Testify Famous Quotes

For the house of Dunraven, the ravens represented a spiritual claim to the Tower for the Celtic, especially the Welsh, people. For the English, the ravens represented the colorful savagery of their ancestors, which, however, testified to the exalted state of civilization they had since achieved. The national sagas of the Welsh and English gradually blended in tall tales told to tourists by Yeoman Warders, to eventually create a national myth. The romanticized past of Wales, predicated on survival, was fused with that of England, predicated on progress and conquest, to create a legend of Britain.

A famous British writer is revealed to be the author of an obscure mystery novel. An immigrant is granted asylum when authorities verify he wrote anonymous articles critical of his home country. And a man is convicted of murder when he’s connected to messages painted at the crime scene. The common element in these seemingly disparate cases is “forensic linguistics”—an investigative technique that helps experts determine authorship by identifying quirks in a writer’s style. Advances in computer technology can now parse text with ever-finer accuracy. Consider the recent outing of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling as the writer of The Cuckoo’s Calling , a crime novel she published under the pen name Robert Galbraith. England’s Sunday Times , responding to an anonymous tip that Rowling was the book’s real author, hired Duquesne University’s Patrick Juola to analyze the text of Cuckoo , using software that he had spent over a decade refining. One of Juola’s tests examined sequences of adjacent words, while another zoomed in on sequences of characters; a third test tallied the most common words, while a fourth examined the author’s preference for long or short words. Juola wound up with a linguistic fingerprint—hard data on the author’s stylistic quirks. He then ran the same tests on four other books: The Casual Vacancy , Rowling’s first post-Harry Potter novel, plus three stylistically similar crime novels by other female writers. Juola concluded that Rowling was the most likely author of The Cuckoo’s Calling , since she was the only one whose writing style showed up as the closest or second-closest match in each of the tests. After consulting an Oxford linguist and receiving a concurring opinion, the newspaper confronted Rowling, who confessed. Juola completed his analysis in about half an hour. By contrast, in the early 1960s, it had taken a team of two statisticians—using what was then a state-of-the-art, high-speed computer at MIT—three years to complete a project to reveal who wrote 12 unsigned Federalist Papers. Robert Leonard, who heads the forensic linguistics program at Hofstra University, has also made a career out of determining authorship. Certified to serve as an expert witness in 13 states, he has presented evidence in cases such as that of Christopher Coleman, who was arrested in 2009 for murdering his family in Waterloo, Illinois. Leonard testified that Coleman’s writing style matched threats spray-painted at his family’s home (photo, left). Coleman was convicted and is serving a life sentence. Since forensic linguists deal in probabilities, not certainties, it is all the more essential to further refine this field of study, experts say. “There have been cases where it was my impression that the evidence on which people were freed or convicted was iffy in one way or another,” says Edward Finegan, president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists. Vanderbilt law professor Edward Cheng, an expert on the reliability of forensic evidence, says that linguistic analysis is best used when only a handful of people could have written a given text. As forensic linguistics continues to make headlines, criminals may realize the importance of choosing their words carefully. And some worry that software also can be used to obscure distinctive written styles. “Anything that you can identify to analyze,” says Juola, “I can identify and try to hide.

How do we know those who are on the Lord's side? My answer: when things happened adversarily, those who stand by God becomes Testifiers. I testify that the Lord is good, I don't know about you.

The one who has realised Essence of Mind can testify to it at once as soon as he is spoken to about it. He cannot lose sight of it, even if he were engaged in a battle.

…I am a storyteller. From barstools to back porches, from kitchen tables to campfires, from podiums to park benches, I have spun my yarns to audiences both big and small, both rapt and bored. I didn’t start out that way. I was just a dreamer, quietly imagining myself as something special, as someone who would “make a difference” in the world. But the fact is, I was just an ordinary person leading an ordinary life. Then, partly by design, partly by happenstance, I was thrust into a series of adventures and circumstances beyond anything I had ever dreamed. It all started when I ran away from home at eighteen and hitchhiked around the country. Then I joined the Army, became an infantry lieutenant, and went to Vietnam. After Vietnam, I tried to become a hippie, got involved with Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), and became a National Coordinator for the organization. I was subsequently indicted for conspiracy to incite a riot at the Republican Convention in 1972—the so-called Gainesville Eight case—and one of my best friends turned out to be an FBI informant who testified against me at the trial. In the early eighties, I was involved with the New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission, which built a memorial for Vietnam veterans in New York City and published the book Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam. In the late eighties, I was part of a delegation of Vietnam veterans who went to the Soviet Union to meet with Soviet veterans of their Afghanistan War. I fell in love with a woman from Russia, married her, and spent nine years living there, during which I fathered two children, then brought my family back to the U.S. and the suburban middle-class life I had left so many years before. The adventures ultimately, inevitably perhaps, ended, and like Samwise Gamgee, I returned to an ordinary life once they were over. The only thing I had left from that special time was the stories… I wrote this book for two reasons. First and foremost, I wrote it for my children. Their experience of me is as a slightly boring “soccer dad,” ordinary and unremarkable. I wanted them to know who I was and what I did before I became their dad. More importantly, I hope the book can be inspiring to the entire younger generation they represent, who will have to deal with the mess of a world that we have left them. The second reason is that when I was young, I had hoped that my actions would “make a difference,” but I’m not so sure if they amounted to “a hill of beans,” as Humphry Bogart famously intoned. If my actions did not change the world, then I dream that maybe my stories can.

One famous (and perhaps apocryphal) story tells of how he, while testifying in court, was asked by an official to identify himself. Wright responded by declaring that he was the greatest architect in the world. His response, when asked how he could make such a statement, was that he had no choice – he was under oath.

The most famous trial took place in France, in 1521. It was the trial of some Rats, which had been causing a lot of destruction. They were summoned to court by the townsfolk and were appointed a public defense counsel, a quick-witted lawyer named Bartolomeo Chassenée. When his clients failed to appear at the first hearing, Chassenée petitioned for a deferment, testifying that they lived in wide dispersal, on top of which many dangers lay in wait for them on the way to the court. He even appealed to the court to provide a guarantee that Cats belonging to the plaintiffs would not do the defendants any harm on their way to the hearing. Unfortunately, the court could not provide any such guarantee, so the case was postponed several times more. Finally, after an ardent speech by their defense counsel, the Rats were acquitted.

In 1612 he testified as a witness in a lawsuit in London, where he was identified not as the famous writer but merely as a “gentleman” of Stratford-upon-Avon.

Early on, advocates of big bang cosmology realized that the universe is evolutionary. In the words of one famous cosmologist, George Gamov, “We conclude that the relative abundances of atomic species represent the most ancient archaeological document pertaining to the history of the universe.” In other words, the periodic table is evidence of the evolution of matter, and atoms can testify to the history of the cosmos. But early versions of big bang cosmology held that all the elements of the universe were fused in one fell swoop. As Gamov puts it, “These abundances …” meaning the ratio of the elements (heaps of hydrogen, hardly any gold—that kind of thing), “… must have been established during the earliest stages of expansion, when the temperature of the primordial matter was still sufficiently high to permit nuclear transformations to run through the entire range of chemical elements.” It was a neat idea, but very wrong. Only hydrogen, helium, and a dash of lithium could have formed in the big bang. All of the elements heavier than lithium were made much later, by being fused in evolving and exploding stars. How do we know this? Because at the same time some scholars were working on the big bang theory, others were trying to ditch the big bang altogether. Its association with thermonuclear devices made it seem hasty, and its implied mysterious origins tainted it with creationism. And so, a rival camp of cosmologists developed an alternate theory: the Steady State. The Steady State held that the universe had always existed. And always will. Matter is created out of the vacuum of space itself. Steady State theorists, working against the big bang and its flaws, were obliged to wonder where in the cosmos the chemical elements might have been cooked up, if not in the first few minutes of the universe. Their answer: in the furnaces of the very stars themselves. They found a series of nuclear chain reactions at work in the stars. First, they discovered how fusion had made elements heavier than carbon. Then, they detailed eight fusion reactions through which stars convert light elements into heavy ones, to be recycled into space through stellar winds and supernovae. And so, it’s the inside of stars where the alchemist’s dream comes true. Every gram of gold began billions of years ago, forged out of the inside of an exploding star in a supernova. The gold particles lost into space from the explosion mixed with rocks and dust to form part of the early Earth. They’ve been lying in wait ever since.

One of the famous stars is Danica. In contrast to ancient times, today we know it is the planet Venus. It is considered the sister or wife of the moon or sun, sometimes even their daughter, which was usual in the context of stars. Its role in rituals was not large, except in situations when it was necessary to testify, confirm, or to help perform rituals, However, among the Vlach people of eastern Serbia, this star is of masculine gender and its name is Lusafur, a transliteration of the Latin word” Lucifer” which means “svetlonosa- the one who carries the light”. Based on that, he is very important, because it is believed that he himself brings the sun and the light that is necessary for every living thing on this planet. Just as he brings light, in the same way, he takes something away. What he takes away is symbolized by white quartz. What remains of this belief about Lusafur among the Vlach people can be evidenced in posthumous rituals, where white quartz must be sewn into the clothes of the deceased so Lusafur could take it into the world of the dead, which means that he has role of a psychopomp – a soul’s guide to underworld.