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Because bread was so important, the laws governing its purity were strict and the punishment severe. A baker who cheated his customers could be fined £10 per loaf sold, or made to do a month's hard labor in prison. For a time, transportation to Australia was seriously considered for malfeasant bakers. This was a matter of real concern for bakers because every loaf of bread loses weight in baking through evaporation, so it is easy to blunder accidentally. For that reason, bakers sometimes provided a little extra- the famous baker's dozen.
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Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
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On the raptors kept for falconry:
"They talk every night, deep into the darkness. They say about how they were taken, about what they can remember about their homes, about their lineage and the great deeds of their ancestors, about their training and what they've learned and will learn. It is military conversation, really, like what you might have in the mess of a crack cavalry regiment: tactics, small arms, maintenance, betting, famous hunts, wine, women, and song. Another subject they have is food. It is a depressing thought," he continued, "but of course they are mainly trained by hunger. They are a hungry lot, poor chaps, thinking of the best restaurants where they used to go, and how they had champagne and caviar and gypsy music. Of course, they all come from noble blood."
"What a shame that they should be kept prisoners and hungry."
"Well, they do not really understand that they are prisoners any more than the cavalry officers do. They look on themselves as being 'dedicated to their profession,' like an order of knighthood or something of that sort. You see, the member of the Muse [where Raptors are kept for falconry] is restricted to the Raptors, and that does help a lot. They know that none of the lower classes can get in. Their screened perches do not carry Blackbirds or such trash as that. And then, as for the hungry part, they're far from starving or that kind of hunger: they're in training, you know! And like everybody in strict training, they think about food.
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T.H. White (The Sword in the Stone (The Once and Future King, #1))
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Imagine if we taught baseball the way we teach science. Until they were twelve, children would read about baseball technique and history, and occasionally hear inspirational stories of the great baseball players. They would fill out quizzes about baseball rules. College undergraduates might be allowed, under strict supervision, to reproduce famous historic baseball plays. But only in the second or third year of graduate school, would they, at last, actually get to play a game. If we taught baseball this way, we might expect about the same degree of success in the Little League World Series that we currently see in our children’s science scores.
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Alison Gopnik (The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children)
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Key traits are a large x-height, strict geometry, and the infamous leaning letters and ligatures that allow extra tight fitting words. These glyphs are often abused, leading Ed Benguiat to famously declare, “The only place Avant Garde looks good is in the words ‘Avant Garde.
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Stephen Coles (The Anatomy of Type: A Graphic Guide to 100 Typefaces)
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I have strict ideas, you know, about how a martini should be made. Controversially, I prefer vodka, not gin. It must be ice-cold, and extremely dry. Vermouth originated in Milan; and Noël Coward once famously quipped that the nearest a martini should ever get to vermouth was a wave of the glass in the general direction of Italy. I agree, and I was careful to add only a drop or two, for the merest whisper of vermouth. This was an excellent vermouth, fortunately—French, not Italian—and kept chilled in the fridge, as it should be.
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Alex Michaelides (The Fury)
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There’s a famous story that John and Lorna Marshall, who carried out a study of Kalahari Bushmen in the ’60s, once gave a knife to one of their favorite informants. They left and came back a year later, only to discover that pretty much everyone in the band had been in possession of the knife at some point in between. On the other hand, several Arab friends confirm to me that in less strictly egalitarian contexts, there is an expedient. If a friend praises a bracelet or bag, you are normally expected to immediately say, “Take it”—but if you are really determined to hold on to it, you can always say, “Yes, isn’t it beautiful? It was a gift.
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David Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years)
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What few knew at the beginning, but many of us know now, is that this was a typical response on the part of this intensely individualistic man, who had attended Waseda in the late 1960s, at the height of the student riots in Tokyo, and joined in the violence but strictly as an independent; he refused to join any political group or faction but hurled stones at the police in his own right. Today we know Murakami as the man who went to Jerusalem to accept the Jerusalem Prize from the Israeli government and in his acceptance speech criticized the Israeli state for its military actions against civilians in Gaza, declaring to his hosts, in effect, that if they chose to bring their massive military and political power against the individuals protesting in the Gaza Strip, then, right or wrong, he would stand against them. This was his now famous declaration of the “wall and eggs” metaphor, in which powerful political systems are seen as a great stone wall, and individuals as eggs, hopelessly and rather suicidally hurling themselves against its implacable strength.
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Matthew Strecher (The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami)
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During the last three years and a half, hundreds of American men, women, and children have been murdered on the high seas and in Mexico. Mr. Wilson has not dared to stand up for them...He wrote Germany that he would hold her to "strict accountability" if an American lost his life on an American or neutral ship by her submarine warfare. Forthwith the Arabic and the Gulflight were sunk. But Mr. Wilson dared not take any action...Germany despised him; and the Lusitania was sunk in consequence. Thirteen hundred and ninety-four people were drowned, one hundred and three of them babies under two years of age. Two days later, when the dead mothers with their dead babies in their arms lay by the scores in the Queenstown morgue, Mr. Wilson selected the moment as opportune to utter his famous sentence about being "too proud to fight."
Roosevelt threw his speech script to the floor and continued in near absolute silence.
Mr Wilson now dwells at Shadow Lawn. There should be shadows enough at Shadow Lawn: the shadows of men, women, and children who have risen from the ooze of the ocean bottom and from graves in foreign lands; the shadows of the helpless who Mr. Wilson did not dare protect lest he might have to face danger; the shadows of babies gasping pitifully as they sank under the waves; the shadows of women outraged and slain by bandits; the shadows of troopers who lay in the Mexican desert, the black blood crusted round their mouths, and their dim eyes looking upward, because President Wilson had sent them to do a task, and then shamefully abandoned them to the mercy of foes who knew no mercy.
Those are the shadows proper for Shadow Lawn: the shadows of deeds that were never done; the shadows of lofty words that were followed by no action; the shadows of the tortured dead.
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Edmund Morris (Colonel Roosevelt (Theodore Roosevelt))
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As those people are extreamly apt to get drunk, and, when so, are very quarrelsome and disorderly, we strictly forbad the selling any liquor to them; and when they complain'd of this restriction, we told them that if they would continue sober during the treaty, we would give them plenty of rum when business was over. They promis'd this, and they kept their promise, because they could get no liquor, and the treaty was conducted very orderly, and concluded to mutual satisfaction. They then claim'd and receiv'd the rum; this was in the afternoon; they were near one hundred men, women, and children, and were lodg'd in temporary cabins, built in the form of a square, just without the town. In the evening, hearing a great noise among them, the commissioners walk'd out to see what was the matter. We found they had made a great bonfire in the middle of the square; they were all drunk, men and women, quarreling and fighting. Their dark-colour'd bodies, half naked, seen only by the gloomy light of the bonfire, running after and beating one another with firebrands, accompanied by their horrid yellings, form'd a scene the most resembling our ideas of hell that could well be imagin'd; there was no appeasing the tumult, and we retired to our lodging. At midnight a number of them came thundering at our door, demanding more rum, of which we took no notice. The next day, sensible they had misbehav'd in giving us that disturbance, they sent three of their old counselors to make their apology. The orator acknowledg'd the fault, but laid it upon the rum; and then endeavored to excuse the rum by saying, "The Great Spirit, who made all things, made every thing for some use, and whatever use he design'd any thing for, that use it should always be put to. Now, when he made rum, he said 'Let this be for the Indians to get drunk with,' and it must be so." And, indeed, if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited the sea-coast.
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Benjamin Franklin (The Complete Harvard Classics - ALL 71 Volumes: The Five Foot Shelf & The Shelf of Fiction: The Famous Anthology of the Greatest Works of World Literature)
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It seemed the whole world loved Gracie: her wacky, innocent way with a quip, her ability to make the most ridiculous comment seem almost logical. She captured the nation’s affection in that first season, 1932. By 1933, Burns remembers, she was one of the five most famous women in America. She set the standard for all the crazy females, from Jane Ace to Marie Wilson, that radio would produce. Her humor wasn’t strictly malapropian, though at times it was. It utilized her real persona, not just the fiction that Burns created. Others could copy the dumb part, but no one could copy Gracie.
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John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
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Correlation is enough,” 2 then-Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson famously declared in 2008. We can, he implied, solve innovation problems by the sheer brute force of the data deluge. Ever since Michael Lewis chronicled the Oakland A’s unlikely success in Moneyball (who knew on-base percentage was a better indicator of offensive success than batting averages?), organizations have been trying to find the Moneyball equivalent of customer data that will lead to innovation success. Yet few have. Innovation processes in many companies are structured and disciplined, and the talent applying them is highly skilled. There are careful stage-gates, rapid iterations, and checks and balances built into most organizations’ innovation processes. Risks are carefully calculated and mitigated. Principles like six-sigma have pervaded innovation process design so we now have precise measurements and strict requirements for new products to meet at each stage of their development. From the outside, it looks like companies have mastered an awfully precise, scientific process. But for most of them, innovation is still painfully hit or miss. And worst of all, all this activity gives the illusion of progress, without actually causing it. Companies are spending exponentially more to achieve only modest incremental innovations while completely missing the mark on the breakthrough innovations critical to long-term, sustainable growth. As Yogi Berra famously observed: “We’re lost, but we’re making good time!” What’s gone so wrong? Here is the fundamental problem: the masses and masses of data that companies accumulate are not organized in a way that enables them to reliably predict which ideas will succeed. Instead the data is along the lines of “this customer looks like that one,” “this product has similar performance attributes as that one,” and “these people behaved the same way in the past,” or “68 percent of customers say they prefer version A over version B.” None of that data, however, actually tells you why customers make the choices that they do.
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Clayton M. Christensen (Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice)
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One thing that we conclude from all this is that the 'learning robot' procedure for doing mathematics is not the procedure that actually underlies human understanding of mathematics. In any case, such bottom-up-dominated procedure would appear to be hopelessly bad for any practical proposal for the construction of a mathematics-performing robot, even one having no pretensions whatever for simulating the actual understandings possessed by a human mathematician. As stated earlier, bottom-up learning procedures by themselves are not effective for the unassailable establishing of mathematical truths. If one is to envisage some computational system for producing unassailable mathematical results, it would be far more efficient to have the system constructed according to top-down principles (at least as regards the 'unassailable' aspects of its assertions; for exploratory purposes, bottom-up procedures might well be appropriate). The soundness and effectiveness of these top-down procedures would have to be part of the initial human input, where human understanding an insight provide the necesssary additional ingredients that pure computation is unable to achieve.
In fact, computers are not infrequently employed in mathematical arguments, nowadays, in this kind of way. The most famous example was the computer-assisted proof, by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken, of the four-colour theorem, as referred to above. The role of the computer, in this case, was to carry out a clearly specified computation that ran through a very large but finite number of alternative possibilities, the elimination of which had been shown (by the human mathematicians) to lead to a general proof of the needed result. There are other examples of such computer-assisted proofs and nowadays complicated algebra, in addition to numerical computation, is frequently carried out by computer. Again it is human understanding that has supplied the rules and it is a strictly top-down action that governs the computer's activity.
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Roger Penrose (Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness)
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Boyd concluded, “The prospect of being burned alive naturally terrified us, and, as a last resource, I contrived to get a message conveyed to the Federal officer in command. He exerted himself with effect, and had the incendiaries arrested before they could execute their horrible purpose. In the meantime it had been reported at head-quarters that I had shot a Yankee soldier, and great was the indignation at first felt and expressed against me. Soon, however, the commanding officer, with several of his staff, called at our house to investigate the affair. He examined the witnesses, and inquired into all the circumstances with strict impartiality, and finally said I had ‘done perfectly right.’" Spying
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Charles River Editors (Belle Boyd: The Controversial Life and Legacy of the Civil War’s Most Famous Spy)
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How could the vacuum, which has nothing in it, have any energy at all? The answer comes from another equation: Einstein's famous E=mc^2. This simple formula relates mass and energy: the mass of an object is equivalent to a certain amount of energy. (In fact, particle physics don't measure the mass of the electron, say, in kilograms or pounds or any of the usual units of mass or weight. They say that the electron's rest mass is .511 MeV [million electron volts]- a lump of energy.) The fluctuation in the energy in the vacuum is the same thing as a fluctuation in the amount of mass. Particles are constantly winking in and out of existence, like tiny Cheshire cats. The vacuum is never truly empty. Instead, it is seething with these virtual particles; at every point in space, an infinite number are happily popping up and disappearing. This is the zero-point energy, an infinity in the formulas of quantum theory. Interpreted strictly, the zero-point energy is limitless. According to the equations of quantum mechanics, more power than is stored in all the coal mines, oil fields, and nuclear weapons in the world is sitting in the space inside your toaster.
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Charles Seife (Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea)
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Alma wrote in depth about laurel, mimosa, and verbena. She wrote about grapes and camellias, about the myrtle orange, about the cosseting of figs, She published under the name "A. Whittaker." Neither she nor George Hawkes believed that it would much benefit Alma to announce herself in print as female. In the scientific world of the day, there was still a strict division between "botany" (the study of plants by men) and "polite botany" was often indistinguishable from "botany"- except that one field was regarded with respect and the other was not- but still, Alma did not wish to be shrugged off as a mere polite botanist.
Of course, the Whittaker name was famous in the world of plants and science, so a good number of botanists already knew precisely who "A. Whittaker" was. Not all of them, however. In response to her articles, then, Alma sometimes received letters from botanists around the world, sent to her in care of George Hawkes's print shop. Some of these letters began, "My dear Sir." Other letters were written to "Mr. A. Whittaker." One quite memorable missive even came addressed to "Dr. A. Whittaker." ( Alma kept that letter for a long time, tickled by the unexpected honorific.)
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Elizabeth Gilbert (The Signature of All Things)
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Crucially, most of the existing Harrah’s debt did not have to be refinanced. Because it was not secured by any collateral, suddenly Harrah’s could issue senior debt backed by the company’s assets. It would do so in the LBO deal, pushing $4.5 billion of existing debt to the bottom of the totem pole in a $25 billion debt stack. This was cruel. Those existing unsecured bonds crashed in price as they were last in line to be repaid. But the maneuver allowed Apollo and TPG to issue new debt more cheaply. And it illustrated one of the key legal principles that would echo through this case: Debtholders’ relationship with the company remains strictly contractual. Any rights they have must be bargained for and embedded in documents. The management and board of a company, in contrast, have fiduciary duties which dictate that they maximize shareholder value.
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Sujeet Indap (The Caesars Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Corruption of the Private Equity Industry)
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Horkheimer famously said that ‘Whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism.’ Poulantzas offered a useful addendum: ‘Strictly speaking, this is incorrect: it is he who does not wish to discuss imperialism who should stay silent on the subject of fascism.
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Richard Seymour
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And it’s no accident, I’d add, that the transsexual is the only thing that trans can describe that queer can’t. The transsexual is not queer; this is the best thing about her. Take Agnes, the pseudonymous transsexual woman who famously posed as intersex at UCLA’s Gender Identity Clinic in the late fifties in order to obtain access to vaginoplasty. Agnes’s case was chronicled by Harold Garfinkel in an article that’s now taught in trans studies courses. Agnes is regularly celebrated as some kind of gender ninja: savvy, tactical, carefully conning the medical-industrial complex into giving her what she wants. What no one wants to talk about is what she actually wanted: a cunt, a man, a house, and normal fucking life. Whatever intuition she may not have had about gender as a “managed achievement” was put toward a down payment on a new dishwasher. If there’s anything Agnes “reveals” about gender, it’s that actually existing normativity is, strictly speaking, impossible. Norms, as such, do not exist. (If Gender Trouble knew this, it did a poor job explaining it.) That doesn’t mean that norms don’t structure people’s desires; what it means is that the desire for the norm consists, in terms of its lived content, in nonnormative attempts at normativity. Agnes was a nonnormative subject, but that wasn’t because she was “against” the norm; on the contrary, her nonnormativity was what wanting to be normal actually looked like. Like most of us, Agnes was making do in the gap between what she wanted and what wanting it got her. We can argue, and people have, about whether queer theory is possible without antinormativity. But whatever comes after trans studies—can I suggest transsexual theory?—will be impossible with antinormativity. The most powerful intervention scholars working in trans studies can make, at this juncture within the academy, is to defend the claim that transness requires that we understand, as we never have before, what it means to be attached to a norm—by desire, by habit, by survival.
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Andrea Long Chu
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The Natural Law Argument
Bertrand Russell: “There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice, you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design.”
Russell's argument is a logical fallacy because we cannot impose our understanding and interpretation of playing dice on God or the natural law. We must first define or understand our subject to talk about anything with scientific precision. Since nobody has an understanding of the world before the world, to put it that way, we cannot have a clear understanding or grasp of the things that are beyond our cognitive powers. We still can think about them. To say that science is only what is proven by scientific experiments would be foolish because that would exclude the vast space of the unknown, even unknowable. Maybe God does not play dice, but maybe even God needs, metaphorically speaking, to throw out thirty-six worlds to make some effects, even if only two, that would otherwise not be possible. As we know, matter cannot power itself and organize itself without the underlying creative force empowering it. Matter is matter thanks to our perceptive and cognitive powers, not per se. Matter per se does not exist in the form we see it. What we see is a reality based on our senses. We cannot completely rely on our senses to tell the underlying reality. Reaching the underlying reality is possible only through abstract thought. This abstract thought will enhance scientific discoveries because we cannot reach the physically unreachable by experiments or strictly scientific means.
Identification of God from religious books with God independent of holy books is prevalent in the books or arguments against God used by the most famous atheists, including agnostics like Bertrand Russell. However, a huge difference exists between a God from religious books and Spinoza’s God or the God of many philosophers and scientists. Once we acknowledge and accept this important difference, we will realize that the gap between believers (not contaminated by religions) and atheists (or agnostics) is much smaller than it looks at first sight. God is not in the religious books, nor can he be owned through religious books. The main goal of the major monotheistic religions is to a priori appropriate and establish the right to God rather than to define and explain God in the deepest possible sense because that is almost impossible, even for science and philosophy. For that reason, a belief in blind faith and fear mostly saves major religions, rather than pure belief, unaffected by religious influence or deceit.
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Dejan Stojanovic
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After Joe Kennedy’s stroke in December 1961, Rose Kennedy and the rest of the family discovered Rosemary’s whereabouts and the strict rules Joe had set in place. Mrs. Kennedy was shaken by what she learned about her husband’s edicts. Although she grieved for her wheelchair-bound husband, she was shocked by his beliefs. Rosie’s safety had been an issue, of course—Rosemary was part of the rich and famous Kennedy family. But she was convinced that Rosemary deserved a more fulfilling life.
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Elizabeth Koehler-Pentacoff (The Missing Kennedy: Rosemary Kennedy and the Secret Bonds of Four Women)
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The famous Isa 7:14 prophecy of a virginal conception (Matt 1:23) is forward-looking, but the fact that the son was to be born in Ahaz's day (Isa 7:15-16) implies at least a provisional fulfillment in Isaiah's lifetime. Probably “virgin” (Hb. 'almah) meant simply “a young woman of marriageable age,” and the promised son was Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz (8:3). Yet in the larger context of Isaiah 7-9, the son to be born who will be called Immanuel (“God with us,” as in 7:14; 8:8) is also identified as “Mighty God” (9:6). The Septuagint later translated Isa 7:14 with a Greek word (parthenos) that more strictly referred to a woman who had never had sex.
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Craig L. Blomberg (Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey)
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Through the decade of the 1880s and into the early 1890s, Tolstoy and Fedorov met many times, and Tolstoy frequently refers to him in his letters and notebooks. For Tolstoy these were years of spiritual unrest. Never a complacent person unaware of his own self-development, Tolstoy in the late 1870S and early 1880s was passing through a stage of especially intense spiritual torment and particularly ruthless self-examination. His earlier religious faith, never terribly strong, had collapsed utterly, and he was seeking a new faith to live by. That he could not live a life strictly consistent with his deeply felt (and widely publicized) principles had always troubled him, and now tormented him. He had turned against the ideal of family life that he had so memorably depicted in War and Peace, but he still lived as-and at times very much enjoyed being-a family man. Theoretically he had turned against his own social class and against all art that did not illustrate some simple moral truth-and yet his biographers give us a charming picture of Tolstoy at age fifty and his old aesthetic and ideological enemy Turgenev, age sixty, sitting at opposite ends of a child's teeter-totter, seesawing up and down as children from the neighborhood laugh and applaud. Even during his famous "peasant" phase, in which he allowed himself to be portrayed by the artist Repin à la moujik behind a plow, we learn from his wife's diary that under his peasant smock he always wore silk underwear.
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George M. Young (The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers)
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Ibn Taimiyah spent years hunting down any philosophical interpretation that appeared to deviate from the literalist, ‘clear’ interpretation of the Koran. He was especially scathing of the Sufis, the mystics of Islam, who, in earlier ages, had produced some of the most creative and refreshing insights in Islamic thought. Ibn Taimiyah's most famous book, Politics in the Name of Divine Rule for Establishing Good Order in the Affairs of the Shepherd and the Flock, called for strict imposition of the Sharia, set out the literalist interpretation of the Koran as the sole source and measure of law and rule, and criminalized the separation of power and authority from religious rule and jihad. Ibn Taimiyah's ideas had featured regularly, not only in Sayyid Qutb's writings, but in those of other jihadist theorists as well.
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Tarek Osman (Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak)
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Ruin and desolation were everywhere. Gates, with his Council, on July 7, 1610, wrote that Jamestown seemed "raither as the ruins of some auntient [for]tification, then that any people living might now inhabit it...." Gates promptly distributed provisions, such as he had, and introduced a code of martial law, the code that was strengthened later by De La Warr and made famous by its strict enforcement during the governorship of Sir Thomas Dale.
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Charles E. Hatch (The First Seventeen Years: Virginia, 1607-1624)
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since humans are not famous for being strictly logical. These
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Julie Tetel Andresen (Languages In The World: How History, Culture, and Politics Shape Language)
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It’s a Gay Life A young gay man calls home and tells his mother that he has decided to go back into the closet because he has met a wonderful girl and they are going to be married. He tells his mother, a strict Muslim, that he is sure she will be happier because he knows that his gay lifestyle has been very disturbing to her. She responds that she is indeed delighted and asks tentatively, “I suppose it would be too much to hope that she comes from a good family?” He tells her she comes from a rich, famous, and powerful family. His mother admits she’s overwhelmed by the news, and asks, delighted, “What is her name?” He answers, “Tiffany Trump.” There is a pause, then his mother asks, “What happened to that nice boy you were dating last year?
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mad comedy (World's Dumbest President: A Compendium of the Funniest Jokes about America’s Worst President (World's Greatest Jokes Book 5))
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The strongest argument for gene editing cane toads, house mice, and ship rats is also the simplest: what's the alternative? Rejecting such technologies as unnatural isn't going to bring nature back. The choice is not between what was and what is, but between what is and what will be, which often enough is nothing. This is the situation of the Devil's Hole pupfish, the Shoshone pupfish, and the Pahrump poolfish, of the northern quoll, the Campbell Island teal, and the Tristan albatross. Stick to a strict interpretation of the natural and these--along with thousands of other species--are goners. The issue at this point, is not whether we're going to alter nature, but to what end?
"We are as gods and might as well get good at it," Stewart Brand, editor of the Who Earth Catalog, famously wrote in its first issue, published in 1968. Recently, in response to the whole-earth transformation that's under way, Brand has sharpened his statement: "We are as gods and we have to get good at it.
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Elizabeth Kolbert (Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future)
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Endeavour could be contacted only through PLANETCOM, which was an autonomous corporation famous for the strictness and efficiency of its accounting. It took a long time to establish a line of credit with PLANETCOM. Somewhere, someone was working on this, but, at the moment, PLANETCOM’s hardhearted computers did not recognize the existence of the Rama Committee.
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Arthur C. Clarke (Rendezvous with Rama (Rama, #1))
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Solon and Pisistratus were very fond of one another. We are told they entered into a love affair when Pisistratus was a good-looking lad in his teens. Despite a wide gap of thirty years between them, this is not implausible. Solon was highly sexed, if we may judge from his poetry, where he writes of the delights of falling in love “with a boy in the lovely flower of youth,/Desiring his thighs and sweet mouth.” However, it would be wrong to believe that either man was necessarily, in our modern sense, gay. This is because from the eighth century onwards the Greek upper classes established and maintained a system of pederasty as a form of higher education. A fully grown adult male, usually in his twenties, would look out for a boy in his mid-teens and become his protector and guide. His task was to see him through from adolescence into adulthood and to act as a kind of moral tutor. Sex was not compulsory, but it was under certain strictly defined conditions allowed. The older man was the active lover/partner or erastes and the teenager was the loved one, or eromenos. Buggery was absolutely out of bounds and brought shame on any boy who allowed it to be done to him. It could have the most serious consequences, as the fate of Periander showed. This famous tyrant of Corinth in the seventh century unwisely teased his eromenos in the presence of other people with the question: “Aren’t you pregnant yet?” The boy was so upset by the insult that he killed Periander. A popular and acceptable technique for achieving orgasm was intercrural sex: both participants stood up and the erastes inserted his erect penis between the thighs of the eromenos and rubbed it to and fro. The youth was not meant to enjoy his lover’s attentions or show signs of arousal; rather, he was making a disinterested gift of himself to someone he admired. The great Athenian writer of tragic dramas, Aeschylus, wrote a play about the love between the two Greek heroes, Achilles and Patroclus. It was called The Myrmidons, after the warriors whom Achilles commanded during the Trojan War. Achilles is presented as the erastes, and reproaches his lover, in rather roundabout terms, for declining an intercrural proposition.
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Anthony Everitt (The Rise of Athens: The Story of the World's Greatest Civilization)
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Chikusho, I thought. This was the famous Imogen Kato, right here! She saw me and glanced down at the magazine I'd been looking at while waiting for my meeting with Chloe, open to the photo spread- of her. God, how embarrassing. I closed the magazine abruptly. It was definitely the same girl, although now her hair was platinum blond with dark roots instead of a mixture of auburn with honey and green apple-colored streaks. Beneath her plaid uniform skirt, she wore deep purple-and-blue-and-silver leggings that had prints of galloping gray unicorns, and over her blouse was a worn-out, oversize, cream-colored cardigan sweater with the belt tied to the side instead of center. Apparently, the uniform dress code was not that strict at this school.
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Rachel Cohn (My Almost Flawless Tokyo Dream Life)
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Belle is planning to host a series of salons," said Lio, appearing out of nowhere to fill her silence. It had been his first promise to her, in those wild days right after they broke the curse, when they talked feverishly about their most cherished dreams and whispered their deepest fears to each other. Back then, Belle's only fear had been her own ignorance. She had told him of her wish to travel to Paris and attend a salon herself, perhaps one that counted some of her favorite philosophes and encyclopédistes among its members. He had said her dream was toon small and that she herself should host one.
The Mademoiselle de Vignerot smiled politely. "What will the subject be?"
"Oh, everything," said Belle. Her enthusiasm elicited laughter, but she was entirely serious.
The comte de Chamfort cleared his throat, his lips curling into a sneer. "That is very broad, madame. Surely you have a more specific interest? My parents used to attend the famous Bout-du-Banc literary salon in Paris, but that was a very long time ago."
Belle gave him her best patient smile. "I don't wish to be limited, monsieur. My salons will invite scientists, philosophers, inventors, novelists, really anyone in possession of a good idea."
The comte guffawed. "Why on earth would you do such a thing?"
"To learn from them, monsieur. I would have thought the reason obvious."
Marguerite snorted into her glass. Belle sipped her drink as Lio placed his hand on the small of her back. She didn't know if it was meant to calm her down or encourage her.
"Whatever for?" the comte asked with the menacing air of a man discovering he was the butt of a joke. "Everything that is worth learning is already taught."
"To whom?" Belle felt the heat rising in her cheeks. "Strictly the wealthy sons of wealthier fathers?" Some of Bastien's guests gasped, they themselves being the children of France's aristocracy, but Belle was heartened when she saw Marguerite smile encouragingly. "I believe that education is a right, monsieur, and one that has long been reserved exclusively for the most privileged among us. My salons will reflect the true reality."
"Which is what, madame?" Marguerite prompted eagerly.
Belle's heart rattled in her chest. "That scholarship is the province of any who would pursue it.
”
”
Emma Theriault (Rebel Rose (The Queen's Council, #1))
“
It’s important to realize that the Norse gods are inherently “human” in their vices and behavior. This is not a religion of “perfect beings” so often attested in the monotheistic religions found today and, as far as we know, there was no sense of strict “dogma” concerning the gods as a whole. As the historian Julian Richards pointed out, to speak of the pre-Christian beliefs of northern Europe and Scandinavia in particular, it would be better to refer to it as a “belief system,” a specific way of looking at the world that was inclusive of all the monstrous beasts and flawed gods who needed to be appeased and propitiated nonetheless.
”
”
Charles River Editors (Norse Mythology: The History of the Norse Pantheon and the Most Famous Myths)
“
The Leveller position was put forward in a famous speech by Colonel Thomas Rainsborough: I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore . . . I think it’s clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under. . . .
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”
Sheldon S. Wolin (Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism - New Edition)
“
In his famous novel Émile (1762), Rousseau tries to show that boys should be brought up as close to nature as possible, learning by experience. Girls do not need to be educated rationally: their role in life is to please men. Accordingly, Thomas abstracted two girls from orphanages and named them Sabrina and Lucretia. He took them to France to educate them according to Rousseau’s precepts so that one girl could become the perfect wife (one was a spare). He taught them to read and write, and tried to instil in them a hatred of fripperies like fashion, fine titles and luxuries. While the girls were growing up, Day became enamoured of several genteel women, none of whom were prepared to conform to his ideas of wifely perfection. Meanwhile, Lucretia did not cope well with Day’s training programme and he was forced to abandon the experiment. He gave her some money and she later married a shopkeeper. However, Thomas became more and more attached to Sabrina, and their friends expected them to marry. According to Richard Lovell Edgeworth in his Memoirs, Day was ‘never more loved by any woman… nor do I believe, that any woman was to him ever personally more agreeable.’ But Sabrina ‘was too young and artless, to feel the extent of that importance, which my friend [Day] annexed to trifling concessions or resistance to fashion, particularly with respect to female dress.’ Day left Sabrina at a friend’s house, along with some strict instructions on her mode of dress. Then disaster struck over a ‘trifling circumstance… She did, or did not, wear certain long sleeves, and some handkerchief, which had been the object of his dislike, or of his liking.’ Unfortunately Day equated her obedience to his wishes with proof of her attachment; disobedience proved ‘her want of strength of mind.’ So Thomas ‘quitted her for ever!’ He later married a Yorkshire heiress; Sabrina married a barrister.
”
”
Sue Wilkes (A Visitor's Guide to Jane Austen's England)
“
The Commander tucked the timepiece back into the fob pocket, and with the air of a conjurer brought out a full moon, as bright as a new coin, and tossed it up in the air. Heads, Humphrey called, and laughed, because he knew this trick, but just couldn’t at the moment remember how it went.
“That’s it! Time’s up! Time’s up!” the empire cried then, fussily drawing stumps.
The moon sat above the cricket ground, where it struck twelve more times than was strictly necessary, it was the umpire’s opinion, and Humphrey opened his eyes to the sound of the grandfather clock on the bottom landing chiming the half-hour.
”
”
Peter Maughan (Sir Humphrey of Batch Hall plus The Famous Cricket Match (Batch Magna #2))
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THERE 7 SACRED RULES GUIDING THIS SACRED OCCULT WHICH MAKES IT EASY AND THE BEST FRATERNITY TO BELONG TO, THIS RULES CAN ONLY BE DISCLOSED TO AN ALREADY INITIATED MEMBER, STRICT MEASURES ARE APPLIED IN TERMS OF KEEPING THE SECRETS OF THIS GREAT OCCULT WHICH IS INSTANT DEATH , SO IF YOU KNOW YOU CAN"T KEEP SHUT WHEN THE CLOSE GUARDED SECRETS ARE BEEN GIVING TO YOU DURING YOUR INITIATION RITUAL; DO YOURSELF GOOD BY STAYING AWAY OTHER THAN BRINGING CALAMITY UPON YOURSELF AND HOUSEHOLD. THE ZEDICHORAH BROTHERHOOD WAS FOUNDED IN INDIA BY AFRICAN BROTHERS WHO TOOK DECISION TO CHANGE THE COURSE OF NATURE IN OTHER FOR LIFE TO BE EASY IN THE EARLY DAYS OF ALLAQUATHAMIN, THERE BY MAKING THE HOME OF THE LORD ZEDICHORAH BROTHERHOOD TO BE IN AFRICA.
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Arturo Torres
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