Stick To Your Convictions Quotes

In the morning a new man was behind the front desk. "And how did you enjoy your stay, Sir?" he asked smoothly. "It was singularly execrable," I replied. "Oh, excellent," he purred, taking my card "In fact, I would go so far as to say that the principal value of a stay in this establishment is that it is bound to make all subsequent service-related experiences seem, in comparison, refreshing." He made a deeply appreciative expression as if to say, "Praise indeed," and presnted my bill for signature. "Well, we hope you'll come again." "I would sooner have bowel surgery in the woods with a a stick." His expression wavered, then held there for a long moment. "Excellent," he said again, but without a great show of conviction.

I'm very glad you asked me that, Mrs Rawlinson. The term `holistic' refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson. "Let me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist with toothache he sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do you know why he does that, Mrs Rawlinson? No, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but we intend to find out. A pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye.

The term ‘holistic’ refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson. “Let me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist with toothache he sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do you know why he does that, Mrs Rawlinson? “No, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but we intend to find out. A pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye.

And if you're the kind of person who always does what you think is right, no matter how crazy others think it is, take heart. The bad news is that you will be wrong more often that the herd followers. The good news is that sticking to your convictions creates a positive externality, letting people make accurate inferences from your behavior. There may come a time when you will save the entire herd from disaster.

Zubaydah was transferred in 2006 to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. The videotapes of his interrogations, along with recordings of the torture of other detainees, were ordered destroyed by the head of the CIA’s clandestine service, Jose Rodriguez, despite standing orders from the White House Counsel’s Office to preserve them. According to his attorney, Zubaydah, who remains in Guantánamo today, has “permanent brain damage,” has suffered hundreds of seizures, and “cannot picture his mother’s face or recall his father’s name.” Some might read this and say to themselves, “Who gives a damn what happened to a terrorist after what they did on September 11?” But it’s not about them. It never was. What makes us exceptional? Our wealth? Our natural resources? Our military power? Our big, bountiful country? No, our founding ideals and our fidelity to them at home and in our conduct in the world make us exceptional. They are the source of our wealth and power. Living under the rule of law. Facing threats with confidence that our values make us stronger than our enemies. Acting as an example to other nations of how free people defend their liberty without sacrificing the moral conviction upon which it is based, respect for the dignity possessed by all God’s children, even our enemies. This is what made us the great nation we are. My fellow POWs and I could work up very intense hatred for the people who tortured us. We cussed them, made up degrading names for them, swore we would get back at them someday. That kind of resistance, angry and pugnacious, can only carry you so far when your enemy holds most of the cards and hasn’t any scruples about beating the resistance out of you however long it takes. Eventually, you won’t cuss them. You won’t refuse to bow. You won’t swear revenge. Still, they can’t make you surrender what they really want from you, your assent to their supremacy. No, you don’t have to give them that, not in your heart. And your last resistance, the one that sticks, the one that makes the victim superior to the torturer, is the belief that were the positions reversed you wouldn’t treat them as they have treated you. The ultimate victim of torture is the torturer, the one who inflicts pain and suffering at the cost of their humanity.

How do you know how you are if you wear the same things as before?” she asked. "You have to shake your life until you rid yourself of everything you thought you were. You will shiver during the transition and then replenish with non-identity. After that, you’ll see clearly. What does that mean? Well, you may have to move out of this country. Build your closet from the ground up. Befriend those you despise. Take a left. Trade different things, you see? One must refresh themselves. Stay current with the needs of our soul.” “The adventure isn’t real though... like, people don’t actually do those things. It’s very romantic, but it’s not true. People don’t actually do that.” “What in the world? Do you know your history? We are anything– anything!—we are... in medieval times, kings would behead their brothers. Rulers would commission the most talented artists in the world to paint their bathroom ceilings. People have defeated mammoths with sticks. People have loved. People have killed the innocent to hurt the guilty. Waited until dawn. Mocked death. Staged coup d'états. Go further in your emotions and convictions. Increase your tolerance for extremity. Life can stretch.” “I think you’re mad,” giggled Andrei, shifting his feet. “Like a comet,” she stared with a firm jaw.

What are you planting in your subconscious? Are you filling it with things that will help you stick to your convictions or are you filling it with things that are going to pull you away from your faith?

I don’t think you even like me.” Like most profound revelations, it was painfully obvious, once one was smacked in the face with the truth. “That’s preposterous. I love you.” “Name one thing you love about me.” His knuckles whitened as he clasped his hands tightly together. “You’re acting crazy. I love everything about you.” “You can’t do it, can you?” “Of course I can. If I didn’t love you, why did I stick with you all these years?” “I don’t know. You’ll have to answer that for yourself.” That was his job to figure out, but she knew it was true, deep down in the pit of her stomach. “What are you saying?” “I can’t marry you. Not now. Not ever.” She spoke the words with so much conviction that they rang with a truth even Steve couldn’t deny. “It’s not your job to fix me anymore.” “I’m sure we can work this out,” he said, but his voice had lost its strength and its smug certainty. “No, we can’t.” “Why?” She met his gaze. “Because I don’t want to.” All the background noise dimmed and the diner seemed to still as several long moments passed. He lowered his eyes and stared down at the table. “I’m tired of playing it safe,” she said, the words gentle with compassion. He gave a frown, followed by a twist of his lips. “You know better than anyone the danger in that statement.” It was the first mean thing he’d said to her, and it was like a stab in the heart. It rocked her to the very core, resonating with everything she had understood about herself since her dad had died. But it didn’t break her, didn’t change her mind. “I’m not afraid anymore.” To her shock, she realized it was true. “So that’s it? No more discussion.” “I’m sorry.” He took a deep breath, slowly exhaling. “When are you coming home?” “I don’t know,” she said, picking up another napkin and blotting under her lashes. “But it’s no longer your concern.” “There’s nothing I can do, is there?” She

I couldn’t shake the idea that I, too, was probably one conversation away from changing my own mind about something, maybe a lot of things. But I also recalled how many conversations I’d had that only made my convictions stronger. I thought about the truthers and all the conversations they had in New York. I wondered what made these interactions different. In the training, after the videos, Laura handed things over to Steve, and I got my first clue. He opened by telling the crowd that facts don’t work. A serene man with a gentle and patient spirit, Steve put away his persistent smile and raised his voice to address the audience on this point. “There is no superior argument, no piece of information that we can offer, that is going to change their mind,” he said, taking a long pause before continuing. “The only way they are going to change their mind is by changing their own mind—by talking themselves through their own thinking, by processing things they’ve never thought about before, things from their own life that are going to help them see things differently.” He stood by a paper easel on which Laura had drawn a cartoon layer cake. Steve pointed to the smallest portion at the top with a candle sticking out. It was labeled “rapport,” the next smallest layer was “our story,” and the huge base was “their story.” He said to keep that image in mind while standing in front of someone, to remember to spend as little time as possible talking about yourself, just enough to show that you are friendly, that you aren’t selling anything. Show you are genuinely interested in what they have to say. That, he said, keeps them from assuming a defensive position. You should share your story, he said, pointing to the portion of the cake that sat on top of the biggest layer, but it’s their story that should take up most of the conversation. You want them to think about their own thinking. The team tossed out lots of metaphors like these. For instance, Steve later said to think of questions as keys on a giant ring. If you keep asking and listening, he told the crowd, one of those keys was bound to unlock the door to a personal experience related to the topic. Once that real, lived memory was out in the open, you could (if done correctly) steer the conversation away from the world of conclusions with their facts googled for support, away from ideological abstractions and into the world of concrete details from that individual’s personal experiences. It was there, and only there, he said, that a single conversation could change someone’s mind.

were ostentatious about it, they were hated even more. It may have been stupid of them, and of course the wiser Jews, especially the older ones, were greatly upset, and remonstrated with the younger, because they foresaw the antagonism their behaviour would create. The Jews probably paid fair prices for what they bought - but that wasn’t the point. Except for my father and many of his generation, people hated the Jews. My father realised that the fault did not lie with the Jews but somehow much higher up. Of course, it would be wrong to give the impression that there were not many impoverished Jews in Budapest and other places who had got things just as wrong as everybody else. Compared with elsewhere, the elite branches of the Hungarian civil service - the Army, the diplomatic corps, and the financial administration - usually maintained the old traditions of integrity; and they suffered for that. The families of senior civil servants who tried to stick to the ethics of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy often met disaster - unless they had land with which to support their convictions - and the attitudes of such parents were often resented by the young who found the maintenance of uncomfortable principles objectionable while their friends’ families were obviously making compromises. Real corruption was found less in the central government than at county level. This was something entirely new. When my father protested about the irregularities that were permitted - the keeping of two sets of books, the acceptance of bribes, the payments in cash, the extra jobs taken on which left less time for official work to be done - the reply was: ‘Your Excellency, will you feed my children?’ There was communal hatred, which was new. There was social resentment, which was new. There was bribery and corruption: that was new. It was the same in Austria and Poland. If you get the same fever, you get the same symptoms.

The artifacts are often what people latch on to most in a church, though they are expressions of so much beneath the surface. Imagine growing up in a healthy church. The church is generous, kind, nurturing, full of truth, and loving. You grow up loving your church. This church happens to have some programs that have deeply impacted you. Maybe it was a children’s program or a great worship ministry. In your mind, even without realizing it, your affinity for belief of the church is connected to the visible expressions of the church. Now, years long past that first church experience, artifacts that seem nearest to those original expressions will just feel right. Because of this, people are often really attached to the artifacts. While changing actual beliefs is the most difficult task, changing artifacts often creates the most pain. In order to understand culture, it is critical to recognize the differences in the layers. It is faster to correct unwanted behaviors or artifacts in a culture, but only addressing behavior is insufficient. Unless all the layers of culture are addressed, other deviant behaviors will pop up in the place of recently addressed ones. This game of behavioral whack-a-mole becomes an endless cycle of battling unnamed enemies underneath the surface. The unwanted behaviors are symptoms; an unhealthy culture is the sickness. Wherever we find stubborn sticking points in a church culture, there is always inconsistency between the actual beliefs and values and the stated ones. If there are deeply held assumptions and beliefs within the culture that are incompatible with the desired future that leaders are leading toward, then the beliefs beneath the surface must be addressed. If our churches are going to have strong cultures, there must be actual beliefs driven deeply into the church that are articulated and then expressed in artifacts. There will be harmony and congruence between all three layers of culture. The church won’t settle for mere alignment between the articulated values and the artifacts. The leaders will push for the actual beliefs to be deeply rooted in the church. The true beliefs and assumptions of a church culture are not only written on signs, posters, and e-mail footers. The truly embraced convictions of a local church are written in the lives of believers as they interact with one another and the world. Church leaders often

No easy matter to stick to the conviction that your point of view is right and that all the people about you are wrong. That is the way not merely with pioneers of thought, with heroes, saints, and martyrs, but also with lunatics and “nuts,” of whom there are millions in the world. When one of these “nuts” succeeds in persuading the greater part of a great nation that he is right, the five per cent have to stop and ask themselves: “How come?

I’m one of the latter, a live-and-let-live guy all the way. You do your thing; I’ll do mine. The twain don’t have to meet. Don’t get me wrong: if you’re about to step in front of a bus, I’ll stick out my am, but that’s about it. Otherwise, you’re pretty much flyin’ solo, as far as I’m concerned. As long as whatever you’ve got in mind involves other consenting adults, I say go for it. When it comes to kids, however, I get downright medieval. I fall right into line with penitentiary convicts, who consider it to be full-time open season on child molesters.