Switzerland Sayings And Quotes

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Shhh. Just listen. You, of all people. Listen to what Im saying. This...tonight...is the most wonderful thing you could have done for me. What you have told me, what you have done in bringing me here...knowing that, somehow, from that complete arse, I was at the start of this, you managed to salvage something to love is astonishing to me. But...I need it to end here. No more chair. No more pneumonia. No more burning limbs. No more pain and tiredness and waking up every morning already wishing it was over. When we get back, I am still going to go to Switzerland. And if you do love me, Clark, as you say you do, the thing that would make me happier than anything is if you would come with me. So I'm asking you - if you feel the things you say you feel - then do it. Be with me. Give me the end I'm hoping for.
Jojo Moyes (Me Before You (Me Before You, #1))
Hey," says Hayden, "I'm Switzerland; neutral as can be, and also with great chocolate." "Get lost," Roland tells him. "Already am." And Hayden strolls away.
Neal Shusterman (Unwind (Unwind, #1))
I'm not leaving." "I want you out of the city, and now. If the chalet doesn't suit you, go where you like. But you will go." "I have no intention of going anywhere." "Fuck it. You're fired." "Very well. I will remove my belongings and book a hotel until -- " "Oh, shut up. Both of you shut the hell up." She fisted her hands in her hair, yanked fiercely. "Just my luck, you finally say the words I've been waiting over a year to hear and I can't do my happy dance. You expect him to put his tail between his skinny legs and hide?" she demanded of Roarke. "You think when you're in the middle of this kind of mess he's just going to bop over to Switzerland and yodel, or whatever the hell they do there?
J.D. Robb (Betrayal in Death (In Death, #12))
Or perhaps your marriage is more of a covalent bond,” she said, sketching a new structural formula. “And if so, lucky you, because that means you both have strengths that, when combined, create something even better. For example, when hydrogen and oxygen combine, what do we get? Water—or H2O as it’s more commonly known. In many respects, the covalent bond is not unlike a party—one that’s made better thanks to the pie you made and the wine he brought. Unless you don’t like parties—I don’t—in which case you could also think of the covalent bond as a small European country, say Switzerland. Alps, she quickly wrote on the easel, + a Strong Economy = Everybody Wants to Live There. In a living room in La Jolla, California, three children fought over a toy dump truck, its broken axle lying directly adjacent to a skyscraper of ironing that threatened to topple a small woman, her hair in curlers, a small pad of paper in her hands. Switzerland, she wrote. Move.
Bonnie Garmus (Lessons in Chemistry)
A critical analysis of the present global constellation-one which offers no clear solution, no “practical” advice on what to do, and provides no light at the end of the tunnel, since one is well aware that this light might belong to a train crashing towards us-usually meets with reproach: “Do you mean we should do nothing? Just sit and wait?” One should gather the courage to answer: “YES, precisely that!” There are situations when the only true “practical” thing to do is to resist the temptation to engage immediately and to “wait and see” by means of a patient, critical analysis. Engagement seems to exert its pressure on us from all directions. In a well-known passage from his ‘Existentialism and Humanism’, Sartre deployed the dilemma of a young man in France in 1942, torn between the duty to help his lone, ill mother and the duty to enter the war and fight the Germans; Sartre’s point is, of course, that there is no a priori answer to this dilemma. The young man needs to make a decision grounded only in his own abyssal freedom and assume full responsibility for it. An obscene third way out of this dilemma would have been to advise the young man to tell his mother that he will join the Resistance, and to tell his Resistance friends that he will take care of his mother, while, in reality, withdrawing to a secluded place and studying. There is more than cheap cynicism in this advice. It brings to mind a well-known Soviet joke about Lenin. Under socialism; Lenin’s advice to young people, his answer to what they should do, was “Learn, learn, and learn.” This was evoked all the time and displayed on the school walls. The joke goes: Marx, Engels, and Lenin are asked whether they would prefer to have a wife or a mistress. As expected, Marx, rather conservative in private matters, answers, “A wife!” while Engels, more of a bon vivant, opts for a mistress. To everyone’s surprise, Lenin says, “I’d like to have both!” Why? Is there a hidden stripe of decadent jouisseur behind his austere revolutionary image? No-he explains: “So that I can tell my wife that I am going to my mistress and my mistress that I am going to my wife. . .” “And then, what do you do?” “I go to a solitary place to learn, learn, and learn!” Is this not exactly what Lenin did after the catastrophe in 1914? He withdrew to a lonely place in Switzerland, where he “learned, learned, and learned,” reading Hegel’s logic. And this is what we should do today when we find ourselves bombarded with mediatic images of violence. We need to “learn, learn, and learn” what causes this violence.
Slavoj Žižek (Violence: Six Sideways Reflections)
[Christy] joined some other girls from her floor who had gathered in the den to watch THe Princess Bride. The last time Christy had watched the movie was before she went to Switzerland. Katie had rented it and brought it over for their final girls' night. After watching it, Katie had declared she would never trust a guy who said "As you wish" to her every whim. She wanted a guy with gusto who would say, "Get it yourself," otherwise she knew she would sit around and get fat while he catered to her.
Robin Jones Gunn (As You Wish (Christy and Todd: College Years #2))
Shhh. Just listen. You, of all people. Listen to what Im saying. This...tonight...is the most wonderful thing you could have done for me. What you have told me, what you have done in bringing me here...knowing that, somehow, from that complete arse, I was at the start of this, you managed to salvage something to love is astonishing to me. But...I need it to end here. No more chair. No more pneumonia. No more burning limbs. No more pain and tiredness and waking up every morning already wishing it was over. When we get back, I am still going to go to Switzerland. And if you do love me, Clark, as you say you do, the thing that would make me happier than anything is if you would come with me. So I'm asking you - if you feel the things you say you feel - then do it. Be with me. Give me the end I'm hoping for.
Jojo Moyes (Me Before You (Me Before You, #1))
And another question we are asking is: what is going to happen to humanity, to all of us, when the computer outthinks man in accuracy and rapidity—as the computer experts are saying it will? With the development of the robot, man will only have, perhaps, two hours of work a day. This may be going to happen within the foreseeable future. Then what will man do? Is he going to be absorbed in the field of entertainment? That is already taking place: sports are becoming more important; there is the watching of television; and there are the varieties of religious entertainment. Or is he going to turn inwardly, which is not an entertainment but something which demands great capacity of observation, examination and non-personal perception? These are the two possibilities. The basic content of our human consciousness is the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of fear. Is humanity increasingly going to follow entertainment? 21st July, 1981
J. Krishnamurti (The Network Of Thought: Authentic Reports of Talks in 1981 in Saanen, Switzerland and Amsterdam Holland)
She bent down and reached around his trim waist to grab the handcuffs. A bit of a compromising position, given the state of her thoughts, but she had to help the poor guy out before his nose froze off. “There’s a saying here in Switzerland. To be a fool at the right time is an art.” She caught his eye before continuing with the knot. “You better hush, now.” “Well, there’s a saying in the US, too. Imagination is worse than the truth. I have a real vivid imagination, and you bent over me like this is not helping.
Melinda Dozier
Dominated by Zionism's particular concept of nationality, the State of Israel still refuses, sixty years after its establishment, to see itself as a republic that serves its citizens. One quarter of the citizens are not categorized as Jews, and the laws of the state imply that Israel is not their state nor do they own it. The state has also avoided integrating the local inhabitants into the superculture it has created, and has instead deliberately excluded them. Israel has also refused to be a consociational democracy (like Switzerland or Belgium) or a multicultural democracy (like Great Britain or the Netherlands)—that is to say, a state that accepts its diversity while serving its inhabitants. Instead, Israel insists on seeing itself as a Jewish state belonging to all the Jews in the world, even though they are no longer persecuted refugees but full citizens of the countries in which they choose to reside. The excuse for this grave violation of a basic principle of modern democracy, and for the preservation of an unbridled ethnocracy that grossly discriminates against certain of its citizens, rests on the active myth of an eternal nation that must ultimately forgather in its ancestral land.
Shlomo Sand
an hour in running shoes, I got almost instantly from these Kangoo boots,” Ted says. “My worldview of what I needed was shattered.” Furious and frustrated, he yanked them off his feet. He couldn’t wait to shove the stupid Kangoos back in the box and mail them back to Switzerland with instructions for further shoving. He stalked
Christopher McDougall (Born to Run)
I have noticed that most people don’t use more than a pea size equivalent of their brain. They can’t process more than one idea each time. If I say that my grandparents were from Switzerland and then I was born somewhere else, they will forget the somewhere else and focus on Switzerland; If I say that my name originates in the South of France before saying my nationality, it becomes irrelevant as well. And I’m surprised at how many people get offended when I tell them I can easily brainwash them with new ideas and convince them that I’m right. It’s not my fault but theirs, for not knowing how to think. They shouldn’t blame the overthinker but the underthinker. And yet, I hear so many times this explanation for any kind of life problem: “You think too much”. Everything serves as an excuse to be stupid in this world. And then the majority wonders why getting a job is so difficult for them. It’s not for overthinkers. I used to be called for job interviews because I was a rule breaker; I would hide my age and be called because the interviewer wanted to ask me how old I am; or paint the letters of my CV in green and be called because it was the first to be noticed among thousands in black and white. The only problem about overthinking is that you will eventually overcome the norm. That’s why I don’t need a job anymore; I have outthought the majority.
Robin Sacredfire
And seriously, get over yourself. Just because you didn’t do it doesn’t mean things don’t or won’t get done. They will, give it a try, and in case they really don’t get done, you already have the expertise and super speciality skill of getting things back on track, right? I am guessing you have realised by this time that you get no medal, trip to Switzerland, gourmet dinner at doorstep, acknowledgement certificate or much less appreciation for being there for everybody every single time, so learn to be there for yourself once in a while. Say
Rujuta Diwekar (The PCOD - Thyroid Book)
You really don’t believe that anything can have a value of its own beyond what function it serves for human beings?” Resaint said. “Value to who?” Resaint asked Halyard to imagine a planet in some remote galaxy—a lush, seething, glittering planet covered with stratospheric waterfalls, great land-sponges bouncing through the valleys, corals budding in perfect niveous hexagons, humming lichens glued to pink crystals, prismatic jellyfish breaching from the rivers, titanic lilies relying on tornadoes to spread their pollen—a planet full of complex, interconnected life but devoid of consciousness. “Are you telling me that, if an asteroid smashed into this planet and reduced every inch of its surface to dust, nothing would be lost? Because nobody in particular would miss it?” “But the universe is bloody huge—stuff like that must happen every minute. You can’t go on strike over it. Honestly it sounds to me to like your real enemy isn’t climate change or habitat loss, it’s entropy. You don’t like the idea that everything eventually crumbles. Well, it does. If you’re this worried about species extinction, wait until you hear about the heat death of the universe.” “I would be upset about the heat death of the universe too if human beings were accelerating the rate of it by a hundred times or more.” “And if a species’ position with respect to us doesn’t matter— you know, those amoebae they found that live at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, if they’re just as important as Chiu Chiu or my parents’ dog, even though nobody ever gets anywhere near them—if distance in space doesn’t matter, why should distance in time? If we don’t care about whether their lives overlap with our lives, why even worry about whether they exist simultaneously with us? Your favorite wasp—Adelo-midgy-midgy—” “Adelognathus marginatum—” “It did exist. It always will have existed. Extinction can’t take that away. It went through its nasty little routine over and over again for millions and millions of years. The show was a big success. So why is it important that it’s still running at the same time you are? Isn’t that centering the whole thing on human beings, which is exactly what we’re not supposed to be doing? I mean, for that matter—reality is all just numbers anyway, right? I mean underneath? That’s what people say now. So why are you so down on the scans? Hacks aside. Why is it so crucial that these animals exist right now in an ostensibly meat-based format, just because we do? My point is you talk about extinction as if you’re taking this enlightened post-human View from Nowhere but if we really get down to it you’re definitely taking a View from Karin Resaint two arms two legs one head born Basel Switzerland year of our lord two-thousand-and-when-ever.” But Resaint wasn’t listening anymore.
Ned Beauman (Venomous Lumpsucker)
Sir George Wode read about it in his London club, and Sterndale Rockford in New York, and Joanna Southwood in Switzerland, and it was discussed in the bar of the Three Crowns in Malton-under-Wode. And Mr. Burnaby's lean friend said, "Well it didn't seem fair..." And Mr. Burnaby said acutely, "Well, it doesn't seem to have done her much good, poor lass." But after a while they stopped talking about her and discussed instead who was going to win the Grand National. For, as Mr. Ferguson was saying at that minute in Luxor, it is not the past that matters but the future.
Agatha Christie
The principle of the national state, that is to say, the political demand that the territory of every state should coincide with the territory inhabited by one nation, is by no means so self-evident as it seems to appear to many people to-day. Even if anyone knew what he meant when he spoke of nationality, it would be not at all clear why nationality should be accepted as a fundamental political category, more important for instance than religion, or birth within a certain geographical region, or loyalty to a dynasty, or a political creed like democracy (which forms, one might say, the uniting factor of multi-lingual Switzerland).
Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies)
In 1936 the Inland Exploration Company of New York obtained a concession over more than two hundred thousand square miles of Western Afghanistan; the same “interests” had also secured a concession on Persian soil, thus insuring that no rival could tap their underground naphtha from across the border. But could the boring machines be brought so far and the oil be piped to Chahbar on the Indian Ocean across more than a thousand miles of desert? A five-year contract had promised twenty per cent of the benefits to the Afghans; but two years later the company had suddenly given up its claim. Some people say that the Americans were frightened by the oil-expropriation that took place in Mexico.
Ella Maillart (The Cruel Way: Switzerland to Afghanistan in a Ford, 1939)
The movie The Third Man takes place in Vienna immediately after the end of the Second World War. Reflecting on the recent conflict, the character Harry Lime says: ‘After all, it’s not that awful…In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’ Lime gets almost all his facts wrong – Switzerland was probably the most bloodthirsty corner of early modern Europe (its main export was mercenary soldiers), and the cuckoo clock was actually invented by the Germans – but the facts are of lesser importance than Lime’s idea, namely that the experience of war pushes humankind to new achievements. War allows natural selection free rein at last. It exterminates the weak and rewards the fierce and the ambitious. War exposes the truth about life, and awakens the will for power, for glory and for conquest. Nietzsche summed it up by saying that war is ‘the school of life’ and that ‘what does not kill me makes me stronger’.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus A Brief History of Tomorrow By Yuval Noah Harari & How We Got to Now Six Innovations that Made the Modern World By Steven Johnson 2 Books Collection Set)
Nor are languages any respecters of frontiers. If you drew a map of Europe based on languages it would bear scant resemblance to a conventional map. Switzerland would disappear, becoming part of the surrounding dominions of French, Italian, and German but for a few tiny pockets for Romansh (or Rumantsch or Rhaeto-Romanic as it is variously called), which is spoken as a native language by about half the people in the Graubünden district (or Grisons district—almost everything has two names in Switzerland) at the country’s eastern edge. This steep and beautiful area, which takes in the ski resorts of St. Moritz, Davos, and Klosters, was once effectively isolated from the rest of the world by its harsh winters and forbidding geography. Indeed, the isolation was such that even people in neighboring valleys began to speak different versions of the language, so that Romansh is not so much one language as five fragmented and not always mutually intelligible dialects. A person from the valley around Sutselva will say, “Vagned nà qua” for “Come here,” while in the next valley he will say, “Vegni neu cheu” [cited in The Economist, February 27, 1988]. In other places people will speak the language in the same way but spell it differently depending on whether they are Catholic or Protestant.
Bill Bryson (The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way)
To Gobineau, as he stated in his dedication of the work to the King of Hanover, the key to history and civilization was race. “The racial question dominates all the other problems of history… the inequality of races suffices to explain the whole unfolding of the destiny of peoples.” There were three principal races, white, yellow and black, and the white was the superior. “History,” he contended, “shows that all civilization flows from the white race, that no civilization can exist without the co-operation of this race.” The jewel of the white race was the Aryan, “this illustrious human family, the noblest among the white race,” whose origins he traced back to Central Asia. Unfortunately, Gobineau says, the contemporary Aryan suffered from intermixture with inferior races, as one could see in the southern Europe of his time. However, in the northwest, above a line running roughly along the Seine and east to Switzerland, the Aryans, though far from simon-pure, still survived as a superior race. This took in some of the French, all of the English and the Irish, the people of the Low Countries and the Rhine and Hanover, and the Scandinavians. Gobineau seemingly excluded the bulk of the Germans, who lived to the east and southeast of his line—a fact which the Nazis glossed over when they embraced his teachings.
William L. Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich)
The secret—to being you, to being Happy?” “Just keep on smiling. Even when you’re sad. Keep on smiling.” Not the most profound advice, admittedly. But Happy is wise, for only a fool or a philosopher would make sweeping generalizations about the nature of happiness. I am no philosopher, so here goes: Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude. To venture any further, though, is to enter treacherous waters. A slippery seal, happiness is. On the road, I encountered bushels of inconsistencies. The Swiss are uptight and happy. The Thais are laid-back and happy. Icelanders find joy in their binge drinking, Moldovans only misery. Maybe an Indian mind can digest these contradictions, but mine can’t. Exasperated, I call one of the leading happiness researchers, John Helliwell. Perhaps he has some answers. “It’s simple,” he says. “There’s more than one path to happiness.” Of course. How could I have missed it? Tolstoy turned on his head. All miserable countries are alike; happy ones are happy in their own ways. It’s worth considering carbon. We wouldn’t be here without it. Carbon is the basis of all life, happy and otherwise. Carbon is also a chameleon atom. Assemble it one way—in tight, interlocking rows—and you have a diamond. Assemble it another way—a disorganized jumble—and you have a handful of soot. The arranging makes all the difference. Places are the same. It’s not the elements that matter so much as how they’re arranged and in which proportions. Arrange them one way, and you have Switzerland. Arrange them another way, and you have Moldova. Getting the balance right is important. Qatar has too much money and not enough culture. It has no way of absorbing all that cash. And then there is Iceland: a country that has no right to be happy yet is. Iceland gets the balance right. A small country but a cosmopolitan one. Dark and light. Efficient and laid-back. American gumption married to European social responsibility. A perfect, happy arrangement. The glue that holds the entire enterprise together is culture. It makes all the difference. I have some nagging doubts about my journey. I didn’t make it everywhere. Yet my doubts extend beyond matters of itinerary. I wonder if happiness is really the highest good, as Aristotle believed. Maybe Guru-ji, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, is right. Maybe love is more important than happiness. Certainly, there are times when happiness seems beside the point. Ask a single, working mother if she is happy, and she’s likely to reply, “You’re not asking the right question.” Yes, we want to be happy but for the right reasons, and,
Eric Weiner (The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World)
The turning-point [in Klosters, Switzerland in 1988] At the Aids hospice last week [July 1991] with Mrs Bush was another stepping stone for me. I had always wanted to hug people in hospital beds. This particular man who was so ill started crying when I sat on his bed and he held my hand and I thought ‘Diana, do it, just do it,’ and I gave him an enormous hug and it was just so touching because he clung to me and he cried. Wonderful! It made him laugh, that’s all right. On the other side of room, a very young man, who I can only describe as beautiful, lying in his bed, told me he was going to die about Christmas and his lover, a man sitting in a chair, much older than him, was crying his eyes out so I put my hand out to him and said: ‘It’s not supposed to be easy, all this. You’ve got a lot of anger in you, haven’t you?’ He said: ‘Yes. Why him not me?’ I said: ‘Isn’t it extraordinary, wherever I go it’s always those like you, sitting in a chair, who have to go through such hell whereas those who accept they are going to die are calm?’ He said: ‘I didn’t know that happened,’ and I said: ‘Well, it does, you’re not the only one. It’s wonderful that you’re actually by his bed. You’ll learn so much from watching your friend.’ He was crying his eyes out and clung on to my hand and I felt so comfortable in there. I just hated being taken away. All sorts of people have come into my life--elderly people, spiritual people, acupuncturists, all these people came in after I finished my bulimia. When I go into the Palace for a garden party or summit meeting dinner I am a very different person. I conform to what’s expected of me. They can’t find fault with me when I’m in their presence. I do as I’m expected. What they say behind my back is none of my business, but I come back here and I know when I turn my light off at night I did my best.
Andrew Morton (Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words)
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Adam Simba
The turning-point [in Klosters, Switzerland in 1988] [Diana’s sister] Jane’s wonderfully solid. If you ring up with a drama, she says: ‘Golly, gosh, Duch, how horrible, how sad and how awful’ and gets angry. But my sister Sarah swears: ‘Poor Duch, such a shitty thing to happen.’ My father says: ‘Just remember we always love you.’ But that summer [1988] when I made so many cock-ups I sat myself down in the autumn, when I was in Scotland, and I remember saying to myself: ‘Right, Diana, it’s no good, you’ve got to change it right round, this publicity, you’ve got to grow up and be responsible. You’ve got to understand that you can’t do what other 26- and 27-year olds are doing. You’ve been chosen to do a position so you must adapt to the position and stop fighting it.’ I remember my conversation so well, sitting by water. I always sit by water when contemplating. Stephen Twigg [a therapist] who comes to see me said once: ‘Whatever anybody else thinks of you is none of your business.’ That sat with me. Then once someone said to me, when I said I’ve got to go up to Balmoral, and they said: ‘Well, you’ve got to put up with them but they’ve also got to put up with you.’ This myth about me hating Balmoral--I love Scotland but just the atmosphere drains me to nothing. I go up ‘strong Diana.’ I come away depleted of everything because they just suck me dry, because I tune in to all their moods and, boy, are there some undercurrents there! Instead of having a holiday, it’ the most stressful time of the year. I love being out all day. I love the stalking. I’m much happier now. I’m not blissful but much more content than I’ve ever been. I’ve really gone down deep, scraped the bottom a couple times and come up again and it’s very nice meeting people now and talking about tai-chi and people say: ‘Tai-chi--what do you know about tai-chi?’ and I said: ‘An energy flow,’ and all this and they look at me and they say: ‘She’s the girl who’s supposed to like shopping and clothes the whole time. She’s not supposed to know about spiritual things.
Andrew Morton (Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words)
Ionic is the ‘opposites attract’ chemical bond,” Elizabeth explained as she emerged from behind the counter and began to sketch on an easel. “For instance, let’s say you wrote your PhD thesis on free market economics, but your husband rotates tires for a living. You love each other, but he’s probably not interested in hearing about the invisible hand. And who can blame him, because you know the invisible hand is libertarian garbage.” She looked out at the audience as various people scribbled notes, several of which read “Invisible hand: libertarian garbage.” “The point is, you and your husband are completely different and yet you still have a strong connection. That’s fine. It’s also ionic.” She paused, lifting the sheet of paper over the top of the easel to reveal a fresh page of newsprint. “Or perhaps your marriage is more of a covalent bond,” she said, sketching a new structural formula. “And if so, lucky you, because that means you both have strengths that, when combined, create something even better. For example, when hydrogen and oxygen combine, what do we get? Water—or H2O as it’s more commonly known. In many respects, the covalent bond is not unlike a party—one that’s made better thanks to the pie you made and the wine he brought. Unless you don’t like parties—I don’t—in which case you could also think of the covalent bond as a small European country, say Switzerland. Alps, she quickly wrote on the easel, + a Strong Economy = Everybody Wants to Live There. In a living room in La Jolla, California, three children fought over a toy dump truck, its broken axle lying directly adjacent to a skyscraper of ironing that threatened to topple a small woman, her hair in curlers, a small pad of paper in her hands. Switzerland, she wrote. Move. “That brings us to the third bond,” Elizabeth said, pointing at another set of molecules, “the hydrogen bond—the most fragile, delicate bond of all. I call this the ‘love at first sight’ bond because both parties are drawn to each other based solely on visual information: you like his smile, he likes your hair. But then you talk and discover he’s a closet Nazi and thinks women complain too much. Poof. Just like that the delicate bond is broken. That’s the hydrogen bond for you, ladies—a chemical reminder that if things seem too good to be true, they probably are.” She walked
Bonnie Garmus (Lessons in Chemistry)
Two men were advancing towards the car along the cross track. One man carried a short wooden bench on his back, the other a big wooden object about the size of an upright piano. Richard hailed them, they greeted him with every sign of pleasure. Richard produced cigarettes and a cheerful party spirit seemed to be developing. Then Richard turned to her. “Fond of the cinema? Then you shall see a performance.” He spoke to the two men and they smiled with pleasure. They set up the bench and motioned to Victoria and Richard to sit on it. Then they set up the round contrivance on a stand of some kind. It had two eye-holes in it and as she looked at it, Victoria cried: “It’s like things on piers. What the butler saw.” “That’s it,” said Richard. “It’s a primitive form of same.” Victoria applied her eyes to the glass-fronted peephole, one man began slowly to turn a crank or handle, and the other began a monotonous kind of chant. “What is he saying?” Victoria asked. Richard translated as the singsong chant continued: “Draw near and prepare yourself for much wonder and delight. Prepare to behold the wonders of antiquity.” A crudely coloured picture of Negroes reaping wheat swam into Victoria’s gaze. “Fellahin in America,” announced Richard, translating. Then came: “The wife of the great Shah of the Western world,” and the Empress Eugénie simpered and fingered a long ringlet. A picture of the King’s Palace in Montenegro, another of the Great Exhibition. An odd and varied collection of pictures followed each other, all completely unrelated and sometimes announced in the strangest terms. The Prince Consort, Disraeli, Norwegian Fjords and Skaters in Switzerland completed this strange glimpse of olden far-off days. The showman ended his exposition with the following words: “And so we bring to you the wonders and marvels of antiquity in other lands and far-off places. Let your donation be generous to match the marvels you have seen, for all these things are true.” It was over. Victoria beamed with delight. “That really was marvellous!” she said. “I wouldn’t have believed it.” The proprietors of the travelling cinema were smiling proudly. Victoria got up from the bench and Richard who was sitting on the other end of it was thrown to the ground in a somewhat undignified posture. Victoria apologized but was not ill pleased. Richard rewarded the cinema men and with courteous farewells and expressions of concern for each other’s welfare, and invoking the blessing of God on each other, they parted company. Richard and Victoria got into the car again and the men trudged away into the desert. “Where are they going?” asked Victoria. “They travel all over the country. I met them first in Transjordan coming up the road from the Dead Sea to Amman. Actually they’re bound now for Kerbela, going of course by unfrequented routes so as to give shows in remote villages.” “Perhaps someone will give them a lift?
Agatha Christie (They Came to Baghdad)
The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Oh, what a pleasure that was! Mollie Katzen's handwritten and illustrated recipes that recalled some glorious time in upstate New York when a girl with an appetite could work at a funky vegetarian restaurant and jot down some tasty favorites between shifts. That one had the Pumpkin Tureen soup that Margo had made so many times when she first got the book. She loved the cheesy onion soup served from a pumpkin with a hot dash of horseradish and rye croutons. And the Cardamom Coffee Cake, full of butter, real vanilla, and rich brown sugar, said to be a favorite at the restaurant, where Margo loved to imagine the patrons picking up extras to take back to their green, grassy, shady farmhouses dotted along winding country roads. Linda's Kitchen by Linda McCartney, Paul's first wife, the vegetarian cookbook that had initially spurred her yearlong attempt at vegetarianism (with cheese and eggs, thank you very much) right after college. Margo used to have to drag Calvin into such phases and had finally lured him in by saying that surely anything Paul would eat was good enough for them. Because of Linda's Kitchen, Margo had dived into the world of textured vegetable protein instead of meat, and tons of soups, including a very good watercress, which she never would have tried without Linda's inspiration. It had also inspired her to get a gorgeous, long marble-topped island for prep work. Sometimes she only cooked for the aesthetic pleasure of the gleaming marble topped with rustic pottery containing bright fresh veggies, chopped to perfection. Then Bistro Cooking by Patricia Wells caught her eye, and she took it down. Some pages were stuck together from previous cooking nights, but the one she turned to, the most splattered of all, was the one for Onion Soup au Gratin, the recipe that had taught her the importance of cheese quality. No mozzarella or broken string cheeses with- maybe- a little lacy Swiss thrown on. And definitely none of the "fat-free" cheese that she'd tried in order to give Calvin a rich dish without the cholesterol. No, for this to be great, you needed a good, aged, nutty Gruyère from what you couldn't help but imagine as the green grassy Alps of Switzerland, where the cows grazed lazily under a cheerful children's-book blue sky with puffy white clouds. Good Gruyère was blocked into rind-covered rounds and aged in caves before being shipped fresh to the USA with a whisper of fairy-tale clouds still lingering over it. There was a cheese shop downtown that sold the best she'd ever had. She'd tried it one afternoon when she was avoiding returning home. A spunky girl in a visor and an apron had perked up as she walked by the counter, saying, "Cheese can change your life!" The charm of her youthful innocence would have been enough to be cheered by, but the sample she handed out really did it. The taste was beyond delicious. It was good alone, but it cried out for ham or turkey or a rich beefy broth with deep caramelized onions for soup.
Beth Harbison (The Cookbook Club: A Novel of Food and Friendship)
I recalled thinking...His freakishly tidy side could be a problem. To say that neatness was not my strong suit would be a crime against, well, the truth.
Betsy Cook Speer
We need in the “Ummah” to move away from the normative attitudes towards the acceptance of pluralism of the “Ummah”, and that pluralism starts from the time of the Prophet himself and “Hadith” (Sayings of the Prophet Mohammad) as well as the Prophet’s historical footprints show that in the life time of the Prophet himself he knew that there would be pluralism in the interpretation of the faith" His Highness The Aga Khan Geneva, Switzerland 2006
Aga Khan IV
By His grace and for His glory, when we opened up our hearts to Jesus, God placed us—weak and foolish that we are—in Christ. And because Christ fulfilled the “ifs,” we get the “thens,” leaving us nothing to do but say, “Yea and Amen!” If that sounds too good to be true, think of it this way.… Suppose I’m in Switzerland and I begin to crave a hamburger, fries, and a shake. The two dollars I have in my pocket will buy just that at Hot and Now Burgers in Medford, Oregon. Therefore, if I can get to Medford, then I will have a burger, fries, and a shake. So I call the airport and say, “Can you give me directions to Medford?” “What is your mode of transportation?” the official asks.
Jon Courson (Jon Courson's Application Commentary: Volume 3, New Testament (Matthew - Revelation))
Let’s say an unsavory app developer that’s based in Pakistan utilizes an exchange that’s based in Thailand to rip off an Arizonan who’s using a wallet that was built in Spain, so they steal all of their Libra. And that, of course, is minted by an association based in Switzerland. So which law enforcement or government or agency in which country does the Arizonan call to seek his or her Libra and financial recourse in this situation?
David Gerard (Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money)
M. Keith Chen, an economist now at UCLA, was one of the first to explore the connection between language and economic behavior. He first grouped thirty-six languages into two categories—those that have a strong future tense and those that have a weak or nonexistent one. Chen, an American who grew up in a Chinese-speaking household, offers the differences between English and Mandarin to illustrate the distinction. He says, “[I]f I wanted to explain to an English-speaking colleague why I can’t attend a meeting later today, I could not say ‘I go to a seminar.’” In English, Chen would have to explicitly mark the future by saying, “I will be going to a seminar” or “I have to go to a seminar.” However, Chen says, if “on the other hand I were speaking Mandarin, it would be quite natural for me to omit any marker of future time and say Wŏ qù tīng jiăngzò (I go listen seminar).”13 Strong-future languages such as English, Italian, and Korean require speakers to make sharp distinctions between the present and the future. Weak-future languages such as Mandarin, Finnish, and Estonian draw little or often no contrast at all. Chen then examined—controlling for income, education, age, and other factors—whether people speaking strong-future and weak-future languages behaved differently. They do—in somewhat stunning fashion. Chen found that speakers of weak-future languages—those that did not mark explicit differences between present and future—were 30 percent more likely to save for retirement and 24 percent less likely to smoke. They also practiced safer sex, exercised more regularly, and were both healthier and wealthier in retirement. This was true even within countries such as Switzerland, where some citizens spoke a weak-future language (German) and others a strong-future one (French).14 Chen didn’t conclude that the language a person speaks caused this behavior. It could merely reflect deeper differences. And the question of whether language actually shapes thought and therefore action remains a contentious issue in the field of linguistics.15 Nonetheless, other research has shown we plan more effectively and behave more responsibly when the future feels more closely connected to the current moment and our current selves. For example, one reason some people don’t save for retirement is that they somehow consider the future version of themselves a different person than the current version. But showing people age-advanced images of their own photographs can boost their propensity to save.16 Other research has found that simply thinking of the future in smaller time units—days, not years—“made people feel closer to their future self and less likely to feel that their current and future selves were not really the same person.”17 As with nostalgia, the highest function of the future is to enhance the significance of the present.
Daniel H. Pink (When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing)
With the false claim that the Germans murdered six million Jews, mostly in gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland during WWII, since the end of WWII, the world has been saturated with films, documentaries and books on the Holocaust. Anyone worldwide who dares to investigate the Jewish Holocaust claims, is branded an Anti-Semite and Holocaust Denier. In our democratic world, a person who is accused of a crime is deemed innocent until irrefutable evidence proves them guilty. What has happened to democracy in Germany, Poland, France and Switzerland where people accused of Holocaust Denial are not allowed to provide any evidence that would prove that they are not guilty? In the Middle Ages, people accused of being witches, were also allowed no defence and were burned at the stake. As burning at the stake and crucifiction is not allowed in today's world, the best that the Jewish leaders and holocaust promoters can achieve is incarceration where no one can hear claims backed by years of very thorough research. The Jewish success in blocking my book "The Answer Justice", their failed attempts to stop the book "Chutzpah" written by Norman Finkelstein whose mother and father were held in German concentration camps, the incarceration of revisionists Ernst Zundel and Germar Rudolf in Germany and David Irving in Austria: these are all desperate attempts to end what they call Holocaust Denial. The English historian David Irving was refused entry to Australia in 2003 at the behest of the Jewish community (representing only 0.4% of the Australian population) thus denying the right of the other 99.6% to hear what David Irving has to say. Proof of Jewish power was the blocking of the public viewing of David Irving's film. The Jewish owners of the building locked the film presentation out which resulted in the headline in the "Australian" newspaper of: " Outrage at Jewish bid to stop the film by David Irving called "The Search For Truth in History" . Sir Zelman Cowan who was Governor General of Australia and a man much reverred in the Jewish community, has stated in the Jewish Chronicle (London) that "The way to deal with people who claim the holocaust never happened, is to produce irrefutable evidence that it did happen". I agree 100% with Sir Zelman Cowan. I am quite certain that he and other Zionist Jewish (Ashkenazim) world leaders are aware that a United Nations or International forensic examination of the alleged gas chamber at No. 2 Crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, would irrefutably prove the truth to the world that xyclon B cyanide has never been used as alleged by world Jewry to kill Jews. In 1979 Professor W.D. Rubenstein stated: "If the Holocaust can be shown to be a Zionist myth, the strongest of all weapons in Israels's propaganda armory collapses. The Falsification of history by Zionist Jews in claiming the murder of six million Jews by Germany, constitutes the GREATEST ORGANISED CRIME that the world has known.
Alexander McClelland
Switzerland. Whatever you want to say about the Swiss, they are clever woodcarvers, no?” I wanted to say no, but instead merely murmured something tactfully admiring.
Diana Gabaldon (Dragonfly in Amber (Outlander, #2))
The argument is that we are influenced by historical research.” Michael Simpson glanced over at Sophie before continuing. “When one commences an education, to become say a physicist or a chemist in today’s society, one is automatically loaded up with all the accumulated knowledge of what is wrong and what is right. Many of the scientists thus have a very similar line of attack for new problems. And this colours our scientific progress. We advance, but only in small steps. True progress most often is made when some individual looks at a problem from a totally new angle, and that is hard when everybody has been through the same basic foundations. Take Albert Einstein. The revolutionary ideas he came up with weren’t the result of discussions with equal minded academics in the university hall. They were a result of Albert Einstein’s relentless pondering and single minded focus on theoretical abstractions, alone in a small crummy patent office in Switzerland, back in 1905. If Einstein at an early stage had discussed his ideas with colleagues at a university, there is a real danger he would have been set forth on a different line of thinking, and quite possibly we wouldn’t have the theory of relativity in the form we have it today.
Erik Hamre (The Last Alchemist)
Chinese clients used to talk only about prices and vintages, not what was in the bottle. Now the important thing is not how much money you have but how you express it in wine knowledge.” Tim Weiland, former general manager of the exclusive Aman at Summer Palace in the emperor’s onetime retreat in Beijing, suggests that the image of China’s wealthy class as crass nouveau riche—mixing expensive Bordeaux with Coca-Cola, for example—is entirely out of date. “The nouveaux riches of ten years ago are now the old rich,” he says. “They have homes in Switzerland and Aspen, they’re incredibly sophisticated and well traveled—much more well traveled than I am—and they know their wines.
Andrew McCarthy (The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (The Best American Series))
Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg agreed. “We reward men every step of the way—for being leaders, for being assertive, for taking risks, for being competitive,” she said in 2012 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “And we teach women as young as four—lay back, be communal. Until we change that at a personal level, we need to say there’s an ambition gap. We need our boys to be as ambitious to contribute in the home and we need our girls to be as ambitious to achieve in the workforce.
Lynn Povich (The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace)
through any structure without detection by his prey. He was a flawless assassin. It was just before five local time when Steven settled into the plush leather seating of the first-class compartment. The Deutsche Bahn Intercity Express, or ICE, was a high-speed train connecting major cities across Germany with other major European destinations. The trip to Frankfurt would take about four hours, giving him time to spend some rare personal time with his team. Slash was the first to find him. The men shook hands and sat down. Typically, these two longtime friends would chest bump in a hearty bro-mance sort of way, but it would be out of place for Europe. “Hey, buddy,” said Steven. “Switzerland is our new home away from home.” “It appears so, although the terrain isn’t that different from our place in Tennessee,” said Slash. “I see lots of fishin’ and huntin’ opportunities out there.” Slash grew up on his parents’ farm atop the Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee about halfway between Nashville and Knoxville. His parents were retired and spent their days farming while raising ducks, rabbits and some livestock. While other kids spent their free time on PlayStation, Slash grew up in the woods, learning survival skills. During his time with the SEAL Teams, he earned a reputation as an expert in close-quarters combat, especially using a variety of knives—hence the nickname Slash. “Beats the heck out of the desert, doesn’t it?” asked Steven. After his service ended, Slash tried a few different security outfits like Blackwater, protecting the Saudi royal family or standing guard outside some safe house in Oman. “I’m not saying the desert won’t call us back someday, but I’ll take the Swiss cheese and German chocolate over shawarma and falafel every friggin’ day!” “Hell yeah,” said Slash. “When are you comin’ down for some ham and beans, along with some butter-soaked cornbread? My folks really wanna meet you.” “I need to, buddy,” replied Steven. “This summer will be nuts for me. Hey, when does deer hunting season open?” “Late September for crossbow and around Thanksgiving otherwise,” replied Slash. Before the guys could set a date, their partners Paul Hittle and Raymond Bower approached their seats. Hittle, code name Bugs, was a former medic with Army Special Forces who left the Green Berets for a well-paying job with DynCorp. DynCorp was a private
Bobby Akart (Cyber Attack (The Boston Brahmin #2))
In the days leading up to the passage of Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act of 2010), I listened on the radio to ‘a town hall’. ‘I happen to be an American,’ said a woman in the audience, her voice yodelling and hiccuping with emotion, ‘and I don’t want to live in a country like the Soviet Union!’ Or, she might have said, a country (at last) beginning (at least) to emulate Canada, Australia, and all the constituent states of the EU. But in the US saying ‘like Europe’, or ‘like England’, or ‘like France’, or ‘like Switzerland’, is the rough equivalent of saying ‘like the Soviet Union’ – which disappeared for ever in 1991.
Martin Amis (Inside Story)
Inwardly their spirit was utterly commercial, everything was seen by them in terms of money. It was their barrier, their defence, their hope for the future, their support for the present, it raised them above their fellowmen, and with it they warded off evil. The only mental qualities that they respected were those which produced money in substantial quantities, it was their one criterion of success, it was power and it was glory. To say that a man was poor was to label him a rotter, bad at his job, idle, feckless, immoral. If it was somebody whom they really rather liked, in spite of this cancer, they could add that he had been unlucky. They had taken care to insure against this deadly evil in many ways. That it should not overwhelm them through such cataclysms beyond their control as war or revolution they had placed huge sums of money in a dozen different countries; they owned ranches, and estancias, and South African farms, an hotel in Switzerland, a plantation in Malaya, and they possessed many fine diamonds, not sparkling round Linda’s lovely neck to be sure, but lying in banks, stone by stone, easily portable.
Nancy Mitford (The Pursuit of Love)
It was time to move on, which is why I’m now living here in the land of the cuckoo clock. Didn’t someone once say, “all successful careers in finance end up in Switzerland?
Edward Chancellor (Capital Returns: Investing Through the Capital Cycle: A Money Manager’s Reports 2002-15)
And I’m not kidding when I say “craziness.” The University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, has come out with a study that compares traders with psychopaths. The study reviewed the results from an existing study comparing 24 psychopaths in German high-security hospitals with a control group of 27 “normal” people. The funny thing is, this control group of “normal” people turned out to be traders. Stock guys, currency and commodity traders, and derivative types happened to be the normal control group that was stacked up against the high-security, barbed-wire-enclosed psychopaths. In the end, the performance of the trading group was actually worse than that of the psychopaths. The study indicated that traders, “Have a penchant for immense destruction,” and that their mindset would lead them to the logical conclusion of “beating one of the neighbor’s expensive cars with a baseball bat with the sole objective of owning the most beautiful car in the neighborhood.” In other words, traders are nuts. Indeed if you look up the textbook definition of a psychopath, here are some of the tidbits you’ll uncover: antisocial behavior, poor judgment and failure to learn from experience, inability to see oneself as others do, inexplicable impulsiveness … sounds like a typical trader who is struggling against the market and can’t figure out why.
John F. Carter (Mastering the Trade: Proven Techniques for Profiting from Intraday and Swing Trading Setups)
Aside from France, I was baffled by the puzzle of Sweden and other Nordic states, which are often offered as paragons of the large state “that works”—the government represents a large portion of the total economy. How could we have the happiest nation in the world, Denmark (assuming happiness is both measurable and desirable), and a monstrously large state? Is it that these countries are all smaller than the New York metropolitan area? Until my coauthor, the political scientist Mark Blyth, showed me that there, too, was a false narrative: it was almost the same story as in Switzerland (but with a worse climate and no good ski resorts). The state exists as a tax collector, but the money is spent in the communes themselves, directed by the communes—for, say, skills training locally determined as deemed necessary by the community themselves, to respond to private demand for workers. The economic elites have more freedom than in most other democracies—this is far from the statism one can assume from the outside.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder)
I knew you forever and you were always old, soft white lady of my heart. Surely you would scold me for sitting up late, reading your letters, as if these foreign postmarks were meant for me. You posted them first in London, wearing furs and a new dress in the winter of eighteen-ninety. I read how London is dull on Lord Mayor's Day, where you guided past groups of robbers, the sad holes of Whitechapel, clutching your pocketbook, on the way to Jack the Ripper dissecting his famous bones. This Wednesday in Berlin, you say, you will go to a bazaar at Bismarck's house. And I see you as a young girl in a good world still, writing three generations before mine. I try to reach into your page and breathe it back… but life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack. This is the sack of time your death vacates. How distant your are on your nickel-plated skates in the skating park in Berlin, gliding past me with your Count, while a military band plays a Strauss waltz. I loved you last, a pleated old lady with a crooked hand. Once you read Lohengrin and every goose hung high while you practiced castle life in Hanover. Tonight your letters reduce history to a guess. The count had a wife. You were the old maid aunt who lived with us. Tonight I read how the winter howled around the towers of Schloss Schwobber, how the tedious language grew in your jaw, how you loved the sound of the music of the rats tapping on the stone floors. When you were mine you wore an earphone. This is Wednesday, May 9th, near Lucerne, Switzerland, sixty-nine years ago. I learn your first climb up Mount San Salvatore; this is the rocky path, the hole in your shoes, the yankee girl, the iron interior of her sweet body. You let the Count choose your next climb. You went together, armed with alpine stocks, with ham sandwiches and seltzer wasser. You were not alarmed by the thick woods of briars and bushes, nor the rugged cliff, nor the first vertigo up over Lake Lucerne. The Count sweated with his coat off as you waded through top snow. He held your hand and kissed you. You rattled down on the train to catch a steam boat for home; or other postmarks: Paris, verona, Rome. This is Italy. You learn its mother tongue. I read how you walked on the Palatine among the ruins of the palace of the Caesars; alone in the Roman autumn, alone since July. When you were mine they wrapped you out of here with your best hat over your face. I cried because I was seventeen. I am older now. I read how your student ticket admitted you into the private chapel of the Vatican and how you cheered with the others, as we used to do on the fourth of July. One Wednesday in November you watched a balloon, painted like a silver abll, float up over the Forum, up over the lost emperors, to shiver its little modern cage in an occasional breeze. You worked your New England conscience out beside artisans, chestnut vendors and the devout. Tonight I will learn to love you twice; learn your first days, your mid-Victorian face. Tonight I will speak up and interrupt your letters, warning you that wars are coming, that the Count will die, that you will accept your America back to live like a prim thing on the farm in Maine. I tell you, you will come here, to the suburbs of Boston, to see the blue-nose world go drunk each night, to see the handsome children jitterbug, to feel your left ear close one Friday at Symphony. And I tell you, you will tip your boot feet out of that hall, rocking from its sour sound, out onto the crowded street, letting your spectacles fall and your hair net tangle as you stop passers-by to mumble your guilty love while your ears die.
Anne Sexton
To give just one example of what the inside of this world (largely upper-class and Oxbridge world of wealth, power, and privilege) looked like: Huxley sent the UNESCO documents to his close friend the English poet Stephen Spender. In his reply, from his regular retreat at the Chalet Waldegg in Gstaad, Switzerland, Spender says that he won't burden Huxley with his own views on human rights, since he doesn't have anything 'worth saying' on the topic, but then goes on to suggest that Huxley send the documents to some of his acquaintances. This curious list of the great and the good includes the psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers, the first and second president of Czechoslovakia, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, Isaiah Berlin, A.J. Ayer, and W.H. Auden. Spender even gives Huxley some advice about whom to avoid: 'I honestly don't think there are any outstanding Belgians.
Mark Goodale (Letters to the Contrary: A Curated History of the UNESCO Human Rights Survey)
Try this: For one week treat every idea that comes your way from another person with complete neutrality. Think of yourself as a human Switzerland. Don’t take sides. Don’t express an opinion. Don’t judge the comment. If you find yourself constitutionally incapable of just saying “Thank you,” make it an innocuous, “Thanks, I hadn’t considered that.” Or, “Thanks. You’ve given me something to think about.
Marshall Goldsmith (What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful)
1. State the situation. “You go right in and hit them with how you see it in the cold light of day, without being too inflammatory or dramatic,” says Rosenberg. She made it clear to the A.M.A. that (a) having no women speakers was wrong, and (b) hiring her would be a step in the right direction. It makes sense that before you can speak persuasively—that is, before you speak from a position of passion and personal knowledge—you need to know where you stand. 2. Communicate your feelings. We downplay the influence of emotions in our day-to-day contacts, especially in the business world. We’re told that vulnerability is a bad thing and we should be wary of revealing our feelings. But as we gain comfort using “I feel” with others, our encounters take on depth and sincerity. Your emotions are a gift of respect and caring to your listeners. 3. Deliver the bottom line. This is the moment of truth when you state, with utter clarity, what it is you want. If you’re going to put your neck on the line, you’d better know why. The truth is the fastest route to a solution, but be realistic. While I knew Phil Knight of Nike wasn’t going to buy anything based on one five-minute conversation on a bus in Davos, Switzerland, I did make sure to get his e-mail and tell him that I’d like to follow up with him again sometime. Then I did so. 4. Use an open-ended question. A request that is expressed as a question—one that cannot be answered by a yes or no—is less threatening. How do you feel about this? How can we solve this problem? The issue has been raised, your feelings expressed, your desires articulated. With an open-ended suggestion or question, you invite the other person to work toward a solution with you. I didn’t insist on a specific lunch date at a specific time with Phil. I left it open and didn’t allow our first exchange to be weighted down by unnecessary obligations
Keith Ferrazzi (Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time)
Madame Lorraine was a rich French woman who lived in an old mansion, which she inherited from her husband. The family had already had many possessions, however, they were ruined in the Revolution. For defending the monarchy, they lost their titles, lands and servants. Madame Lorraine's husband, the old Earl, died in the Reign of Terror, as did her children. The wife, however, had hidden the jewelry at the beginning of the revolution and had left in secret for Switzerland. After the restoration, she returned to France, but with few resources she had, she bought a house in Paris. She complained of loneliness and adopted a little orphan, named Juliette, who she used as a servant. When the girl complained about being overworked, as she had to take care of the entire house alone, her stepmother told her: “your complaints hurt me, you see, I lost everything and I only have you, your mother didn't want you, but I I adopted you and took care of you and you don’t even appreciate that.” The girl, then, victim of emotional blackmail, got used to serving, without complaining. The problem is that every day more and more was demanded – the girl never reached perfection, said Madame Lorraine: “look at the silverware, look at the floor, look at the walls, you will never be able to get married”. However, Madame Lorraine did not tell the girl that perfection is never achieved: it is just a resource to dominate the poor in spirit, who see in the light of their own craft a hope of transcendence. Another thing that Madame Lorraine had not taught the girl – even if the Revolution had taught humanity: that they were free. The girl then grew older and became an object of exploitation every day, her arms becoming weaker, her mind increasingly taken over by obedience. One day, the girl went to the market in the square, and hardly talked to anyone – Madame Lorraine told her that everyone wanted to abuse her and that she shouldn't trust anyone. That day, however, she was exhausted and stopped at a farmer's stand selling tomatoes and said to her: “young man, what's your name, I always see you running around here and you never talk to anyone”. She decided to talk to him: “I'm the old widow's daughter, she says that everyone wants to exploit me, that I shouldn't trust strangers”. The salesman, already aware of the girl's situation from the stories that were circulating in the village, said to her: “Isn't it just the opposite, girl, maybe you haven't learned a lie all your life and now you're trying harder and harder to keep this lie as if it were the truth – see, God made everyone free.” The girl then quickly returned to the house, but doubt had entered her heart and there she began to take root and grow. Until, one day, the old lady released the drop that would overflow her body and said to her: “Well, Juliette, you don't do anything right, look how my dresses are, you didn't sew them perfectly”. The girl then got up, looked the vixen in the eyes and said: “if it’s not good, do it yourself” and left. It is said that she married the farmer in the sale and, from that day on, she was the best wife in the world. Not because she did everything with great care, with an almost divine perfection, that she was modest or because she had freed herself from the shrew who exploited her, but simply because she recognized the value of freedom itself.
Geverson Ampolini