“
At the very moment when people underestimate you is when you can make a breakthrough.
”
”
Germany Kent
“
You cannot simply read the Quran,not if you take it seriously.You either have surrendered to it already or you fight it.
It attacks tenaciously,directly,personally; it debates,criticizes,shames and challenges.
From the outset it draws the line of battle, and I was on other side.
”
”
Jeffrey Lang (Struggling to Surrender: Some Impressions of an American Convert to Islam)
“
You may be able to “buy” a person’s back with a paycheck, position, power, or fear, but a human being’s genius, passion, loyalty, and tenacious creativity are volunteered only.
”
”
L. David Marquet (Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders)
“
Being highly sensitive does not at all rule out being, in your own way, a tenacious survivor.
”
”
Elaine N. Aron (The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You)
“
When he moved, she could tell that he’d stopped breathing. His fingers spasmed as he started to reach out. He hesitated and then just barely brushed the baby's palm as though he expected his touch to poison or break her. The tiny hand reflexively closed around his finger, gripping it.
Draco sat frozen.
Hermione watched him and recognized the expression in his eyes as he looked down at the little person who was clinging tenaciously to him.
Possessive and adoring.
”
”
SenLinYu (Manacled)
“
I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for long.
If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who did have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be forgiven? I myself certainly hope that it will not. The Jews have seen through Jesus and Mohammed. In retrospect, many of them have also seen through the mythical, primitive, and cruel figures of Abraham and Moses. Nearer to our own time, in the bitter combats over the work of Marx and Freud and Einstein, Jewish participants and protagonists have not been the least noticeable. May this always be the case, whenever any human primate sets up, or is set up by others, as a Messiah.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
“
Nothing that can deterrent for a determined.A tenacious person flys against all on odds, sails in a rough sea, and travels in uncharted territory.
”
”
Ebinezar Gnanasekaran (You Can Step Ahead to Success)
“
Be purposeful about putting yourself in a stimulating environment where your creativity can take flight.
”
”
Germany Kent
“
Fear had absorbed her completely and remained there, fixed, tenacious, almost corporeal, as if it were some invisible person who had made up his mind not to leave the room. And the most upsetting part was that the fear had no justification at all, that it was a unique fear, without any reason, a fear just because.
”
”
Gabriel García Márquez (Collected Stories)
“
How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? Hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer their course there, and trains thunder off to it--but all with nary a mark on them to tell of their destination. And at ticket windows or at travel bureaus for Soviet or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were to ask for a ticket to go there. They know nothing and they've never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or any one of its innumerable islands.
Those who go to the Archipelago to administer it get there via the training schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Those who go there to be guards are conscripted via the military conscription centers.
And those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest.
Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?
The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: "You are under arrest."
If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?
But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these displacements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience,
can gasp out only: "Me? What for?"
And this is a question which, though repeated millions and
millions of times before, has yet to receive an answer.
Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somersault from one state into another.
We have been happily borne—or perhaps have unhappily
dragged our weary way—down the long and crooked streets of
our lives, past all kinds of walls and fences made of rotting wood,
rammed earth, brick, concrete, iron railings. We have never given
a thought to what lies behind them. We have never tried to penetrate them with our vision or our understanding. But there is
where the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards away
from us. In addition, we have failed to notice an enormous number of closely fitted, well-disguised doors and gates in these
fences. All those gates were prepared for us, every last one! And
all of a sudden the fateful gate swings quickly open, and four
white male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but nonetheless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap,
ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to
our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.
That's all there is to it! You are arrested!
And you'll find nothing better to respond with than a lamblike
bleat: "Me? What for?"
That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow which
shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into
omnipotent actuality.
That's all. And neither for the first hour nor for the first day
will you be able to grasp anything else.
”
”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation V-VII)
“
We have learned to accommodate that person as much as we can, to ignore who we know ourselves to be. Most of the time, we're succesful. We must be: Pretending is the cost of sanity. But we all know who we really are. If we had lived, it is because we are worse than we ever believed ourselves to be, not better. Indeed, it feels at times as if all who remain are those who were wily or tenacious or scheming enough to survive. I know that this belief is its own kind of romance, but in my more fanciful moments, it makes perfect sense - we are the left-behind, the dregs, the rats fighting for bits of rotten food, the people who chose to stay on earth, while those better and smarter than we are have left some other realm we can only dream of, the door to which we're too frightened to open, even to peek inside.
”
”
Hanya Yanagihara (To Paradise)
“
And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end he was his own murderer. He wrote and wrote and he talked and talked, then suddenly at a stroke he cancelled himself. If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.
”
”
Hilary Mantel (Bring Up the Bodies (Thomas Cromwell, #2))
“
The obvious definition of a monarchy seems to be that of a state, in which a single person, by whatsoever name he may be distinguished, is entrusted with the execution of the laws, the management of the revenue, and the command of the army. But, unless public liberty is protected by intrepid and vigilant guardians, the authority of so formidable a magistrate will soon degenerate into despotism. The influence of the clergy, in an age of superstition, might be usefully employed to assert the rights of mankind; but so intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people. A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies, form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against enterprises of an aspiring prince.
”
”
Edward Gibbon (The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volume I)
“
He finds he cannot think of the dying men at all. Into his mind instead strays the picture of More on the scaffold, seen through the veil of rain: his body, already dead, folding back neatly from the impact of the axe. The cardinal when he fell had no persecutor more relentless than Thomas More. Yet, he thinks, I did not hate him. I exercised my skills to the utmost to persuade him to reconcile with the king. And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end he was his own murderer. He wrote and wrote and he talked and talked, then suddenly at a stroke he cancelled himself. If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.
”
”
Hilary Mantel (Bring Up the Bodies (Thomas Cromwell, #2))
“
Georges Sorel, to whom fascism is so much indebted, wrote at the beginning of our century that all great movements are compelled by 'myths.' A myth is the strongest belief held by the group, and its adherents feel themselves to be an army of truth fighting an army of evil. Some years earlier, in 1895, the French psychologist Gustav Le Bon had written of the 'conservatism of crowds' which cling tenaciously to traditional ideas. Hitler took the basic nationalism of the German tradition and the longing for stable personal relationships of olden times, and built upon them as the strongest belief of the group. In the diffusion of the 'myth' Hitler fulfilled what Le Bon had forecast: that 'magical powers' were needed to control the crowd. The Fuhrer himself wrote of the 'magic influence' of mass suggestion and the liturgical aspects of his movement, and its success as a mass religion bore out the truth of this view.
”
”
George L. Mosse (Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich)
“
I used to imagine life divided into separate compartments, consisting, for example, of such dual abstractions as pleasure and pain, love and hate, friendship and enmity; and more material classifications like work and play: a profession or calling being, according to that concept—one that seemed, at least on the surface, unequivocally assumed by persons so dissimilar from one another as Widmerpool and Archie Gilbert, something entirely different from “spare time.” That illusion, as such a point of view was, in due course, to appear—was closely related to another belief: that existence fans out indefinitely into new areas of experience, and that almost every additional acquaintance offers some supplementary world with its own hazards and enchantments. As time goes on, of course, these supposedly different worlds, in fact, draw closer, if not to each other, then to some pattern common to all; so that, at last, diversity between them, if in truth existent, seems to be almost imperceptible except in a few crude and exterior ways: unthinkable, as formerly appeared, any single consummation of cause and effect. In other words, nearly all the inhabitants of these outwardly disconnected empires turn out at last to be tenaciously inter-related; love and hate, friendship and enmity, too, becoming themselves much less clearly defined, more often than not showing signs of possessing characteristics that could claim, to say the least, not a little in common; while work and play merge indistinguishably into a complex tissue of pleasure and tedium.
”
”
Anthony Powell (A Buyer's Market (A Dance to the Music of Time, #2))
“
We had better want the consequences of what we believe or disbelieve, because the consequences will come! . . .
But how can a society set priorities if there are no basic standards? Are we to make our calculations using only the arithmetic of appetite? . . .
The basic strands which have bound us together socially have begun to fray, and some of them have snapped. Even more pressure is then placed upon the remaining strands. The fact that the giving way is gradual will not prevent it from becoming total. . . .
Given the tremendous asset that the family is, we must do all we can within constitutional constraints to protect it from predatory things like homosexuality and pornography. . . .
Our whole republic rests upon the notion of “obedience to the unenforceable,” upon a tremendous emphasis on inner controls through self-discipline. . . .
Different beliefs do make for different behaviors; what we think does affect our actions; concepts do have consequences. . . .
Once society loses its capacity to declare that some things are wrong per se, then it finds itself forever building temporary defenses, revising rationales, drawing new lines—but forever falling back and losing its nerve. A society which permits anything will eventually lose everything!
Take away a consciousness of eternity and see how differently time is spent.
Take away an acknowledgement of divine design in the structure of life and then watch the mindless scurrying to redesign human systems to make life pain-free and pleasure-filled.
Take away regard for the divinity in one’s neighbor, and watch the drop in our regard for his property.
Take away basic moral standards and observe how quickly tolerance changes into permissiveness.
Take away the sacred sense of belonging to a family or community, and observe how quickly citizens cease to care for big cities.
Those of us who are business-oriented are quick to look for the bottom line in our endeavors. In the case of a value-free society, the bottom line is clear—the costs are prohibitive!
A value-free society eventually imprisons its inhabitants. It also ends up doing indirectly what most of its inhabitants would never have agreed to do directly—at least initially.
Can we turn such trends around? There is still a wealth of wisdom in the people of this good land, even though such wisdom is often mute and in search of leadership. People can often feel in their bones the wrongness of things, long before pollsters pick up such attitudes or before such attitudes are expressed in the ballot box. But it will take leadership and articulate assertion of basic values in all places and in personal behavior to back up such assertions.
Even then, time and the tides are against us, so that courage will be a key ingredient. It will take the same kind of spunk the Spartans displayed at Thermopylae when they tenaciously held a small mountain pass against overwhelming numbers of Persians. The Persians could not dislodge the Spartans and sent emissaries forward to threaten what would happen if the Spartans did not surrender. The Spartans were told that if they did not give up, the Persians had so many archers in their army that they would darken the skies with their arrows. The Spartans said simply: “So much the better, we will fight in the shade!
”
”
Neal A. Maxwell
“
The thoughts, words, and emotions that human beings emit from moment to moment are constantly streaming forth from their bodies, forming creative fields that are visible in various colors, forms, and shapes. Some of these creative fields are hazy and cloudy in appearance, and they hover around the person in indeterminate patterns. Others are extremely tenacious, and they twine tightly around the person like a resilient string.
”
”
Ervin Laszlo (The Akashic Experience: Science and the Cosmic Memory Field)
“
Kevin tried to sleep with a pillow tight over his face, and he nearly suffocated himself. When he tiptoed over to close the door, they were talking in a subdued tone on the narrow couch. Colette's bare legs were curled up on the pillows, her head riding on the camelback motion of his chest. But her eyes were open, and she looked more adrift than comforted. In a tired baritone, Jerry was talking about prison. It was a horror story -- about the echoing screams of young kids and eyeballs cut open with smuggled razor blades, beginning as the usual speech about the hell he'd seen. But somehow it bcame a lonesome country-western love song, about how every long night of his life he had dreamed of a woman like her-- quick-witted and beautiful and tenacious. It was more than Kevin expected from the man. He told her that if he could buy her safe passage out of this life, hers and Kevin's, he would; but it was hard with a teenage son always pressing to know more and a tiring and insatiable young girlfriend who wanted to devour the world. Think of the pressure on him. "You need to know that we're together like this partly because of you. You keep us up and running. I know it and Kevin knows it. I'm not a good person, Colette -- I never claimed to be, I don't want to be, and you can't expect me to be. But look me in the eye and accept me as a snake, and I'll tell you whatever you're waiting to hear: I need you, I want you, I hurt for you, down in the dust, honey, down in the dust of my bones."
She interrupted him with kisses that sounded like determined sips at a scalding drink.
”
”
Peter Craig (Hot Plastic)
“
He was numbered among the suicides. And here it must be said that to call suicides only those who actually destroy themselves is false. Among these, indeed, there are many who in a sense are suicides only by accident and in whose being suicide has no necessary place. Among the common run of men there are many of little personality and stamped with no deep impress of fate, who find their end in suicide without belonging on that account to the type of the suicide by inclination; while on the other hand, of those who are to be counted as suicides by the very nature of their beings are many, perhaps a majority, who never in fact lay hands on themselves. The "suicide," and Harry was one, need not necessarily live in a peculiarly close relationship to death. One may do this without being a suicide. What is peculiar to the suicide is that his ego, rightly or wrongly, is felt to be an extremely dangerous, dubious, and doomed germ of nature; that he is always in his own eyes exposed to an extraordinary risk, as though he stood with the slightest foothold on the peak of a crag whence a slight push from without or an instant's weakness from within suffices to precipitate him into the void. The line of fate in the case of these men is marked by the belief they have that suicide is their most probable manner of death. It might be presumed that such temperaments, which usually manifest themselves in early youth and persist through life, show a singular defect of vital force. On the contrary, among the "suicides" are to be found unusually tenacious and eager and also hardy natures.
”
”
Hermann Hesse
“
For a long time now the remembrance of love had helped me not to fear death . . . since my childhood I had already died many times. To take a comparatively recent period, had I not clung to Albertine more tenaciously than to my own life? Could I at the time when I loved her conceive my personality without the continued existence within it of my love for her? Yet now I no longer loved her, I was no longer the person who loved her but a different person who did not love her, and it was when I had become a new person that I had ceased to love her.
”
”
Marcel Proust (Time Regained)
“
The Gender Sonnet
Woman means not weakling, but wonder.
Woman means not obstinate, but original.
Woman means not man-slave, but mother.
Woman means not amorous, but amiable.
Woman means not neurotic, but nimble.
Man mustn't mean medieval, but moral.
Man mustn't mean abusive, but affable.
Man mustn't mean nefarious, but noble.
Trans doesn't mean titillating, but tenacious.
Trans doesn't mean riff-raff, but radiant.
It doesn't mean abhorrent, but affectionate.
It ain't nasty and sick, but nerved and sentient.
Gender has no role in society except in bed.
Person is known by character, not dongs 'n peaches.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Honor He Wrote: 100 Sonnets For Humans Not Vegetables)
“
Many Christians will have honest questions about God's sovereignty. But a sustained, tenacious denial of God's sovereignty should concern us. To baptize a person who is so antagonistic to God's sovereignty may be to baptize someone who in his heart still isn't really quite willing to trust God. That, after all, is the issue when it comes to God's sovereignty. Are we willing to trust Him? Are we willing to acknowledge, finally, that we are not God? That we are not the Judge? That we are not the ones to say what is fair and unfair? Are we willing to put our whole lives in God's hands and to truly trust Him? That is what's really at issue in this discussion about the sovereignty of God.
”
”
Mark Dever (Nine Marks of a Healthy Church)
“
Kashmarin had borne away yet another image of Smurov. Does it make any difference which? For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist. Smurov, however, will live on for a long time. The two boys, those pupils of mine, will grow old, and some image or other of me will live within them like a tenacious parasite. And then will come the day when the last person who remembers me will die. A fetus in reverse, my image, too, will dwindle and die within that last witness of the crime I committed by the mere fact of living. Perhaps a chance story about me, a simple anecdote in which I figure, will pass on from him to his son or grandson, and so my name and my ghost will appear fleetingly here and there for some time still. Then will come the end.
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (The Eye)
“
After all, as Prokhorov said, "Money nowadays comes in two stories." What Westerners could comprehend "two-story money"? A lathe operator during the war received, after deductions, eight hundred rubles a month, and bread cost 140 rubles on the open market. And that meant that in the course of one month he did not earn enough for even six kilos of bread, over and above his ration. In other words, he could not bring home even seven ounces a day for his whole family! But at the same time he did… live. With frank and open impudence they paid the workers an unreal wage, and let them go and seek "the second story." And the person who paid our plasterer [at the Kaluga Gates prison camp] insane money [200 rubles] for his evening's work also got to the "second story" on his own in some particular way. Thus it was that the socialist system triumphed, but only on paper. The old ways—tenacious, flexible—never died out, as a result of either curses or persecution by the prosecutors.
”
”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV)
“
Pots hung from the ceiling beams, between the festoons of braided garlic, the hams, the salsicce, bunches of mountain herbs for medicine, strings of dried porcini, necklaces of dried apple rings in winter, chains of dried figs. The smell of onions, of hot lard and smoldering oak wood, of cinnamon and pepper, always seemed to hang in the air. The larder was full of meat at all times, needless to say: not small pieces, but huge joints and sides of beef and lamb, which Mamma and Carenza could never hope to use just for our household, and which were quietly passed on to the monks of Santa Croce so that they could feed the poor. Carenza made salami with fennel seeds and garlic, prosciutto, pancetta. Sometimes the air in the larder was so salty that it stung your nostrils, and sometimes it reeked of spoiled blood from the garlands of hares, rabbits, quail, thrushes and countless other creatures that would arrive, bloody and limp, from Papa's personal game dealer.
Next to the larder, a door led out to our courtyard, which Mamma had kept filled with herbs. An ancient rosemary bush took up most of one side, and the air in summer was always full of bees. Sage, thyme, various kinds of mint, oregano, rocket, hyssop, lovage and basil grew in Mamma's collection of old terra-cotta pots. A fig tree was slowly pulling down the wall, and a tenacious, knotted olive tree had been struggling for years in the sunniest corner.
”
”
Philip Kazan (Appetite)
“
What would happen, wonders Borges, if due to his belief in these fantasies, Don Quixote attacks and kills a real person? Borges asks a fundamental question about the human condition: what happens when the yarn spun by our narrating self causes grievous harm to ourselves or those around us? There are three main possibilities, says Borges.
One option is that nothing much happens. Don Quixote will not be bothered at all by killing a real man. His delusions are so overpowering that he will not be able to recognise the difference between committing actual mored and his duelling with imaginary windmill giants.
Another option is that once he takes a person’s life, Don Quixote will be so horrified that he will be shaken out of his delusions. This is akin to a young recruit who goes to war believing that it is good to die for one’s country, only to end up completely disillusioned by the realities of warfare.
But there is a third option, much more complex and profound. As long as he fought imaginary giants, Don Quixote was just play-acting. However, once he actually kills someone, he will cling to his fantasies for all he is worth, because only they will give meaning to his tragic misdeed. Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the more tenaciously we hold on to it, because we desperately want to give meaning to these sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused. In politics this is known as ‘Our Boys Didn’t Die in Vain’ syndrome.
”
”
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)
“
I USED to imagine life divided into separate compartments, consisting, for example, of such dual abstractions as pleasure and pain, love and hate, friendship and enmity; and more material classifications like work and play: a profession or calling being, according to that concept—one that seemed, at least on the surface, unequivocally assumed by persons so dissimilar from one another as Widmerpool and Archie Gilbert—something entirely different from ‘spare time’. That illusion—as such a point of view was, in due course, to appear—was closely related to another belief: that existence fans out indefinitely into new areas of experience, and that almost every additional acquaintance offers some supplementary world with its own hazards and enchantments. As time goes on, of course, these supposedly different worlds, in fact, draw closer, if not to each other, then to some pattern common to all; so that, at last, diversity between them, if in truth existent, seems to be almost imperceptible except in a few crude and exterior ways: unthinkable as formerly appeared any single consummation of cause and effect. In other words, nearly all the inhabitants of these outwardly disconnected empires turn out at last to be tenaciously interrelated; love and hate, friendship and enmity, too, becoming themselves much less clearly defined, more often than not showing signs of possessing characteristics that could claim, to say the least, not a little in common; while work and play merge indistinguishably into a complex tissue of pleasure and tedium.
”
”
Anthony Powell (A Buyer's Market (A Dance to the Music of Time #2))
“
and at one point they had heard what had sounded mighty like a musket shot which, although not very near, might or might not have been fired in their direction but, they decided, probably had been. Harry clung to this adventure, such as it was, all the more tenaciously when he found that because of his sprained wrist he had missed an adventure at Captainganj. Those of his peers who had escaped with life and limb from the Captainganj parade ground did not seem to be thinking of it as an adventure, those who had managed to escape unhurt were now looking tired and shocked. And they seemed to be having trouble telling Harry what it had been like. Each of them simply had two or three terrible scenes printed on his mind: an Englishwoman trying to say something to him with her throat cut, or a comrade spinning down into a whirl-pool of hacking sepoys, something of that sort. To make things worse, one kept finding oneself about to say something to a friend who was not there to hear it any more. It was hard to make any sense out of what had happened, and after a while they gave up trying. Of the score of subalterns who had managed to escape, the majority had never seen a dead person before . . . a dead English person, anyway . . . one occasionally bumped into a dead native here and there but that was not quite the same. Strangely enough, they listened quite enviously to Harry talking about the musket shot which had “almost definitely” been fired at himself and Fleury. They wished they had had an adventure too, instead of their involuntary glimpse of the abattoir. It
”
”
J.G. Farrell (The Siege of Krishnapur)
“
emotionally immature people are more like an amalgam of various borrowed parts, many of which don’t go together well. Because they had to shut down important parts of themselves out of fear of their parents’ reactions, their personalities formed in isolated clumps, like pieces of a puzzle that don’t fit together. This explains their inconsistent reactions, which make them so difficult to understand. Because they probably weren’t allowed to express and integrate their emotional experiences in childhood, these people grow up to be emotionally inconsistent adults. Their personalities are weakly structured, and they often express contradictory emotions and behaviors. They step in and out of emotional states, never noticing their inconsistency. When they become parents, these traits create emotional bafflement in their children. One woman described her mother’s behavior as chaotic, “flip-flopping in ways that made no sense.” This inconsistency means that, as parents, emotionally immature people may be either loving or detached, depending on their mood. Their children feel fleeting moments of connection with them but don’t know when or under what conditions their parent might be emotionally available again. This sets up what behavioral psychologists call an intermittent reward situation, meaning that getting a reward for your efforts is possible but completely unpredictable. This creates a tenacious resolve to keep trying to get the reward, because once in a while these efforts do pay off. In this way, parental inconsistency can be the quality that binds children most closely to their parent, as they keep hoping to get that infrequent and elusive positive response.
”
”
Lindsay C. Gibson (Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents)
“
Though we have much in common with Christ’s first motley crew of followers, our experiences also vary. You and I haven’t seen the Lord face-to-face as the first disciples did. Yes, their faith was gigantic, but it was also fueled by sight. At first glance, you and I and all who have composed the church of Jesus Christ through the centuries may seem to be at a decided advantage. But Christ has promised blessing to those of us who have not seen with our own eyes and yet believe. If He honored the tenacious faith of the disciples who had seen Him in person, how much more will He honor ours.
”
”
Beth Moore (Believing God Day by Day: Growing Your Faith All Year Long)
“
If there was any politician in America who reflected the Cold War and what it did to the country, it was Richard Nixon—the man and the era were made for each other. The anger and resentment that were a critical part of his temperament were not unlike the tensions running through the nation as its new anxieties grew. He himself seized on the anti-Communist issue earlier and more tenaciously than any other centrist politician in the country. In fact that was why he had been put on the ticket in the first place. His first congressional race in 1946, against a pleasant liberal incumbent named Jerry Voorhis, was marked by red-baiting so savage that it took Voorhis completely by surprise. Upon getting elected, Nixon wasted no time in asking for membership in the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was the committee member who first spotted the contradictions in Hiss’s seemingly impeccable case; in later years he was inclined to think of the case as one of his greatest victories, in which he had challenged and defeated a man who was not what he seemed, and represented the hated Eastern establishment. His career, though, was riddled with contradictions. Like many of his conservative colleagues, he had few reservations about implying that some fellow Americans, including perhaps the highest officials in the opposition party, were loyal to a hostile foreign power and willing to betray their fellow citizens. Yet by the end of his career, he became the man who opened the door to normalized relations with China (perhaps, thought some critics, he was the only politician in America who could do that without being attacked by Richard Nixon), and he was a pal of both the Soviet and Chinese Communist leadership. If he later surprised many long-standing critics with his trips to Moscow and Peking, he had shown his genuine diplomatic skills much earlier in the way he balanced the demands of the warring factions within his own party. He never asked to be well liked or popular; he asked only to be accepted. There were many Republicans who hated him, particularly in California. Earl Warren feuded with him for years. Even Bill Knowland, the state’s senior senator and an old-fashioned reactionary, despised him. At the 1952 convention, Knowland had remained loyal to Warren despite Nixon’s attempts to help Eisenhower in the California delegation. When Knowland was asked to give a nominating speech for Nixon, he was not pleased: “I have to nominate the dirty son of a bitch,” he told friends. Nixon bridged the gap because his politics were never about ideology: They were the politics of self. Never popular with either wing, he managed to negotiate a delicate position acceptable to both. He did not bring warmth or friendship to the task; when he made attempts at these, he was, more often than not, stilted and artificial. Instead, he offered a stark choice: If you don’t like me, find someone who is closer to your position and who is also likely to win. If he tilted to either side, it was because that side seemed a little stronger at the moment or seemed to present a more formidable candidate with whom he had to deal. A classic example of this came early in 1960, when he told Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican leader, that he would advocate a right-to-work plank at the convention; a few weeks later in a secret meeting with Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican leader—then a more formidable national figure than Goldwater—Nixon not only reversed himself but agreed to call for its repeal under the Taft-Hartley act. “The man,” Goldwater noted of Nixon in his personal journal at the time, “is a two-fisted four-square liar.
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David Halberstam (The Fifties)
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It is much easier, to teach an uneducated person than the backward cultural values persistent and tenacious one, who lives into yesterday, not today.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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No one person can live, move about and possess the varied improvements of the earth's materials all by himself. He is indebted to others for their accomplishments, and they in turn are indebted to him for the improvements he renders. In short, we are all so closely allied with the actions and lives of one another that there should be a mutual appreciation and a common understanding among all.
The farmer may know nothing about manufacturing; the manufacturer may know nothing about farming; the artist, the explorer, the thinker, the inventor and the scientist may know nothing about any field of endeavor other than his own, yet all are inter-dependent.
With such a condition existing, and with the uncertainty of life forever staring us in the face, and no one exempt from its terrible enactment, it is a marvelous wonder to me why there exist so tenaciously in the human heart all the petty and aggravating tempers, prejudices and jealousies.
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Joseph Lewis (The Tyranny of God)
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Il 24 agosto è ritenuto dai cercatori di segni un giorno nefasto, da quando, secondo la testimonianza di Plinio il Giovane, la lava del Vesuvio cancellò Pompei, evaporandone la vita, costringendo migliaia di persone a un combattimento impari con la morte. Il 24 agosto è anche il giorno in cui, nel 476, l’Impero romano andò giù; catastrofe cui non seguì nulla di buono, solo macerie e il dilagare di popoli frenetici che si muovevano convulsi, seminando anarchia e distruzione. Si può essere tenaci cercatori di segni o scettici impenitenti, ma una cosa è certa: la notte tra il 23 e il 24 agosto bisognerebbe passarla col fiato sospeso perché è la notte in cui cessano i venti estivi. Di lì inizia l’autunno, di lì la natura apre le porte all’incedere lento dell’inverno e il mondo pare spesso ribellarsi a questo innaturale passaggio dalla vita dell’estate alla morte dell’inverno, producendo altre morti.
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Chiara Mercuri (Dante: Una vita in esilio (Italian Edition))
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Sometimes I think of us all, temporarily inhabiting the same vehicles, the same streets, but with our networks of love overlapping, like layers upon layers of spiderwebs until the whole thing is a dense, silver mesh so strong that no one can pull it apart. Envisioning this thick, tenacious web of love helps me feel less irritable when people are hopelessly slow or bump me with their baggage. I think, "We don't even know each other, but you love someone as much as I do, and somewhere there's a person waiting for you who'd be wrecked if you didn't come home. " That awareness of love - all around, all the time, flowing - somehow buoys me up, makes me tender and patient, when I'm in public , where it seems we become so easily exasperated with each other.
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Joy Castro (Flight Risk)
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It always astonishes me to discover people who think that religion and sex have nothing to do with one another, and that you can act as you like in the one sphere while thinking what you should in the other. In fact, of all the rites of passage that religions have taken under their wing, that of sexual initiation has been by the most tenaciously adhered to. English people today look with incredulity on the habit in some Muslim communities of veiling and hiding women, of forcing them to marry the man chosen for them, and of occasionally killing them for 'honour's' sake. What can this possibly have to do with obedience to Allah, the compassionate, the merciful, they ask themselves? In fact, it has everything to do with it. Sex is not only the gateway through which the next generation enters the community; it is the place in which our actions are most unavoidably subject to the ethic of 'pollution and taboo'.
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Roger Scruton (Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England)
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In Iceland—where roads will soon close after the first snowfalls, and life has to cling tenaciously to the windswept lava—I have learned something about keeping warm. Here on the deck of the Andrea in the outer reaches of the Atlantic, approaching a personal winter, I’m certain that the cold has healing powers that I don’t yet come close to understanding. After all, you apply ice to a joint after an awkward fall. Why not do the same to a life?
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Katherine May (Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times)
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Recognize the importance of prayer in this hour. We can talk about revival all we want, but historically, landscape-changing revival has been preceded by tenacious men and women of prayer.
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Michael Brown (The Fire that Never Sleeps: Keys to Sustaining Personal Revival)
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Money represents your time, your energy, your talents, your total personality converted into currency. We usually hold on to it tenaciously, yet it is uncertain in value and we cannot take it into the next world.
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Billy Graham (Billy graham in quotes)
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Given this lack of evidence, why has the meshing hypothesis proved so tenacious? The authors of the paper suspect that learning style theories ‘may reflect the fact that people are concerned that they, and their children, be seen and treated by educators as unique individuals’ (2008: 107). Moreover, learning styles offer unsuccessful learners (and their parents) a stick to beat their teachers with: ‘If a person or a person’s child is not succeeding or excelling in school, it may be more comfortable for the person to think that the educational system … is responsible [and] that the fault lies with instruction being inadequately tailored to one’s learning style’ (ibid.). Learning styles, in other words, are a convenient untruth.
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Scott Thornbury (Big Questions in ELT)
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To sum up—what can you do now to build up your self-confidence? Following are ten simple, workable rules for overcoming inadequacy attitudes and learning to practice faith. Thousands have used these rules, reporting successful results. Undertake this program and you, too, will build up confidence in your powers. You, too, will have a new feeling of power. 1. Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop this picture. Never think of yourself as failing; never doubt the reality of the mental image. That is most dangerous, for the mind always tries to complete what it pictures. So always picture “success” no matter how badly things seem to be going at the moment. 2. Whenever a negative thought concerning your personal powers comes to mind, deliberately voice a positive thought to cancel it out. 3. Do not built up obstacles in your imagination. Depreciate every so-called obstacle. Minimize them. Difficulties must be studied and efficiently dealt with to be eliminated, but they must be seen for only what they are. They must not be inflated by fear thoughts. 4. Do not be awestruck by other people and try to copy them. Nobody can be you as efficiently as YOU can. Remember also that most people, despite their confident appearance and demeanor, are often as scared as you are and as doubtful of themselves. 5. Ten times a day repeat these dynamic words, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31) (Stop reading and repeat them NOW slowly and confidently.) 6. Get a competent counselor to help you understand why you do what you do. Learn the origin of your inferiority and self-doubt feelings which often begin in childhood. Self-knowledge leads to a cure. 7. Ten times each day practice the following affirmation, repeating it out loud if possible. “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” (Philippians 4:13) Repeat those words NOW. That magic statement is the most powerful antidote on earth to inferiority thoughts. 8. Make a true estimate of your own ability, then raise it 10 per cent. Do not become egotistical, but develop a wholesome self-respect. Believe in your own God-released powers. 9. Put yourself in God’s hands. To do that simply state, “I am in God’s hands.” Then believe you are NOW receiving all the power you need. “Feel” it flowing into you. Affirm that “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21) in the form of adequate power to meet life’s demands. 10. Remind yourself that God is with you and nothing can defeat you. Believe that you now RECEIVE power from him.
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Anonymous
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But most importantly…I didn’t give up on myself. I’ve learned to accept myself (even after years of failing hard), and I’ve continued to tenaciously press forward to be the best person I can be.
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Jonathan Heston (The Unlimited Self: Destroy Limiting Beliefs, Uncover Inner Greatness, and Live the Good Life)
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Still, separation continues to masquerade as strength, and your politics, your economics, and even your religions have perpetuated the lie. This lie is the genesis of all wars and all the class struggles that lead to war; of all animosity between races and genders, and all the power struggles that lead to animosity; of all personal trials and tribulations, and all the internal struggles that lead to tribulations. Still, you cling to the lie tenaciously, no matter where you’ve seen it lead you—even as it has led you to your own destruction. Now I tell you this: Know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. There is no separation. Not from each other, not from God, and not from anything that is. This truth I will repeat over and over on these pages. This observation I will make again and again. Act as if you were separate from nothing, and no one, and you will heal your world tomorrow. This is the greatest secret of all time. It is the answer for which man has searched for millennia. It
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Neale Donald Walsch (The Complete Conversations with God)
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And funneled through the experiences outlined in this book, as well as through the specific work of God’s Spirit in your life and (most importantly) the living power of God’s Word, a number of personal prayer strategies will begin to develop. You’re going to march out of here with some battle options that will not only help you deflect every assault trained against you but will allow you to actively advance against them—against scrappy, tenacious opposition. You’ll be able to tread across stretches of high-voltage ground that you’ve never known how to navigate before, places that have always seemed too impossible to figure out. Through prayer you’ll not only be able to defend yourself from incoming sniper fire but through Almighty God will be able to push into enemy territory and take . . . stuff . . . back. Trust me, it can happen. It will happen.
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Priscilla Shirer (Fervent: A Woman's Battle Plan to Serious, Specific, and Strategic Prayer)
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Death will come in with a force equal to the resistance we have to it. The reaction we feel when confronting death is death confronting us. Our resistance comes from the tenacious hold we have on personal safety in the face of an event that represents the complete elimination of security. We are never on psychologically safe ground when we deal with death and dying. Our need for self-preservation can force us away from creative responses. We find ourselves responding with a cliché or saying something completely inappropriate.
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Rodney Smith
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We are in the middle of one of the most profound shifts in human history, where the primary work of mankind is moving from the Industrial Age of “control” to the Knowledge Worker Age of “release.” As Albert Einstein said, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” They certainly won’t be solved by one person; even, and especially, the one “at the top.” Our world’s bright future will be built by people who have discovered that leadership is the enabling art. It is the art of releasing human talent and potential. You may be able to “buy” a person’s back with a paycheck, position, power, or fear, but a human being’s genius, passion, loyalty, and tenacious creativity are volunteered only. The world’s greatest problems will be solved by passionate, unleashed “volunteers.
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L. David Marquet (Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders)
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Ordinary art is what I am making. I am a regular person doggedly making ordinary art. But as Ted Orland and David Bayles point out in their book Art and Fear, “ordinary art” is the art that most of us, those of us not Proust or Mozart, actually make. If Proust-like genius were the prerequisite for art, then statistically speaking very little of it would exist. Art is seldom the result of true genius; rather, it is the product of hard work and skills learned and tenaciously practiced by regular people. In my case, I practice my skills despite repeated failures and self-doubt so profound it can masquerade outwardly as conceit. It’s not heroic in any way. To the contrary, it’s plodding, obdurate effort. I make bad picture after bad picture week after week until the relief comes: the good new picture that offers benediction. The early success I enjoyed in this new project gave me a false sense that not only would the good pictures come easily, but also that I understood my reasons for doing them in the first place. In general, I am past taking pictures for the sake of seeing how things look in a photograph, although sometimes, for fun, I still do that. These days I am more interested in photographing things either to understand what they mean in my life or to illustrate a concept.
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Sally Mann (Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (LITTLE, BROWN A))
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You may be able to “buy” a person’s back with a paycheck, position, power, or fear, but a human being’s genius, passion, loyalty, and tenacious creativity are volunteered only.
The world’s greatest problems will be solved by passionate, unleashed “volunteers.
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L. David Marquet (Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders)
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It takes a certain personality to overcome the mental challenges of long-distance hiking. Stubborn. Tenacious. Idealistic.
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Daisy Prescott (Happy Trail (Park Ranger, #1))
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After three months of hard work and as many distractions as he'd been able to devise for himself, Tom still hadn't been able to put Lady Cassandra Ravenel out of his mind. Memories of her kept catching at the edge of his consciousness, sparkling like a tenacious strand of Christmas tinsel stuck in the carpet.
He wouldn't have guessed in a million years that Cassandra would have come down to the kitchen to visit him. Nor would he have wanted her to. He'd have chosen far different circumstances, somewhere with flowers and candlelight, or out on a garden terrace. And yet as they'd crouched together on a dirty floor, soldering boiler pipes in a room full of kitchen maids, Tom had been conscious of an unfolding sense of delight. She had been so clever and curious, with a sunny energy that transfixed him.
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Lisa Kleypas (Chasing Cassandra (The Ravenels, #6))
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Self-image is the product of our very own spin machine. Revolutions of long-term memories and the gyrations of short-term thoughts fabricate the epicycle of our present self-image. Once a synchronized self-image is developed, the human mind exhibits a tenacious tendency to maintain that centralized self-image through selective recall of prior events and by displaying a corresponding perception bias in interpreting present day experiences. In short, once we come to a firm belief of what we are, we exercise various mental and emotional prejudices to confirm and sustain our self-image.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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There are 7 essential elements for achieving change and personal and professional progress 1) Seeing the importance of change 2) The willingness to walk the path 3) Appreciating the context, terrain, external-factors and life’s unknowns / uncertainties 4) Gathering quality help, knowledge and support 5) Genuinely putting in the work 6) Being creative, calm, patient, cooperative and tenacious 7) The readiness and ability to listen, learn, accept, adjust and adapt.
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Rasheed Ogunlaru
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So what was so special about Thomas that the government wanted him to be CVC? Neither was he the senior-most, nor did he have experience in the field of vigilance and investigation as required under the CVC Act. What other outstanding or spectacular achievements put him above the other two officers in the panel? We may not know all these answers but what we do know is, that apart from being chargesheeted in the case, he also worked as secretary of telecommunication, from October 2009 to September 2010, with A. Raja, and had a smooth working relationship with him. The prime minister and home minister appeared to be in a hurry to appoint PJ Thomas as CVC and so disregarded objections from the leader of the Opposition, refusing to defer the matter even for a day when she asked them to verify PJ Thomas’ credentials. In fact, even when there was public outcry at the decision and cases filed in the Supreme Court, the government defended him tenaciously, with the prime minister stating on 6 September 2010, ‘I think what we have done is the right thing. Of all the three persons whose names were under consideration, we have chosen the best possible person.’ Obviously, Thomas as CVC would have been invaluable to the UPA. He had already revealed his predilections as secretary of telecommunication by challenging the CVC and the CAG’s powers to examine policy decisions taken by the government, laying the foundation to ensure that Raja cannot be brought to book for the manner in which he dispensed 2G spectrum. And yes, it does appear a little strange that all officers in the panel were those who had worked with DMK ministers.
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Ram Jethmalani (RAM JETHMALANI MAVERICK UNCHANGED, UNREPENTANT)
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I commenced writing this scroll in a frenzied attempt to find myself. I wished to ascertain how the concertina wire that cinches the plasma pool of my biological capsule together stitches a person into the vacillating web of eternity. Instead of my wild ravings spooling out answers, the act of writing nonstop in the midst of my darkest hours triggered a torrent of questions to examine. Each adamant question posed led to a baffling string of insistent conundrums. I orchestrated an urgent caucus, and tenaciously conducted a fact-finding mission. I held a self-questioning klatch attempting to pierce a spool of secular inquiries, a series of pious and profane questions that compressed upon my confused mind. The resultant positive displacement and negative displacement of febrile energy generated from this disorientating and mind-numbing process of rigorous self-scrutiny spun me akin to a crazed top. Unsure of my destiny, I lunged into the unknown, diving headfirst into the indecipherable parts of my reeling existence. I asked questions and sought answers, examined a sundry of personal experiences, and listened to my inner vibrations. How does a person square their mystical self to the undulating camber of life? How does anyone face the deflating specter of the impending death of his or her beloved? I seek to develop a desirable quotient of self-confidence and gain the needed degree of brio to tackle life. I wish to learn how to savor every moment, come to terms with impairing personal fears, blighting uncertainty, and caustic self-doubt. I aspire to overcome the disfiguring emotional liabilities harvested during my troubled past, develop healthful new habits, and brace myself against the irreducible fact of human mortality.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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In all these conflicts, individuals from both sides can read similar history books and even have the same facts taught to them, yet it is very unusual to find individuals who would agree about who started the conflict, who is to blame, who should make the next concession, etc. In such matters, our investment in our beliefs is much stronger than any affiliation to sport teams, and so we hold on to these beliefs tenaciously. Thus the likelihood of agreement about “the facts” becomes smaller and smaller as personal investment in the problem grows. This is clearly disturbing. We like to think that sitting at the same table together will help us hammer out our differences and that concessions will soon follow. But history has shown us that this is an unlikely outcome; and now we know the reason for this catastrophic failure.
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Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions)
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John Serrao
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Who would you be if you had somehow avoided every tenacious impediment in the invisible bacterial obstacle course of your daily life? Or what if, through some miracle of science...there was a way to cleanse the detritus that has cumulatively contaminated your genes since before you were even born? Who would you be today? Would you be the same person; the same unique individual? Or would you be something more?
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Ezra Claytan Daniels (Upgrade Soul)
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In all of the elite companies studied, Level 5 Leaders were in charge when they made the leap from good to great. Level 5 Leadership refers to a type of leader who is not only a highly capable individual, team player, and manager, but also embodies two essential traits: personal humility and the will to do whatever it takes to get results. Level 5 Leaders are quiet, modest, self-effacing, even reserved. They lack over-sized egos or inflated sense of self-importance. Level 5 Leaders are driven to create great results. They are not afraid to make difficult or unpopular decisions if it will better their company. While Level 5 Leaders demonstrate tenacious ambition and will to succeed, they do not devote this energy for their own benefit but instead drive it towards the company’s success. In contrast, the outsized egos and self-serving nature of the “control set” executives contributed to the deaths of their own companies. When good results happen, Level 5 Leaders credit good luck. When results are disappointing, Level 5 Leaders blame only themselves and take responsibility. Other leaders credit themselves when good results come and blame luck or other people for failures. Level 5 Leaders make sure their companies maintain excellence by setting up competent successors who will push their companies to even greater heights. In contrast, other types of managers often leave gaping holes in leadership once they retire. An unexpected finding showed that a majority of the great CEOs were home-grown. In contrast, “celebrity” executives brought into a company have shown to cause more harm than good. It is incredibly detrimental for a company to elect an ego-driven and self-serving CEO instead of a Level 5 Leader. Potential Level 5 Leaders are all around us, and it is possible for one to become a Level 5 leader by embodying their basic traits.
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Eighty Twenty Publishing (Summary of Good To Great by Jim Collins)
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Discretion: "Responsible diplomats will always be guarded in what they say to each other. They know that the constant application of discretion precludes neither cordial personal relations nor many mutual useful exchanges with competent colleagues. Rather than being put off when they encounter this quality in others, they take it as reassuring evidence that they are dealing with reliable and useful professionals. If this quality is not present, a wise diplomat will be warned off, and will take his dealings elsewhere."
— William Macomber, 1975
Dishonesty: "A reputation for trickiness will follow a diplomat around the globe as tenaciously as the dossiers prepared by his diplomatic colleagues pursue him from post to post."
— Charles Thayer, 1959
Dissent: There is always a danger that the message will be mistaken for the messenger. Dissent is often taken for insult, as it implicitly condemns the judgment of those with whose policies it takes issue. The ultimate test of an ambassador's persuasiveness is to report and recommend honestly on the lapses and errors of his own country's policies without fatally offending those guilty of them.
Dissent: "There are strict limits, dictated by common sense and the realities of the situation, to how far an ambassador can go in opposing a position of his own government. If a compromise is not possible and once the final decision has been made, he must of course loyally and scrupulously implement it even if it goes against what he had recommended. But until the final decision is made an ambassador owes his government the frankest and most unvarnished advice."
— François de Laboulaye and Jean Laloy, 1983
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Chas W. Freeman Jr. (The Diplomat's Dictionary)
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So when the two come into conflict in a child’s life, the outcome is well-nigh predetermined. If the choice is between “hiding my feelings, even from myself, and getting the basic care I need” and “being myself and going without,” I’m going to pick that first option every single time. Thus our real selves are leveraged bit by bit in a tragic transaction where we secure our physical or emotional survival by relinquishing who we are and how we feel. The fact that we don’t consciously choose such coping mechanisms makes them all the more tenacious. We cannot will them away when they no longer serve us precisely because we have no memory of them not being there, no notion of ourselves without them. Like wallpaper, they blend into the background; they are our “new normal,” our literal second nature, as distinct from our original or authentic nature. As these patterns get wired into our nervous system, the perceived need to be what the world demands becomes entangled with our sense of who we are and how to seek love. Inauthenticity is thereafter misidentified with survival because the two were synonymous during the formative years—or, at least, seemed so to our young selves. Here we see the perilous downside of our much-vaunted and wondrous capacity to adapt to diverse and challenging circumstances. After all, most adaptations are meant for specific situations, not as eternally applicable responses in every possible case. Here’s an analogy plucked from the headlines: At the time of this writing, freezing weather has enveloped Texas.[*] People are adapting by wearing extra clothing, heating their homes when power is available, wrapping themselves in warm blankets—all necessary strategies for surviving inclement winter conditions. Those same adaptations, meant to be temporary, would jeopardize health and life if not discarded by the time of summer’s blazing heat. The internal adaptations we make to our own personalities in order to survive adversity early in life carry the same risks as conditions shift, but we are far less wise to the danger. No matter how the weather changes, the protective gear, welded as it is onto the personality, never comes off. It is sobering to realize that many of the personality traits we have come to believe are us, and perhaps even take pride in, actually bear the scars of where we lost connection to ourselves, way back when.
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Gabor Maté (The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture)