus will look like one of my college Bible students, playing free association with the Bible. Or worse, we may try to find some way of taking Jesus out of his ancient Jewish world and making him look more like a suburban Protestant, an urban hipster, a tea party spokesman, and so on.
Peter Enns (The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It)
As the pre-eminent spokesman for Kashmir Shaivism, Abhinavagupta’s view opposes Shankara’s Vedanta. Where Shankara’s Vedanta says that this world is a trap and an illusion, Shaivism says it is the embodiment of the Divine.
Shankarananda (Consciousness Is Everything: The Yoga of Kashmir Shaivism)
But this was not enough on its own to generate the kind of terror that Mao wanted. On 18 August, a mammoth rally was held in Tiananmen Square in the center of Peking, with over a million young participants. Lin Biao appeared in public as Mao's deputy and spokesman for the first time. He made a speech calling on the Red Guards to charge out of their schools and 'smash up the four olds' defined as 'old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits." Following this obscure call, Red Guards all over China took to the streets, giving full vent to their vandalism, ignorance, and fanaticism. They raided people's houses, smashed their antiques, tore up paintings and works of calligraphy. Bonfires were lit to consume books. Very soon nearly all treasures in private collections were destroyed. Many writers and artists committed suicide after being cruelly beaten and humiliated, and being forced to witness their work being burned to ashes. Museums were raided. Palaces, temples, ancient tombs, statues, pagodas, city walls anything 'old' was pillaged. The few things that survived, such as the Forbidden City, did so only because Premier Zhou Enlai sent the army to guard them, and issued specific orders that they should be protected. The Red Guards only pressed on when they were encouraged. Mao hailed the Red Guards' actions as "Very good indeed!" and ordered the nation to support them. He encouraged the Red Guards to pick on a wider range of victims in order to increase the terror. Prominent writers, artists, scholars, and most other top professionals, who had been privileged under the Communist regime, were now categorically condemned as 'reactionary bourgeois authorities." With the help of some of these people's colleagues who hated them for various reasons, ranging from fanaticism to envy, the Red Guards began to abuse them. Then there were the old 'class enemies': former landlords and capitalists, people with Kuomintang connections, those condemned in previous political campaigns like the 'rightists' and their children.
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
The barrier ascribed to Von Braun’s deathbed-like confession can be ascribed to the deadly and impenetrable radiation belts known as the Van Allen Belts. NASA’s Engineer and spokesman, Kelly Smith, admits, “As we get further away from earth,
Jeremy Stone (American Hoaxism: Surviving the New World Order II (Surviving The New World Order Trilogy Book 2))
How will we ever tell you apart?" Collins asked, unable to resist the question. "It's really quite simple, sir, once you know us," the spokesman assured him. "If he's talking, it's probably George, because Geoff is a quiet lad; if he's dancing a hornpipe, it's Geoff, because hornpipes make me dizzy." "You're George, then?" "Yes, sir - the eldest." "By five minutes and fifty-five seconds," added Geoffrey, frowning. "Five minutes and fifty-nine seconds," George corrected him calmly.
Sarah Beth Brazytis (The Apprentices)
I was to grow used to hearing, around New York, the annoying way in which people would say: 'Edward Said, such a suave and articulate and witty man,' with the unspoken suffix 'for a Palestinian.' It irritated him, too, naturally enough, but in my private opinion it strengthened him in his determination to be an ambassador or spokesman for those who lived in camps or under occupation (or both). He almost overdid the ambassadorial aspect if you ask me, being always just too faultlessly dressed and spiffily turned out. Fools often contrasted this attention to his tenue with his membership of the Palestine National Council, the then-parliament-in-exile of the people without a land. In fact, his taking part in this rather shambolic assembly was a kind of noblesse oblige: an assurance to his landsmen (and also to himself) that he had not allowed and never would allow himself to forget their plight. The downside of this noblesse was only to strike me much later on.
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
In his funeral oration the spokesman of the most artistic and critical of European nations, Ernest Renan, hailed him as one of the greatest writers of our times: ‘The Master, whose exquisite works have charmed our century, stands more than any other man as the incarnation of a whole race,’ because ‘a whole world lived in him and spoke through his mouth.’ Not the Russian world only, we may add, but the whole Slavonic world, to which it was ‘an honour to have been expressed by so great a Master.
Ivan Turgenev (Rudin)
Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called hidden people—or, to put it more plainly, elves—in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free, but, as he put it, “we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.
Michael Lewis (Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World)
I’m in difficulty, lord, and pitiable: no one cares about me, no one helps me; I’m the object of universal scorn.’ [49] Is that the witness you are going to bear, making a mockery of God’s summons, when he honoured you and judged you worthy to be his public spokesman?
Epictetus (Discourses and Selected Writings (Classics))
In the immediate aftermath of Chris’s death, Bubba dealt with his grief by playing. He played all the time, with anyone and everyone who came to the house. It was his way of staying busy and not focusing on sadness. Angel, younger, was a little more direct, though quieter. She often looked toward her brother as her spokesman and maybe test case: his emotions guided hers. She expressed her connection with her dad directly, mentioning that she often felt him still close to her. I came to take that as a comfort and reassurance: Chris walked with us still.
Taya Kyle (American Wife: Love, War, Faith, and Renewal)
How far can the airlines go?” replied a clearly irritated TWA spokesman when asked whether his employer planned to make any changes to its boarding procedures. “Restrict everyone from the terminal except those who have a ticket? Stop everyone from entering the airport area except those who
Brendan I. Koerner (The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking)
Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology, as you put it, because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.
James Baldwin (James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations)
The next year, Kroger refused to negotiate a new contract, and Hoffa’s victory was short-lived. But on the strength of his stand with the Strawberry Boys, Jimmy Hoffa was recruited by Detroit’s Teamsters Local 299 as an organizer. Hoffa’s job was to encourage men to join the union and through solidarity and organization to better their lives and the lives of their families. Detroit was home to America’s auto industry. As the auto industry’s chief spokesman, Henry Ford’s position on the labor movement in general was that “labor unions are the worst thing that ever struck the earth.” In
Charles Brandt ("I Heard You Paint Houses", Updated Edition: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa)
Andrew Young, a former U.S. Congressman and U.N. ambassador turned Wal-Mart spokesman, seemed to offer an explanation: “Poverty in America,” he said, “is market potential unrealized.” It seems that the poor benefit the discounting industry far more than the discounting industry benefits the poor.
Ellen Ruppel Shell (Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture)
Jinnah's "Pakistan" did not entail the partition of India; rather it meant its regeneration into an union where Pakistan and Hindustan would join to stand together proudly against the hostile world without. This was no clarion call for pan-Islam; this was not pitting Muslim India against Hindustan; rather it was a secular vision of a polity where there was real political choice & safeguards, the India of Jinnah's dreams, a vision unfulfilled but noble nonetheless.
Ayesha Jalal (The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan)
The trumpet, an incredible brass invention, is the king of instruments. This wild machine, its curved pipes, valves, and flowering bell. A puzzle of cold metal and grease, but when placed against the lips of a human being, and love is blown into it, it becomes warm and alive, a conduit for god, a spokesman for the divine.
Flea (Acid for the Children: A Memoir)
Israel’s assault on Gaza became excessive on October 9, when it cut off food and electricity to everyone in the Strip. The following day, Israel’s defense minister announced that he had “released all the restraints” on how Israel fought, and its military spokesman declared that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.
Peter Beinart (Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning)
The War Department wanted no part of the film,” Huston wrote. “I was told by one of its spokesman that it was ‘anti-war.’ I pompously replied that if I ever made a picture that was pro-war, I hoped someone would take me out and shoot me. The guy looked at me as if he were considering just that.” Huston himself felt that perhaps he
Mark Harris (Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War)
We do have a grand strategy,” says Zeese, who was the spokesman for Ralph Nader’s 2004 presidential campaign. “Nonviolent movements shift power by attacking the columns that hold the power structure in place. Those columns are the military, police, media, business, workers, youth, faith groups, NGOs, and civil servants. Every time we deal with the police, we have that in mind. The goal is not to hit them, hit them, hit them, and weaken them. The goal is to pull people from those columns to our side. We want the police to know that we understand they’re not the 1 percent. The goal is not to get every police officer, but to get enough police so that you have a division.
Chris Hedges (Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt)
Scientists who had worked on the atom bomb added their voices to the growing movement. George Kistiakowsky, a Harvard University chemistry professor who had worked on the first atomic bomb, and later was science adviser to President Eisenhower, became a spokesman for the disarmament movement. HIs last public remarks, before his death from cancer at the age of eighty-two, were in an editorial for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist in December 1982. "I tell you as my parting words: Forget the channels. There simply is not enough time left before the world explodes. Concentrate instead on organizing, with so many others of like mind, a mass movement for peace such as there has not been before.
Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present)
Through a spokesman he told Newsweek Argentina of his ‘unhappiness’ with Benedict’s words. ‘Pope Benedict’s statement doesn’t reflect my own opinions,’ the Archbishop of Buenos Aires declared. ‘These statements will serve to destroy in 20 seconds the careful construction of a relationship with Islam that Pope John Paul II built over the last twenty years.
Paul Vallely (Pope Francis: Untying the Knots)
All the wild beasts have been extinct for years, but it's perfectly possible to synthesize them autobiogenically. On the other hand, why be bound to what was once produced by natural evolution? The spokesman for surrealist zoology was most eloquent - we should populate our preserves with bold, original conceptions, not slavish imitations, we should forge the New, not plagiarize the Old.
Stanisław Lem (The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy)
March! Walk . . . jump up and down . . . do a little dance . . . er . . . ” The staff wobbled nervously in his grip. “You’ve got free will, haven’t you.” “Sort of,” said the spokesman. “They’ve got free will!” called the necromancer, to a trio of men in full suits of spikey black armor who had been tending to a quartet of horses some distance away. “How the hell have they got free will?!
Anonymous
In the summer of 2007, I was sitting in a studio in Dublin, debating with a lay spokesman of the Roman Catholic Church who turned out to be the only believing Christian on a discussion panel of five people. He was a perfectly nice and rather modest logic-chopping polemicist, happy enough to go for a glass of refreshment after the program, and I suddenly felt a piercing stab of pity for him. A generation ago in Ireland, the Church did not have to lower itself in this way. It raised its voice only slightly, and was instantly obeyed by the Parliament, the schools, and the media. It could and did forbid divorce, contraception, the publication of certain books, and the utterance of certain opinions. Now it is discredited and in decline. Its once-absolute doctrines appear ridiculous:
Christopher Hitchens (The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever)
It was said that everyone appointed by the Reagan administration in a major public health capacity was either a Mormon or a fundamentalist. The chief spokesman for the administration now was the overripe and venomous Patrick Buchanan, one of whose major qualifications for the job was his widely quoted remark that nature was finally exacting her price on homosexuals for having spilled their seed against her.
Paul Monette (Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir)
If Gissing is less compassionately observant than Mrs Gaskell, less overtly polemical than Kingsley, still The Nether World and Demos would be sympathetically endorsed by either of them, or by their typical readers. Yet Gissing does introduce an important new element, and one that remains significant. He has often been called ‘the spokesman of despair,’ and this is true in both meanings of the phrase. Like Kingsley and Mrs Gaskell, he writes to describe the true conditions of the poor, and to protest against those brute forces of society which fill with wreck the abysses of the nether world. Yet he is also the spokesman of another kind of despair: the despair born of social and political disillusion. In this he is a figure exactly like Orwell in our own day, and for much the same reason. Whether one calls this honesty or not will depend on experience.
Raymond Williams
One indicator of the self-conscious dissociation of radicals like Gitlin and Hayden from reformers like King is that neither of them, nor any other white student activist, sos leader, or anti-war spokesman was in Memphis for the demonstrations King was organizing in 1968 at the time he was killed.. In fact, no one in the New Left (at least no one who mattered) could still be called a serious supporter of King in the year before he was assassinated.
David Horowitz (Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes)
You will also notice a profound pattern of character traits that take hold early in his life, but later these traits get tempered by tragedy and introspection as Roosevelt learned how to shape events, interpret people, and humble himself. It is clear that Roosevelt was not born the right person for the times but assiduously cultivated the opportunity to become its spokesman. He learned how to lead the individual, which allowed him to lead the country.
Jon Knokey (Theodore Roosevelt and the Making of American Leadership)
As with all Torino stories, there was to be a final, weird, twist to this tale. In 2000 Torino appointed a new president. He was a life-long Torino fan and had worked as a spokesman for FIAT. His name? Attilio Romero. The same Attilio ‘Tilli’ Romero who had run over his idol – Gigi Meroni – in 1967. The club was now run by a man who had killed one of its most famous players, albeit by accident. This bizarre fact did not pass without comment. Some fans, unhappy at the performance of the team, took to shouting ‘murderer’ at Romero.
John Foot (Calcio: A History of Italian Football)
Putin was a new modern “strongman,” Peskov said, an archetype who was spawning imitations across the globe. “People around the world are tired of leaders that are all similar to each other. There’s a demand in the world for special sovereign leaders, for decisive ones who do not fit into general frameworks,” the Kremlin spokesman explained. “Putin’s Russia was the starting point.” Others that fit the mold included Viktor Orban in Hungary, Xi Jinping in China, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an in Turkey.
Greg Miller (The Apprentice)
When we seek to understand liberty, equality, progress, constitutional governance, separation of church and state, and the meaning of the American Revolution, we do so in contexts framed by Jefferson's writings and arguments. Whatever we think of Jefferson as a person or as a politician, we can never take away from him his remarkable gift as a writer or his ultimate claims to fame. He achieved his intention to express 'the American mind' and became the leading spokesman for the revolution of ideas that changed, and that continues to change, the face of America and the world. His words mean not only what he might have intended them to mean, but also what succeeding generations of Americans have read into them. Thus, whether he would even comprehend the United States in the first years of the twenty-first century, Jefferson's shadow looms large over us, thanks to the conflicting influences of his thinking, doing, and -- most important -- his writing. That truth alone requires each generation to reacquaint itself with the life and work of Thomas Jefferson, and to grapple with his ambiguous legacies.
R.B. Bernstein (Thomas Jefferson)
If we were all on board ship and there was trouble among the stewards, I can just conceive their chief spokesman looking with disfavor on anyone who stole away from the fierce debates in the saloon or pantry to take a breather on deck. For up there, he would taste the salt, he would see the vastness of the water, he would remember that the ship had a whither and a whence. He would remember things like fog, storms, and ice. What had seemed, in the hot, lighted rooms down below to be merely the scene for a political crisis, would appear once more as a tiny egg-shell moving rapidly through an immense darkness over an element in which man cannot live. It would not necessarily change his convictions about the rights and wrongs of the dispute down below, but it would probably show them in a new light. It could hardly fail to remind him that the stewards were taking for granted hopes more momentous than that of a rise in pay, and the passengers forgetting dangers more serious than that of having to cook and serve their own meals. Stories of the sort I am describing are like that visit to the deck. They cool us.
C.S. Lewis (Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories)
Taking the logic of Jinnah's demand to its extreme, Congress now offered him a 'Pakistan' stripped of the Punjab's eastern divisions (Ambala and Jullundur), Assam (except Sylhet district) and western Bengal and Calcutta - the 'mutilated and moth-eaten' Pakistan which Jinnah had rejected out of hand in 1944 and again in May 1946. Such a permanent settlement would at a stroke eject Jinnah from the centre, clear the way for a strong unitary government wholly under Congress's sway, and give away only parts of provinces which past experience had shown lay outside the Congress's ken.
Ayesha Jalal (The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan)
personal, personally. When it is necessary to emphasize that a person is acting on his own rather than as a spokesman or that he is addressing people individually rather than collectively, personal and personally are unexceptionable. But usually the context makes that clear and the word is used without purpose, as it was here: ‘Dr Leonard has decided to visit personally the Oklahoma parish which is the centre of the dispute …’ (Daily Telegraph). He could hardly do otherwise. Personal in many other common terms – personal friend, personal opinion, personal favourite – is nearly always equally redundant.
Bill Bryson (Troublesome Words)
In 2010, RT was helping American conspiracy theorists spread the false idea that President Barack Obama had not been born in the United States. This fiction, designed to appeal to the weaknesses of racist Americans who wished to imagine away their elected president, invited them to live in an alternative reality. In 2011, Trump became the spokesman of this fantasy campaign. He only had a platform to do so because Americans associated him with the successful businessman he played on television, a role which in turn was only possible because Russians had bailed him out. Fiction rested on fiction rested on fiction
Timothy Snyder (The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America)
I acknowledge my inadequacies as a spokesman. I acknowledge my many imperfections as a human being. And yet, as the Elders taught me, speaking out is my first duty, my first obligation to myself and to my people. To speak your mind and heart is Indian Way. This book is not a plea or a justification. Neither is it an explanation or an apology for the events that overtook my life and many other lives in 1975 and made me unwittingly — and, yes, even unwillingly — a symbol, a focus for the sufferings of my people. But all of my people are suffering, so I'm in no way special in that regard. You must understand.... I am ordinary. Painfully ordinary. This isn't modesty. This is fact. Maybe you're ordinary, too. If so, I honor your ordinariness, your humanness, your spirituality. I hope you will honor mine. That ordinariness is our bond, you and I. We are ordinary. We are human. The Creator made us this way. Imperfect. Inadequate. Ordinary. Be thankful you weren't cursed with perfection. If you were perfect, there'd be nothing for you to achieve with your life. Imperfection is the source of every action. This is both our curse and our blessing as human beings. Our very imperfection makes a holy life possible. We're not supposed to be perfect. We're supposed to be useful.
Leonard Peltier (Prison Writings)
A brain bank spokesman showed me around. Down the hall from the dissection room was the computer room. The spokesman referred to this as the "brains of the operation" which in any other operation would have been fine but in this case was a tad confusing. At the end of the hall were the real brains. It wasn't quite what I imagined. I pictured whole intact brains floating in glass jars, but the brains were cut in half, one side being sliced and frozen, the other side sliced and stored in formaldehyde inside Rubbermaid and Freezet food savers. Somehow I'd expected more of Harvard, if not glass at least Tupperware. I wondered what the dorms looked like these days.
Mary Roach (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)
The implication of Bush’s New World Order was that the planet would be divided between nations destined to be dominated and one nation, the United States, which would dominate. Only the United States would have the right to independence, and the Pentagon, CIA, and US state and treasury departments would exercise leadership over the affairs of other countries. The expression of Bush’s declaration of US world leadership can be seen in the words of a Pentagon spokesman, Rear Admiral John Kirby, who, in 2015, declared that the United States retains the “right,” the “responsibility,” and “the resources” to intervene in any country unilaterally to achieve US foreign policy goals.5
Dan Kovalik (The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran)
All of the stimuli of awe and wonder, whose capacity is invested in the human mind, have been appropriated by religious faiths across centuries, in masterpieces of literature, the visual arts, music, and architecture. Three thousand years of Yahweh have wrought an aesthetic power in these creative arts second to none. There is nothing in my own experience more moving than the Roman Catholic Lucernarium, when the lumen Christi (light of Christ) is spread by Paschal candlelight into a darkened cathedral; or the choral hymns to the standing faithful and approaching procession during an evangelical Protestant altar call. These benefits require submission to God, or his Son the Redeemer, or both, or to His final chosen spokesman Muhammad. This is too easy. It is necessary only to submit, to bow down, to repeat the sacred oaths. Yet let us ask frankly, to whom is such obeisance really directed? Is it to an entity that may have no meaning within reach of the human mind—or may not even exist? Yes, perhaps it really is to God. But perhaps it is to no more than a tribe united by a creation myth. If the latter, religious faith is better interpreted as an unseen trap unavoidable during the biological history of our species. And if this is correct, surely there exist ways to find spiritual fulfillment without surrender and enslavement. Humankind deserves better.
Edward O. Wilson (The Social Conquest of Earth)
Sartre’s reputation as France’s preeminent moral spokesman during the postwar period is rather tarnished these days. In 1941 he had no qualms about accepting a post at a prestigious lycée that came vacant when its previous occupant, a Jew, was dismissed by the Vichy authorities. His contribution to the Resistance was slight—he wrote articles for underground papers but took few risks—and his subversive play The Flies could not have been produced without the approval of the German censors. To undermine the heroism of resistance fighters appears self-serving, and coming from a man who was not a devout Catholic, the claim that Resistance fighters were willing martyrs is simply bizarre.
Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris Under the Occupation)
Dwight Langley, the painter, is the pure exponent of the evil the play is attacking; he is, in effect, the spokesman for Platonism, who explicitly preaches that beauty is unreachable in this world and perfection unattainable. Since he insists that ideals are impossible on earth, he cannot, logically enough, believe in the reality of any ideal, even when it actually confronts him. Thus, although he knows every facet of Kay Gonda’s face, he (alone among the characters) does not recognize her when she appears in his life. This philosophically induced blindness, which motivates his betrayal of her, is a particularly brilliant concretization of the play’s theme, and makes a dramatic Act I curtain.
Ayn Rand (Ideal)
Satan and witches. If they admit they are in league with him, then they are disobeying him (since he forbids them to admit to being witches) and they are spared. Those who protest their innocence are burned. A bus driver who falsely claims to have been assaulted is found guilty of wasting police time. A police spokesman declares: 'We already have so many problems with genuine violent crime. What are things coming to if we have to deal with the fake kind?' It is for this reason that a fake hold-up was in the past punished more severely than a real one, for faking evil is even more serious than evil. The hoax is evil raised to the second power. And faking good? Isn't a fake 'good deed' worse than a bad one?
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004)
This new turn of events prompted them to philosophize more than ever. There lived in the vicinity a famous dervish who was known as the best philosopher in Turkey; they went to consult him. Acting as their spokesman, Pangloss said to the dervish, “Sir, we've come to ask you why such a strange animal as man was ever created.” “Why are you concerned about that?” said the dervish. “Is it any of your business?” “But, Reverend Father,” said Candide, “there's a terrible amount of evil in the world.” “What does it matter whether there's evil or good?” said the dervish. “When His Highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he worry about whether the mice in it are comfortable?” “Then what ought we to do?” asked Pangloss. “Keep quiet,” said the dervish.
Voltaire (Candide)
On February 7, President Johnson met at the White House with five black leaders, including Frederick Douglass, who came to lobby for a civil rights bill. The black leaders were treated in a tasteless, abusive manner. After they shook hands with the president, their spokesman, George T. Downing, said they hoped he would support voting rights for blacks, which elicited a bizarre, rambling monologue from Johnson. He admitted to having owned slaves, but boasted of never having sold one, as if that would somehow ingratiate him with his visitors. He presented himself as a kindly master who had been “their slave instead of their being mine.” To promote civil rights, Johnson went on, would “result in the extermination of one [race] or the other.
Ron Chernow (Grant)
The deeper historical sources of the Great Inquisition are best revealed by the other enthusiasms of its devotees: hatred of Franklin D. Roosevelt, implacable opposition to New Deal reforms, desire to banish or destroy the United Nations, anti-Semitism, Negrophobia, isolationism, a passion for the repeal of the income tax, fear of poisoning by fluoridation of the water system, opposition to modernism in the churches. McCarthy’s own expression, “twenty years of treason,” suggested the long-standing grievances that were nursed by the crusaders, though the right-wing spokesman, Frank Chodorov, put it in better perspective when he said that the betrayal of the United States had really begun in 1913 with the passage of the income-tax amendment.
Richard Hofstadter (Anti-Intellectualism in American Life)
Rule Britannia, a bunch of thugs had been sing-shouting in the street at the weekend past Elisabeth's flat. Britannia rules the waves. First we'll get the Poles. And then we'll get the Muslims. Then we'll get the gyppos, then the gays. You lot are on the run and we're coming after you, a right-wing spokesman had shouted at a female MP on a panel on Radio 4 earlier than same Saturday. The chair of the panel didn't berate, or comment on, or even acknowledge the threat the man had just made. Instead, he gave the last word to the Tory MP on the panel, who used what was the final thirty seconds of the programme to talk about the real and disturbing cause for concern — not the blatant threat just made on the air by one person to another — of immigration.
Ali Smith (Autumn (Seasonal Quartet, #1))
Because by preference Schiller proceeds rationally and intellectually, he falls a victim to his own conclusion. This is already demonstrated in his choice of the word “aesthetic.” Had he been acquainted with Indian literature, he would have seen that the primordial image which floated before his mind’s eye had a very different character from an “aesthetic” one. His intuition seized on the unconscious model which from time immemorial has lain dormant in our mind. Yet he interpreted it as “aesthetic,” although he himself had previously emphasized its symbolic character. The primordial image I am thinking of is that particular configuration of Eastern ideas which is condensed in the brahman-atman teaching of India and whose philosophical spokesman in China is Lao-tzu.
C.G. Jung (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 6: Psychological Types (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung))
Michael Ward knows. Ward loves railroads. His loves his own railroad company, CSX, which traces its origins to 1827 when the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was formed as the nation’s first common carrier. He traces his own origins at CSX back thirty-seven years, when he took an analyst job as a newly minted Harvard Business School M.B.A., rising to become chairman, president, and CEO in 2003. And he loves the whole American freight rail industry. “Railroaders are like farmers,” Ward declares. “You heard about the farmer that won the lottery? They said to him, ‘Oh my gosh, you won the lottery; what are you going to do with all that money?’ He said, ‘I’m a farmer and I love farming, and I’m going to farm until every penny of it is gone.’ And I say railroaders are like that. When we make more money, we’re going to invest more back into the infrastructure, so we can strengthen the railroad and grow the business.” Ward may sound like a press release, but that’s exactly how he talks, and why he’s a major industry spokesman. He lavishes praise on industry performance: “While we’ve improved the profitability of the industry, we’ve also cut rates in half of what they were in 1980 for our customers, on an inflation-adjusted basis. We’re providing a more economical product to them, and it’s safer and more reliable. Over the years, as an industry, our train accident rate is down 80 percent; our personal injury rate is down 85 percent; and we’re doing this with about one-third of the workforce we had in 1980.” He calls the industry “the envy of the world.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter (Move: How to Rebuild and Reinvent America's Infrastructure)
My name is Professor Ben Fielding and I’d like to invite you to experience our ‘Game’. It remains currently in a Closed Beta stage but will remain in a continual state of ‘live development’. As a dedicated spokesman for a certain kind of Game-world my team and I feel sure that you’ll accept our invitation to try it for yourself, along with the few others in number so far invited. Possible errors and residual bugs together with any suggestions may be reported by vocal commands when you have ‘acclimatised’ to the surroundings. Please ensure that you follow the tutorials for the Interface as you may find it makes potent use of its fully immersive features. Despite anything you may have read or heard about it, we hold high hopes that you will experience it simply as yourself and without pre-conceived notions. Instructions for Fountellion access are as follows…
Ade M. Campbell (In THE SPIRAL: Connected Stories & Fragments from the Virtual Future)
The plight of Jews in German-occupied Europe, which many people thought was at the heart of the war against the Axis, was not a chief concern of Roosevelt. Henry Feingold's research (The Politics of Rescue) shows that, while the Jews were being put in camps and the process of annihilation was beginning that would end in the horrifying extermination of 6 million Jews and millions of non-Jews, Roosevelt failed to take steps that might have saved thousands of lives. He did not see it as a high priority; he left it to the State Department, and in the State Department anti-Semitism and a cold bureaucracy became obstacles to action. Was the war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over "inferior" races? The United States' armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old. The Red Cross, with government approval, separated the blood donations of black and white. It was, ironically, a black physician named Charles Drew who developed the blood bank system. He was put in charge of the wartime donations, and then fired when he tried to end blood segregation. Despite the urgent need for wartime labor, blacks were still being discriminated against for jobs. A spokesman for a West Coast aviation plant said: "The Negro will be considered only as janitors and in other similar capacities.... Regardless of their training as aircraft workers, we will not employ them." Roosevelt never did anything to enforce the orders of the Fair Employment Practices Commission he had set up.
Howard Zinn (A People's History Of The United States Sm)
Of all the Islamic organizations in America, CAIR has risen to the top as the most visible, most outspoken defender of Muslims in the United States. Masquerading as a civil rights organization, CAIR has had a hidden agenda to Islamize America from the start. Its cofounder and chairman, Omar Ahmad, a Palestinian American, told a Muslim audience in Fremont, California, in 1998: ‘Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.’ Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s national spokesman, is on record stating: ‘I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic.’ Three of CAIR’s officials have already been convicted of terror-related crimes. One even worked for Hooper. He’s now in prison for conspiring to kill Americans.
Brigitte Gabriel (Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America)
Stalin was the most audible and powerful spokesman in the campaign against what he contemptuously called uravnilovka (leveling). His hostility - voiced in sarcastic and dismissive terms - was so deep and so clearly enunciated that it rapidly became state policy and social doctrine. He believed in productive results, not through spontaneity or persuasion, but through force, hierarchy, reward, punishment, and above all differential wages. He applied this view to the whole of society. Stalin's anti-egalitarianism was not born of the five-year plan era. He was offended by the very notion and used contemptuous terms such as "fashionable leftists", "blockheads", "petty bourgeois nonsense" and "silly chatter," thus reducing the discussion to a sweeping dismissal of childish, unrealistic, and unserious promoters of equality. The toughness of the delivery evoked laughter of approval from his audience.
Richard Stites
[John C.] Calhoun was a minority spokesman in a democracy, a particularist in an age of nationalism, a slaveholder in an age of advancing liberties, and an agrarian in a furiously capitalistic country. His weakness was to be inhumanly schematic and logical, which is only to say that he thought as he lived. His mind, in a sense, was too masterful - it imposed itself upon realities. The great human, emotional, moral complexities of the world escaped him because he had no private training for them, had not even the talent for friendship, in which he might have been schooled. It was easier for him to imagine, for example, that the South had produced upon its slave base a better culture than the North because he had no culture himself, only a quick and muscular mode of thought. It may stand as a token of Calhoun's place in the South's history that when he did find culture there, at Charleston, he wished a plague upon it.
Richard Hofstadter (The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It)
A 1987 front-page article in The Wall Street Journal quotes a black spokesman who claims, “If you wiped out racism, 90 percent of black people’s problems would disappear.”24 The white author of a recent well-received book on race relations agrees. His concluding view is that whites are responsible for the woes of blacks, even for the fact that so many young black men are killing each other that it “amounts to a self-inflicted genocide.”25 Americans are so accustomed to hearing—and repeating—this view that they scarcely bother to think about what it means. It means essentially, that white people, not blacks, are responsible for black behavior. It implies that blacks are helpless and cannot make progress unless whites transform themselves. This inverted version of the doctrine, with its unpleasant odor of paternalism, is almost never heard, but it finds expression in a host of race-based explanations that have sprung up to explain the failures of underclass blacks:
Jared Taylor (Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America)
Lynum had plenty of information to share. The FBI's files on Mario Savio, the brilliant philosophy student who was the spokesman for the Free Speech Movement, were especially detailed. Savio had a debilitating stutter when speaking to people in small groups, but when standing before a crowd and condemning his administration's latest injustice he spoke with divine fire. His words had inspired students to stage what was the largest campus protest in American history. Newspapers and magazines depicted him as the archetypal "angry young man," and it was true that he embodied a student movement fueled by anger at injustice, impatience for change, and a burning desire for personal freedom. Hoover ordered his agents to gather intelligence they could use to ruin his reputation or otherwise "neutralize" him, impatiently ordering them to expedite their efforts. Hoover's agents had also compiled a bulging dossier on the man Savio saw as his enemy: Clark Kerr. As campus dissent mounted, Hoover came to blame the university president more than anyone else for not putting an end to it. Kerr had led UC to new academic heights, and he had played a key role in establishing the system that guaranteed all Californians access to higher education, a model adopted nationally and internationally. But in Hoover's eyes, Kerr confused academic freedom with academic license, coddled Communist faculty members, and failed to crack down on "young punks" like Savio. Hoover directed his agents to undermine the esteemed educator in myriad ways. He wanted Kerr removed from his post as university president. As he bluntly put it in a memo to his top aides, Kerr was "no good." Reagan listened intently to Lynum's presentation, but he wanted more--much more. He asked for additional information on Kerr, for reports on liberal members of the Board of Regents who might oppose his policies, and for intelligence reports about any upcoming student protests. Just the week before, he had proposed charging tuition for the first time in the university's history, setting off a new wave of protests up and down the state. He told Lynum he feared subversives and liberals would attempt to misrepresent his efforts to establish fiscal responsibility, and that he hoped the FBI would share information about any upcoming demonstrations against him, whether on campus or at his press conferences. It was Reagan's fear, according to Lynum's subsequent report, "that some of his press conferences could be stacked with 'left wingers' who might make an attempt to embarrass him and the state government." Lynum said he understood his concerns, but following Hoover's instructions he made no promises. Then he and Harter wished the ailing governor a speedy recovery, departed the mansion, slipped into their dark four-door Ford, and drove back to the San Francisco field office, where Lynum sent an urgent report to the director. The bedside meeting was extraordinary, but so was the relationship between Reagan and Hoover. It had begun decades earlier, when the actor became an informer in the FBI's investigation of Hollywood Communists. When Reagan was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, he secretly continued to help the FBI purge fellow actors from the union's rolls. Reagan's informing proved helpful to the House Un-American Activities Committee as well, since the bureau covertly passed along information that could help HUAC hold the hearings that wracked Hollywood and led to the blacklisting and ruin of many people in the film industry. Reagan took great satisfaction from his work with the FBI, which gave him a sense of security and mission during a period when his marriage to Jane Wyman was failing, his acting career faltering, and his faith in the Democratic Party of his father crumbling. In the following years, Reagan and FBI officials courted each other through a series of confidential contacts. (7-8)
Seth Rosenfeld (Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power)
My friend Dr. Rod Rosenbladt told me the story of how he’d wrecked his car when he was sixteen years old after he and his friends had been drinking. Following the accident, Rod called his dad, and the first thing his dad asked him was, “Are you all right?” Rod said yes. Then he confessed to his father that he was drunk. Rod was naturally terrified about how his father might respond. Later that night after Rod had made it home, he wept and wept in his father’s study. He was embarrassed, ashamed. At the end of the ordeal, his father asked him this question: “How about tomorrow we go and get you a new car?” Rod now says that he became a Christian in that moment. God’s grace became real to him in that moment of forgiveness and mercy. Now nearly seventy, Rod has since spent his life as a spokesman for the theology of grace. Rod’s father’s grace didn’t turn Rod into a drunk—it made him love his father and the Lord he served. Now let me ask you: What would you like to say to Rod’s dad? Rod says that every time he tells that story in public, there are always people in the audience who get angry. They say, “Your dad let you get away with that? He didn’t punish you at all? What a great opportunity for your dad to teach you responsibility!” Rod always chuckles when he hears that response and says, “Do you think I didn’t know what I had done? Do you think it wasn’t the most painful moment of my whole life up to that point? I was ashamed; I was scared. My father spoke grace to me in a moment when I knew I deserved wrath … and I came alive.” Isn’t that the nature of grace? We know that we deserve punishment and then, when we receive mercy instead, we discover grace. Romans 5:8 reads, “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” God gives forgiveness and imputes righteousness to us even though we are sinful and while we were His enemies (vv. 6, 8, 10). Our offenses are infinitely greater than a sixteen-year-old getting drunk and wrecking his car, yet God’s grace is greater still.
Tullian Tchividjian (It Is Finished: 365 Days of Good News)
Galileo's Two New Sciences was in certain respects one long raspberry at the Inquisition, whose treatment of G.G. is infamous. Part of this agenda was to have the dialogue's straight man act as a spokesman for Aristotelian metaphysics and Church credenda and to have his more enlightened partner slap him around intellectually. One of the main targets is Aristotle's ontological division of (infinity) into actual and potential, which the Church has basically morphed into the doctrine that only God is Actually Infinite and nothing else in His creation can be. Example: Galileo ridicules the idea that the number of parts that any line segment can be divided into is only 'potentially' (meaning unreal-ly) infinite by showing that if you bend the segment into a circle-which, 'a la Nicholas of Cusa, is defined as a regular polygon with a (infinity) of sides-you have "reduced to actuality that infinite number of parts into which you claimed, while it was straight, were contained in it only potentially.
David Foster Wallace (Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity)
Great writers and my mom never used food as an object. Instead it was a medium, a catalyst to mend hearts, to break down barriers, to build relationships. Mom's cooking fed body and soul. She used to quip, "If the food is good, there's no need to talk about the weather." That was my mantra for years---food as meal and conversation, a total experience. I leaned my forehead against the glass and thought again about Emma and the arrowroot. Mom had highlighted it in my sophomore English class. "Jane Fairfax knew it was given with a selfish heart. Emma didn't care about Jane, she just wanted to appear benevolent." "That girl was stupid. She was poor and should've accepted the gift." The football team had hooted for their spokesman. "That girl's name was Jane Fairfax, and motivation always matters." Mom's glare seared them. I tried to remember the rest of the lesson, but couldn't. I think she assigned a paper, and the football team stopped chuckling. Another memory flashed before my eyes. It was from that same spring; Mom was baking a cake to take to a neighbor who'd had a knee replacement. "We don't have enough chocolate." I shut the cabinet door. "We're making an orange cake, not chocolate." "Chocolate is so much better." "Then we're lucky it's not for you. Mrs. Conner is sad and she hurts and it's spring. The orange cake will not only show we care, it'll bring sunshine and spring to her dinner tonight. She needs that." "It's just a cake." "It's never just a cake, Lizzy." I remembered the end of that lesson: I rolled my eyes----Mom loathed that----and received dish duty. But it turned out okay; the batter was excellent. I shoved the movie reel of scenes from my head. They didn't fit in my world. Food was the object. Arrowroot was arrowroot. Cake was cake. And if it was made with artisan dark chocolate and vanilla harvested by unicorns, all the better. People would crave it, order it, and pay for it. Food wasn't a metaphor---it was the commodity---and to couch it in other terms was fatuous. The one who prepared it best won.
Katherine Reay (Lizzy and Jane)
One way of phrasing it might be to say that injustice and irrationality are inevitable parts of the human condition, but that challenges to them are inevitable also. On Sigmund Freud’s memorial in Vienna appear the words: 'The voice of reason is small, but very persistent.' Philosophers and theologians have cogitated or defined this in differing ways, postulating that we respond to a divinely implanted 'conscience' or that—as Adam Smith had it—we carry around an unseen witness to our thoughts and doings and seek to make a good impression on this worthy bystander. Neither assumption need be valid; it’s enough that we know that this innate spirit exists. We have to add the qualification, however, that even if it is presumptively latent in all of us, it very often remains just that—latent. Its existence guarantees nothing in itself, and the catalytic or Promethean moment only occurs when one individual is prepared to cease being the passive listener to such a voice and to become instead its spokesman, or representative.
Christopher Hitchens (Letters to a Young Contrarian)
In any long fiction, Henry James remarked, use of the first-person point of view is barbaric. James may go too far, but his point is worth considering. First person locks us in one character's mind, locks us to one kind of diction throughout, locks out possibilities of going deeply into various characters' minds and so forth. ....Vulgar diction in the telling of the Helen story would clearly create a white-hot irony, probably all but unmanageable. Colloquial diction and relatively short sentences would have the instant effect of humanizing once elevated characters and events. Highly formal diction and all that goes along with the traditional omniscient narrator might seem immediately appropriate for the seriousness of the story, but it can easily backfire, providing not suitable pomp but mere pompousness. And some choices in p.o.v. as well as in other stylistic elements, may have more direct bearing on the theme than would others. For instance, the "town" point of view, in which the voice in the story is some unnamed spokesman for all the community--among the most famous examples is Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"--might have the immediate effect of foregrounding the story's controlling idea, conflicting community values versus personal values.
John Gardner
A woman was stabbed after she rebuffed a man’s sexual advances while she walked in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood late Monday night, a police spokesman said today. The 33-year-old victim was walking down the street when a stranger approached her and propositioned her, police spokesman Officer Albie Esparza said. When she rejected him, the man became very upset and slashed the victim in the face and stabbed her in the arm, Esparza said. The man, in other words, framed the situation as one in which his chosen victim had no rights and liberties, while he had the right to control and punish her. This should remind us that violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you. Murder is the extreme version of that authoritarianism, where the murderer asserts he has the right to decide whether you live or die, the ultimate means of controlling someone.  This may be true even if you are obedient, because the desire to control comes out of a rage that obedience can’t assuage. Whatever fears, whatever sense of vulnerability may underlie such behavior, it also comes out of entitlement, the entitlement to inflict suffering and even death on other people. It breeds misery in the perpetrator and the victims.
Rebecca Solnit (Men Explain Things to Me)
In the past two decades, especially, scholars and biographers have given emphasis to a pattern of hypocrisy and duplicity in the president’s life and career. Affecting the modesty and frugality of a simple country farmer, Jefferson’s private tastes ran to fine food, fine wines, fine homes, and fine horses. He criticized government waste, overspending, and public debt, but his profligate spending habits kept him buried under a mountain of personal debt all his adult life. He was enthralled by mechanical contrivances and innovations, but an enemy of industrialization. He denounced financial speculators while speculating aggressively in real estate. Deploring the smear tactics that were so pervasive in the 1790s, he arranged to have his political adversaries smeared. He declared that “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all,” but he was the first acknowledged leader of a major American political party. Jefferson was his country’s greatest spokesman for liberty—swearing “eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the minds of men”—and also the deeded owner of more than two hundred men, women and children, some of whom were his blood relations. As Dr. Samuel Johnson had asked: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?
Ian W. Toll (Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy)
A Favorite start to a book [sorry it's long!]: "In yesterday’s Sunday Times, a report from Francistown in Botswana. Sometime last week, in the middle of the night, a car, a white American model, drove up to a house in a residential area. Men wearing balaclavas jumped out, kicked down the front door, and began shooting. When they had done with shooting they set fire to the house and drove off. From the embers the neighbors dragged seven charred bodies: two men, three women, two children. Th killers appeared to be black, but one of the neighbors heard them speaking Afrikaans among themselves. And was convinced they were whites in blackface. The dead were South Africans, refugees who had moved into the house mere weeks ago. Approached for comment, the SA Minister of Foreign Affairs, through a spokesman, calls the report ‘unverified’. Inquiries will be undertaken, he says, to determine whether the deceased were indeed SA citizens. As for the military, an unnamed source denies that the SA Defence Force had anything to do with the matter. The killings are probably an internal ANC matter, he suggests, reflecting ‘ongoing tensions between factions. So they come out, week after week, these tales from the borderlands, murders followed by bland denials. He reads the reports and feels soiled. So this is what he has come back to! Yet where in the world can one hide where one will not feel soiled? Would he feel any cleaner in the snows of Sweden, reading at a distance about his people and their latest pranks? How to escape the filth: not a new question. An old rat-question that will not let go, that leaves its nasty, suppurating wound. Agenbite of inwit. ‘I see the Defense Force is up to its old tricks again,’ he remarks to his father. ‘In Botswana this time.’ But his father is too wary to rise to the bait. When his father picks up the newspaper, he cares to skip straight to the sports pages, missing out the politics—the politics and the killings. His father has nothing but disdain for the continent to the north of them. Buffoons is the word he uses to dismiss the leaders of African states: petty tyrants who can barely spell their own names, chauffeured from one banquet to another in their Rolls-Royces, wearing Ruritanian uniforms festooned with medals they have awarded themselves. Africa: a place of starving masses with homicidal buffoons lording over them. ‘They broke into a house in Francistown and killed everyone,’ he presses on nonetheless. ‘Executed them .Including the children. Look. Read the report. It’s on the front page.’ His father shrugs. His father can find no form of words spacious enough to cover his distaste for, on one hand, thugs who slaughter defenceless women and children and, on the other, terrorists who wage war from havens across the border. He resolves the problem by immersing himself in the cricket scores. As a response to moral dilemma it is feeble; yet is his own response—fits of anger and despair—any better?" Summertime, Coetzee
J.M. Coetzee
And not merely slogan-shouting, but debate. The Chronicle of the courtier Theophanes faithfully records a debate—perhaps disputation is the better word—between Justinian (through his herald, or mandatus) and the chosen representative of the Green faction. The dialogue is startling on a number of grounds. First, the Green “debater” addresses the emperor, the viceroy of Christ on earth, practically as an equal. He addresses Justinian respectfully—as “Justinianus Augustus”—but registers his complaint precisely as if he were doing so before a small claims court, informing the most powerful man in the world that “my oppressor can be found in the shoemaker’s quarter.” For his part, Justinian, though clearly aware that he holds what might be called a preemptive advantage (“Verily, if you refuse to keep silent, I shall have you beheaded”), still debates both the truth of the Green claims and the theological position that he suggests informs those claims. Justinian tells his interlocutor, “I would have you baptized in the name of one God” only to receive the response, “I am baptized in One God,” evidently an attempt to contrast his Monophysite sympathies with the emperor’s orthodoxy. The Green spokesman accuses the emperor of suppressing the truth, of countenancing murder, and when he has had enough, he ends with “Goodbye Justice! You are no longer in fashion. I shall turn and become Jew; better to be a pagan than a Blue, God knows…”14 The most telling part of the entire dialogue, however, is that it was
William Rosen (Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire)
Author Shelby Steele, one of America’s most insightful commentators on race relations, notes that whites have been looking for some time for a black leader who has credibility within the black community and yet can offer whites racial absolution. This should not be taken too cynically. Many whites genuinely espouse an idealism that seeks to move beyond race, and they recognize that it’s going to take a black spokesman to make this case on a national level and help to get us there. Steele notes bluntly that this idealism cannot be divorced from a powerful sense of white racial guilt. We have to get beyond race because America’s past racial history has become such an embarrassment. Now the black leader that whites are looking for does not actually have to issue indulgences in the manner of the medieval papacy; rather, by his words and deeds, he can signal to white America that whites are no longer on the hook for past racism. In Steele’s view, whites have been eagerly, hungrily awaiting the black leader who would give them a chance, through their support of his leadership, not merely to say to others but to feel, in their innermost being, “Whew, I am not a racist.” Steele speculated that whites may be willing to pay heavily both in money and in political support if such a candidate appeared on the horizon. He would truly be the anointed one.11 Obama’s ingenuity was to recognize that this unique opportunity required a black man of a kind not seen in American politics before. Such a man would have to look black but act white.
Dinesh D'Souza (The Roots of Obama's Rage)
Just when the first collie came to Sunnybank is not known. But Terhune wrote and told many times how he acquired his own first collie when he was thirteen. He had painfully amassed a savings of $9 and took it to the New York dog pound. There he bought a tricolored collie, which he named Argus. “I devoted all my out-of-school hours to Argus’s education,” he wrote later. “He learned with bewildering ease, but I learned ten times as much from him as he ever learned from me.” It was Argus who made Terhune into a collie man – a strange, deep-rooted aberration afflicting collie owners by the score and, eventually, Terhune readers by the thousands. Its major symptom is the passionate, wholly illogical belief that one breed of dog rises regally far above the rest of the barking pack – and that the old Scottish sheep-herding breed whose very name, like its origins, is shrouded in mystery. Though every breed has its equally impassioned adherents, collie people had the clear advantage, in Terhune, of a trumplet-like spokesman. He was wont to write things like: “A dog is a dog, but a collie is – a collie. “Or: “…the Sunnybank collies aren’t merely dogs. There a super dogs!” But much more than such extravagant claims about collies, it was the attributes given to the collies in his stories that had such a powerful effect on his readers. They were wise beyond belief, everlastingly gentle with those where merited such treatment (and the collies always knew), terrifyingly vengeful with those who didn’t. And they were eternally loyal – so loyal that the word itself seems inadequate to describe their fealty.
Irving Litvag (The Master of Sunnybank: A Biography of Albert Payson Terhune)
Kennewick Man is a skeleton discovered in Washington State in 1996, carbon-dated to older than 9,000 years. Anthropologists were intrigued by anatomical suggestions that he might be unrelated to typical Native Americans, and therefore might represent a separate early migration across what is now the Bering Strait, or even from Iceland. They were preparing to do all-important DNA tests when the legal authorities seized the skeleton, intending to hand it over to representatives of local Indian tribes, who proposed to bury it and forbid all further study. Naturally there was widespread opposition from the scientific and archaeological community. Even if Kennewick Man is an American Indian of some kind, it is highly unlikely that his affinities lie with whichever particular tribe happens to live in the same area 9,000 years later. Native Americans have impressive legal muscle, and ‘The Ancient One’ might have been handed over to the tribes, but for a bizarre twist. The Asatru Folk Assembly, a group of worshippers of the Norse gods Thor and Odin, filed an independent legal claim that Kennewick Man was actually a Viking. This Nordic sect, whose views you may follow in the Summer 1997 issue of The Runestone, were actually allowed to hold a religious service over the bones. This upset the Yakama Indian community, whose spokesman feared that the Viking ceremony could be ‘keeping Kennewick Man’s spirit from finding his body’. The dispute between Indians and Norsemen could well be settled by DNA comparison, and the Norsemen are quite keen to be put to this test. Scientific study of the remains would certainly cast fascinating light on the question of when humans first arrived in America. But Indian leaders resent the very idea of studying this question, because they believe their ancestors have been in America since the creation. As Armand Minthorn, religious leader of the Umatilla tribe, put it: ‘From our oral histories, we know that our people have been part of this land since the beginning of time. We do not believe our people migrated here from another continent, as the scientists do.’ Perhaps the best policy for the archaeologists would be to declare themselves a religion, with DNA fingerprints their sacramental totem. Facetious but, such is the climate in the United States at the end of the twentieth century, it is possibly the only recourse that would work.
Richard Dawkins (Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder)
One evening in April a thirty-two-year-old woman, unconscious and severely injured, was admitted to the hospital in a provincial town south of Copenhagen. She had a concussion and internal bleeding, her legs and arms were broken in several places, and she had deep lesions in her face. A gas station attendant in a neighboring village, beside the bridge over the highway to Copenhagen, had seen her go the wrong way up the exit and drive at high speed into the oncoming traffic. The first three approaching cars managed to maneuver around her, but about 200 meters after the junction she collided head-on with a truck. The Dutch driver was admitted for observation but released the next day. According to his statement he started to brake a good 100 meters before the crash, while the car seemed to actually increase its speed over the last stretch. The front of the vehicle was totally crushed, part of the radiator was stuck between the road and the truck's bumper, and the woman had to be cut free. The spokesman for emergency services said it was a miracle she had survived. On arrival at the hospital the woman was in very critical condition, and it was twenty-four hours before she was out of serious danger. Her eyes were so badly damaged that she lost her sight. Her name was Lucca. Lucca Montale. Despite the name there was nothing particularly Italian about her appearance. She had auburn hair and green eyes in a narrow face with high cheek-bones. She was slim and fairly tall. It turned out she was Danish, born in Copenhagen. Her husband, Andreas Bark, arrived with their small son while she was still on the operating table. The couple's home was an isolated old farmhouse in the woods seven kilometers from the site of the accident. Andreas Bark told the police he had tried to stop his wife from driving. He thought she had just gone out for a breath of air when he heard the car start. By the time he got outside he saw it disappearing along the road. She had been drinking a lot. They had had a marital disagreement. Those were the words he used; he was not questioned further on that point. Early in the morning, when Lucca Montale was moved from the operating room into intensive care, her husband was still in the waiting room with the sleeping boy's head on his lap. He was looking out at the sky and the dark trees when Robert sat down next to him. Andreas Bark went on staring into the gray morning light with an exhausted, absent gaze. He seemed slightly younger than Robert, in his late thirties. He had dark, wavy hair and a prominent chin, his eyes were narrow and deep-set, and he was wearing a shabby leather jacket. Robert rested his hands on his knees in the green cotton trousers and looked down at the perforations in the leather uppers of his white clogs. He realized he had forgotten to take off his plastic cap after the operation. The thin plastic crackled between his hands. Andreas looked at him and Robert straightened up to meet his gaze. The boy woke.
Jens Christian Grøndahl (Lucca)
consider the state of earthquake preparedness of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The TSE computer is housed in a Tokyo neighborhood that was completely destroyed in 1923. I asked a panel of four TSE officials what would happen if their computer were lost in a major earthquake. “Ha,” said the spokesman for the group, as if he had caught me flat-footed, “we have a backup computer.” “Where?” I asked. “Next to the main computer.” Sure enough, as easy as it would be to store a spare copy of TSE records outside of Tokyo, there are no official records of ownership outside of that one building.
Michael Lewis (Moneyball)
Reporters rely on what people tell them. A woman claims she was the lover of a president. The story is accurate, because she said it, but where’s the truth? A spokesman for the tobacco industry claims there’s no proven link between smoking and lung cancer. Religious fanatics ignore all science and maintain that the Earth is only six thousand years old. So rule number one, the news is filled with accurate lies.
Paul Levine (Fool Me Twice (Jake Lassiter #6))
The TWP fell apart in spectacular fashion in 2018 after its leader caught the group's chief spokesman having sex with his wife - an event archly dubbed by antifascists 'The Night of the Wrong Wives,' in reference to the infamous intra-Nazi Party purge known as the Night of the Long Knives.
Talia Lavin (Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy)
Of course, the writer is not the person. The writer is a version of the person who makes a model of the world that may seem to advocate for certain virtues, virtues by which he may not be able to live. ‘Not only is the novelist nobody's spokesman,’ wrote Milan Kundera, ‘but I would go so far as to say he is not even the spokesman for his own ideas. When Tolstoy sketched the first draft of Anna Karenina, Anna was a most unsympathetic woman, and her tragic end was entirely deserved and justified. The final version of the novel is very different, but I do not believe that Tolstoy had revised his moral ideas in the meantime; I would say, rather, that in the course of writing, he was listening to another voice than that of his personal moral conviction. He was listening to what I would like to call the wisdom of the novel. Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.
George Saunders (A Swim in a Pond in the Rain)
Great Depression times 100” and hyperinflation on par with the Weimar Republic. Fox News was running stories suggesting that Obama had deployed the Secret Service to monitor the conservative network. And a bizarre conspiracy theory about the president’s birthplace was beginning to gain traction—boosted by an unlikely spokesman. Donald Trump had begun popping up on political talk shows to muse about whether Barack Obama might perhaps be a secret Muslim born in Kenya who’d defrauded American voters to get elected to the presidency. This theory had been kicking around the fringes of U.S. political discourse for years and had already been debunked, but suddenly it—and Trump—were everywhere. On The View: “I want him to show his birth certificate. There’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like.” On Fox News: “He’s spent millions of dollars trying to get away from this issue.… A lot of facts are emerging and I’m starting to wonder myself whether or not he was born in this country.” On The Laura Ingraham Show: “He doesn’t have a birth certificate, or if he does, there’s something on that certificate that is very bad for him. Now, somebody told me—and I have no idea if this is bad for him or not, but perhaps it would be—that where it says ‘religion,’ it might have ‘Muslim.’ ” On the Today show: “If he wasn’t born in this country, which is a real possibility… then he has pulled one of the great cons in the history of politics.” Romney
McKay Coppins (Romney: A Reckoning)
In addition to wartime strategic interests, a complex combination of motives led to the final decision to issue the Balfour Declaration. Contemporary explanations tended to stress the Biblical romanticism of British officials’ interest in the restoration of the Jewish nation in Palestine and their sympathy for the plight of Jews in eastern Europe. The first scholarly accounts focused more on the political and diplomatic context in which British officials came to see Zionism as an ally. These early interpretations stressed the Balfour Declaration as a product of the activities of the Zionist Organization, or specifically of Dr Chaim Weizmann, the most prominent Zionist spokesman. Weizmann was engaged during the war in biochemical research for Britain’s Ministry of Munitions. His influential contacts and skilful persistence were credited with convincing British officials of the wartime propaganda value that a gesture of support for Zionism would carry in the United States and Russia, where Jews were believed to wield great power.
Martin Bunton (The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Very Short Introduction)
As a matter of fact, I agree with almost everything you’ve just said,’ he replied. ‘I’ve never understood why the Americans have targeted Iran for so long, unless it’s revenge for the humiliation of the embassy siege, which happened outside the living memory of more than three-quarters of the population. Maybe it’s because you stoked the insurgency in Iraq or bankrolled Hizbollah for thirty years. How do I know? The Iranian government hates Israel. A lot of Americans don’t hate Israel. I’m not clairvoyant, but could that have something to do with it? There’s no point in asking me these questions. I’m not a politician, Ramin. I’m just a guy who reads the Economist and the New York Times. There’s no point in keeping me here if you think I’m some kind of spokesman for the British government. These are questions you should be asking in Downing Street or, better still, Washington.
Charles Cumming (BOX 88)
The modern sitcom, in particular, is almost wholly dependent for laughs and tone on the M*A*S*H0inspired savaging of some buffoonish spokesman for hypocritical, pre-hip values at the hands of bitingly witty insurgents. [. . .] Its promulgation of cynicism about authority works to the general advantage of television on a number of levels. First, to the extent that TV can ridicule old-fashioned conventions right off the map, it can create an authority vacuum. And then guess what fills it. The real authority on a world we now view as constructed and not depicted becomes the medium that constructs our world-view. Second, to the extent that TV can refer exclusively to itself and debunk conventional standards as hollow, it is invulnerable to critics' changes that what's on is shallow or crass or bad, since and such judgments appeal to conventional, extra-televisual standards about depth, taste, quality. Too, the ironic tone of TV's self-reference means that no one can accuse TV of trying to put anything over on anybody. As essayist Lewis Hyde points out, self-mocking irony is always 'Sincerity, with a motive.' [. . .] If television can invite Joe Briefcase into itself via in-gags and irony, it can ease that painful tension between Joe's need to transcend the crowd and his inescapable status as Audience-member. For to the extent that TV can flatter Joe about 'seeing through' the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of outdated values, it can induce in him precisely the feeling of canny superiority it's taught him to crave, and can keep him dependent on the cynical TV-watching that alone affords this feeling. [. . .] Television can reinforce its on queer ontology of appearance: the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others' ridicule by betraying passé expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability.
David Foster Wallace (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again Signed)
Against Socrates and Plato Nietzsche set ‘the Sophists.’ In a Basel lecture he had referred with approval to Grote’s defense of them (iv. 361 Mus.). But he later condemned Grote for representing them as ‘respectable men and models of morality’; on the contrary, ‘their glory was that they refused to cheat with big words and phrases,’ but ‘had the courage, which all strong spirits have, to recognize their own unmorality’ (Will to Power, 429). It seems evident that in this large generalization Nietzsche had in mind men of the stamp of Callicles or Thrasymachus. His words recall the passage where Socrates praises Callicles’ frankness in ‘saying plainly what others think but do not care to say’ (Gorg. 492d); and that Nietzsche in fact considered Callicles a spokesman for ‘the Sophists’ is made clear in his lectures on Plato (iv. 422 Mus.).
E.R. Dodds (The Greeks and the Irrational)
Morocco used Pegasus to spy on senior French politicians including President Emmanuel Macron. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a close ally of Netanyahu, bought Pegasus to spy on opposition politicians and critical journalists. When this was exposed in 2021, Orbán’s spokesman defaulted to his government’s usual anti-Semitic refrain when under attack, blaming billionaire Jewish philanthropist George Soros. This was the kind of ally that Israel wanted to foster in Europe as a supporter of the Jewish state.
Antony Loewenstein (The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World)
The conference led to the creation of the Muslim World League (Rabitat al-Alam al-Islami), which would become one of the world’s largest non-governmental organizations.31 Headquartered in Mecca and funded largely by Saudi Arabia, the Muslim World League encompasses the International Islamic Relief Organization, the World Council of Mosques, and a jurisprudence committee that issues Islamic legal rulings with international standing. Its secretary general has always been a senior Saudi technocrat who consistently functions as a non-governmental Saudi spokesman.
David Rundell (Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads)
The owners of the land came onto the land, or more often a spokesman for the owners came [...] Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. All of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, some were afraid, and some worshipped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. [...] The owner man said, The Bank--or the Company--needs--wants--insists--must have--as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them. These last would take no responsibility for the banks or the companies because they were men and slaves, while banks were machines and masters all at the same time. Some of the owner men were a little proud to be slaves to such cold and powerful masters.
John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath)
During Malcolm’s own interview, which he gave as the NOI’s newly anointed national spokesman, agreeing with the “evil by nature” charge, he stated that there was no “historic example” of Caucasians ever doing anything other than evil toward blacks. This counterrejection of whites, he asserted, was also the Black Muslim method of reversing Negroes’ ingrained sense of racial inferiority and self-loathing.
Les Payne (The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X)
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever just running out. Like religious millenarians, he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse. “Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”4 The apocalypticism of the paranoid style runs dangerously near to hopeless pessimism, but usually stops short of it.
Richard Hofstadter (The Paranoid Style in American Politics)
Mr Yazdani had made a big deal about me removing any Islamic-imposed clothing as soon as the door had shut behind us, insisting that my headscarf and manteau were exchanged for loose-flowing hair and a T-shirt. He didn’t say as much, but I sensed this was not merely a desire to make his guest comfortable but also his own quiet way of showing me his opinion of the regime. As a fifty-something war veteran, with his reserved, old-school demeanour he seemed an unlikely spokesman for women’s rights, but he talked with great pride about Sara’s career and studies and, as ever, I was reminded how it was impossible to pigeonhole any of the Iranians I had met. Whenever you thought you had a handle on them, they came out with an unexpected opinion, thought or statement. It was one of the most intriguing elements of my journey; I never quite knew what was going to happen next.
Lois Pryce (Revolutionary Ride: On the Road in Search of the Real Iran)
Again historical antecedents played a part. There was dissent from the beginning. Jinnah’s claim to be the ‘sole spokesman’ for Muslims had vied with Maulana Mawdudi’s authoritarian reading of a ‘holy community of Islam’. In turn, General Ayub Khan (1958-68), in collaboration with various pirs (Muslim holy men), competed with the revivalist Jamaat-i-Islami to gain a monopoly over the discourse of ‘modernist’ Islam. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Awami League’s espousal of ‘Bengali Islam’ stood (again mainly versus the Jamaat-i-Islami) in opposition to the authority of ‘Pakistani Islam’. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (1972-77), championed ‘folk Islam’, again in collaboration with an assortment of mainly Sindhi pirs, to challenge the dominance of ‘scripturalist Islam’, advocated both by the Jamaat-i-Islami as well as by sections of the country’s modernizing elite. Later, General Zia ul Haq (1977-88), who initially worked with but then against the Jamaat, favoured a ‘legalist’ interpretation of Islam with a strong punitive bias that aimed to stem both its popular as well as its modernist expressions. In time it strengthened the hold of an ulama-inspired, ‘shariatized Islam’ which, by the 1990s, openly challenged the legitimacy of the nation-state and further aggravated Pakistan’s consensus problem.
Farzana Shaikh (Making Sense of Pakistan)
After the first series of Citizen Labs reports and articles came out in 2012, Hacking Team had apparently paused to take stock of some of its customers. The firm had ended its support for Russia in 2014 because, a spokesman said, “the Putin government evolved from one considered friendly to the West to a more hostile regime.” Apparently, Putin’s raid on Crimea pushed Russia into a different customer category—never mind that for years, Russian journalists and activists had disappeared under Putin’s watch. As for Sudan, Hacking Team cut its contract in 2014 “because of concerns about the country’s ability to use the system in accordance with Hacking Team’s contract.” This after hundreds of thousands of Sudanese were already dead and millions more displaced.
Nicole Perlroth (This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race)
The events in Vietnam and the protests against the draft, led by college students, increased the growing influence of the youth culture, who made Vonnegut their literary hero in questioning the accepted wisdom of the status quo. Kurt was as surprised as anyone and had never wanted to be a “spokesman” of the young. He was very leery of the hippie phenomenon and wrote a searing account of one of their heroes, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, guru to the Beatles and assorted movie stars (“Yes, We Have No Nirvanas,” published in Esquire and collected in his book Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons). He satirized the stylish popularity of Eastern meditation, saying we had the same thing in the West—reading short stories, which also lowered your heart rate and freed your mind from other concerns. He said short stories were “Buddhist catnaps.” He thought the Maharishi was a phony but he loved the music of the Beatles, spoke up for Abbie Hoffman, and admired Allen Ginsberg. When
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Kurt Vonnegut: Letters)
The feverish predictions of a microcephaly scourge in Brazil soon fizzled. World Health Organization spokesman Christopher Dye told NPR that while “we apparently saw a lot of cases of Zika virus in 2016, there was no microcephaly.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
Joel cared about four places: the U.S., Europe, India, and Israel,” said a former member of his team. (A company spokesman denied this characterization, stating that Kaplan traveled broadly overseas.)
Jeff Horwitz (Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets)
This sounds irrational because it is. The part of the brain that causes us to feel that familiar ways are right, no matter what, is older, bigger, and stronger than the rational mind. One psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, compares the logical brain to a human rider sitting on the back of an illogical elephant. We assume the rider is in charge, making fair, just decisions and directing the elephant. But it’s usually the elephant who’s calling the shots. In Haidt’s words, “The rider acts as spokesman for the elephant, even though it doesn’t necessarily know what the elephant is really thinking.
Martha Beck (The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self)
he wrote as lovingly of the jackal, the ghorpad, and the spotted owlet, the small, homely, unglamorous denizens of the Indian countryside.
M Krishnan (Nature's Spokesman)
Krishnan was an ecological patriot,
M Krishnan (Nature's Spokesman)
This man, who in his lifetime was unquestionably the ‘biggest name in India’s wildlife photography’, had more or less to manufacture a camera himself.
M Krishnan (Nature's Spokesman)
Dante, whom commentators willing to judge from surfaces are so fond of calling “the first modern man,” “the precursor of the Renaissance,” was their spokesman. His practical political aims toward his country were traitorous; his sociological allegiance was reactionary, backward-looking. Without his exile, true enough, it may well be that he would never have written his poem.
James Burnham (The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom)
In 1907, the 33-year-old John Duncan Fergusson arrived in Paris from Edinburgh in search of a studio. He found one in the Boulevard Edgar Quinet in Montparnasse, a quartier which had usurped Montmartre as the destination for painters, sculptors, dancers, writers and musicians. Paris was an artistic and international maelstrom, where not being French was no disadvantage for an aspiring artist - Picasso, Gris, Modigliani, Chagall were just a few of the émigrés who settled in the city. There was also soon to be a coterie of British and American artists - including Jesssie King and her husband E.A. Taylor, Jessica Dismorr, Anne Estelle Rice, and Fergusson's Edinburgh friend S.J. Peploe - who seemed to find in Fergusson a natural spokesman, even leader.
Roger Billcliffe (J.D. Fergusson 150)
Michelet has done a good deal, it is true, to make Jeanne d’Arc popular and famous; but it was as the spokesman for the national sense of the people, not as a mystic or a saint, that she interested him. “What legend is more beautiful,” he writes, “than this incontestable story? But one must be careful not to make it into a legend. One must piously preserve all its circumstances, even the most human; one must respect its touching and terrible humanity…However deeply the historian may have been moved in writing this gospel, he has kept a firm hold on the real and never yielded to the temptation of idealism.” And he insisted that Jeanne d’Arc had established the modern type of hero of action, “contrary to passive Christianity.” His approach was thus entirely rational, based squarely on the philosophy of the eighteenth century – anti-clerical, democratic. And for this reason, the History fo the Middle Ages, important as it is, and for all its acute insight and its passages of marvelous eloquence, seems to me less satisfactory than the other parts of Michelet’s history.What Michelet admires are not the virtues which the chivalrous and Christian centuries cultivated, but the heroisms of the scientist and the artist, the Protestant in religion and politics, the efforts of man to understand his situation and rationally to control his development. Throughout the Middle Ages, Michelet is impatient for the Renaissance.
Edmund Wilson (To the Finland Station)
In 2016, Merck distributed 900 million doses in Africa alone. “The drug is safe and has minor side effects,” a Merck spokesman said at the time.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
I sit at my desk with my back to my window, and there, behind me, I feel an eye that sucks up the flow of sentences, leads the story in directions that elude me. Readers are my vampires. I feel a throng of readers looking over my shoulder and seizing the words as they are set down on paper. I am unable to write if there is someone watching me: I feel that what I am writing does not belong to me any more. I would like to vanish, to leave behind for that expectation lurking in their eyes the page stuck in the typewriter, or, at most, my fingers striking the keys. How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone’s ever writing them there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person! Style, taste, individual philosophy, subjectivity, cultural background, real experience, psychology, talents, tricks of the trade: all the elements that make what I write recognizable as mine seem to me a cage that restricts my possibilities. If I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes...who would move this hand? The anonymous throng? The spirit of the times? The collective unconscious? I do not know. It is not in order to be the spokesman for something definable that I would like to erase myself. Only to transmit the writable that waits to be written, the tellable that nobody tells.
Italo Calvino (If on a Winter's Night a Traveler)
According to Shirts’s account, Lee sent messengers south to Santa Clara to bring more Paiutes to the Meadows. By Friday, September 11, there were also “a good many whites come along.” That morning, the militiamen gathered near the besieged wagons and raised a white “flag”—a handkerchief on a stick—signaling they were there to help.18 The emigrants allowed Lee into their corral for negotiation. Hoag remembered how Lee relayed the story to the Harmony congregation. The emigrants’ spokesman asked Lee if “he meant what he showed by the flag.” “Yes,” Lee answered, he “meant peace.” “Do you give us peace?” Lee asked in return. “Yes,” the negotiator replied, but another emigrant protested, “No!” “All I wish,” Lee insisted, is for you “to surrender your arms and we will see that you go unhurt.” “If you give up your arms you are a fool,” the protesting emigrant urged their spokesman. “I don’t know,” the negotiator hesitated. “He promises peace.” “Don’t you be such [a] god damned fool as that,” a third man jumped in. “If you do you are dead men.” “No, I will promise you peace,” Lee assured. “All I want is your arms.”19 After a tense parley, the emigrants finally surrendered their guns on Lee’s promise to protect them back to Cedar City.
Richard E. Turley (Vengeance Is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath)
In An Enemy of the People, speaking the language of comic exaggeration through the mouth of his spokesman, the idealist Doctor Thomas Stockmann, Ibsen puts into very literal terms the theme of the play: It is true that ideas grow stale and platitudinous, but one may go one step further and say flatly that truths die. According to Stockmann, there are no absolute principles of either wisdom or morality. In this Ibsen is referring indirectly to the reception of his previous plays. For example, the commandment "honor thy father and thy mother" referred to in Ghosts is not simply either true or false. It may have been a truth once and a falsehood today. As Stockmann states in his excited harangue to his political enemies: Truths are by no means the wiry Methuselahs some people think them. A normally constituted truth lives — let us say — as a rule, seventeen or eighteen years; at the outside twenty; very seldom more. And truths so patriarchal as that are always shockingly emaciated.
Anonymous
The president of the United States is like a manager at a fast food restaurant. He seems to be the one in charge and the one who takes the brunt of customer complaints, but he is merely working for someone who the customers will never see, or never hear about. The fast food manager is working for the franchise owner, just as the president of the United States is simply a spokesman who is carrying out the orders and agenda of his boss which remains unseen by the public. This boss, is of course, the Illuminati.
Mark Dice (The Illuminati: Facts & Fiction)
The basic issue was formulated quite clearly by Thomas Jefferson. That was before the Industrial Revolution had really taken roots in the former colonies. In his later years, Jefferson lived until 1826, and towards the end of his life, he was observing what was happening, and he had rather serious concerns about the fate of the democratic experiment for which he was the leading intellectual spokesman and a major Enlightenment figure. He feared that the rise of a new form of absolutism, which he considered as being more ominous than the form of absolutism that the American Revolution, 50 years earlier, had overthrown. And in writing about this in his last years, he distinguished between what he called "aristocrats" and "democrats." "Aristocrats," he said, are those who "fear and distrust the people and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes," in particular, the "banking institutions and moneyed incorporations." What we would nowadays call corporations. That was just on the future, and he warned specifically against that. So, that's the "aristocrats." The "democrats," in contrast, in his words, "identify with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the honest and safe depository of the public interest, even if not always the most wise." Well, the "aristocrats" of his day were the advocates of the rising capitalist state, and he recognized the perfectly obvious contradiction between democracy and capitalism. And it just increased as corporate structures were granted increasing powers, primarily early in this century, not by democratic procedures but by courts and lawyers, who turned these "banking institutions and moneyed incorporations," of which Jefferson warned, into immortal persons with powers and rights beyond the worst nightmares of pre-capitalist thinkers like Adam Smith or Thomas Jefferson.
Noam Chomsky
Oscar Goodman’s three terms were as bombastic and controversial as his arguments in court. His policy proposals included setting up brothels in Las Vegas, legalizing all street drugs to collect enough revenue to pay teachers six-figure salaries, and cutting the thumbs off people convicted of graffiti while broadcasting the punishment on television. Not surprising, none of his libertarian ideas were enacted into city ordinance.(60) Goodman’s administration was unlike any in the country. He was the first Las Vegas mayor to have his face on casino chips. He photographed a model for a topless pictorial for the Playboy website. Bombay Sapphire gin recruited him as its spokesman because he was never far from a gin martini, which he garnished with sliced jalapeno peppers and a glass of ice on the side. Oscar Goodman donated the gin endorsement honorarium to charity. In 2005, however, he faced nationwide controversy when fourth graders at a local elementary school asked him the one thing he would want with him if he was stranded on a desert island. “A bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin,” Mayor Goodman responded, adding that one of his main hobbies was drinking. He later apologized if anyone was offended
Arthur Kane (The Last Story: The Murder of an Investigative Journalist in Las Vegas)
In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln had expressed his support for a constitutional amendment to ensure that “the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the states.” He had, he declared, “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” The Republican Party, then in control of both houses of Congress, had taken a similar stance. “Never on earth did the Republican Party propose to abolish Slavery,” wrote Horace Greeley, a Republican spokesman. “Its object with respect to Slavery is simply, nakedly, avowedly, its restriction to the existing states.” In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in the Dred Scott case that any attempt to prohibit the spread of slavery was unconstitutional and that African Americans had no right to U.S. citizenship. Chief Justice Robert Taney wrote that blacks “were so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that [all blacks] might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery.
Daniel Rasmussen (American Uprising: The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt)
It conveys some idea of the morbid guilt and horror with which slaveholders viewed the possibility of black revenge that their most enlightened spokesman could compare his chattels with a medieval Islamic army.
Christopher Hitchens (Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (Eminent Lives))
oversuspicious, overaggressive” terms — that the last days are near. “The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values,” Hofstadter wrote. “He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever running short.
Francis S. Barry (Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey into the Heart of American Democracy)
that government is best which rules least," John Leland Baptist spokesman who knew Thomas Jefferson, circa 1760.
Robert G. Torbet (History of the Baptists)
That government is best which rules least," quoted in Torbet. Leland was a Baptist spokesman and pastor who knew Thomas Jefferson, circa 1760. No, I did not know him personally.
Robert G. Torbet (History of the Baptists)
Moses is considered the greatest of Hebrew leaders, the lawgiver, and God’s spokesman who talked with the LORD face to face. “He was unequaled” (Deut. 34:11; the Revised Standard Version says there was “none like him”).
J. Julius Scott Jr. (Jewish Backgrounds of the New Testament)
spokesman for the Afghan Taliban, who have pushed civilian casualties in Afghanistan to a new high in the past year, posted a Twitter message criticizing the attack as un-Islamic and expressing shared pain with the victims’ families.
Anonymous
The Center for Neighborhood Technology pioneered car sharing in Chicago in 2002 with I-GO, which was operated by Alternative Transportation. I-GO was sold to Enterprise in 2013. With NeighborCar, local car owners set their rental rates, and drivers can use the car for a set price and defined time period. Tim Frisbie, a spokesman for the Shared-Use Mobility Center, another group that promotes ride sharing and is involved in NeighborCar, said that a price range has not been set.
Anonymous
Military Keynesianism means the economy gets a sudden juice-boost of wildly unaccountable new defense spending. And here’s the kicker: It requires that we keep up sustained, prolonged and relentless military ambition in order for the economy not to suck backward into itself and collapse like a Superdome-size water blister. It’s the economic plan endorsed by Germany in the 1930s and under former GE spokesman Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Once,
Cintra Wilson (Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny)
George C. Marshall, the American secretary of state, said on the occasion of Gandhi’s passing: “Mahatma Gandhi had become the spokesman for the conscience of mankind, a man who made humility and simple truth more powerful than empires.”3 And Albert Einstein added: “Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.
Greg McKeown (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less)
Despite its professed radicalism, the Republican party had obviously become the conservative party, spokesman of vested interests and big business, defender of an elaborate system of tariffs, subsidies, currency laws, privileged banks, railroads, and corporations, a system entrenched in the law by Republicans while the voters were diverted by oratory about Reconstruction, civil rights, and Southern atrocities.
C. Vann Woodward (Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction)
The evaluation of securities and businesses for investment purposes has always involved a mixture of qualitative and quantitative factors. At the one extreme, the analyst exclusively oriented to qualitative factors would say, “Buy the right company (with the right prospects, inherent industry conditions, management, etc.) and the price will take care of itself.” On the other hand, the quantitative spokesman would say, “Buy at the right price and the company (and stock) will take care of itself.” . . . Interestingly enough, although I consider myself to be primarily in the quantitative school (and as I write this no one has come back from recess—I may be the only one left in the class), the really sensational ideas I have had over the years have been heavily weighted toward the qualitative side where I have had a “high-probability insight.” This is what causes the cash register to sing. However, it is an infrequent occurrence, as insights usually are, and, of course, no insight is required on the quantitative side—the figures should hit you over the head with a baseball bat. So the really big money tends to be made by investors who are right on qualitative decisions, but, at least in my opinion, the more sure money tends to be made on the obvious quantitative decisions.
Allen C. Benello (Concentrated Investing: Strategies of the World's Greatest Concentrated Value Investors)
A dossier of compromising material on Hillary CLINTON has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct. The dossier is controlled by Kremlin spokesman, PESKOV, directly on Putin’s orders. However, it has not yet been distributed abroad, including to TRUMP. Russian intentions for its deployment still unclear.
Luke Harding (Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win)
The principle of priestly absolution was not a major issue. The Roman Catholic Church has always taught that the priestly words Te absolvo (“I absolve you”) find their strength in the promise of Jesus to the church that “whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matt. 16:19), granting the spokesmen of the church a right to speak the pardon of Christ to penitent people. The Roman Catholic Church understands that the power to forgive sins does not reside ultimately in the priest. The priest is merely a spokesman for Christ. In practice, the priestly absolution differs very little from the Protestant minister’s “assurance of pardon,” which is given from pulpits across the land every Sunday.
R.C. Sproul (Does Prayer Change Things? (Crucial Questions, #3))
academic chair the following year. In his account of what happened, Lessing acknowledged he could do nothing to prevent being “shouted down, threatened and denigrated” by student activists. He was helpless, he said, “against the murderous bellowing of youngsters who accept no individual responsibilities but pose as spokesman for a group or an impersonal ideal, always talking in the royal ‘we’ while hurling personal insults . . . and claiming that everything is happening in the name of what’s true, good and beautiful.”11 This was fascism, German style, in the 1920s. In March 2017, the eminent political scientist Charles Murray—a former colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute—showed up to give a lecture on class divisions in American society at a progressive bastion, Middlebury College in Vermont. Hundreds of protesters gathered outside McCullough Student Center where Murray was scheduled to speak and engage in dialogue with Middlebury political scientist Allison Stanger. Murray is a libertarian who
Dinesh D'Souza (The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left)
beautiful granddaughter at his side, guarding it like a pair of faithful watchdogs. Although they were all nearly at the end of their tether, Jim roused the camp again before dawn. Using a span of oxen, and with much shouting and cracking of long whips, they heaved the overturned wagon back on to its wheels. The robust vehicle had suffered little damage, and within a few hours they had repacked its scattered load. Jim knew that they must leave the battlefield at once. In the heat of the sun the corpses would very soon putrefy, and, with the stench of their rotting, sickness and disease would come. At his orders they inspanned every other wagon in the train. Then Smallboy and the other drivers fired the long whips and the oxen trundled the vehicles out of the gruesome laager and into the open grassland. They set up camp that evening among the deserted thatched huts of the Nguni town, surrounded by the vast herds of humpbacked cattle, with the piles of ivory securely enclosed within the wagon laager. The next morning, after breakfast, Jim summoned all his men to the indaba. He wanted to explain to them his future plans, and to tell them where he would lead them next. First he asked Tegwane to explain how the Nguni used their cattle to carry the ivory when they were on the march. ‘Tell us how they place the loads, and secure them to the backs of the animals,’ Jim ordered. ‘That I do not know,’ Tegwane admitted. ‘I have only watched their advance from afar.’ ‘Smallboy will be able to work out the harness for himself,’ Jim decided, ‘but it would have been better to use a method to which the cattle are accustomed.’ Then he turned to the small group of herd-boys and said, ‘Can you men’ – they liked to be called men and they had earned the right at the barricades – ‘can you men take care of so many?’ They considered the vast herds of cattle that were scattered down the full length of the valley. ‘They are not so very many,’ said the eldest, who was the spokesman. ‘We can herd many more than that,’ said another. ‘We have vanquished the Nguni in battle,’ squeaked Izeze, smallest and cheekiest of the boys, his voice not yet broken. ‘We can take care of their cattle, and their women also, when we capture them.
Wilbur Smith (Blue Horizon: A Courtney Novel 11 (The Courtney Series))
At the end of World War II, American military policy, digesting the Japanese lessons in China, was to control air and sea lanes throughout the East but never to engage in ground hostilities on the Asian mainland. As one spokesman put it, “There was no point to mucking about through Manchuria.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
During the twenties, Germany’s youngsters (both rightist and leftist) were in the vanguard of the growing rebellion against the Weimar Republic. The youngsters were rebelling against the establishment in the name of every fundamental idea which they had been taught by every influential spokesman of that establishment
Leonard Peikoff (The Cause of Hitler's Germany)
o step into the pulpit is to enter onto holy ground. To stand behind an open Bible demands no trifling with sacred things. To be a spokesman for God requires utmost concern and care in handling and proclaiming the Word. Rightly does Scripture warn, “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness” (James 3:1).
Anonymous
Liberal democracy and capitalism remain the essential, indeed the only, framework for the political and economic organization of modern societies. Rapid economic modernization is closing the gap between many former Third World countries and the industrialized North. With European integration and North American free trade, the web of economic ties within each region will thicken, and sharp cultural boundaries will become increasingly fuzzy. Implementation of the free trade regime of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) will further erode interregional boundaries. Increased global competition has forced companies across cultural boundaries to try to adopt “best-practice” techniques like lean manufacturing from whatever source they come from. The worldwide recession of the 1990s has put great pressure on Japanese and German companies to scale back their culturally distinctive and paternalistic labor policies in favor of a more purely liberal model. The modern communications revolution abets this convergence by facilitating economic globalization and by propagating the spread of ideas at enormous speed. But in our age, there can be substantial pressures for cultural differentiation even as the world homogenizes in other respects. Modern liberal political and economic institutions not only coexist with religion and other traditional elements of culture but many actually work better in conjunction with them. If many of the most important remaining social problems are essentially cultural in nature and if the chief differences among societies are not political, ideological, or even institutional but rather cultural, it stands to reason that societies will hang on to these areas of cultural distinctiveness and that the latter will become all the more salient and important in the years to come. Awareness of cultural difference will be abetted, paradoxically, by the same communications technology that has made the global village possible. There is a strong liberal faith that people around the world are basically similar under the surface and that greater communications will bring deeper understanding and cooperation. In many instances, unfortunately, that familiarity breeds contempt rather than sympathy. Something like this process has been going on between the United States and Asia in the past decade. Americans have come to realize that Japan is not simply a fellow capitalist democracy but has rather different ways of practicing both capitalism and democracy. One result, among others, is sthe emergence of the revisionist school among specialists on Japan, who are less sympathetic to Tokyo and argue for tougher trade policies. And Asians are made vividly aware through the media of crime, drugs, family breakdown, and other American social problems, and many have decided that the United States is not such an attractive model after all. Lee Kwan Yew, former prime minister of Singapore, has emerged as a spokesman for a kind of Asian revisionism on the United States, which argues that liberal democracy is not an appropriate political model for the Confucian societies.10 The very convergence of major institutions makes peoples all the more intent on preserving those elements of distinctiveness they continue to possess.
Francis Fukuyama (Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity)
Seven of the 30 largest U.S. corporations paid more money to their chief executives last year than they paid in U.S. federal income taxes, according to a study. The seven companies cited were Verizon, Boeing, Ford, Chevron, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and General Motors. A Verizon spokesman disputed the report, saying that the company paid $422 million in income taxes in 2013 and that "the federal portion of that number is well more than Verizon's CEO's compensation.
Anonymous
What many people do not understand is that the soul was made to do all things while looking at Jesus so that everything done—whether eating or drinking, cleaning or working, preaching or praying, teaching or counseling — is done unto the glory of God.
Eric William Gilmour (Into The Cloud: Becoming God's Spokesman)
The receptivity of God’s voice is the most transformative phenomenon.
Eric William Gilmour (Into The Cloud: Becoming God's Spokesman)
Jesus refused to do anything outside of spiritually perceiving God’s desires. We must recognize that apart from Him we are impotent, but when we choose to do only what He is doing, He causes His own works to be ours.
Eric William Gilmour (Into The Cloud: Becoming God's Spokesman)
We are fully committed to upholding the highest standards of ethics and to rigorously maintaining the integrity of our research,’’ a hospital spokesman wrote in an e-mail. “Any concerns brought to our attention are thoroughly reviewed in accordance with institutional policies and applicable regulations.
Anonymous
She’d never been attracted to alpha men, and Luke was so alpha he could be a spokesman for the Alpha Support Group if they would admit to needing one—which would never happen, because they were too alpha.
Edie Ramer (Dead People (Haunted Hearts #1))
The Greek word that is translated “prophesy” means “to speak for another.” It means to speak for God or to be His spokesman.1 According to Dick Iverson, former senior pastor of Bible Temple in Portland, Oregon: The gift of prophecy is speaking under the direct supernatural influence of the Holy Spirit. It is becoming God’s mouthpiece, to verbalize His words as the Spirit directs. The Greek word propheteia means “speaking forth the mind and counsel of God.” It is inseparable in its New Testament usage with the concept of direct inspiration of the Spirit. Prophecy is the very voice of Christ speaking in the church.
James W. Goll (The Seer Expanded Edition: The Prophetic Power of Visions, Dreams and Open Heavens)
shifts signal a slowing in momentum for the bill among Democrats, who have faced a full-court press from a number of top administration officials, including President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. During Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, Obama vowed to veto the bill if it landed on his desk and urged Congress to let international talks play out. It’s already clear that Congress is reluctant to proceed on the issue. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has signaled an unwillingness to bring the sanctions bill to a vote, and in the House, party leaders have been meeting privately for weeks to figure out how to proceed. Talk in that chamber has centered on the possibility of voting on a non-binding resolution that would allow lawmakers to lay out their preferred endgame in Iran negotiations. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) already said earlier this month that a vote on the bill was not needed during the interim agreement. Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) punted the matter to Reid. "Senator Cardin wants to see negotiations with Iran succeed. As for timing of the bill, it is and has always been up to the Majority Leader," Cardin spokeswoman Sue Walitsky said. Both of the bill’s main sponsors, Sens. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), held their ground when asked for their reactions to Obama’s veto threat. “While the president promises to veto any new Iran sanctions legislation, the Iranians have already vetoed any dismantlement of their nuclear infrastructure,” Kirk said in a statement. On Tuesday night, just after the State of the Union had ended, Menendez said, "I’m not frustrated." He walked quickly into an elevator as he spoke, pushing the buttons and looking ready to be done with the conversation. "The president has every right to do what he wants." A spokesman for Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) said Wednesday that merely introducing the bill -- but not voting on it -- was helpful to negotiations. "Senator Bennet supports the President’s diplomatic efforts and would like them to succeed. The pertinent question isn't about when we vote on the bill, but whether its introduction is helpful to the negotiations. He believes it is," spokesman Adam Bozzi said. Not all senators agreed that a vote should be delayed. Offices for Sens. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) confirmed that the senators wanted to hold
Anonymous
We are now shocked at the current spate of alphabetic scandals — IRS, AP, NSA, VA. But why are we surprised, given that Obama never told the truth about his relationships with the old terrorist Bill Ayers and former PLO ad hoc spokesman Rashid Khalidi, or about the creepy land deal with the crook Tony Rezko? If the Obama White House demonized the Tea Party as tea-baggers, or compared the Republican House opposition to terrorists and arsonists, why should we be astonished, given how he was elected to the U.S. Senate? Quite mysteriously, his primary opponent, Blair Hull, and his general-election opponent, Jack Ryan, both of whom were favored to win, had their confidential divorce records leaked. Their campaigns subsequently imploded.
Anonymous
Does an arbitrary human convention, a mere custom, decree that man must guide his actions by a set of principles—or is there a fact of reality that demands it? Is ethics the province of whims: of personal emotions, social edicts and mystic revelations—or is it the province of reason? Is ethics a subjective luxury—or an objective necessity? In the sorry record of the history of mankind’s ethics—with a few rare, and unsuccessful, exceptions—moralists have regarded ethics as the province of whims, that is: of the irrational. Some of them did so explicitly, by intention—others implicitly, by default. A “whim” is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause. No philosopher has given a rational, objectively demonstrable, scientific answer to the question of why man needs a code of values. So long as that question remained unanswered, no rational, scientific, objective code of ethics could be discovered or defined. The greatest of all philosophers, Aristotle, did not regard ethics as an exact science; he based his ethical system on observations of what the noble and wise men of his time chose to do, leaving unanswered the questions of: why they chose to do it and why he evaluated them as noble and wise. Most philosophers took the existence of ethics for granted, as the given, as a historical fact, and were not concerned with discovering its metaphysical cause or objective validation. Many of them attempted to break the traditional monopoly of mysticism in the field of ethics and, allegedly, to define a rational, scientific, nonreligious morality. But their attempts consisted of trying to justify them on social grounds, merely substituting society for God. The avowed mystics held the arbitrary, unaccountable “will of God” as the standard of the good and as the validation of their ethics. The neomystics replaced it with “the good of society,” thus collapsing into the circularity of a definition such as “the standard of the good is that which is good for society.” This meant, in logic—and, today, in worldwide practice—that “society” stands above any principles of ethics, since it is the source, standard and criterion of ethics, since “the good” is whatever it wills, whatever it happens to assert as its own welfare and pleasure. This meant that “society” may do anything it pleases, since “the good” is whatever it chooses to do because it chooses to do it. And—since there is no such entity as “society,” since society is only a number of individual men—this meant that some men (the majority or any gang that claims to be its spokesman) are ethically entitled to pursue any whims (or any atrocities) they desire to pursue, while other men are ethically obliged to spend their lives in the service of that gang’s desires. This could hardly be called rational, yet most philosophers have now decided to declare that reason has failed, that ethics is outside the power of reason, that no rational ethics can ever be defined, and that in the field of ethics—in the choice of his values, of his actions, of his pursuits, of his life’s goals—man must be guided by something other than reason. By what? Faith—instinct—intuition—revelation—feeling—taste—urge—wish—whim Today, as in the past, most philosophers agree that the ultimate standard of ethics is whim (they call it “arbitrary postulate” or “subjective choice” or “emotional commitment”)—and the battle is only over the question or whose whim: one’s own or society’s or the dictator’s or God’s. Whatever else they may disagree about, today’s moralists agree that ethics is a subjective issue and that the three things barred from its field are: reason—mind—reality. If you wonder why the world is now collapsing to a lower and ever lower rung of hell, this is the reason. If you want to save civilization, it is this premise of modern ethics—and of all ethical
Anonymous
The evaluation of securities and businesses for investment purposes has always involved a mixture of qualitative and quantitative factors. At the one extreme, the analyst exclusively oriented to qualitative factors would say, “Buy the right company (with the right prospects, inherent industry conditions, management, etc.) and the price will take care of itself.” On the other hand, the quantitative spokesman would say, “Buy at the right price and the company (and stock) will take care of itself.” As is so often the pleasant result in the securities world, money can be made with either approach. And, of course, any analyst combines the two to some extent—his classification in either school would depend on the relative weight he assigns to the various factors and not to his consideration of one group of factors to the exclusion of the other group. Interestingly enough, although I consider myself to be primarily in the quantitative school (and as I write this no one has come back from recess—I may be the only one left in the class), the really sensational ideas I have had over the years have been heavily weighted toward the qualitative side where I have had a “high-probability insight.” This is what causes the cash register to really sing. However, it is an infrequent occurrence, as insights usually are, and, of course, no insight is required on the quantitative side—the figures should hit you over the head with a baseball bat. So the really big money tends to be made by investors who are right on qualitative decisions but, at least in my opinion, the more sure money tends to be made on the obvious quantitative decisions. As
Jeremy C. Miller (Warren Buffett's Ground Rules: Words of Wisdom from the Partnership Letters of the World's Greatest Investor – The Value Investing Framework for Discipline and Success)
Then, sadly, Dan died. It was a loss to me and to everyone who knew him. It seemed like an appropriate time for me to withdraw and let the book make its own way. But it was not so simple. Dan had captured peoples’ hearts and imaginations. His story had touched readers who had never before given a thought to Native America. He had articulated the feelings of many Native people who had been seeking a voice by which to explain themselves to their non-Native friends. Most important, his story had contributed in some small fashion to the reshaping of the American cultural narrative that for too long has depicted Native peoples as savages on horseback, drunks in gutters, and wisdom-bearing elders possessed of some mystical earth knowledge. People wanted to hear more from Dan and more about him. They wanted me to tell more of his story. I resisted. I was proud of what we had accomplished. But Dan was gone, and I was uncomfortable serving as a spokesman for a Native point of view and weary of trying to explain the literary method of the project we had undertaken. The book spoke for itself. There was no need to say more. But then came that chance meeting in the café. In that old man’s simple, off-handed comment, I heard the echoes of all the
Kent Nerburn (The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elder's Journey through a Land of Ghosts and Shadows)
At 5.30 a.m. Washington time, the Moscow News radio channel announced Gagarin’s successful landing and recovery. An alert journalist called NASA’s launch centre in Florida to ask if America could catch up. Press officer John ‘Shorty’ Powers was trying to catch a few hours’ rest in his cramped office cot. He and many other NASA staffers were working 16-hour days in the lead-up to astronaut Alan Shepard’s first flight in a Mercury capsule. When the phone at his side rang in the pre-dawn silence, he was irritable and unprepared. ‘Hey, what is this!’ he yelled into the phone. ‘We’re all asleep down here!’ Next morning the headlines read: ‘SOVIETS PUT MAN IN SPACE. SPOKESMAN SAYS US ASLEEP.
Jamie Doran (Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin)
We believe in law and order. Don't do anything panicky at all. Don't get your weapons. He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. Remember that is what God said. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. Love them and let them know you love them. I did not start this boycott. I was asked by you to serve as your spokesman. I want it known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped this movement will not stop. If I am stopped our work will not stop. For what we are doing is right. What we are doing is just. And God is with us.
Arthur Zajonc (Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry)
But on Sunday, a spokesman for Mr. Clinton told reporters that the former president had “sent two emails in his life.
Anonymous
ISIS’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, reportedly told his American captors as he was released (we briefly detained him during the Iraq War), “I’ll see you guys in New York.”5 And now an ISIS spokesman has pledged to raise the black flag of jihad over the White House.6
Jay Sekulow (Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can't Ignore)
From the perspective of an effective altruist, Tzu Chi does some surprising things. After the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in 2011, Tzu Chi raised funds to distribute hot meals to survivors, and in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, which battered New York and New Jersey in 2012, Tzu Chi distributed $10 million dollars worth of Visa debit cards, with $600 on each card, to victims of the storm.7 When I visited the Tzu Chi hospital in Hualien, I asked Rey-Sheng Her, a spokesman for Tzu Chi, why the organization would give aid to the citizens of wealthy countries like Japan and the United States, when the money could do much more good if used to help people in extreme poverty. His answer was that it is important for Tzu Chi to show compassion and love for all, rich and poor.
Peter Singer (The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically)
sort. Jeremiah 15:19 speaks, instructing me, “If you extract the precious from the worthless, you will be My spokesman.” (NASB) This verse was written to Jeremiah, the prophet of God. If anyone should have his spiritual act together, you would think it’d be someone like Jeremiah. Yet God’s word to Jeremiah was that in order to be God’s spokesman, he needed to address an issue in his life. He needed to extract from the rubbish and debris that which was precious.
Arabah Joy (Trust Without Borders: A 40-Day Devotional Journey to Deepen, Strengthen, and Stretch Your Faith in God)
Across the street, the general store was already in full swing. Pickups were packed in tight, fishermen in yellow slickers loitering outside with cigarettes and hot coffee. It looked like a casting call for the next Gorton’s fish sticks spokesman.
Jen Blood (All the Blue-Eyed Angels (Erin Solomon Pentalogy, #1))
Birds may commemorate some human deaths. On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen, a twenty-nine-year-old security guard, killed fortynine people and wounded fifty-three others in a mass shooting inside Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Orlando Police Department officers shot and killed him after a three-hour standoff. In a subsequent vigil, the names of the forty-nine victims were being read as a flock of birds flew by. A photographer noticed them and snapped a photo. Later, she counted the birds in the photo. There were forty-nine. The photographer showed other people and asked them to count. “We were all stunned,” she said. A spokesman for the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, where the vigil was held, said that the center had not released the birds during the vigil. The mind was the collective and individual grief of the mourners of forty-nine deaths. The object was the forty-nine birds.
Bernard D. Beitman, MD (Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen)
The day’s most notable clash occurred when a group of pacifists visited Lodge, an acerbic Boston Brahmin with a white beard. Lodge was an enthusiastic proponent of war who thought Wilson weak-willed, snorting contemptuously at the president’s call for “peace without victory” of a few months earlier. When the senator stepped into the hallway outside his office to meet the pacifist delegation, its spokesman, Alexander Bannwart, a former minor-league baseball player, attacked Lodge’s enthusiasm for war. The senator was furious. “National degeneracy and cowardice are worse than war!” he told Bannwart, who retorted, “Anyone who wants to go to war is a coward! You’re a damned coward!” This was too much for the 67-year-old Lodge, who shouted, “You’re a damned liar!” and punched Bannwart, 36, to the floor. Bannwart fought back, slamming Lodge against a closed door. Office workers, police, and even a passing Western Union messenger joined the melee in defense of the senator. Lodge triumphantly yelled, “I’m glad I hit him first!” but it was the bloodied Bannwart whom the police hauled away in a paddy wagon.
Adam Hochschild (American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis)
The loss of white ethno-cultural confidence manifests itself in other ways. Among the most important is a growing unwillingness to indulge the anti-white ideology of the cultural left. When whites were an overwhelming majority, empirically unsupported generalizations about whites could be brushed off as amusing and mischievous but ultimately harmless. As whites decline, fewer are willing to abide such attacks. At the same time, white decline emboldens the cultural left, with its dream of radical social transformation. ... From a modern perspective, the most important figure to emerge from this milieu is Randolph Bourne. Viewed as a spokesman for the new youth culture in upper-middle-class New York, Bourne burst onto the intellectual scene with an influential essay in the respected Atlantic Monthly in July 1916 entitled ‘Trans-National America’. Here Bourne was influenced by Jewish-American philosopher Horace Kallen. Kallen was both a Zionist and a multiculturalist. Yet he criticized the Liberal Progressive worldview whose cosmopolitan zeal sought to consign ethnicity to the dustbin of history. Instead, Kallen argued that ‘men cannot change their grandfathers’. Rather than all groups giving and receiving cultural influence, as in Dewey’s vision, or fusing together, as mooted by fellow Zionist Israel Zangwill in his play The Melting Pot (1910), Kallen spoke of America as a ‘federation for international colonies’ in which each group, including the Anglo-Saxons, could maintain their corporate existence. There are many problems with Kallen’s model, but there can be no doubt that he treated all groups consistently. Bourne, on the other hand, infused Kallen’s structure with WASP self-loathing. As a rebel against his own group, Bourne combined the Liberal Progressives’ desire to transcend ‘New Englandism’ and Protestantism with Kallen’s call for minority groups to maintain their ethnic boundaries. The end product was what I term asymmetrical multiculturalism, whereby minorities identify with their groups while Anglo-Protestants morph into cosmopolites. Thus Bourne at once congratulates the Jew ‘who sticks proudly to the faith of his fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his’, while encouraging his fellow Anglo-Saxons to: "Breathe a larger air . . . [for] in his [young Anglo-Saxon’s] new enthusiasms for continental literature, for unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton philosophies of power, he feels himself a citizen of a larger world. He may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at least found the clue to that international mind which will be essential to all men and women of good-will if they are ever to save this Western world of ours from suicide." Bourne, not Kallen, is the founding father of today’s multiculturalist left because he combines rebellion against his own culture and Liberal Progressive cosmopolitanism with an endorsement – for minorities only – of Kallen’s ethnic conservatism. In other words, ethnic minorities should preserve themselves while the majority should dissolve itself.
Eric Kaufmann (Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities)
I have no sense of Steven's words; all I know is that if he is the spokesman for empire, then empire is an ugly, dissolute thing. His voice is like the whisper of the devil. Sugarcoated words, designed to make what is evil palatable so that more evil can be committed. Listening to him is like listening to the clean, efficient turning of the wheel at my uncle's bacon factory.
Jennifer McVeigh (Leopard at the Door)
After all, Ovid was never haunted by the skeptical suspicion that history might have two contradictory courses, one appointed by the ruling god, the other by man’s antlike resistance, and that the writer, if he is a spokesman for history, must choose between these two orders. Ovid succumbed to the third order, which was unhistorical, abstract, and determined only by the logic of composition and rhythm. It was this order alone that guided his work. And it had something mathematical about it, even if it did not lack the charms of dancing.
Jacek Bocheński (Naso the Poet: The Loves and Crimes of Rome's Greatest Poet (The Notorious Roman Trilogy))
Dauer figured Moonves was calling about a role for Phillips, which finally seemed to be happening. Dauer was watching his hometown baseball team, the Minnesota Twins, on TV when Moonves reached him. But Moonves wasn’t calling him with good news about Phillips. Instead, he was terse and sounded stressed. Moonves asked Dauer to delete all their text messages, adding that he was asking all his friends to do the same thing. (A spokesman for Moonves denied he asked him to delete messages.) Dauer wondered what that was all about. He hung up and went back to watching the game. He never deleted the messages.
James B. Stewart (Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy)
Carter’s human rights policy was “ambiguous, ambivalent, and ambidextrous,” as Hodding Carter (no relation), Derian’s husband and the State Department spokesman, described it.
Jonathan Alter (His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life)
Everyone talking and thinking out loud, with no space or oxygen left for quiet statements and silence. In a way, it’s not just about being a spokesman for the National Mime Association, but a spokesman for silence itself.
Ronan Hession (Leonard and Hungry Paul)
As spokesman for the whole company, that disciple promptly said: "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and know that Thou art that Christ, the son of the living God," or, according to the reading preferred by most critics, "that Thou art the Holy One of God." Three anchors, we infer from these words, helped the twelve to ride out the storm: Religious earnestness or sincerity; a clear perception of the alternatives before them; and implicit confidence in the character and attachment to the person of their Master.
Alexander Balmain Bruce (The Training of the Twelve: How Jesus Christ Found and Taught the 12 Apostles; A Book of New Testament Biography)
Thai cultural mandates "Thai people must not engage in any business without considering the benefit and safety of the nation." "Thai people must never reveal anything to foreigners that might damage the nation. These actions are a betrayal of the nation." "Thai people must not act as agent or spokesman for foreigners without considering the benefit of the Thai nation, and must not express opinion or take the side of foreigners in international disputes. These actions are a betrayal of the nation." "Thai people must not secretly purchase land on behalf of foreigners in a way that endangers the nation. These actions are a betrayal of the nation." "When a person has betrayed the nation, it is the duty of Thai people to actively and quickly put a stop to it.
Wikipedia
Another thing this spokesman tells me is that more Kansans need to go to jail. In Kansas, he says, the “rate of incarceration went up forty-four percent in the nineties. In the rest of the nation, it went up 71.7 percent. So we are not putting people in jail” at the same rate as other states.
Thomas Frank (What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America)
In a world that has come to see ideas and collective enthusiasm with horror, Hegel becomes a gateway to a new world, where ideas are the key to conciousness, where the philosopher becomes the spokesman for the times and the prophet of a united humanity. It is a world in which archaic terms like "harmony" and "humanity" still make sense—indeed, still give us something to hope for. It is a world worth, at least, considering.
Robert C. Solomon (In the Spirit of Hegel)
To begin the affair, a spokesman from each faction was to give a brief account of his own religion and afterwards they would debate in open forum.
Colin Falconer (Silk Road (Epic Adventure, #1))
The contents included a lengthy interview with Monsignor Corrado Balducci. Two things became obvious from the clergyman’s answers to Paola’s questions. He was well versed in the subject; and although he was speaking as an individual, and not as an official Vatican spokesman, his superiors were well aware that he was speaking with their full knowledge, at least, if not their unofficial blessing.
Paul T. Hellyer (The Money Mafia: A World in Crisis)
Active demonization of the protest movement had already begun while it was still limited to Punjab. At the end of November, when the farmers’ march was finally stopped on the borders of Delhi, the rhetoric against them was ratcheted up. The BJP general secretary in Uttarakhand on 29 November 2020 called the protestors pro-Pakistan, pro-Khalistan and anti-national. Gujarat’s deputy chief minister called the farmers anti-national elements, terrorists, Khalistanis, Communists and pro-China people having pizza and pakodi. Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Chouhan wrote an article blaming the protests on vested interests. Law and justice minister Ravishankar Prasad associated them with the mythical ‘tukde-tukde’ gang. The BJP vice president in Himachal Pradesh called the protests the work of anti-nationals and middlemen. The same day, the party’s spokesman in the state called the protestors miscreants who were the same people behind Shaheen Bagh. On 17 December, the BJP chief minister in Tripura, Biplab Deb, said Maoists were behind the protests, while Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath claimed Opposition parties were using farmers to fuel unrest in the country because they were unhappy about the construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya. He also blamed communism and those who wanted to promote disorder and didn’t want to see India prosper. BJP national spokesman Sambit Patra called the farmers extremists in the garb of food-providers, another spokesman called them terrorists, and BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya called them anarchists and insurrectionists. On 17 January 2021, a BJP MP from Uttar Pradesh said the protests were backed by anti-national powers. A BJP MLA from Gujarat wrote to Amit Shah asking him to hang or shoot the protestors. Even in March 2021, the slander of calling the thousands of protestors fake farmers and terrorists continued. The New York Times reported that this demonisation cleaved to a pattern from Modi’s playbook: first the accusations of foreign infiltration, then police complaints against protest leaders, then the arrests of protesters and journalists, then the blocking of internet access in places where demonstrators gathered. All this was akin to India’s actions in Kashmir, and against the protestors of Shaheen Bagh and elsewhere
Aakar Patel (Price of the Modi Years)
If we were looking for a typically German source we would turn to the metaphysicists; for a typically British source we would apply to the Essayists who, through their spokesman, Meredith, have proclaimed humour the privilege of the select minds. And so on and so forth. But since we want to study the typically American approach and the typically American understanding of humour, we shall not turn to the metaphysicists, or to the satirists, or to the philosophers or Essayists. We shall turn to the practics. American pragmatism in philosophy is a reflection of this avid search for what is useful and applicable — in everything that interests the American.
Serguei Eisenstein (Reflexões De Um Cineasta)
Burt explained. I could see why he had been chosen spokesman. What he had to say, he said clearly and in a few words. I had been selected for participation in an experiment. He hoped I would be cooperative; lack of cooperation on my part would make matters difficult for them and for myself. They were Operators, the three of them. There were Operators everywhere in the world although they rarely were seen or heard. My seeing and hearing them was, unfortunately, a necessary part of the experiment. I thought: I have come upon knowledge which other people do not have and the knowledge is obviously dangerous to have; others would be in equal danger if I revealed it to them. 'Yes,' said Burt, and he looked pleased. But I hadn't spoken. I considered this for a moment. First things first. 'What is the nature of this experiment?' Hinton smiled wryly. 'Didn't I tell you,' he said to Burt, 'that it would say that first?' It?
Barbara O'Brien (Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic)
Solzhenitsyn's August, 1914 is a nostalgic lament over the possibilities which in his opinion were so carelessly let go by the Russian big capital and military. The book would most certainly evoke memories in those who lived through the events it describes. August, 1914 is a belated indictment of the autocratic regime from the position of the bourgeoisie. The fervent speeches which the author put into the mouths of his heroes are in effect a tedious paraphrase of the harsh denunciation of autocracy made by the most ruthless spokesman of Russian capitalism who sought to establish a dictatorship of their own.
Nikolai N. Yakovlev (Solzhenitsyn's Archipelago of Lies)
Emissions of carbon dioxide reasonable commercial For those who do not know each other with the phrase "carbon footprint" and its consequences or is questionable, which is headed "reasonable conversion" is a fast lens here. Statements are described by the British coal climatic believe. "..The GC installed (fuel emissions) The issue has directly or indirectly affected by a company or work activities, products," only in relation to the application, especially to introduce a special procedure for the efforts of B. fight against carbon crank function What is important? Carbon dioxide ", uh, (on screen), the main fuel emissions" and the main result of global warming, improve a process that determines the atmosphere in the air in the heat as greenhouse gases greenhouse, carbon dioxide is reduced by the environment, methane, nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs more typically classified as). The consequences are disastrous in the sense of life on the planet. The exchange is described at a reasonable price in Wikipedia as "...geared a social movement and market-based procedures, especially the objectives of the development of international guidelines and improve local sustainability." The activity is for the price "reasonable effort" as well as social and environmental criteria as part of the same in the direction of production. It focuses exclusively on exports under the auspices of the acquisition of the world's nations to coffee most international destinations, cocoa, sugar, tea, vegetables, wine, specially designed, refreshing fruits, bananas, chocolate and simple. In 2007 trade, the conversion of skilled gross sales serious enough alone suffered due the supermarket was in the direction of approximately US $ 3.62 billion to improve (2.39 million), rich environment and 47% within 12 months of the calendar year. Fair trade is often providing 1-20% of gross sales in their classification of medicines in Europe and North America, the United States. ..Properly Faith in the plan ... cursed interventions towards closing in failure "vice president Cato Industries, appointed to inquire into the meaning of fair trade Brink Lindsey 2003 '. "Sensible changes direction Lindsay inaccurate provides guidance to the market in a heart that continues to change a design style and price of the unit complies without success. It is based very difficult, and you must deliver or later although costs Rule implementation and reduces the cost if you have a little time in the mirror. You'll be able to afford the really wide range plan alternatives to products and expenditures price to pay here. With the efficient configuration package offered in the interpretation question fraction "which is a collaboration with the Carbon Fund worldwide, and acceptable substitute?" In the statement, which tend to be small, and more? They allow you to search for carbon dioxide transport and delivery. All vehicles are responsible dioxide pollution, but they are the worst offenders? Aviation. Quota of the EU said that the greenhouse gas jet fuel greenhouse on the basis of 87% since 1990 years Boeing Company, Boeing said more than 5 747 liters of fuel burns kilometer. Paul Charles, spokesman for Virgin Atlantic, said flight CO² gas burned in different periods of rule. For example: (. The United Kingdom) Jorge Chavez airport to fly only in the vast world of Peru to London Heathrow with British Family Islands 6.314 miles (10162 km) works with about 31,570 liters of kerosene, which produces changes in only 358 for the incredible carbon. Delivery. John Vidal, Environment Editor parents argue that research on the oil company BP and researchers from the Department of Physics and the environment in Germany Wising said that about once a year before the transport height of 600 to 800 million tons. This is simply nothing more than twice in Colombia and more than all African nations spend together.
PointHero
o resume: 2 It is often said—and even more often screamed at anti–gay marriage rallies outside the statehouse in Lansing—that I created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. 3 Wrong. 4 Now will I tell the story of the first man, Adam; and of the companion I fashioned for him, Steve; and of the great closeting that befell their relationship. 5 For after I created the earth, and sea, and every plant and seed and beast of the field and fowl of the air, and had the place pretty much set up, I saw that it was good; 6 But I also saw, that by way of oversight it made administrative sense to establish a new middle-managerial position. 7 So as my final act of Day Six, I formed a man from the dust of the ground, and breathed life into his nostrils; and I called him Adam, to give him a leg up alphabetically. 8 And lo, I made him for my image; not in my image, but for my image; because with Creations thou never gettest a second chance to make a first impression; 9 And so in fashioning him I sought to make not only a responsible planetary caretaker, but also an attractive, likeable spokesman who in the event of environmental catastrophe could project a certain warmth. 10 To immediately assess his ability to function in my absence, I decided to change my plans; for I had intended to use Day Seven to infuse the universe with an innate sense of compassion and moral justice; but instead I left him in charge and snoozed. 11 And Adam passed my test; yea, he was by far my greatest achievement; he befriended all my creatures, and named them, and cared for them; and tended the Garden most skillfully; for he had a great eye for landscape design. 12 But I soon noticed he felt bereft in his solitude; for oft he sighed, and pined for a helpmeet; and furthermore he masturbated incessantly, until he had well-nigh besplattered paradise. 13 So one night I caused him to fall into a deep sleep; fulsomely did I roofie his nectar; and as he slept, I removed a rib, though not a load-bearing one. 14 And from this rib I fashioned a companion for him; a hunk, unburdened by excess wisdom; ripped, and cut, and hung like unto a fig tree before the harvest; 15 Yea, and a power bottom. 16 And Adam arose, and saw him, and wept for joy; and he called the man Steve; I had suggested Steven, but Adam liked to keep things informal. 17 And Adam and Steve were naked, and felt no shame; they knew each other, as often as possible; truly their loins were a wonderland. 18 And they were happy, having not yet eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge That Your Lifestyle Is Sinful.
David Javerbaum (An Act of God: Previously Published as The Last Testament: A Memoir by God)
If I were offering hip replacement services I'd use Jarod Kintz as my spokesman. No one can possibly be better than him, to replace the missing spoke in your wheels.
Will Advise (Nothing is here...)
It was less fun being the chosen one and prophet when the gods were violent and capricious and their spokesman was insane and powerless.
James S.A. Corey (Cibola Burn (Expanse, #4))