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Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That's an idea we're so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it's kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? - because you're not!
Douglas Adams
We cannot subscribe to the belief that this life is a vale of tears, though it once was just that for many of us. But it is clear that we make our own misery.
Alcoholics Anonymous
Because I don’t like to label what I feel for you as love. This”—he points between us—“is much more potent and twisted than mere love. If loving someone means letting them go and wishing them happiness with someone else, then I don’t subscribe to that definition. But if love means protecting and wanting to take care of you till my dying day, then I love you more than anyone has ever loved another human being.
Rina Kent (God of Ruin (Legacy of Gods, #4))
We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don’t know yet which ones they are. We too have been known to prefer plot to truth; to deny the evidence before us in favor of the ideas behind us; to do insane things in the name of reason; to take that satisfying step from the righteous to the self-righteous; to drown our private guilts in a public well; to indulge in a little delusion.
Stacy Schiff (The Witches: Salem, 1692)
I don't subscribe much to the belief that things happen for a reason, that there's some higher power at the controls, directing all of us like we're in some cosmic summer stock production. Shit just happens is more or less my philosophy.
Linwood Barclay (Too Close to Home)
Every brilliant experiment, like every great work of art, starts with an act of imagination. Unfortunately, our current culture subscribes to a very narrow definition of truth. If something can’t be quantified and calculated, then it can’t be true. Because this strict scientific approach has explained so much, we assume that it can explain everything. But every method, even the experimental method, has limits. Take the human mind. Scientists describe our brain in terms of its physical details; they say we are nothing but a loom of electrical cells and synaptic spaces. What science forgets is that this isn’t how we experience the world. (We feel like the ghost, not like the machine.) It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness.
Jonah Lehrer (Proust Was a Neuroscientist)
Given any binary, it's fun to look for some hidden third, and the reason why the third was hidden says a lot about culture. The choice between two of something is not a choice at all, but rather the opportunity to subscribe to the value system which holds the two presented choices as mutually exclusive alternatives. Once we choose one or the other, we've bought into the system that perpetuates the binary.
Kate Bornstein (Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us)
A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetition, misleading emphases and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Bardak Electronics, the saftey handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card and a fly that lands first on the rim and then in the centre of the ashtray. Which explains how the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting wooliness of the present.
Alain de Botton (The Art of Travel)
…such criticism and mockery are largely beside the point. All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith. And faith, by its very definition, tends to be impervious to to intellectual argument or academic criticism. Polls routinely indicate, moreover, that nine out of ten Americans believe in God—most of us subscribe to one brand of religion or another. Those who would assail The Book of Mormon should bear in mind that its veracity is no more dubious than the veracity of the Bible, say, or the Qur'an, or the sacred texts of most other religions. The latter texts simply enjoy the considerable advantage of having made their public debut in the shadowy recesses of the ancient past, and are thus much harder to refute.
Jon Krakauer (Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith)
... When you died, you were supposed to live on in the memories of others. That's what I'd always been told. Didn't matter what you believed, which religion you subscribed to, what god you worshipped. The simple fact was that none of us knew what lay beyond. Immortality and eternal life? The only sure shot at that was the memories of those you left behind - your friends and family...
Brian Keene (Dead Sea)
I've learned, above all, that less is truly beautiful. That happiness and contentment can't be manufactured, bought, subscribed to, or achieved by adding more to our lives. It's the counter-intuitive actioni of stripping away the excess that allows us to discover beauty and joy in the good lives we already have.
Emily Ley (When Less Becomes More: Making Space for Slow, Simple, and Good)
We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don't know yet which ones they are. We too have been known to prefer plot to truth; to deny the evidence before us in favor of the ideas behind us; to do insane things in the name of reason; to take that satisfying step from the righteous to the self-righteous; to drown our private guilt in a public well; to indulge in a little delusion.
Stacy Schiff (The Witches: Salem, 1692)
We are Turks with the affections of our women; and have made them subscribe to our doctrine too. We let their bodies go abroad liberally enough, with smiles and ringlets and pink bonnets to disguise them instead of veils and yakmaks. But their souls must be seen by only one man, and they obey not unwillingly, and consent to remain at home as our slaves—ministering to us and doing drudgery for us.
William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair)
I would like to believe in the myth that we grow wiser with age. In a sense my disbelief is wisdom. Those of a middle generation, if charitable or sentimental, subscribe to the wisdom myth, while the callous see us as dispensable objects, like broken furniture or dead flowers. For the young we scarcely exist unless we are unavoidable members of the same family, farting, slobbering, perpetually mislaying teeth and bifocals.
Patrick White (Three Uneasy Pieces)
Look at it this way: there are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100%, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation.
Lester Bangs
Dear 2600: …So, in the interest of information gathering and because I am a subscriber, are you going to be checking me out? This would be unnecessary since we checked you out before you subscribed. That’s why we made sure you heard about us and followed the plan by subscribing. Writing this letter, however, was not part of the plan and we will be taking corrective action.
Emmanuel Goldstein (Dear Hacker: Letters to the Editor of 2600)
Max Weber was right in subscribing to the view that one need not be Caesar in order to understand Caesar. But there is a temptation for us theoretical sociologists to act sometimes as though it is not necessary even to study Caesar in order to understand him. Yet we know that the interplay of theory and research makes both for understanding of the specific case and expansion of the general rule.
Robert K. Merton (Social Theory and Social Structure)
Technology allows us to instantly find the facts that support what we already believe. While in the past we may have subscribed to particular newspapers or magazines that leaned in the direction of our opinions, still, we could not avoid being exposed to a variety of different ideas. The opportunities to come across information we don’t agree with are now diminished. We can easily expose ourselves only to the information that supports our views, stated as facts right there on the Internet. We show up at the table armed with our already decided upon personal truths, and when the information coming at us doesn’t fit what we already know, we stop listening and discard it.
Nancy Colier (The Power of Off: The Mindful Way to Stay Sane in a Virtual World)
First off, as has been well stated by many Indigenous Feminists before us, the idea of gender equality did not come from the suffragettes or other so-called "foremothers" of feminist theory. It should also be recognized that although we are still struggling for this thing called "gender equality," it is not actually a framed issue within the feminist realm, but a continuation of the larger tackling of colonialism. So this idea that women of colour all of a sudden realized "we are women," and magically joined the feminist fight actually re-colonizes people for who gender equality and other "feminist" notions is a remembered history and current reality since before Columbus. The mainstream feminist movement is supposed to have started in the early 1900s with women fighting for the right to vote. However, these white women deliberately excluded the struggles of working class women of color and participated in the policy of forced sterilization for Aboriginal women and women with disabilities. Furthermore, the idea that we all need to subscribe to the same theoretical understandings of history is marginalizing. We all have our own truths and histories to live.
Erin Konsmo (Feminism FOR REAL: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism)
If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination. Artistic accounts include severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply 'journey through an afternoon'. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out the window at a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties resolves in our consciousness. We notice a luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack above the seats opposite. We tap a finger on the window ledge. A broken nail on an index finger catches a thread. It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might be. We look back at the field. It continues to rain. At last, the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it inexplicably stops. A fly lands on the window And still we may have reached the end only of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence 'He journeyed through the afternoon'. A storyteller who provides us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearking us out with repetitions, misleading emphases[,] and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Burdak Electronics, the safety handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card[,] and a fly that lands first on the rim and then the centre of a laden ashtray. Which explains the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.
Alain de Botton (The Art of Travel)
When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate?
Harold Edmund Stearns (America and the young intellectual)
Senator H. V. Johnson said: I believe we should be recreant to our noble mission, if we refused acquiescence in the high purposes of a wise Providence. War has its evils. In all ages it has been the minister of wholesale death and appalling desolation; but however inscrutable to us, it has also been made, by the Allwise Dispenser of events, the instrumentality of accomplishing the great end of human elevation and human happiness. . . . It is in this view, that I subscribe to the doctrine of “manifest destiny.
Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present)
For some of the things that plagued the seventeenth-century New Englander we have modern-day explanations. For others we do not. We have believed in any number of things—the tooth fairy, cold fusion, the benefits of smoking, the free lunch—that turn out not to exist. We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don’t know yet which ones they are. We too have been known to prefer plot to truth; to deny the evidence before us in favor of the ideas behind us; to do insane things in the name of reason; to take that satisfying step from the righteous to the self-righteous; to drown our private guilts in a public well; to indulge in a little delusion. We have all believed that someone had nothing better to do than spend his day plotting against us. The seventeenth-century world appeared full of inexplicables, not unlike the automated, mind-reading, algorithmically enhanced modern one.
Stacy Schiff (The Witches: Salem, 1692)
I subscribe to a theory that answers cannot hide from us forever if we seek them long enough.
Kevin Hearne (Ink & Sigil (Ink & Sigil, #1))
I neither oblige the belief of other person, nor overhastily subscribe mine own. Nor have I stood with others computing or collating years and chronologies, lest I should be vainly curious about the time and circumstance of things, whereof the substance is so much in doubt. By this time, like one who had set out on his way by night, and travelled through a region of smooth or idle dreams, our history now arrives on the confines, where daylight and truth meet us with a clear dawn, representing to our view, though at a far distance, true colours and shapes.
John Milton (The History of Britain; That Part Especially Now Called England, from the First Traditional Beginning Continued to the Norman Conquest)
All I'm saying is that there is a generation gap, and I think it revolves around this public/private thing. Our generation -- we subscribe to the old liberal doctrine of the inviolate self. I'ts the great tradition of realistic fiction, it's what novels are all about. the private life in the foreground, history a distant rumble of gunfire, somewhere offstage. In Jane Austen not even a rumble. Well, the novel is dying, and us with it. No wonder I could never get anything out of my novel-writing class at Euphoric State. It's an unnatural medium for their experience. Those kids...are living a film, not a novel.
David Lodge (Changing Places (The Campus Trilogy, #1))
Encased in an elaborate illusion of unlimited power and progress, each of us subscribes, at least until one’s mid-life crisis, to the belief that existence consists of an eternal, upward spiral of achievement, dependent on will alone. This
Irvin D. Yalom (Love's Executioner)
today we read of Don Quixote with a bitter taste in the mouth, it is almost an ordeal, which would make us seem very strange and incomprehensible to the author and his contemporaries, – they read it with a clear conscience as the funniest of books, it made them nearly laugh themselves to death).To see suffering does you good, to make suffer, better still – that On the Genealogy of Morality 42 48 See below, Supplementary material, pp. 153–4. 49 See below, Supplementary material, pp. 137–9, pp. 140–1, pp. 143–4. 50 Don Quixote, Book II, chs 31–7. is a hard proposition, but an ancient, powerful, human-all-too-human proposition to which, by the way, even the apes might subscribe: as people say, in thinking up bizarre cruelties they anticipate and, as it were, act out a ‘demonstration’ of what man will do. No cruelty, no feast: that is what the oldest and longest period in human history teaches us – and punishment, too, has such very strong festive aspects! –
Friedrich Nietzsche (On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo)
Somewhere we taught ourselves that our opinions are more significant than the facts. And somehow we get our egos and our opinions and Truth all mixed up in a single package, so that when something does challenge one of the notions to which we subscribe, we react as if it challenges us.
Jack McDevitt (Omega (The Academy, #4))
Whether or not we subscribe to any particular religion or philosophy, it would be hard to deny that knowing our cosmic destiny must have some impact on how we think about our existence, or even how we live our lives. If we want to know whether what we do here ultimately matters, the first thing we ask is: how will it come out in the end? If we find the answer to that question, it leads immediately to the next: what does this mean for us now? Do we still have to take the trash out next Tuesday if the universe is going to die someday? I’ve done my own scouring of theological and philosophical texts, and while I learned many fascinating things from my studies, unfortunately the meaning of existence wasn’t one of them. I may just not have been cut out for it. The questions and answers that have always drawn me in most strongly are the ones that can be answered with scientific observation, mathematics, and physical evidence. As appealing as it sometimes seemed to have the whole story and meaning of life written down for me once and for all in a book, I knew I would only ever really be able to accept the kind of truth I could rederive mathematically.
Katie Mack (The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking))
Self-hatred is not in our nature, but self-love is. If we attempt to think logically we might say, well if self-love is pride, then isn’t the opposite of pride equal to self-hate? The short answer is no. Many Christians actively argue that since the opposite of pride is humility, the opposite of self-love must be self-hatred. In order for this to be true, it would mean that humility is the same thing as self-hatred. It is not. Humility means that you put others above yourself. The motivation for this selflessness is not because you hate yourself, but because you love others more than you love yourself. Did Jesus hate Himself? No. Previously we saw Jesus as the ultimate example of humility. If you subscribe to the belief that the opposite of pride must be self-hatred, you are also subscribing to the idea that Jesus died on the cross because He hated Himself. Jesus actually died on the cross because of His intense love for us, not for any other reason.
Kristin N. Spencer (You Aren't Worthless: Unlock the Truth to Godly Confidence)
A love of neighbor manifests itself in the tolerance not only of opinions of others but, what is more important, of the essence and uniqueness of others, when we subscribe to that religious philosophy of life that insists that God has made each man and woman an individual sacred personality endowed with a specific temperament, created with differing needs, hungers, dreams. This is a variegated, pluralistic world where no two stars are the same and every snowflake has its own distinctive pattern. God apparently did not want a regimented world of sameness. That is why creation is so manifold. So it is with us human beings. Some are born dynamic and restless; others placid and contemplative…One man’s temperament is full throated with laughter; another’s tinkles with the sad chimes of gentle melancholy. Our physiques are different, and that simple difference oftentimes drives us into conflicting fulfillment of our natures, to action or to thought, to passion or to denial, to conquest or to submission. There is here no fatalism of endowment. We can change and prune and shape the hedges of our being, but we must rebel against the sharp shears being wielded by other hands, cutting off the living branches of our spirits in order to make our personalities adornments for their dwellings.
Joshua Loth Liebman
I haven't left my post!" she wanted to shout. "We're here." She needed to convince them that the ALP must remain open. "Libraries are lungs," she scrawled, her pen barely able to keep with her ideas. "Books the fresh air breathed in to keep the heart beating, to keep the brain imagining, to keep home alive. Subscribers depend on us for news, for community. Soldiers need books, need to know their friends at the library care. Our work is too important to stop now." ...."We are giving the students what they need, the public, the books they want, and the soldiers, what we can. It is after all, something, to continue to hold on, to hope for a wider contribution to humanity.
Janet Skeslien Charles (The Paris Library)
In the main, the trouble with American education is that we have put into practice the educational philosophy expounded by John Dewey and his disciples. In varying degrees we have adopted what has been called "progressive education." Subscribing to the egalitarian notion that every child must have the same education, we have neglected to provide an educational system which will tax the talents and stir the ambitions of our best students and which will thus insure us the kind of leaders we will need in the future. In
Barry M. Goldwater (The Conscience of a Conservative)
I was one of the many millions to misunderstand what is wild. I have read authors’ definitions of “wild” as any place you can walk for a week witthout meeting a road or fence. But I think that is a narrow view, a consumer view, a transactional perspective that expects a landscape to give us the sense of wilderness in return for our travel. It is one I subscribed to for many years, which is partly why I found myself in those places, but now I see it as lazy. A sense of wild is engendered by awareness, a sense of connection with and deep understanding of any landscape. The pavement of any city side street wriggles with enough life to terrify and delight us if we choose to immerse ourselves in it
Tristan Gooley (The Nature Instinct: Relearning Our Lost Intuition for the Inner Workings of the Natural World (Natural Navigation))
Judge the powerful by their actions, not their rhetoric; by their deeds, not their words. If democracy is so desirable and wonderful, why aren’t markets, CEOs, managers, bankers, entrepreneurs, monarchs, religious leaders, media moguls, and so on, democratically elected? If they’re not, those in charge don’t rate democracy at all but are advocates of something utterly different. To what is that those who rule us actually subscribe? It’s authoritarian, dictatorial plutocracy – rule by the entrenched, rich elites. That’s the principle by which the world is truly run. Democracy is just a stage show for the marks and suckers, the gullible sheeple that have been so dumbed down that they believe every lie the rich sell them.
Mike Hockney (All the Rest is Propaganda (The God Series Book 12))
Do they also need us to say “No!”? Perhaps the question is formulated incorrectly. The reality is that children need their parents’ authentic closeness. They need to live with and learn from people of flesh and blood. There are still people who subscribe to a rather outdated expression about defiant children—that they are testing the limits or looking for boundaries. This always happens in relationships where the adult tries to act in ways they think parents should behave. This applies to teachers and others who are part of the child’s life. It is my experience that children have a different objective—to explore whether there is a person behind the role. What they are really doing is challenging our ability and willingness to be authentic, attentive and credible.
Jesper Juul (Family Life: The Most Important Values for Living Together and Raising Children)
Nay, in many cases open denials of prayer prove the most excellent answers, and God's not hearing us is the most signal audience. Therefore at the foot of every prayer subscribe "thy will be done," and thou shalt enjoy preventing mercies that thou never soughtest, and converting mercies to change all for the best, resting confident in this, that having asked according to his will he heareth thee.
Samuel Lee (The Bible And The Closet Or How We May Read The Scriptures With The Most Spiritual Profit: And Secret Prayer Successfully Managed (1842))
Frequently, when we are frozen by an event or if an event sheds its leaves and petals in front of our eyes in some other violent way, we dig up the soil around it in horror and shrink back from the ugliness of its roots where that which looks to us like transience lives. We have such a limited capacity to be just toward all phenomena and we are so quick to call ugly, as if turning spitefully and vengefully against ourselves, anything that simply does not correspond to the notion of beauty to which we subscribe at that moment.
Rainer Maria Rilke (The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke)
According to Goffman, the Wise are those people (often with a close personal relationship to a stigmatised individual, such as the wife of a psychiatric patient) who do not subscribe to the prejudicial and stigmatising behaviours prevalent throughout society and do not let the stigmatisable status of an individual cloud their judgment on such persons. They are often afforded honorary status as “one of us” within communities of stigmatised people, and in return help the stigmatised people pass for Normals (as such they can often spot an otherwise passing individual because they are familiar with techniques which are employed to this end).
Jenn Sims (The Sociology of Harry Potter: 22 Enchanting Essays on the Wizarding World)
What I propose in this book is a hard sell in Western culture. We are primarily oriented toward getting from our partners what we need to feel good and don’t believe we can get much from ourselves. We want to transform the source of pain in the outside world rather than the source within us. That external focus—and the therapies of accommodation that subscribe to it—will only provide temporary relief at best from the inner and outer storms that gradually erode the fertile topsoil of our relationships. There is another way, and we will explore it in this book. Before we do, however, let’s further examine the problems with this accommodation premise.
Richard C. Schwartz (You Are the One You've Been Waiting For: Applying Internal Family Systems to Intimate Relationships)
Edwards knew well the preacher’s great challenge—that people could subscribe to many propositions of Christian doctrine with their minds that did not influence how they actually lived their lives. Why? He argued that human beings are body-bound creatures, and because of our fallenness, spiritual realities are simply not as real to us as sense experiences—things we actually see, hear, touch, smell, and taste. Objects that we can experience through our senses are real to us—they are memorable and make impressions that last. While people can agree that “abstractions are true . . . Only images [things they have experienced with the senses] seem real.”13
Timothy J. Keller (Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism)
I was one of the many millions to misunderstand what is wild. I have read authors’ definitions of “wild” as any place you can walk for a week without meeting a road or fence. But I think that is a narrow view, a consumer view, a transactional perspective that expects a landscape to give us the sense of wilderness in return for our travel. It is one I subscribed to for many years, which is partly why I found myself in those places, but now I see it as lazy. A sense of wild is engendered by awareness, a sense of connection with and deep understanding of any landscape. The pavement of any city side street wriggles with enough life to terrify and delight us if we choose to immerse ourselves in it
Tristan Gooley (The Nature Instinct: Relearning Our Lost Intuition for the Inner Workings of the Natural World (Natural Navigation))
Sifting through thousands of petitions a year in order to select the dozens that will be granted is a daunting task for a nine-member court. In the mid-1970s, with the number of petitions growing rapidly, the justices found a way to lighten the load by organizing their energetic young law clerks into a “cert pool.” Under this arrangement, each petition is reviewed by a single law clerk on behalf all the justices who subscribe to the pool. This clerk writes a memo that summarizes the lower court decision and the arguments for and against review, concluding with a recommendation. The recommendation is only that. Most justices in the pool (all but one or two in recent years) assign one of their own four law clerks to review the pool recommendations from the individual justice’s own perspective.
Linda Greenhouse (The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
think we’ll end up seeing a lot of each other.” I felt moved and flattered by how sure she sounded. I wrote her phone number on my hand, while she wrote mine in her daily planner. Already I was the impetuous one in our friendship—the one who cared less about tradition and personal safety, who evaluted every situation from scratch, as if it had arisen for the first time—while Svetlana was the one who subscribed to rules and systems, who wrote things in the designated spaces, and saw herself as the inheritor of centuries of human history and responsibilities. Already we were comparing to see whose way of doing things was better. But it wasn’t a competition so much as an experiment, because neither of us was capable of acting differently, and each viewed the other with an admiration that was inseparable from pity.
Elif Batuman (The Idiot)
here is something that is impossible for anyone to believe. The human species has been in existence as Homo sapiens for (let us not quarrel about the exact total) at least one hundred and fifty thousand years. An instant in evolutionary time, this is nonetheless a vast history when contemplated by primates with brains and imaginations of the dimensions that we can boast. In order to subscribe to monotheistic religion, one must believe that humans were born, struggled, and expired during this time, often dying in childbirth or for want of elementary nurture, and with a life-expectancy of perhaps three decades at most. Add to these factors the turf wars between discrepant groups and tribes, alarming outbreaks of disease, which had no germ theory to explain let alone palliate them, and associated natural disasters and human tragedies. And yet, for all these millennia, heaven watched with indifference and then—and only in the last six thousand years at the very least—decided that it was time to intervene as well as redeem. And heaven would only intervene and redeem in remote areas of the Middle East, thus ensuring that many more generations would expire before the news could begin to spread! Let me send a voice to Sinai and cement a pact with just one tribe of dogged and greedy yokels. Let me lend a son to be torn to pieces because he is misunderstood. . . . Let me tell the angel Gabriel to prompt an illiterate and uncultured merchant into rhetorical flights. At last the darkness that I have imposed will lift! The willingness even to entertain such elaborately mad ideas involves much more than the suspension of disbelief, or the dumb credulity that greets magic tricks. It also involves ignoring or explaining away the many religious beliefs that antedated Moses.
Christopher Hitchens (The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever)
So few were the readers at that time in Philadelphia, and the majority of us so poor, that I was not able, with great industry, to find more than fifty persons, mostly young tradesmen, willing to pay down for this purpose forty shillings each, and ten shillings per annum. On this little fund we began. The books were imported; the library was opened one day in the week for lending to the subscribers, on their promissory notes to pay double the value if not duly returned. The institution soon manifested its utility, was imitated by other towns, and in other provinces. The libraries were augmented by donations; reading became fashionable; and our people, having no publick amusements to divert their attention from study, became better acquainted with books, and in a few years were observ'd by strangers to be better instructed and more intelligent than people of the same rank generally are in other countries.
Benjamin Franklin (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin)
So few were the readers at that time in Philadelphia, and the majority of us so poor, that I was not able, with great industry; to find more than fifty persons, mostly young tradesmen, willing to pay down for this purpose forty shillings each, and ten shillings per annum. On this little fund we began. The books were imported; the library was opened one day in the week for lending to the subscribers, on their promissory notes to pay double the value if not duly returned. The institution soon manifested its utility, was imitated by other towns, and in other provinces. The libraries were augmented by donations; reading became fashionable; and our people, having no publick amusements to divert their attention from study, became better acquainted with books, and in a few years were observ'd by strangers to be better instructed and more intelligent than people of the same rank generally are in other countries.
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)
But don’t worry, I think we live in the same building. Matthews, right? I’m on the fourth floor. I think we’ll end up seeing a lot of each other.” I felt moved and flattered by how sure she sounded. I wrote her phone number on my hand, while she wrote mine in her daily planner. Already I was the impetuous one in our friendship—the one who cared less about tradition and personal safety, who evaluted every situation from scratch, as if it had arisen for the first time—while Svetlana was the one who subscribed to rules and systems, who wrote things in the designated spaces, and saw herself as the inheritor of centuries of human history and responsibilities. Already we were comparing to see whose way of doing things was better. But it wasn’t a competition so much as an experiment, because neither of us was capable of acting differently, and each viewed the other with an admiration that was inseparable from pity.
Elif Batuman (The Idiot)
Living organisms were not independently created, but have descended and diversified over time from common ancestors. And thus, no other biological theory so elegantly explains this. Evolutionary theory has withstood the test of time—by way of vicarious experimentation, observation, analysis, and relentless criticism, though opposing viewpoints still cling to the concept of "design." As a person of the biological sciences, I cannot subscribe to such misguided notions that suggest static biological states. Clearly, proper examination of the natural world reveal evolutionary trajectories—some random, others nonrandom—and all having observable genetic implications. It is only when we apply evolutionary explanations to living systems that it becomes ever so clear. The world was not specifically designed with us in mind, but rather we long since adapted and conformed to our surroundings, only giving it the illusionary appearance of "design.
Tommy Rodriguez (Diaries of Dissension: A Case Against the Irrational and Absurd)
Religious creeds are a great obstacle to any full sympathy between the outlook of the scientist and the outlook which religion is so often supposed to require ... The spirit of seeking which animates us refuses to regard any kind of creed as its goal. It would be a shock to come across a university where it was the practice of the students to recite adherence to Newton's laws of motion, to Maxwell's equations and to the electromagnetic theory of light. We should not deplore it the less if our own pet theory happened to be included, or if the list were brought up to date every few years. We should say that the students cannot possibly realise the intention of scientific training if they are taught to look on these results as things to be recited and subscribed to. Science may fall short of its ideal, and although the peril scarcely takes this extreme form, it is not always easy, particularly in popular science, to maintain our stand against creed and dogma.
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Power itself is founded largely on disgust. The whole of advertising, the whole of political discourse, is a public insult to the intelligence, to reason - but an insult in which we collaborate, abjectly subscribing to a silent interaction. The day of hidden persuasion is over: those who govern us now resort unapologetically to arm-twisting pure and simple. The prototype here was a banker got up like a vampire, saying, 'I am after you for your money' . A decade has already gone by since this kind of obscenity was introduced, with the government's blessing, into our social mores. At the time we thought the ad feeble because of its aggressive vulgarity. In point of fact it was a prophetic commercial, full of intimations of the future shape of social relationships, because it operated, precisely, in terms of disgust, avidity and rape. The same goes for pornographic and food advertising, which are also powered by shamelessness and lust, by a strategic logic of violation and anxiety. Nowadays you can seduce a woman with the words, 'I am interested in your cunt' . The same kind of crassness has triumphed in the realm of art, whose mounds of trivia may be reduced to a single pronouncement of the type, 'What we want from you is stupidity and bad taste' . And the fact is that we do succumb to this mass extortion, with its subtle infusion of guilt. It is true in a sense that nothing really disgusts us any more. In our eclectic culture, which embraces the debris of all others in a promiscuous confusion, nothing is unacceptable. But for this very reason disgust is nevertheless on the increase - the desire to spew out this promiscuity, this indifference to everything no matter how bad, this viscous adherence of opposites. To the extent that this happens, what is on the increase is disgust over the lack of disgust. An allergic temptation to reject everything en bloc: to refuse all the gentle brainwashing, the soft-sold overfeeding, the tolerance, the pressure to embrace synergy and consensus.
Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
If you want to know the real reasons why certain politicians vote the way they do - follow the money. Arch Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg (a.k.a. JackOff Grease-Smug) stands to make billions via his investment firm - Somerset Capital Management - if the UK crashes unceremoniously out of the European Union without a secure future trade deal. Why ? Because proposed EU regulations will give enforcement agencies greater powers to curb the activities adopted by the sort of off-shore tax havens his company employs. Consequently the British electorate get swindled not once, but twice. Firstly because any sort of Brexit - whether hard, soft, or half-baked - will make every man, woman and child in the UK that much poorer than under the status quo currently enjoyed as a fully paid up member of the EU. Secondly because Rees-Mogg's company, if not brought to heel by appropriate EU wide legislation, will deprive Her Majesty's Treasury of millions in taxes, thus leading to more onerous taxes for the rest of us. It begs the question, who else in the obscure but influential European Research Group (ERG) that he chairs and the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) that he subscribes to, have similar vested interests in a no-deal Brexit ? It is high time for infinitely greater parliamentary and public scrutiny into the UK Register of Members' Financial Interests in order to put an end to these nefarious dealings and appalling double standards in public life which only serve to further corrode public trust in an already fragile democracy.
Alex Morritt (Lines & Lenses)
Internet subscription for $59—seemed reasonable. The second option—the $125 print subscription—seemed a bit expensive, but still reasonable. But then I read the third option: a print and Internet subscription for $125. I read it twice before my eye ran back to the previous options. Who would want to buy the print option alone, I wondered, when both the Internet and the print subscriptions were offered for the same price? Now, the print-only option may have been a typographical error, but I suspect that the clever people at the Economist's London offices (and they are clever—and quite mischievous in a British sort of way) were actually manipulating me. I am pretty certain that they wanted me to skip the Internet-only option (which they assumed would be my choice, since I was reading the advertisement on the Web) and jump to the more expensive option: Internet and print. But how could they manipulate me? I suspect it's because the Economist's marketing wizards (and I could just picture them in their school ties and blazers) knew something important about human behavior: humans rarely choose things in absolute terms. We don't have an internal value meter that tells us how much things are worth. Rather, we focus on the relative advantage of one thing over another, and estimate value accordingly. (For instance, we don't know how much a six-cylinder car is worth, but we can assume it's more expensive than the four-cylinder model.) In the case of the Economist, I may not have known whether the Internet-only subscription at $59 was a better deal than the print-only option at $125. But I certainly knew that the print-and-Internet option for $125 was better than the print-only option at $125. In fact, you could reasonably deduce that in the combination package, the Internet subscription is free! “It's a bloody steal—go for it, governor!” I could almost hear them shout from the riverbanks of the Thames. And I have to admit, if I had been inclined to subscribe I probably would have taken the package deal myself. (Later, when I tested the offer on a large number of participants, the vast majority preferred the Internet-and-print deal.)
Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions)
The Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel had lived only for God during his childhood in Hungary; his life had been shaped by the disciplines of the Talmud, and he had hoped one day to be initiated into the mysteries of Kabbalah. As a boy, he was taken to Auschwitz and later to Buchenwald. During his first night in the death camp, watching the black smoke coiling to the sky from the crematorium where the bodies of his mother and sister were to be thrown, he knew that the flames had consumed his faith forever. He was in a world which was the objective correlative of the Godless world imagined by Nietzsche. “Never should I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live,” he wrote years later. “Never shall I forget these moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.”33 One day the Gestapo hanged a child. Even the SS were disturbed by the prospect of hanging a young boy in front of thousands of spectators. The child who, Wiesel recalled, had the face of a “sad-eyed angel,” was silent, lividly pale and almost calm as he ascended the gallows. Behind Wiesel, one of the other prisoners asked: “Where is God? Where is He?” It took the child half an hour to die, while the prisoners were forced to look him in the face. The same man asked again: “Where is God now?” And Wiesel heard a voice within him make this answer: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.”34 Dostoevsky had said that the death of a single child could make God unacceptable, but even he, no stranger to inhumanity, had not imagined the death of a child in such circumstances. The horror of Auschwitz is a stark challenge to many of the more conventional ideas of God. The remote God of the philosophers, lost in a transcendent apatheia, becomes intolerable. Many Jews can no longer subscribe to the biblical idea of God who manifests himself in history, who, they say with Wiesel, died in Auschwitz. The idea of a personal God, like one of us writ large, is fraught with difficulty. If this God is omnipotent, he could have prevented the Holocaust. If he was unable to stop it, he is impotent and useless; if he could have stopped it and chose not to, he is a monster. Jews are not the only people who believe that the Holocaust put an end to conventional theology.
Karen Armstrong (A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam)
It is already apparent that the word 'Fascist' will be one of the hardest-worked words in the Presidential campaign. Henry Wallace called some people Fascists the other day in a speech and next day up jumped Harrison Spangler, the Republican, to remark that if there were any Fascists in this country you would find them in the New Deal's palace guard. It is getting so a Fascist is a man who votes the other way. Persons who vote your way, of course, continue to be 'right-minded people.' We are sorry to see this misuse of the word 'Fascist.' If we recall matters, a Fascist is a member of the Fascist party or a believer in Fascist ideals. These are: a nation founded on bloodlines, political expansion by surprise and war, murder or detention of unbelievers, transcendence of state over individual, obedience to one leader, contempt for parliamentary forms, plus some miscellaneous gymnastics for the young and a general feeling of elation. It seems to us that there are many New Deal Democrats who do not subscribe to such a program, also many aspiring Republicans. Other millions of Americans are nonsubscribers. It's too bad to emasculate the word 'Fascist' by using it on persons whose only offense is that they vote the wrong ticket. The word should be saved for use in cases where it applies, as it does to members of our Ku Klux Klan, for instance, whose beliefs and practices are identical with Fascism. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), there is a certain quality in Fascism which is quite close to a certain quality in nationalism. Fascism is openly against people-in-general, in favor of people-in-particular. Nationalism, although in theory not dedicated to such an idea, actually works against people-in-general because of its preoccupation with people-in-particular. It reminds one of Fascism, also, in its determination to stabilize its own position by whatever haphazard means present themselves--by treaties, policies, balances, agreements, pacts, and the jockeying for position which is summed up in the term 'diplomacy.' This doesn't make an America Firster a Fascist. It simply makes him, in our opinion, a man who hasn't grown into his pants yet. The persons who have written most persuasively against nationalism are the young soldiers who have got far enough from our shores to see the amazing implications of a planet. Once you see it, you never forget it.
E.B. White (The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters)
Ownership is dead. Access is the new imperative. International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that by 2020, 50 percent of the world’s largest enterprises will see the majority of their business depend on their ability to create digitally enhanced products, services, and experiences. Focusing on services over products is also a sound business strategy. Zuora’s Subscription Economy Index, which you’ll find at the end of this book, shows that subscription-based companies are growing eight times faster than the S&P 500 and five times faster than US retail sales.
Tien Tzuo (Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It)
Now the nation’s largest billboard company, Clear Channel Outdoor Inc., is bringing customized pop-up ads to the interstate. Its Radar program, up and running in Boston and 10 other US cities, uses data AT&T Inc. collects on 130 million cellular subscribers, and from two other companies, PlaceIQ Inc. and Placed Inc., which use phone apps to track the comings and goings of millions more. Clear Channel knows what kinds of people are driving past one of their billboards at 6:30 p.m. on a Friday—how many are Dunkin’ Donuts regulars, for example, or have been to three Red Sox games so far this year. It can then precisely target ads to them.
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
One in every ten transactions in a US Starbucks store is handled by its mobile app, which tells you when your order will be ready and how long it will take you to arrive at the closest store. Starbucks is working toward getting rid of lines entirely. But it all starts with that ID.
Tien Tzuo (Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It)
Consider, for a moment, just the physical resources built up by faithful Catholics in America over the years. Scrimping and saving so that they could contribute their hard-earned nickels and dimes, working-class Catholics bequeathed us beautiful churches, parish schools, hospitals, and universities. Now many of those churches and schools are closed, while the hospitals are being sold off to secular corporations. We cannot ignore the spending of over $3 billion to pay the costs incurred by an inexcusable failure to curb sexual abuse among the clergy—a squandering of resources that has now driven ten dioceses into bankruptcy. Parish closings are commonplace in America today, and prelates are praised for their smooth handling of what is seen as an “inevitable” contraction of the Church. A question for the bishops who subscribe to such a defeatist view. Why is it inevitable? The closing of a parish is an admission of defeat. If the faithful could support a parish on this site at one time, why can they not support a parish today? American cities are dotted with magnificent church structures, built with the nickels and dimes that hard-pressed immigrant families could barely afford to donate. Today the affluent grandchildren of those immigrants are unwilling to keep current with the parish fuel bills and, more to the point, to encourage their sons to consider a life of priestly ministry. There are times, admittedly, when parishes
Philip F. Lawler (The Smoke of Satan: How Corrupt and Cowardly Bishops Betrayed Christ, His Church, and the Faithful . . . and What Can Be Done About It)
It is illegal to portal anyone while they are under duress,I could lose my license if I were to do so." "You're going to lose a lot more than that if you don't tell me where my twin went," I said in a low, mean voice. "Mayling, please. I must insist that you allow me to be the bad cop," Gabriel said as I slid the dagger at my ankle out of its sheath. "I have never subscribed to the sexist belief that women have to be good cop," I said, twirling the dagger around one finger. "Nonetheless, you are far more suited to the good cop role," Gabriel insisted. "I'm going to have to go against popular opinion and side with Mei Ling on this," Savian said, watching us with a delighted twinkle in his eye. "She looks like she knows how to use that blade. What is that, a stiletto?" "Sicilian castrating knife," I said with a smile at the portal man. "She wins," Savian told Gabriel. "Er..." Jarilith said, his expression starting to slide into worry. "I am a wyvern! I can do far more to this man than merely remove his genitalia," Gabriel answered in an outraged tone, a little tendril of smoke emerging from between his lips as he spoke. "Eh..." Jarilith said, taking a step backward. "Hmm. He's a weaver," Savian said thoughtfully as he examined the portalist. "Those are immortal, aren't they? So he could survive a castration, but the question is would a dragon barbeque be enough to finish him off?" "Absolutely," Gabriel said. He smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. "Threatening a weaver is strictly prohibited by law," Jarilith said indignantly, but the fight had gone out of him. His gaze was flickering back and forth from Gabriel to Savian to the dagger I held casually. "I could have the watch on you for what you're saying!" "Oh, please," I said with a dramatic roll of my eyes. "Just about every thief taker in this hemisphere is after me. I've already been sentenced to banishment to the Akasha. You think one little murder is going to make that any worse? Not likely." Jarilith's eyes widened. "It's true," Savian said. "The price on her head has already gone over six figures." The color washed out of the portalist's face. "Erm..." "Mate," Gabriel said sternly. "I must insist that you refrain from slicing and dicing this man." Jarilith nodded quickly. "Listen to the dragon." "It is my place to destroy those who stand in your way," Gabriel continued, the pupils in his eyes narrowing as he turned to the now hastily backing away Jarilith. "Let's not lose our heads, here," the latter said in a rush. "I don't think it's your head the lady has in mind," Savian said as he looked pointedly at the portalist's crotch. Jarilith's hands hovered protectively over his fly. "Such an atrocity would constitute torture. You wouldn't do that to an innocent man, would you?" "What makes you think I'd stop at the castration?" I twirled the knife around my fingers again. "This little jobby fillets, as well." "She went to Paris," Jarilith said quickly as he dashed for a door to a back room. "Your portal is ready in room number three. Have a pleasant journey..." His voice trailed off as he bolted. I turned a frown on Gabriel. "You really wouldn't have let me be bad cop? I'm very good at it, as you can see." "I'm sorry," he said, his dimples belying the grave look he was trying to maintain.."Wyverns have some standards to maintain with their mates, and one of them is always being the bad cop.Although I do admit that you have a particularly effective manner. Would you really have castrated him to get the information about your twin?" "Would you really have burnt him to acrisp for not answering?" "Such a bloodthirsty little bird," he said fondly, giving my butt a little pinch. Savian stood still for a moment, giving us an odddisbelieving look before shaking his head and following. "You two are the strangest couple I've ever met. And I have to tell you-I've met some real weirdos
Katie MacAlister (Playing With Fire (Silver Dragons, #1))
The jargon, the tenets, the manifestos - it wasn’t just to make the guest feel better about spending their money. It was for us. To make us feel noble, called, necessary. They would miss me for a week. At most. Perhaps the biggest fallacy I subscribed to was that I was - that we were - irreplaceable.
Stephanie Danler
In provisionally characterizing the object which serves as the theme of our investigation (the Being of entities, or the meaning of Being in general), it seems that we have also delineated the method to be employed. The task of ontology is to explain Being itself and to make the Being of entities stand out in full relief. And the method of ontology remains questionable in the highest degree as long as we merely consult those ontologies which have come down to us historically, or other essays of that character. Since the term "ontology" is used in this investigation in a sense which is formally broad, any attempt to clarify the method of ontology by tracing its history is automatically ruled out. When, moreover, we use the term "ontology," we are not talking about some definite philosophical discipline standing in interconnection with the others. Here one does not have to measure up to the tasks of some discipline that has been presented beforehand; on the contrary, only in terms of the objective necessities of definite questions and the kind of treatment which the 'things themselves' require, can one develop such a discipline. With the question of the meaning of Being, our investigation comes up against the fundamental question of philosophy. This is one that must be treated *phenomenologically*. Thus our treatise does not subscribe to a 'standpoint' or represent any special 'direction'; for phenomenology is nothing of either sort, nor can it become so as long as it understands itself. The expression 'phenomenology' signifies primarily a *methodological conception*. This expression does not characterize the what of the objects of philosophical research as subject-matter, but rather the *how* of that research. The more genuinely a methodological concept is worked out and the more comprehensively it determines the principles on which a science is to be conducted, all the more primordially is it rooted in the way we come to terms with the things themselves, and the farther is it removed from what we call "technical devices," though there are many such devices even in the theoretical disciplines. Thus the term 'phenomenology' expresses a maxim which can be formulated as 'To the things themselves!' It is opposed to all free-floating constructions and accidental findings; it is opposed to taking over any conceptions which only seem to have been demonstrated; it is opposed to those pseudo-questions which parade themselves as 'problems', often for generations at a time. Yet this maxim, one may rejoin, is abundantly self-evident, and it expresses, moreover, the underlying principle of any scientific knowledge whatsoever. Why should anything so self-evident be taken up explicitly in giving a title to a branch of research? In point of fact, the issue here is a kind of 'self-evidence' which we should like to bring closer to us, so far as it is important to do so in casting light upon the procedure of our treatise. We shall expound only the preliminary conception [Vorbegriff] of phenomenology. This expression has two components: "phenomenon" and "logos." Both of these go back to terms from the Greek: φαινόμενον and λόγος. Taken superficially, the term "phenomenology" is formed like "theology," "biology," "sociology"―names which may be translated as "science of God," "science of life," "science of society." This would make phenomenology the *science of phenomena*. We shall set forth the preliminary conception of phenomenology by characterizing what one has in mind in the term's two components, 'phenomenon' and 'logos', and by establishing the meaning of the name in which these are *put together*. The history of the word itself, which presumably arose in the Wolffian school, is here of no significance." ―from_Being and Time_. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, pp. 49-51
Martin Heidegger
[During this winter the citizens of Jo Davies County, Ill., subscribed for and had a diamond-hilled sword made for General Grant, which was always known as the Chattanooga sword. The scabbard was of gold, and was ornamented with a scroll running nearly its entire length, displaying in engraved letters the names of the battles in which General Grant had participated. Congress also gave him a vote of thanks for the victories at Chattanooga, and voted him a gold medal for Vicksburg and Chattanooga. All such things are now in the possession of the government at Washington.]
Ulysses S. Grant (Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant: All Volumes)
It is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on these differences. Recall that our measures of Intuitionism are based on sets of behaviors that have nothing to do with politics. Intuitionists are not simply apprehensive people who are drawn to metaphors, but people who translate these tendencies into a number of beliefs that defy basic scientific logic. And this way of thinking is becoming increasingly aligned with one’s ideological self-description. Only a tiny fraction of Americans calling themselves very conservative do not hold a least some magical beliefs; an overwhelming majority of strong conservatives are also very strong magical thinkers.36 To be very conservative in America is, almost certainly, to be someone who has a strong Intuitionist worldview. These differences are important for US politics. Not only are liberals disproportionately Democrat in their party identification, they are disproportionately Rationalist in their worldview. Where liberals do hold higher levels of magical beliefs, they tend to be non-Christian ones like horoscopes or reincarnation. Conservatives, meanwhile, are not only more likely to be Republican, they are more likely to be strongly Intuitionist. The Rationalist conservatives who attend talks at the Cato Institute or subscribe to Reason magazine are a small minority on the political Right. Indeed, it’s the rare American who identifies as a strong conservative who doesn’t hold a lot of Christian magical beliefs. Conservatism and magical thinking, especially within religious fundamentalism, are increasingly becoming aligned. And as we’ll see in chapter 4, this alignment between Intuitionism and ideology is behind much of the polarization in US politics.
J. Eric Oliver (Enchanted America: How Intuition & Reason Divide Our Politics)
No matter how many YouTube and TikTok subscribers, Facebook friends, or Instagram followers we collect, there will never be enough for us to truly feel fulfilled and happy.
Cornelius Christopher (ONEO: Enlightenment of Eternal Life, The Acceptance of I, and One With Yourself.)
I wanted to explore the relationships that make us who we are, as well as how we help and hinder one another. Language is a gate that we can open and close on people. The words we use shape perception, as do the books we read, the stories we tell one another, and the stories we tell ourselves. The foreign staff and subscribers of the Library were considered “enemy aliens,” and several were interned. Jewish subscribers were not allowed to enter the Library, and many were later killed in concentration camps. A friend said she believes that in reading stories set in World War II, people like to ask themselves what they would have done. I think a better question to ask is what can we do now to ensure that libraries and learning are accessible to all and that we treat people with dignity and compassion.
Janet Skeslien Charles (The Paris Library)
On the evening of November 1, at a campaign rally in Philadelphia, Eisenhower addressed the tensions in the Mediterranean by letting fly a salvo of antitribal idealism, declaring, “We cannot and will not condone armed aggression—no matter who the attacker, and no matter who the victim. We cannot—in the world, any more than in our own nation—subscribe to one law for the weak, another law for the strong; one law of those opposing us, another for those allied with us.
James D. Hornfischer (Who Can Hold the Sea: The U.S. Navy in the Cold War 1945-1960)
Is it easier to cover the world with leather or to put on a pair of shoes?” Most of us are quick to proclaim the latter, but in practice subscribe to the former. “Everyone thinks of changing the world,” said Tolstoy, “but no one thinks of changing himself.
Benjamin Riggs (Finding God in the Body: A Spiritual Path for the Modern West)
Crossroads On the call, use this checklist: Do you perform a demo for this prospect and spend 30–60 minutes with him or her? Do you add the user to a drip campaign and follow up later? Do you disqualify the user? Is the user willing to change their business requirements to make this software work? Some of our users change how they process orders to make Connex work for them. Avoid scope creep with the 15-minute call. Trial users are usually disrespectful of your company’s time. Find a way to “yes” If your software lacks a feature and there is a workaround, suggest it. For example, customers would ask us if we had an Etsy integration. We said we can sync with it if the they purchase a 3rd party add-on. If your company plans to build a feature, alert the trial user. Systems like UserVoice and UpVoty can ask users to subscribe to a feature request and receive an alert when it is made.
Joseph Anderson (The $20 SaaS Company: from Zero to Seven Figures without Venture Capital)
Not that I subscribe to the utilitarian view that plants are only good for what we can get out of them—it should be enough to add another beautiful (or even plain) item to nature’s inventory. We need to know what there is in the world for us to look after, regardless of its potential use.
Richard Fortey (Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum)
Social Media Advertising - Different Options & Their Benefits How To Use Social Media Paid Ads Ideally? What is the most effective way to make use of social media ads? Choosing which social media platform to advertise on depends on your target audience. You need to understand which platforms are being used, the type of campaigns that can run on each platform, and what investment you’ll be required to make. Pew Research Center’s report helps give us an idea of the most preferred platform for various demographics. For example, if your product caters to the teenage group, consider advertising on Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat. If you’re catering to a more B2B client, you can consider LinkedIn. Once you understand where your audience spends the most time, you can narrow down the platforms. However, we’d still advise on A/B testing various platforms. You’d be surprised by how many B2B clients you can find on TikTok! What Are The Most Popular Social Media Ads? Here is a brief rundown of the various social media ad options available. 1. Facebook Ads Facebook Ads are the most successful form of social media advertising. Statistics show that Facebook paid ads have an average conversion rate of 9.21%. They’re easy to set up and track, and allow you to measure campaign performance easily, giving insights into how well your ads are performing. They also offer a wide range of targeting options that help you reach people who might be interested in what you’re selling, which is why they’re so effective at generating sales leads. Facebook Ads are also highly targeted. You can target specific demographics or audiences based on gender, age range, location, and other details such as interests and behaviors or job titles. This helps ensure that only people who are interested in what you’re offering, see your ad on Facebook. 2. Twitter Ads Twitter ads are a great way to reach your target audience, especially if your company already has a presence on the platform. They’re easy to set up and manage so you can focus on other aspects of your business. As of 2022, they have an average conversion rate of 0.77%. Twitter ads also offer simple targeting options that let you get more followers, increase engagement with existing customers and gain new followers interested in what you have to offer. There are multiple ad options to choose from for accomplishing various advertising goals, including promoted ads, follower ads, amplify ads, and takeover ads. Promoted and follower ads have a much wider average cost range than their takeover counterparts. 3. LinkedIn Ads LinkedIn is a professional networking site, so it’s not as casual as other social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. As a result, users are more likely to be interested in what you are promoting on the platform because they’re looking for something related to their professional lives. LinkedIn has an average click-through rate of 0.65%. In addition, the conversion rate for LinkedIn ads is also fairly decent (2.35%). They can have high or low conversion rates depending on factors like interests and demographics. But if your ad is effectively targeted, it will have more chances of enjoying a higher conversion rate. 4. Instagram Ads As a younger demographic, Instagram users make up a great target audience for social media advertising. They are highly engaged in the platform and are more likely to respond to call-to-action than other demographics. 5. YouTube Ads YouTube ads are excellent for marketers with video content to promote their business. Furthermore, the advertising options offered by this platform ensure that you needn't bother with YouTuber fame or even a large number of subscribers on your channel to spread the word on this platform.
David parkyd
Jesus is sometimes lauded as one of the great moral teachers of all time, [...] But it is important to realize that the reasoning behind his moral teaching is not the reasoning most of us use today. People today think that we should live ethically for a wide variety of reasons—most of them irrelevant to Jesus—for example, so we can find the greatest self-fulfillment in life and so we can all thrive together as a society for the long haul. Jesus did not teach his ethics so that society could thrive for the long haul. For Jesus, there was not going to be a long haul. The end was coming soon, and people needed to prepare for it. Those who lived according to the standards he set forth, loving God with all their being and loving one another as themselves, would enter into the kingdom of God that was very soon to appear. Anyone who chose not to do so would be destroyed when the Son of Man arrived in judgment from heaven. Jesus’s ethics were an “ethics of the kingdom” both because the kinds of lives his followers led when they followed these ethical principles would be the kinds of lives they would experience in the kingdom—where there would be no war, hatred, violence, oppression, or injustice—and because a person could enter into the kingdom only by living in this way. […] Most Christians today do not realize that they have recontextualized Jesus. But in fact they have. Everyone who either believes in him or subscribes to any of his teachings has done so—from the earliest believers who first came to believe in his resurrection until today. And so it will be, world without end.
Bart D. Ehrman (How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee)
Because unity is at its core, the systems view of health is ultimately about raising human consciousness. One might argue that it is all very well transforming ourselves, but what about the millions of people in the world who do not subscribe to this view? What about those who stoke division and strife at every turn by resolutely seeing the world in terms of us and them? While raising the consciousness of humanity might seem like a tall order, the Maharishi effect and the 3.5 percent rule show that we have a very real chance of evolving past our current problems if even just a few of us put our minds to it. As Mahatma Gandhi so poignantly highlighted, we need simply be the change we want to see in the world.
Dr. Andrea Revell
Wrong’ is why we have this office. ‘Wrong’ is why we both have the bank accounts we do. ‘Wrong’ is what our readers, our viewers, our subscribers ... what the public wants to see. ‘Wrong’ is why you and I are rich. For the next two or three weeks, until you turn in that winning ticket, I will be the one person in the world you will need to trust. I will be the architect of the new life the two of you are about to embark on. I know your best case scenarios and a whole lot of the worst case scenarios you might run into. Any publicity for you is publicity for us too. You might not understand it, but as far as the world is concerned, Celebrity Bounty owns you and your family.
Michael Vraa
The problems we are experiencing are different aspects of one single crisis, which is a crisis in perception. It derives from the fact that most of us, and especially our large social institutions, subscribe to the concepts of an outdated worldview.
Joseph P. Kauffman (Conscious Collective: An Aim for Awareness)
Education has turned into a cookie mill. everyone recieves the same degree, the same council, the same formula of inspiration and ideas to make them a MODEL of an educated being. But that is the problem. No 2 people are alike so why subscribe to a system that makes everyone EXACTLY alike? A system that will never recognize the individual or a persons uniqueness? We must re-train our brains to think and not merely respond to a set of patterns that we have been TRAINED to act on. We must learn to think more creatively, See with new eyes and view the symbols of the world around us with a wider scope of view.
Levon Peter Poe
During the Protestant Reformation, the slogans sola Scriptura and prima Scriptura became popular to summarize this conviction; they mean Scripture alone is our highest authority. This should not be confused with solo Scriptura, which is the erroneous belief that truth is only to be found in Scripture and nowhere else. Scripture itself tells us that God reveals truth to us in such things as creation and our consciences, but that the beliefs we may subscribe to from such forms of lesser revelation are to be tested by Scripture.
Mark Driscoll (On Church leadership)
Before wrapping up this chapter, let us look at one of the deadly scams in the Indian primary market history. There was company named ‘MS shoes east’. Shares of this company traded in Rs 150-200 range throughout the year 1994. But towards December 1994 it spurted to Rs 500 without any justifiable rationale behind the raise. Its promoter Pavan Sachedeva and his broker artificially manipulated the stock price to this level.   By February 1995, the company devised an expansion plan for an estimated expense Rs 700 crores. It proposed to raise around Rs 428 crores by means of Fully convertible bonds. These bonds were to be sold at Rs 199 each through public issue. The idea was to provoke people to subscribe the issue with a hope of converting this bond of Rs 199 to a share of Rs 500.   Well, his brokers was constantly buying the stocks from the open market to maintain the price at that high level. But the situation had already worsened. He had bought too much and had too little money at hand that he could not pay the stock exchange for all the purchases he made. BSE could not give money to the sellers of that security. Things turned out to be serious. You may find it hard to believe  - the BSE was shut down for three consecutive days without any business.   Before this drama came to light, FCD ('Fully Convertible Debenture) public issue was a big success and it almost stole the show. Delighted by the overwhelming response from the investing community, MS Shoes had announced to close the public issues few days before the stipulated time. The world came to know that the cruel plan of manipulating the stock price was only to push the bond issue successfully. Even the authorities woke up to the problem. The company was issued a notice. And also it allowed the investors to take back their FCD application. Almost all the investors took back. Even the underwriter refused to buy the unsold portion of the issue because the company had voluntarily announced to close the issue before the end date. The ruling was in favor the underwriter. Sachedeva declared himself to be innocent. MS shoes office resembled a mourning house with  deserted look.   There was one Sachedeva who came to light. There were and probably still are more of them out there.
Chellamuthu Kuppusamy (The Science of Stock Market Investment - Practical Guide to Intelligent Investors)
We could choose to celebrate our differences, rather than over-analyze them. This might help us become more realistic about the generalizations to which we subscribe. For example, consider this. If women are the overemotional ones, why do so many bar fights break out between men? Such brawls do not spring from logical, calm places.
Cathy Burnham Martin (The Bimbo Has Brains: And Other Freaky Facts)
I don’t subscribe much to any of these fancy investing theories, and most people seem surprised to learn that I’ve never done much investing in anything except Wal-Mart. I believe the folks who’ve done the best with Wal-Mart stock are those who have studied the company, who have understood our strengths and our management approach, and who, like me, have just decided to invest with us for the long run. We
Sam Walton (Sam Walton: Made In America)
For wasn't the practice of slavery at least as serious a system of human-rights wrongs as the Nazi holocaust? Did not the holocaust of slavery last longer–indeed, 234 years longer? Did it not claim at least twice as many lives, in the Middle Passage alone? Did it not savagely eviscerate the emotional core of a whole race of people on three continents? In raising any defense of Jefferson, a powerful American cog in slavery's long-grinding machine, are we not then subscribing to Jefferson's view that a black life has lesser value, black suffering an inconsequential significance? Their griefs are transient. Does not the continued unremarked American deification of Jefferson tell us all how profoundly contemptuous of black sensibilities American society persists in being? How deeply, stubbornly, poisonously racist our society to this day remains?
Randall Robinson (The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks)
the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” the Targum expresseth, “In wisdom God created the heaven and the earth.” Both bear a stamp of this perfection on them;’ and when the apostle tells the Romans (Rom. i. 20) “The invisible things of God were clearly understood by the things that are made.” The whole creation is a poem, every species a stanza, and every individual creature a verse in it. The creation presents us with a prospect of the wisdom of God, as a poem doth the reader with the wit and fancy of the composer: “By wisdom he created the earth” (Prov. iii. 19), “and stretched out the heavens by discretion” (Jer. x. 12). There is not anything so mean, so small, but glitters with a beam of Divine skill; and the consideration of them would justly make every man subscribe to that of the psalmist, “O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all” (Ps. civ. 24).
William Symington (The Existence and Attributes of God)
Being poised to shatter the adaptive illusion of God is arguably one of the most significant turning points our species has ever faced in its relatively brief 150,000-year history. The belief instinct may never be completely deprogrammed in our animal brains, but by understanding it for what it is rather than subscribing uncritically to the intuitions it generates, we can distance ourselves from an adaptive system that was designed, ultimately, to keep us hobbled in fear.
Jesse Bering
Unfortunately, many people in our society do believe that individuals are in some way responsible for the abuse they experience, that they must have in some way contributed to it, or deserved it. It seems more comforting to believe this than to put the issue of blame and responsibility for abuse with those who perpetrate it. By subscribing to victim-blaming beliefs, so often voiced by perpetrators of such crimes, people can delude themselves with the idea that they, and their children, can avoid being abused by not being like those who have been; victims are ‘not like us’.
Gerrilyn Smith (Women and Self-Harm)
Something changed in me, as it did for many people, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It felt like the day I first beat my father at arm wrestling. In that moment, I realized that he could no longer protect me. I had to take care of myself. An anarchist is someone who believes that people are responsible enough to maintain order in the absence of government. That week, I realized I was something very different: a Fliesian. I began to subscribe to the view of human nature depicted in the William Golding novel Lord of the Flies. After reading reports of the chaos, violence, and suffering in New Orleans, it became clear that when the system is smashed, some of us start smashing each other. Most survivalists are also Fliesians. That’s why they stockpile guns. They’re planning to use them not to shoot enemy soldiers, but to shoot the neighbors trying to steal their supplies.
Neil Strauss (Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life)
The big problem is that the messages, while they can be and sometimes are personalized, are seldom filled with dynamic content based on what we know about each customer. We have these rich databases, but we do not use the rich data that they hold. To use it requires many creative staff members who dream up the dynamic content. The thought is, “Subscribers who are over 65 have certain interests, while other subscribers are college students who have different interests. We will vary our messages based on this knowledge, and also do that for about a half-dozen other subscriber segments to make our relationships richer for them and more profitable for us.” This makes a lot of sense, but few marketers today are doing anything like that. They are blasting identical content to every subscriber or customer whose e-mail or address they can get their hands on.
Arthur Hughes (Strategic Database Marketing 4e: The Masterplan for Starting and Managing a Profitable, Customer-Based Marketing Program)
He tugged on her hand, but instead of going to him, she looked at the timepiece above her breast. “It’s getting late.” “Are you coming over here or not?” “Not.” But she smiled to lessen the refusal. After a moment, he stood. “I was planning to cover the south side tomorrow. Sales have been kind of slow and I need to find us some new subscribers.” Unfolding herself from the couch, she rose as well. “Does SWT&T know who you are?” “Only the chairman. Everyone else thinks I’m a troubleman, including our boss.” She tilted her head. “Are you really going to try and sell phones or are you doing your, um, other work?” He ran the back of his knuckles against her cheek. “Both. I’m always doing both.” Twisting her face to the side, she gave his hand a peck. “You be careful, then.” He slid his hand around the nape of her neck, and gently pulled her toward him. Defenses melting, she let him reel her in as surely as if she were one of his fish. The kiss was slow, gentle, and devastating. “If I don’t see you tomorrow,” he whispered, “I’ll see you on Tuesday.
Deeanne Gist (Love on the Line)
Center for Science in the Public Interest, simply because it was so ruthlessly effective. Founded in 1971, this group of activists would grow to have nine hundred thousand subscribers to its
Michael Moss (Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us)
Libraries are lungs. Books the fresh air breathed in to keep the heart beating, to keep the brain imagining, to keep hope alive. Subscribers depend on us for news, for community. Soldiers need books, need to know their friends at the Library care.
Janet Skeslien Charles (The Paris Library)
You know that society has failed you, that men have failed you as a woman when you read the horrors that depraved disgusting monsters have done to a 31 year old who was a self-actualized and successful woman chasing her passions just like the rest of us. Yet because she is a woman, she was not spared an ounce of mercy. What are we meant to hope or to believe when society keeps failing us, when men keep preying upon us like predators and see us like nothing else but meat whose bones they should jump? No matter how impressive we are, we’re always regarded as “less” and “lesser” because the world was built to make us feel ashamed and small for existing. Such is the state of women now in 2024 pushing forward, we’re still in the Dark Ages. Isn’t it heartwrenching how we must always live in fear that tomorrow it could be us, how no woman is safe, how people,have become so desensitized to this when rapists walk free on parole, when they feel remorseless. Haven’t society and men failed women over and over? To think that days ago, men were all over the Olympics, piping up about silly acrobatics and have an informed opinion about which football rivalry is most exciting and now no second is spared for the only movement that matters above all else, not even two words spared for our sakes. And then there are those women! Who shame on them still subscribe to the ‘benevolent sexism’ and encourage it. WE SEE YOU ALL AND WE’LL REMEMBER YOUR SILENCE ABOVE ALL ELSE. Justice for Moumita and Murdabad to her perpetrators.
Writer
Anyway, JBA was selling magazines to raise money for whatever it is they do there. You got three dollars for every subscription you signed people up for (and yes, they check to make sure it’s legitimate, so we couldn’t just sign Armando up for twenty subscriptions to Women’s Health). But you got five dollars for every subscription to The Economist, which personally I find fascinating but is too advanced for most 12-year-old minds. So we bought a copy of The Economist, removed the cover, and then stapled it around one of the magazines Tina’s dad keeps under his bed. Dirty magazine, fake cover. Then we left it in the boys’ bathroom and waited. By the end of the day, every boy in school was coming to us asking to subscribe to The Economist. Easy money.
Gregg Maxwell Parker (Troublemakers)
So, how do we make things better? Given so many obstacles, both internal and external, discussed above, how can a bisexual person come to a positive bisexual identity? Understand the social dynamics of oppression and stereotyping. Get support and validation from others. Join a support group. Subscribe to an email list. Attend a conference. Read books and blogs about bisexuality. Get a good bi-affirming therapist. Find a friend (or two or twenty) to talk to. Silence kills. I encourage bisexual people to come out as bisexual to the maximum extent that you can do so safely. Life in the closet takes an enormous toll on our emotional well-being. Bisexuals must remember that neither bisexuals nor gays and lesbians created heterosexism and that as bisexuals we are its victims as well as potential beneficiaries. Although we must be aware that we, as bisexuals, may—because of the gender/sex of our partner compared to our own gender/sex at a given point in our lives—be accorded privileges that are denied to gays, lesbians and to transgender people of any orientation, this simply calls for us to make thoughtful decisions about how to live our lives. We did not create the inequities, and we must not feel guilty for who we are; we need only be responsible for our actions.
Robyn Ochs (REC*OG*NIZE: The Voices of Bisexual Men)
We know that everything that is anything is made from matter and energy being interrelated aspects of the same thing. The First Law of Thermodynamics tells us that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. However, if this is true, the obvious question is: what created it in the first place? It appears that either something had to have come from nothing, or something has always been. In the case that something has always been, if time can be in fact nonlinear and can infinitely regress in a loop, going backward on itself at the end of itself, it would be possible that there is no beginning or end of the universe at all, but a continuation of the same thing, as if the universe were breathing in and out, filling up its lungs with everything, and then emptying them back out, over and over. Or similarly, everything is, was, and will always be across space-time for all eternity. Every moment in time and location in space has a coordinate on the map of space-time and the map exists at all times at the same time, forever. However in both cases, if something has always been something where did that something come from. Who or what made it? How can anything be anything without having been made by something else? If the universe is entirely based on cause and effect, which appears to be, how could there be no first cause for there to be an effect. Alternatively, in what is known as quantum field theory, physicists have also found that particles known as virtual particles can come into existence from apparent nothingness. Which is to say, it is perhaps possible that a feature of nothing is to create something. However, if a feature of nothing is to create something, how can it be nothing? And if nothing isn’t nothing, what is it, and what made it? Even if one subscribes to the notion of a god, that’s fine, but that doesn’t resolve the question of where a god would have come from. Everything ultimately brings us back to the same question: How can anything come from nothing? Or something be infinite? And neither concept seem to concur with any human sensibilities, meaning there is some mystery of everything that our brains can’t seem to comprehend, as if the rules of the game were made of logic, but the reason for the game was made of something else. The only truth is, of course, no matter what anyone says or how they say it, nobody has any idea what’s going on beneath their feet, inside their brain, or above their head. Maybe at some point in the future, we, or some iteration of us, will know precisely how everything works and why with one little equation. Maybe Newton will be wrong and Einstein will be wrong and thousands of other Einsteins of the future will be wrong until someone somehow isn’t.
Robert Pantano
these fears and the insecurities that protect us influence: The rules we force ourselves to follow The opportunities we justify avoiding The excuses we give into The stories we tell ourselves about others The assumptions we make about the world  The generalizations about the world The unhealthy narratives we subscribe to The beliefs we hold about what is possible The limitations we place on others The logic and reasoning we insist are correct The best practices we follow  The self-sabotaging behaviors we engage in
Justin Quinton (Enlightened Enough: A Self Mastery Book To Stop Overthinking, Escape Self Sabotage, And Improve Your Mind And Emotions)
Many contemporary Yoga practitioners, especially those in Western countries, look upon āsana as a tool for achieving physical fitness and flexibility. The yogic postures have certainly demonstrated their physiological benefits in millions of cases. They improve musculoskeletal flexibility, strength, resilience, endurance, cardiovascular and respiratory efficiency, endocrine and gastrointestinal functioning, immunity, sleep, eye-hand coordination, balance. Experiments also have shown various psychological benefits, including improvement of somatic awareness, attention, memory, learning, and mood. The regular practice of postures also decreases anxiety, depression, and aggression.1 All these effects are clearly beneficial and highly desirable. Yet, the traditional purpose of āsana is something far more radical, namely to assist the Hatha-Yoga practitioner in the creation of an “adamantine body” (vajra-deha) or “divine body” (divya-deha). This is a transubstantiated body that is immortal and completely under the control of the adept’s will (which is merged with the Divine Will). It is an energy body that, depending on the adept’s wish, is either visible or invisible to the human eye. In this body, the liberated master can carry out benevolent activities with the least possible obstruction. ĀSANA AS A TOOL OF NONDUAL EXPERIENCE2 The transubstantiated body of the truly accomplished Hatha-Yoga master is, realistically speaking, out of reach for most of us—not because we are not in principle capable of realizing it but because only very few have the determination and stamina to even pursue this yogic ideal. Does this mean we have to settle for the more pedestrian benefits of posture practice? I believe there is another side to āsana, which, while not representing the ultimate possibility of our human potential, is yet a significant and necessary accomplishment on the yogic path. That is to cultivate and experience āsana as an instrument for tasting nonduality (advaita). Almost all Yoga authorities subscribe to a nondualistic metaphysics according to which Reality is singular and the world of multiplicity is either altogether false (mithyā) or merely a lower expression of that ultimate Singularity. Typically, Yoga practitioners assume that the experience of nonduality is bound to the state of ecstasy (samādhi) and that this state is hard to come by and is likely to escape them at least in this lifetime. But this belief is ill founded. In fact, it is counterproductive and should be regarded as an obstacle (vighna) on the path to enlightenment. While we might not have an experience of ecstasy, we can have an experience of nonduality. The ecstatic state is simply a special version of the nondual experience. As Karl Baier, a German professor of psychology and practitioner of Iyengar Yoga, has shown, posture practice can be an efficient means of nondual experience in which we overcome the most obvious and painful duality of body and mind.
Georg Feuerstein (The Deeper Dimension of Yoga: Theory and Practice)
Ultimately, our future as a human race depends on all of us subscribing to a revolution of morals in which we each commit ourselves to something beyond ourselves.
Jacqueline Novogratz (Manifesto for a Moral Revolution: Practices to Build a Better World)
Those who subscribe to this theory have suggested HIV was spread by some pro-eugenics splinter group to decimate the black race, both in the US and in Africa.
James Morcan (The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy)
There’s an inherent dissonance to all this, a dialectic that becomes part of how we enact the informational appetite. We ping-pong between binge-watching television and swearing off new media for rustic retreats. We lament our overflowing in-boxes but strive for “in-box zero”—temporary mastery over tools that usually threaten to overwhelm us. We subscribe to RSS feeds so as to see every single update from our favorite sites—or from the sites we think we need to follow in order to be well-informed members of the digital commentariat—and when Google Reader is axed, we lament its loss as if a great library were burned. We maintain cascades of tabs of must-read articles, while knowing that we’ll never be able to read them all. We face a nagging sense that there’s always something new that should be read instead of what we’re reading now, which makes it all the more important to just get through the thing in front of us. We find a quotable line to share so that we can dismiss the article from view. And when, in a moment of exhaustion, we close all the browser tabs, this gesture feels both like a small defeat and a freeing act. Soon we’re back again, turning to aggregators, mailing lists, Longreads, and the essential recommendations of curators whose brains seem somehow piped into the social-media firehose. Surrounded by an abundance of content but willing to pay for little of it, we invite into our lives unceasing advertisements and like and follow brands so that they may offer us more.
Jacob Silverman (Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection)
HAPPY, JOYOUS, AND FREE” We are sure God wants us to be happy, joyous, and free. We cannot subscribe to the belief that this life is a vale of tears, though it once was just that for many of us. But it is clear that we made our own misery. God didn’t do it. Avoid then, the deliberate manufacture of misery, but if trouble comes, cheerfully capitalize it as an opportunity to demonstrate His omnipotence.
Alcoholics Anonymous (Daily Reflections: A Book of Reflections by A.A. Members for A.A. Members)