The Selection Famous Quotes

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As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.
William S. Burroughs (The Adding Machine: Selected Essays)
How can 5 judges decide the best book of the year without reading every book of the year? While some lucky authors can enter the contest, others may never get the chance to do so due to the tough nomination and selection processes. And how can the judges’ decision be right when we know that submitting the same books to different panels will result in different winners?
Mouloud Benzadi
Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... Here, each term is the sum of the previous two terms. The phenomenon is well known and called phyllotaxis. Many are the efforts of biologists to understand why pinecones, sunflowers, and many other plants exhibit this remarkable pattern. Organisms do the strangest things, but all these odd things need not reflect selection or historical accident. Some of the best efforts to understand phyllotaxis appeal to a form of self-organization. Paul Green, at Stanford, has argued persuasively that the Fibonacci series is just what one would expects as the simplest self-repeating pattern that can be generated by the particular growth processes in the growing tips of the tissues that form sunflowers, pinecones, and so forth. Like a snowflake and its sixfold symmetry, the pinecone and its phyllotaxis may be part of order for free
Stuart A. Kauffman (At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity)
For I make others say what I cannot say so well,... I do not count my borrowings, but, weight them.... They are all, or very nearly all, from such famous and ancient names that they seem to identify themselves enough without me.
Michel de Montaigne (The Essays: A Selection)
the trouble with the famous is that they must be replaced and they can never quite be replaced, and that gives us this unique sadness.
Charles Bukowski (The Pleasures of the Damned: Selected Poems 1951-1993)
In books "we converse with the wise, as in action with fools." That is, if we know how to select our books. "Some books are to be tasted," reads a famous passage, "others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested"; all these groups forming, no doubt, an infinitesimal portion of the oceans and cataracts of ink in which the world is daily bathed and poisoned and drowned.
Will Durant (The Story of Philosophy)
Quite openly, voters selected on the basis of perceived character and past behaviour rather than the views a candidate expressed. Where an individual’s nature was not obvious, the Roman people tended to be drawn to a famous name, for there was a sense that virtue and ability were inherited.
Adrian Goldsworthy (Augustus: From Revolutionary to Emperor)
He told me that in 1886 he had invented an original system of numbering and that in a very few days he had gone beyond the twenty-four-thousand mark. He had not written it down, since anything he thought of once would never be lost to him. His first stimulus was, I think, his discomfort at the fact that the famous thirty-three gauchos of Uruguayan history should require two signs and two words, in place of a single word and a single sign. He then applied this absurd principle to the other numbers. In place of seven thousand thirteen he would say (for example) Maximo Pérez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Railroad; other numbers were Luis Melián Lafinur, Olimar, sulphur, the reins, the whale, the gas, the caldron, Napoleon, Agustin de Vedia. In place of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a kind of mark; the last in the series were very complicated...
Jorge Luis Borges (Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings)
After Darwin, human morality became a scientific mystery. Natural selection could explain how intelligent, upright, linguistic, not so hairy, bipedal primates could evolve, but where did our morals come from? Darwin himself was absorbed by this question. Natural selection, it was thought, promotes ruthless self-interest. Individuals who grab up all the resources and destroy the competition will survive better, reproduce more often, and thus populate the world with their ruthlessly selfish offspring. How, then, could morality evolve in a world that Tennyson famously described as “red in tooth and claw”? We now have an answer. Morality evolved as a solution to the problem of cooperation, as a way of averting the Tragedy of the Commons: Morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation.
Joshua Greene (Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them)
Is ‘vagina’ suitable for use in a sonnet? I don’t suppose so. A famous poet told me, ‘Vagina’s ugly.’ Meaning, of course, the sound of it. In poems. Meanwhile he inserts his penis frequently into his verse, calling it seriously, ‘My Penis’. It is short, I know, and dignified. I mean of course the sound of it. In poems.
Joan Larkin (My Body: New and Selected Poems)
In a somer seson whan soft was the sonne I shope me in shroudes as I a shepe were, In habite as an heremite vnholy of workes, Went wyde in þis worlde wondres to here.
William Langland (Piers Plowman: Selections from the B-text)
She took my morning with her. My day begins in the afternoon, and it’s always hazy.
Bhuwan Thapaliya (Safa Tempo: Poems New & Selected)
Clicking on "send" has its limitations as a system of subtle communication. Which is why, of course, people use so many dashes and italics and capitals ("I AM joking!") to compensate. That's why they came up with the emoticon, too—the emoticon being the greatest (or most desperate, depending how you look at it) advance in punctuation since the question mark in the reign of Charlemagne. You will know all about emoticons. Emoticons are the proper name for smileys. And a smiley is, famously, this: :—) Forget the idea of selecting the right words in the right order and channelling the reader's attention by means of artful pointing. Just add the right emoticon to your email and everyone will know what self-expressive effect you thought you kind-of had in mind. Anyone interested in punctuation has a dual reason to feel aggrieved about smileys, because not only are they a paltry substitute for expressing oneself properly; they are also designed by people who evidently thought the punctuation marks on the standard keyboard cried out for an ornamental function. What's this dot-on-top-of-a-dot thing for? What earthly good is it? Well, if you look at it sideways, it could be a pair of eyes. What's this curvy thing for? It's a mouth, look! Hey, I think we're on to something. :—( Now it's sad! ;—) It looks like it's winking! :—r It looks like it's sticking its tongue out! The permutations may be endless: :~/ mixed up! <:—) dunce! :—[ pouting! :—O surprise! Well, that's enough. I've just spotted a third reason to loathe emoticons, which is that when they pass from fashion (and I do hope they already have), future generations will associate punctuation marks with an outmoded and rather primitive graphic pastime and despise them all the more. "Why do they still have all these keys with things like dots and spots and eyes and mouths and things?" they will grumble. "Nobody does smileys any more.
Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation)
Ludwig Feuerbach says a wonderful thing about baptism. I have it marked. He says, ‘Water is the purest, clearest of liquids; in virtue of this, its natural character, it is the image of the spotless nature of the Divine Spirit. In short, water has a significance in itself, as water; it is on account of its natural quality that it is consecrated and selected as the vehicle of the Holy Spirit. So far there lies at the foundation of Baptism a beautiful, profound natural significance.’ Feuerbach is a famous atheist, but he is about as good on the joyful aspects of religion as anybody, and he loves the world.
Marilynne Robinson (Gilead)
Still, statistically the probability that there are other thinking beings out there is good. Nobody knows how many stars there are in the Milky Way – estimates range from a hundred billion or so to perhaps four hundred billion – and the Milky Way is just one of a hundred and forty billion or so other galaxies, many of them even larger than ours. In the 1960s, a professor at Cornell named Frank Drake, excited by such whopping numbers, worked out a famous equation designed to calculate the chances of advanced life existing in the cosmos, based on a series of diminishing probabilities. Under Drake’s equation you divide the number of stars in a selected portion of the universe by the number of stars that are likely to have planetary systems; divide that by the number of planetary systems that could theoretically support life; divide that by the number on which life, having arisen, advances to a state of intelligence; and so on. At each such division, the number shrinks colossally – yet even with the most conservative inputs the number of advanced civilizations just in the Milky Way always works out to be somewhere in the millions.
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
My anthology continues to sell & the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum-- however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in Faber's Anthology-- he calls poets 'bards,' a girl a 'maid,' & talks about 'Titanic wars'). There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him. . . .(from a letter of December 26, 1936, in Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, p. 124).
W.B. Yeats
The media might pretend that every life was of equal importance, but they selected people, graded them, decided whether their lives were -- as Ayako put it -- "heavy" or "lightweight," then imposed that set of values on society. The death of a famous person. And the death of someone who wasn't. A tragic death. And one that wasn't.
Hideo Yokoyama (Seventeen)
Here again, she was amazingly clever. Without make-up of any kind, her features seemed to dissolve suddenly and re-form themselves into those of a famous politician, or a well-known actress, or a society beauty. In each character she gave a short typical speech. These speeches, by the way, were remarkably clever. They seemed to hit off every weakness of the subject selected.
Agatha Christie (Lord Edgware Dies (Hercule Poirot, #9))
Famously contemptuous of the art of photography, Marcel Proust, of all men, would have understood that the face I am seeking is in the end unfixable. People never stop changing position in relation to us. In the imperceptible but incessant movement of the world, we regard them as immobile in an instant of vision too brief for us to notice the moment which is propelling them. But we have only to select from our memories two pictures of them taken at different times, but similar enough for them not to change in themselves, at least not perceptibly and the difference between the two pictures is a gauge of the displacement they have undergone in relation to us. Even the dead are not immobile and dreams pay no homage to the absurd waking-myth of fixity.
Gail Jones (Fetish Lives)
In books “we converse with the wise, as in action with fools.” That is, if we know how to select our books. “Some books are to be tasted,” reads a famous passage, “others to be swallowed, and some to be chewed and digested”; all these groups forming, no doubt, an infinitesimal portion of the oceans and cataracts of ink in which the world is daily bathed and poisoned and drowned.
Will Durant (The Story of Philosophy)
Kraus asks the question of Freudian analysis: What would be enough? At what point would talking about one’s problems for x hours a week, be sufficient to bring one to a state of “normalcy”? The genius of Freudianism, Kraus writes, is not the creation of a cure, but of a disease—the universal, if intermittent, human sentiment that “something is not right,” elaborated into a state whose parameters, definitions, and prescriptions are controlled by a self-selecting group of “experts,” who can never be proved wrong. It was said that the genius of the Listerine campaign was attributable to the creation not of mouthwash, but of halitosis. Kraus indicts Freud for the creation of the nondisease of dissatisfaction. (See also the famous “malaise” of Jimmy Carter, which, like Oscar Wilde’s Pea Soup Fogs, didn’t exist ’til someone began describing it.) To consider a general dissatisfaction with one’s life, or with life in general as a political rather than a personal, moral problem, is to exercise or invite manipulation. The fortune teller, the “life coach,” the Spiritual Advisor, these earn their living from applying nonspecific, nonspecifiable “remedies” to nonspecifiable discomforts.The sufferers of such, in medicine, are called “the worried well,” and provide the bulk of income and consume the bulk of time of most physicians. It was the genius of the Obama campaign to exploit them politically. The antecedent of his campaign has been called Roosevelt’s New Deal, but it could, more accurately, be identified as The Music Man.
David Mamet (The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture)
It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map. My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the map-maker's distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual. Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker's technical interest is obvious ("This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation-for short-range, you'd better use a different projection"). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations. To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly. The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.
Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States)
From insomnia and as a result of the intense struggle against mounting weakness, something strange is happening to me. In the midst of a lecture, tears suddenly choke me, my eyes begin to itch, and I feel a passionate, hysterical desire to stretch my arms out and complain loudly. I want to cry in a loud voice that fate has sentenced me, a famous man, to capital punishment, and that in six months or so another man will be master of this auditorium. I want to cry out that I've been poisoned; new thoughts such as I have never known before have poisoned the last days of my life and go on stinging my brain like mosquitoes. And at such times my situation seems so terrible that I want all my listeners to be horrified, to jump up from their seats and, in panic fear, rush for the exit with a desperate cry. It is not easy to live through such moments.
Anton Chekhov (Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov)
Most people think the Lego corporation assembled a crack team of world-class experts to engineer Mini-Florida on a computer, but I’m not buying it.” “You aren’t?” asked Coleman. “It’s way too good.” Serge pointed at a two-story building in Key West. “Examine the meticulous green shutters on Hemingway’s house. No, my money is on a lone-wolf manic type like the famous Latvian Edward Leedskalnin, who single-handedly built the Coral Castle back in the twenties. He operated in secret, moving multi-ton hewn boulders south of Miami, and nobody knows how he did it. Probably happened here as well: The Lego people conducting an exhaustive nationwide search among the obsessive-compulsive community. But they had to be selective and stay away from the ones whose entire houses are filled to the ceiling with garbage bags of their own hair. Then they most likely found some cult guru living in a remote Lego ashram south of Pueblo with nineteen wives, offered him unlimited plastic blocks and said, ‘Knock yourself out.
Tim Dorsey (Tiger Shrimp Tango (Serge Storms #17))
In Paley's famous illustration, the adaptation of all the parts of the watch to the function, or purpose, of showing the time, is held to be evidence that the watch was specially contrived to that end; on the ground, that the only cause we know of, competent to produce such an effect as a watch which shall keep time, is a contriving intelligence adapting the means directly to that end. Suppose, however, that any one had been able to show that the watch had not been made directly by any person, but that it was the result of the modification of another watch which kept time but poorly; and that this again had proceeded from a structure which could hardly be called a watch at all—seeing that it had no figures on the dial and the hands were rudimentary; and that going back and back in time we came at last to a revolving barrel as the earliest traceable rudiment of the whole fabric. And imagine that it had been possible to show that all these changes had resulted, first, from a tendency of the structure to vary indefinitely; and secondly, from something in the surrounding world which helped all variations in the direction of an accurate time-keeper, and checked all those in other directions; then it is obvious that the force of Paley's argument would be gone. For it would be demonstrated that an apparatus thoroughly well adapted to a particular purpose might be the result of a method of trial and error worked by unintelligent agents, as well as of the direct application of the means appropriate to that end, by an intelligent agent. Now it appears to us that what we have here, for illustration's sake, supposed to be done with the watch, is exactly what the establishment of Darwin's Theory will do for the organic world. For the notion that every organism has been created as it is and launched straight at a purpose, Mr. Darwin substitutes the conception of something which may fairly be termed a method of trial and error. Organisms vary incessantly; of these variations the few meet with surrounding conditions which suit them and thrive; the many are unsuited and become extinguished.
Thomas Henry Huxley (Criticism on "The Origin of Species")
The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation,’ Bentham famously once articulated. Yet dig a little deeper, and a trickier, quirkier, murkier, picture emerges – one of ruthless selectivity and treacherous moral rip-tides. Crafting that legislation, for example, excavating those morals, will inevitably necessitate riding roughshod over someone else’s interests: some group or cause, which, through the simple lottery of numbers, has to bite the bullet for the sake of the ‘greater good’.
Kevin Dutton (The Wisdom of Psychopaths)
A reflection on Robert Lowell Robert Lowell knew I was not one of his devotees. I attended his famous “office hours” salon only a few times. Life Studies was not a book of central importance for me, though I respected it. I admired his writing, but not the way many of my Boston friends did. Among poets in his generation, poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Alan Dugan, and Allen Ginsberg meant more to me than Lowell’s. I think he probably sensed some of that. To his credit, Lowell nevertheless was generous to me (as he was to many other young poets) just the same. In that generosity, and a kind of open, omnivorous curiosity, he was different from my dear teacher at Stanford, Yvor Winters. Like Lowell, Winters attracted followers—but Lowell seemed almost dismayed or a little bewildered by imitators; Winters seemed to want disciples: “Wintersians,” they were called. A few years before I met Lowell, when I was still in California, I read his review of Winters’s Selected Poems. Lowell wrote that, for him, Winters’s poetry passed A. E. Housman’s test: he felt that if he recited it while he was shaving, he would cut himself. One thing Lowell and Winters shared, that I still revere in both of them, was a fiery devotion to the vocal essence of poetry: the work and interplay of sentences and lines, rhythm and pitch. The poetry in the sounds of the poetry, in a reader’s voice: neither page nor stage. Winters criticizing the violence of Lowell’s enjambments, or Lowell admiring a poem in pentameter for its “drill-sergeant quality”: they shared that way of thinking, not matters of opinion but the matter itself, passionately engaged in the art and its vocal—call it “technical”—materials. Lowell loved to talk about poetry and poems. His appetite for that kind of conversation seemed inexhaustible. It tended to be about historical poetry, mixed in with his contemporaries. When he asked you, what was Pope’s best work, it was as though he was talking about a living colleague . . . which in a way he was. He could be amusing about that same sort of thing. He described Julius Caesar’s entourage waiting in the street outside Cicero’s house while Caesar chatted up Cicero about writers. “They talked about poetry,” said Lowell in his peculiar drawl. “Caesar asked Cicero what he thought of Jim Dickey.” His considerable comic gift had to do with a humor of self and incongruity, rather than wit. More surreal than donnish. He had a memorable conversation with my daughter Caroline when she was six years old. A tall, bespectacled man with a fringe of long gray hair came into her living room, with a certain air. “You look like somebody famous,” she said to him, “but I can’t remember who.” “Do I?” “Yes . . . now I remember!— Benjamin Franklin.” “He was a terrible man, just awful.” “Or no, I don’t mean Benjamin Franklin. I mean you look like a Christmas ornament my friend Heather made out of Play-Doh, that looked like Benjamin Franklin.” That left Robert Lowell with nothing to do but repeat himself: “Well, he was a terrible man.” That silly conversation suggests the kind of social static or weirdness the man generated. It also happens to exemplify his peculiar largeness of mind . . . even, in a way, his engagement with the past. When he died, I realized that a large vacuum had appeared at the center of the world I knew.
Robert Pinsky
The altruistic gene doesn’t help just any randomly chosen individual. In a sense, it helps copies of itself in a different individual. Generally speaking, full siblings share 50 percent of their genes, so if I can help more than two of my sisters, even at the expense of sacrificing myself, then, on average, such behavior will be favored by natural selection. Hence the famous quip by the evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane. When asked whether he would give his life to save a drowning brother, he replied: “No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.
Peter Turchin (Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth)
But in the essay “Of Truth” he writes: “The inquiry of truth, which is the lovemaking or wooing of it; the knowledge of truth, which is the praise of it; and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human natures.” In books “we converse with the wise, as in action with fools.” That is, if we know how to select our books. “Some books are to be tasted,” reads a famous passage, “others to be swallowed, and some to be chewed and digested”; all these groups forming, no doubt, an infinitesimal portion of the oceans and cataracts of ink in which the world is daily bathed and poisoned and drowned.
Will Durant (The Story of Philosophy)
In the lower-brow selection of tabloids that report on the weight of celebrities, one statement that follows women struggling with their weight around more than any other is "She got her body back." Here you'll find near-constant Britney coverage. But barring any transcendent out-of-body experiences, these women were never separated from their bodies. They've occupied them across various weights. This phrase is not about a woman getting back something she lost as much as it as about our approval that she has returned to something we want her to be. What is meant by this phrase is "We got her body back." We got the body we felt entitled to.
Alana Massey (All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers)
North: The frieze from the north portion of the temple depicts the war against the Amazons. It shows a meeting between the Amazon and Greek warriors, with Hekate being the central figure sanctioning a pact. The position of her body in this particular frieze has been interpreted as being indicative that while she brought the sides together and sanctioned the pact, she sided with the legendary female warriors of Anatolia. East: The eastern frieze depicts scenes from the life of Zeus, including a version of his birth in which Hekate takes the role of midwife. She assists the goddess Rhea in swaddling the baby and protecting it from his father Kronos’ paranoid madness. West: The western side shows a version of the war against the Giants. Like that of the famous friezes of Pergamon, it depicts Hekate as fighting on the side of Zeus. South: The south side shows a selection of Carian deities gathering for a feast. This has been interpreted as a gathering for the Hekatesion or another significant festival. Here it is interesting to note that the front of the temple (East) depicted the birth of Zeus and the back his battle and victory over the Titans. These are pivotal points in Greek religious history, Zeus’ birth and his victory in the battle which enables him to ascend to the throne. At both these points, Hekate is present.
Sorita d'Este (Circle for Hekate - Volume I: History & Mythology (The Circle for Hekate Project Book 1))
human designers, being farsighted but blinkered, tend to find their designs thwarted by unforeseen side effects and interactions, so they try to guard against them by giving each element in the system a single function, and insulating it from all the other elements. In contrast, Mother Nature (the process of natural selection) is famously myopic and lacking in goals. Since she doesn’t foresee at all, she has no way of worrying about unforeseen side effects. Not “trying” to avoid them, she tries out designs in which many such side effects occur; most such designs are terrible (ask any engineer), but every now and then there is a serendipitous side effect: two or more unrelated functional systems interact to produce a bonus: multiple functions for single elements.
Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained)
The Tomb of Lanes Marcus, the Lanes whom you loved is not here in this tomb where you visit and weep for hours. The Lanes whom you loved is nearer, Marcus, when you close yourself in your room and gaze on his portrait; that image preserved all that was worthy in him; that image preserved all that you loved. Do you remember, Marcus, when you brought from the proconsul’s palace the famous painter from Cyrene, and as soon as he laid eyes on your friend, he tried to persuade you with his artist’s cunning that he should draw him, without question, as Hyacinth (that way the portrait would garner more fame)? But your Lanes didn’t put his beauty on loan like that; firmly opposing the man, he demanded to be portrayed not as Hyacinth, nor as anyone else, but as Lanes, son of Rhametichus, an Alexandrian.
Constantinos P. Cavafy (Selected Poems)
The Czech novelist Milan Kundera made a famous observation. ‘Kitsch,’ he wrote, ‘causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: how nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!’ Kitsch, in other words, is not about the thing observed but about the observer. It does not invite you to feel moved by the doll you are dressing so tenderly, but by yourself dressing the doll. All sentimentality is like this: it redirects emotion from the object to the subject, so as to create a fantasy of emotion without the real cost of feeling it. The kitsch object encourages you to think ‘look at me feeling this; how nice I am and how lovable’. That is why Oscar Wilde, referring to one of Dickens’s most sickly death-scenes, said that ‘a man must have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell’.
Roger Scruton (Confessions of a Heretic: Selected Essays)
Lincoln was raised in the thick of Old School Calvinism. In Kentucky and Indiana, his parents belonged to a fire-breathing sect called Separate Baptism, in which congregants heard—in the tradition of Jonathan Edward’s famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”—that they were bound for eternal hellfire, and nothing they could do or say or think would change their fate. Preachers did allow that a chosen few were ordained for grace and would be saved, but these fortunate ones had been selected by God before time began. As one Baptist preacher in Lincoln’s Kentucky explained it, “Long before the morning stars sang together . . . the Almighty looked down upon the ages yet unborn, as it were, in review before him, and selected one here and another there to enjoy eternal life and left the rest to the blackness of darkness forever.” Such Baptist ministers were so intense that it has been said that they “out-Calvined Calvin.
Joshua Wolf Shenk (Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness)
In addition to bearing him thirteen children, Soya was privileged to copy the 1,225-page War and Peace by hand eight times while Tolstoy was editing it, because Tolstoy needed clean drafts to send along to the publisher. She also helped him work on the less famous but equally essential book Resurrection about the many women he cheated on with her. In the final weeks of his life, the increasingly radical Tolstoy left his wife without telling her, refused to see her when she tracked him down, and then died ij a train station. But at least Soya was comforted by the fact Tolstoy also made sure that they never had any money. At this point he had already freed his serfs, renounced his title, and given away most of his wealth to the poor. Instead of his wife and kids, he left the entirety of his estate and future royalties to the fringe Doukhobor spiritual movement. Tolstoy was selected for the first Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901, but he turned it down because he knew the prize money would complicate things in his life, What could a man with a wife and about a dozen children possibly need money for?
Dana Schwartz (The White Man's Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon)
Winning will make you famous. Losing means certain death. The nation of Panem, formed from a post-apocalyptic North America, is a country that consists of a wealthy Capitol region surrounded by 12 poorer districts. Early in its history, a rebellion led by a 13th district against the Capitol resulted in its destruction and the creation of an annual televised event known as the Hunger Games. In punishment, and as a reminder of the power and grace of the Capitol, each district must yield one boy and one girl between the ages of 12 and 18 through a lottery system to participate in the games. The 'tributes' are chosen during the annual Reaping and are forced to fight to the death, leaving only one survivor to claim victory. When 16-year-old Katniss's young sister, Prim, is selected as District 12's female representative, Katniss volunteers to take her place. She and her male counterpart Peeta, are pitted against bigger, stronger representatives, some of whom have trained for this their whole lives. , she sees it as a death sentence. But Katniss has been close to death before. For her, survival is second nature.
Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1))
In another famous study, introverts and extroverts were asked to play a challenging word game in which they had to learn, through trial and error, the governing principle of the game. While playing, they wore headphones that emitted random bursts of noise. They were asked to adjust the volume of their headsets up or down to the level that was “just right.” On average, the extroverts chose a noise level of 72 decibels, while the introverts selected only 55 decibels. When working at the volume that they had selected—loud for the extroverts, quiet for the introverts—the two types were about equally aroused (as measured by their heart rates and other indicators). They also played equally well. When the introverts were asked to work at the noise level preferred by the extroverts, and vice versa, everything changed. Not only were the introverts over-aroused by the loud noise, but they also underperformed—taking an average of 9.1 trials rather than 5.8 to learn the game. The opposite was true for the extroverts—they were under-aroused (and possibly bored) by the quieter conditions, and took an average of 7.3 trials, compared with the 5.4 they’d averaged under noisier conditions.
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
IN THE SMALL Ohio town where I grew up, many homes had parlors that contained pianos, sideboards, and sofas, heavy objects signifying gentility. These pianos were rarely tuned. They went flat in summer around the Fourth of July and sharp in winter at Christmas. Ours was a Story and Clark. On its music stand were copies of Stephen Foster and Ethelbert Nevin favorites, along with one Chopin prelude that my mother would practice for twenty minutes every three years. She had no patience, but since she thought Ohio—all of it, every scrap—made sense, she was happy and did not need to practice anything. Happiness is not infectious, but somehow her happiness infected my father, a pharmacist, and then spread through the rest of the household. My whole family was obstinately cheerful. I think of my two sisters, my brother, and my parents as having artificial, pasted-on smiles, like circus clowns. They apparently thought cheer and good Christian words were universals, respected everywhere. The pianos were part of this cheer. They played for celebrations and moments of pleasant pain. Or rather, someone played them, but not too well, since excellent playing would have been faintly antisocial. “Chopin,” my mother said, shaking her head as she stumbled through the prelude. “Why is he famous?
Charles Baxter (Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (Vintage Contemporaries))
I was dumbfounded to witness this specimen of male beauty in such a compromising position. I had never imagined finding the famous Rick Samuels in a dungeon, let alone in such a vulnerable and decubitus posture. He was my visiting lecturer, who had advised me to be selective in posing pornographically and for high art. He specifically told me that he was careful not to associate himself in the porn industry. Here he was, lying bare among men whom he did not know or have the vision to see. They were using him as a sex object, gratifying themselves regardless of how he felt. The men took turns pumping their swollen instruments into both his orifices until they could stave off their cravings no longer before they released their loads into Rick’s welcoming openings. He was the ‘power bottom,’ otherwise known to the gay underground community as a ‘cum pig’ or a ‘pig bottom.’ That evening was an eye-opener and a reformation. It reaffirmed men’s double standards in their words and actions for me. They were just like seasoned politicians, who promise a world of positive reforms before election. When elected to office, their promises are thrown to the wind. A set of new rules for personal gains then take effect. Thus is the nature of mankind. That evening, Andy, I learned an important lesson that humankind has its strengths and foibles. It is therefore worth the effort to take a closer look at a person’s character instead of embracing the superficiality that could often cloud a sound judgment. My beloved ex-’big brother,’ I am positive in my heart of hearts that you are an honorable gentleman of your word. From the first time I met you to our recent reconnection, you will always be the man I respect, honor, cherish, and, most importantly, LOVE. Young.
Young (Unbridled (A Harem Boy's Saga, #2))
During the last three years and a half, hundreds of American men, women, and children have been murdered on the high seas and in Mexico. Mr. Wilson has not dared to stand up for them...He wrote Germany that he would hold her to "strict accountability" if an American lost his life on an American or neutral ship by her submarine warfare. Forthwith the Arabic and the Gulflight were sunk. But Mr. Wilson dared not take any action...Germany despised him; and the Lusitania was sunk in consequence. Thirteen hundred and ninety-four people were drowned, one hundred and three of them babies under two years of age. Two days later, when the dead mothers with their dead babies in their arms lay by the scores in the Queenstown morgue, Mr. Wilson selected the moment as opportune to utter his famous sentence about being "too proud to fight." Roosevelt threw his speech script to the floor and continued in near absolute silence. Mr Wilson now dwells at Shadow Lawn. There should be shadows enough at Shadow Lawn: the shadows of men, women, and children who have risen from the ooze of the ocean bottom and from graves in foreign lands; the shadows of the helpless who Mr. Wilson did not dare protect lest he might have to face danger; the shadows of babies gasping pitifully as they sank under the waves; the shadows of women outraged and slain by bandits; the shadows of troopers who lay in the Mexican desert, the black blood crusted round their mouths, and their dim eyes looking upward, because President Wilson had sent them to do a task, and then shamefully abandoned them to the mercy of foes who knew no mercy. Those are the shadows proper for Shadow Lawn: the shadows of deeds that were never done; the shadows of lofty words that were followed by no action; the shadows of the tortured dead.
Edmund Morris (Colonel Roosevelt (Theodore Roosevelt))
The Extraordinary Persons Project In fact, Ekman had been so moved personally—and intrigued scientifically—by his experiments with Öser that he announced at the meeting he was planning on pursuing a systematic program of research studies with others as unusual as Öser. The single criterion for selecting apt subjects was that they be “extraordinary.” This announcement was, for modern psychology, an extraordinary moment in itself. Psychology has almost entirely dwelt on the problematic, the abnormal, and the ordinary in its focus. Very rarely have psychologists—particularly ones as eminent as Paul Ekman—shifted their scientific lens to focus on people who were in some sense (other than intellectually) far above normal. And yet Ekman now was proposing to study people who excel in a range of admirable human qualities. His announcement makes one wonder why psychology hasn't done this before. In fact, only in very recent years has psychology explicitly begun a program to study the positive in human nature. Sparked by Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania long famous for his research on optimism, a budding movement has finally begun in what is being called “positive psychology”—the scientific study of well-being and positive human qualities. But even within positive psychology, Ekman's proposed research would stretch science's vision of human goodness by assaying the limits of human positivity Ever the scientist, Ekman became quite specific about what was meant by “extraordinary.” For one, he expects that such people exist in every culture and religious tradition, perhaps most often as contemplatives. But no matter what religion they practice, they share four qualities. The first is that they emanate a sense of goodness, a palpable quality of being that others notice and agree on. This goodness goes beyond some fuzzy, warm aura and reflects with integrity the true person. On this count Ekman proposed a test to weed out charlatans: In extraordinary people “there is a transparency between their personal and public life, unlike many charismatics, who have wonderful public lives and rather deplorable personal ones.” A second quality: selflessness. Such extraordinary people are inspiring in their lack of concern about status, fame, or ego. They are totally unconcerned with whether their position or importance is recognized. Such a lack of egoism, Ekman added, “from the psychological viewpoint, is remarkable.” Third is a compelling personal presence that others find nourishing. “People want to be around them because it feels good—though they can't explain why,” said Ekman. Indeed, the Dalai Lama himself offers an obvious example (though Ekman did not say so to him); the standard Tibetan title is not “Dalai Lama” but rather “Kundun,” which in Tibetan means “presence.” Finally, such extraordinary individuals have “amazing powers of attentiveness and concentration.
Daniel Goleman (Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama)
Jung famously said that about a third of his cases weren’t suffering from some clinically definable illness, but from a sense of meaninglessness and aimlessness. Jung believed he could help them find some meaning. It had been his own quest, and understandably he felt he could help others in theirs. In a way, one could say Jung built his Tower so he would have a safe space for himself and some selected others to go crazy, without having to deal with the incomprehension of outsiders. Most people who visited the Tower certainly felt it had an unusual atmosphere. Jung had some strange relationship with his pots and utensils; he spoke with them, believing they had souls, and required his guests to as well, and he insisted that the stove in his Küsnacht study was human.39 He also felt the same about a bronze box that stored his tobacco, and even named it Habbakuk. 40 It isn’t surprising to read that at the Tower Jung could immerse himself deeply in active imagination, often sitting for long periods in utter stillness, in a room set apart for this, where he painted his fantasies on the wall. He would see images and faces in stone and then slowly carve them; one stone in particular, a huge “perfect cube” Jung received from a quarry by mistake, became a favorite, and over the years Jung worked on it, carving on its surface alchemical, Greek, and Latin sayings.41
Gary Lachman (Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings)
Salespeople are famous for lack of discipline and losing focus. They attempt to call on an account (once), but don’t get anywhere. Instead of sharpening their weapons and continuing to attack the same strategically selected targets, they turn and pursue a new set of prospects. This constant change of direction becomes their death knell because they never gain traction against the defined target set.
Mike Weinberg (New Sales. Simplified.: The Essential Handbook for Prospecting and New Business Development)
Excerpted From Chapter One “Rock of Ages” floated lightly down the first floor corridor of the Hollywood Hotel’s west wing. It was Sunday morning, and Hattie Mae couldn’t go to church because she had to work, so she praised the Lord in her own way, but she praised Him softly out of consideration for the “Do Not Disturb” placards hanging from the doors she passed with her wooden cart full of fresh linens and towels. Actually Sundays were Hattie Mae’s favorite of the six days she worked each week. For one thing, her shift ended at noon on Sundays. For another, this was the day Miss Lillian always left a “little something” in her room to thank Hattie Mae for such good maid service. Most of the hotel’s long-term guests left a little change for their room maids, but in Miss Lillian’s case, the tip was usually three crinkly new one dollar bills. It seemed like an awful lot of money to Hattie Mae, whose weekly pay was only nineteen dollars. Still, Miss Lillian Lawrence could afford to be generous because she was a famous actress in the movies. She was also, Hattie Mae thought, a very fine lady. When Hattie Mae reached the end of the corridor, she knocked quietly on Miss Lillian’s door. It was still too early for most guests to be out of their rooms, but Miss Lillian was always up with the sun, not like some lazy folks who laid around in their beds ‘til noon, often making Hattie Mae late for Sunday dinner because she couldn’t leave until all the rooms along her corridor were made up. After knocking twice, Hattie Mae tried Miss Lillian’s door. It opened, so after selecting the softest towels from the stacks on her cart, she walked in. With the curtains drawn the room was dark, but Hattie Mae didn’t stop to switch on the overheard light because her arms were full of towels. The maid’s eyes were on the chest of drawers to her right where Miss Lillian always left her tip, so she didn’t see the handbag on the floor just inside the door. Hattie Mae tripped over the bag and fell headlong to the floor, landing inches from the dead body of Lillian Lawrence. In the dim light Hattie Mae stared into a pale face with a gaping mouth and a trickle of blood from a small red dot above one vacant green eye. Hattie Mae screamed at the top of her lungs and kept on screaming.
H.P. Oliver (Silents!)
Every year I collect a select amount of material possessions (baseball cards, coins, famous paraphernalia) to pass on to my children. In two or more generations they should have a small fortune of 'ancient' famous items.
Akutra-Ramses Atenosis Cea
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The largest, longest study of experts’ economic forecasts was performed by Philip Tetlock, a professor at the Haas Business School of the University of California–Berkeley. He studied 82,000 predictions over 25 years by 300 selected experts. Tetlock concludes that expert predictions barely beat random guesses. Ironically, the more famous the expert, the less accurate his or her predictions tended to be.
Burton G. Malkiel (The Elements of Investing: Easy Lessons for Every Investor)
On one occasion, someone asked a famous American musician, Ben Harper, this question: “We’ve heard you now have a new drummer in your band. Tell me something: is he black?” And Harper replied: “I don’t know, I’ve never asked him.
Mia Couto (Pensativities: Selected Essays)
It was only after World War II that Stanford began to emerge as a center of technical excellence, owing largely to the campaigns of Frederick Terman, dean of the School of Engineering and architect-of-record of the military-industrial-academic complex that is Silicon Valley. During World War II Terman had been tapped by his own mentor, presidential science advisor Vannevar Bush, to run the secret Radio Research Lab at Harvard and was determined to capture a share of the defense funding the federal government was preparing to redirect toward postwar academic research. Within a decade he had succeeded in turning the governor’s stud farm into the Stanford Industrial Park, instituted a lucrative honors cooperative program that provided a camino real for local companies to put selected employees through a master’s degree program, and overseen major investments in the most promising areas of research. Enrollments rose by 20 percent, and over one-third of entering class of 1957 started in the School of Engineering—more than double the national average.4 As he rose from chairman to dean to provost, Terman was unwavering in his belief that engineering formed the heart of a liberal education and labored to erect his famous “steeples of excellence” with strategic appointments in areas such as semiconductors, microwave electronics, and aeronautics. Design, to the extent that it was a recognized field at all, remained on the margins, the province of an older generation of draftsmen and machine builders who were more at home in the shop than the research laboratory—a situation Terman hoped to remedy with a promising new hire from MIT: “The world has heard very little, if anything, of engineering design at Stanford,” he reported to President Wallace Sterling, “but they will be hearing about it in the future.
Barry M. Katz (Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design (The MIT Press))
In this chapter we will look at the entire edifice of QFT. We will see that it is based on three simple principles. We will also list some of its achievements, including some new insights and understandings not previously mentioned. THE FOUNDATION QFT is an axiomatic theory that rests on a few basic assumptions. Everything you have learned so far, from the force of gravity to the spectrum of hydrogen, follows almost inevitably from these three basic principles. (To my knowledge, Julian Schwinger is the only person who has presented QFT in this axiomatic way, at least in the amazing courses he taught at Harvard University in the 1950's.) 1. The field principle. The first pillar is the assumption that nature is made of fields. These fields are embedded in what physicists call flat or Euclidean three-dimensional space-the kind of space that you intuitively believe in. Each field consists of a set of physical properties at every point of space, with equations that describe how these particles or field intensities influence each other and change with time. In QFT there are no particles, no round balls, no sharp edges. You should remember, however, that the idea of fields that permeate space is not intuitive. It eluded Newton, who could not accept action-at-a-distance. It wasn't until 1845 that Faraday, inspired by patterns of iron filings, first conceived of fields. The use of colors is my attempt to make the field picture more palatable. 2. The quantum principle (discetization). The quantum principle is the second pillar, following from Planck's 1900 proposal that EM fields are made up of discrete pieces. In QFT, all physical properties are treated as having discrete values. Even field strengths, whose values are continues, are regarded as the limit of increasingly finer discrete values. The principle of discretization was discovered experimentally in 1922 by Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach. Their experiment (Fig. 7-1) showed that the angular momentum (or spin) of the electron in a given direction can have only two values: +1/2 or -1/2 (Fig. 7-1). The principle of discretization leads to another important difference between quantum and classical fields: the principle of superposition. Because the angular momentum along a certain axis can only have discrete values (Fig. 7-1), this means that atoms whose angular momentum has been determined along a different axis are in a superposition of states defined by the axis of the magnet. This same superposition principle applies to quantum fields: the field intensity at a point can be a superposition of values. And just as interaction of the atom with a magnet "selects" one of the values with corresponding probabilities, so "measurement" of field intensity at a point will select one of the possible values with corresponding probability (see "Field Collapse" in Chapter 8). It is discretization and superposition that lead to Hilbert space as the mathematical language of QFT. 3. The relativity principle. There is one more fundamental assumption-that the field equations must be the same for all uniformly-moving observers. This is known as the Principle of Relativity, famously enunciated by Einstein in 1905 (see Appendix A). Relativistic invariance is built into QFT as the third pillar. QFT is the only theory that combines the relativity and quantum principles.
Rodney A. Brooks (Fields of Color: The theory that escaped Einstein)
If your father was just an ordinary father and told everybody he had no son, people would call him a liar. But if your father was famous for all the saints he was making and said he had no son, then he had no son, period.
Gina Berriault (Stolen Pleasures: Selected Stories of Gina Berriault)
I have always fancied myself as a fairly objective looker, but I’m beginning to wonder whether I do not miss whole categories of things. Let me give you an example of what I mean, Alicia. Some years ago the U.S. Information Service paid the expenses of a famous and fine Italian photographer to go to America and to take pictures of our country. It was thought that pictures by an Italian would be valuable to Italians because they would be of things of interest to Italy. I was living in Florence at the time and I saw the portfolio as soon as the pictures were printed. The man had traveled everywhere in America, and do you know what his pictures were? Italy, in every American city he had unconsciously sought and found Italy. The portraits—Italians; the countryside—Tuscany and the Po Valley and the Abruzzi. His eye looked for what was familiar to him and found it. . . . This man did not see the America which is not like Italy, and there is very much that isn’t. And I wonder what I have missed in the wonderful trip to the south that I have just completed. Did I see only America? I confess I caught myself at it. Traveling over those breathtaking mountains and looking down at the shimmering deserts . . . I found myself saying or agreeing—yes, that’s like the Texas panhandle— that could be Nevada, and that might be Death Valley. . . . [B]y identifying them with something I knew, was I not cutting myself off completely from the things I did not know, not seeing, not even recognizing, because I did not have the easy bridge of recognition . . . the shadings, the nuance, how many of those I must not have seen. (Newsday, 2 Apr. 1966)
John Steinbeck (America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction)
Why do men feel threatened by women?" I asked a male friend of mine. - - So this male friend of mine, who does by the way exist, conveniently entered into the following dialogue. "I mean," I said, "men are bigger, most of the time, they can run faster, strangle better, and they have on the average a lot more money and power." "They are afraid women will laugh at them," he said. "Undercut their world view." Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, "Why do women feel threatened by men?" "They're afraid of being killed," they said. * * * Margaret Atwood's famous quote ("Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them") in its original form. Source: 'Writing The Male Character' (1982), p. 413 in "Second Words – Selected Critical Prose 1960-1982" (2018)
Margaret Atwood
Why do men feel threatened by women?" I asked a male friend of mine. - - "They are afraid women will laugh at them," he said. "Undercut their world view." Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, "Why do women feel threatened by men?" "They're afraid of being killed," they said. * * * Margaret Atwood's famous quote ("men are afraid that women will laugh at them, women are afraid that men will kill them") in its original form. Source: 'Writing The Male Character' (1982), p. 413 in "Second Words – Selected Critical Prose 1960-1982" (2018)” * * *
Margaret Atwood (Second Words: Selected Critical Prose)
Lastly, the story that the Tapestry tells is inevitably selective and in places demonstrably inaccurate; some events are left out and others are deliberately distorted. No other source, for example, suggests that Harold swore his famous oath to William at Bayeux, or that it was Odo who heroically turned the tide for the Normans during the Battle of Hastings. The Tapestry, it bears repeating, is really an embroidery.
Marc Morris (The Norman Conquest: The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon England)
Nietzsche’s most famous views are his earliest ones: the accounts of the Apollonian and Dionysian “art-drives” (Kunsttrieben) in The Birth of Tragedy. Already there, let’s note, Nietzsche is explaining aesthetic experience by “drives”. But in that first book these drives are mainly thought of in Schopenhauer’s way, as manifestations of a metaphysical, noumenal will. This early aesthetics is premised as responding to this noumenal reality: both Apollonian and Dionysian art drives are ways of coping with that reality of Schopenhauerian will. But Nietzsche soon insists on thinking of drives scientifically—not only of what they are (the body’s abilities), but of why we have them (evolution by selection)... It’s in aesthetics that this step into naturalism moves Nietzsche furthest from Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer had depicted our aesthetic experience as (unlike intellect) genuinely a disengagement from willing: it really achieves the objectivity we only thought we could have in our science. But Nietzsche insists that it too expresses a (naturalized) will and drive—and “serves life” by making us more fit. As such, the aesthetic attitude is not “disinterested” or “disengaged” at all, as not just Schopenhauer but Kant had found it. Nietzsche now scorns their notion of it. The aesthetic attitude in fact involves a heightening of our engagement and feeling. These drives, in which art and aesthetic experience are ultimately rooted, are something ancient and fixed in us. Indeed, artistic drives have been designed into all organisms. They were set into our bodies and our “blood” in our presocietal deep history, and persist there today beneath the layers of customs and habits that societies have superimposed on them (to exploit them, or counteract them, or both). By acting on these drives, beauty works on the “animal” in us—directly on the body, on the “muscles and senses” (WP809 [1888]), and the drives embedded in them. Our bodies themselves have a taste for certain kinds of beauty—above all the beauty of human bodies.
John Richardson, Nietzsche's New Darwinism
End of May 2012 The continuation of my email to Andy: …I was delighted to return to London after war-ravaged Belfast. The students in our college had to evacuate several times due to IRA bomb threats. I must have subconsciously selected to be in Northern Ireland because of my unsettling inner upheavals. Much like the riots that went on in the city in 1971, I was unconsciously fighting my inner demons within myself. I needed that year to overcome my sexual additions and to immerse myself in my fashion studies. By the following year, I had compiled an impressive fashion design portfolio for application with various London Art and Design colleges. Foundation students generally required two years to complete their studies. I graduated from the Belfast College of Art with flying colors within a year. By the autumn of 1972, I was accepted into the prestigious Harrow School of Art and Technology. Around that period, my father’s business was waning and my family had financial difficulty sponsoring my graduate studies. Unbeknownst to my family, I had earned sufficient money during my Harem services to comfortably put myself through college. I lied to my parents and told them I was working part-time in London to make ends meet so I could finance my fashion education. They believed my tall tale. For the next three years I put my heart and soul into my fashion projects. I would occasionally work as a waiter at the famous Rainbow Room in Biba, which is now defunct. Working at this dinner dance club was a convenient way of meeting beautiful and trendy patrons, who often visit this capricious establishment.
Young (Unbridled (A Harem Boy's Saga, #2))
Scientists, famously, use a lot of mathematics, at least in many disciplines (including both cognitive science and economics). Much of this is simply statistics, and derives from the importance of exact measurement. But that is not the whole story. Natural languages and the distinctions they draw are evolutionary products shaped by the interaction of cultural and genetic selection. They therefore encode, in deeply embedded and mutually reinforcing levels, distinctions important to folk theories—that is, the nonscientific social-cognitive structures that organize relationships important to special human purposes. Mathematical language is quite different, and this reflects differences between the nature of mathematical and of practical reasoning. Mathematical reasoning begins from sets of rigorously fixed procedural concepts, and these fixed points then have absolute authority, relative to special purposes in application, over what can and cannot be stated in the language. If we suspect there may be some particular structural fact but cannot figure out how to express it mathematically, this does not show that there is no such fact; but it implies that we must do some more work, either logical or empirical or both, before we can say that we are quite sure just what the putative structural fact is that we are trying to claim.
Don Ross
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Standing out from the (New York City) map's delicate tracery of gridirons representing streets are heavy lines, lines girdling the city or slashing across its expanses. These lines denote the major roads on which automobiles and trucks move, roads whose very location, moreover, does as much as any single factor to determine where and how a city's people live and work. With a single exception, the East River Drive, Robert Moses built every one of those roads. (...) Only one borough of New York City—the Bronx—is on the mainland of the United States, and bridges link the island boroughs that form metropolis. Since 1931, seven such bridges were built, immense structures, some of them anchored by towers as tall as seventy-story buildings, supported by cables made up of enough wire to drop a noose around the earth. (...) Robert Moses built every one of those bridges. (He also built) Lincoln Center, the world's most famous, costly and imposing cultural complex. Alongside another stands the New York Coliseum, the glowering exhibition tower whose name reveals Moses' preoccupation with achieving an immortality like that conferred on the Caesars of Rome. The eastern edge of Manhattan Island, heart of metropolis, was completely altered between 1945 and 1958. (...) Robert Moses was never a member of the Housing Authority and his relationship with it was only hinted at in the press. But between 1945 and 1958 no site for public housing was selected and no brick of a public housing project laid without his approval. And still further north along the East River stand the buildings of the United Nations headquarters. Moses cleared aside the obstacles to bringing to New York the closest thing to a world capitol the planet possesses, and he supervised its construction. When Robert Moses began building playgrounds in New York City, there were 119. When he stopped, there were 777. Under his direction, an army of men that at times during the Depression included 84,000 laborers. (...) For the seven years between 1946 and 1953, no public improvement of any type—not school or sewer, library or pier, hospital or catch basin—was built by any city agency, even those which Robert Moses did not directly control, unless Moses approved its design and location. To clear the land for these improvements, he evicted the city's people, not thousands of them or tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands, from their homes and tore the homes down. Neighborhoods were obliterated by his edict to make room for new neighborhoods reared at his command. “Out from the heart of New York, reaching beyond the limits of the city into its vast suburbs and thereby shaping them as well as the city, stretch long ribbons of concrete, closed, unlike the expressways, to trucks and all commercial traffic, and, unlike the expressways, bordered by lawns and trees. These are the parkways. There are 416 miles of them. Robert Moses built every mile. (He also built the St. Lawrence Dam,) one of the most colossal single works of man, a structure of steel and concrete as tall as a ten-story apartment house, an apartment house as long as eleven football fields, a structure vaster by far than any of the pyramids, or, in terms of bulk, of any six pyramids together. And at Niagara, Robert Moses built a series of dams, parks and parkways that make the St. Lawrence development look small. His power was measured in decades. On April 18, 1924, ten years after he had entered government, it was formally handed to him. For forty-four years thereafter (until 1968), he held power, a power so substantial that in the field s in which he chose to exercise it, it was not challenged seriously by any (of 6) Governors of New York State or by any Mayor of New York City.
Robert Caro
My mother gets up and puts the needle back to the start of the record or onto a select song. Light ones, famous with tourists, aren't her favorites. She prefers those that tear like an ache in your heart. Afterwards, she exhales a deep breath and looks up as if she is waking to the clap of a hypnotist. She leaves the smoky club, the sulfurous streetlights, the even darker cars, the clouds of ouzo in glasses, plates of chicken livers crusted with oregano and salt, and the man with a mustache at the door who calls the hat check girl his 'little doll.
Georgia Scott (American Girl: Memories That Made Me)
Richard N. Gardner, The Hard Road to World Order, Foreign Affairs, Volume 52 No. 3, pg. 558. If instant world government, Charter review, and a greatly strengthened International Court do not provide the answers, what hope for progress is there? The answer will not satisfy those who seek simple solutions to complex problems, but it comes down essentially to this: The hope for the foreseeable lies, not in building up a few ambitious central institutions of universal membership and general jurisdiction as was envisaged at the end of the last war, but rather in the much more decentralized, disorderly and pragmatic process of inventing or adapting institutions of limited jurisdiction and selected membership to deal with specific problems on a case-by-case basis … In short, the ‘house of world order’ will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great ‘booming, buzzing confusion,’ to use William James’ famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.
Richard N. Gardner
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Lijecab
Nerida Seafood Bar and Restaurant located in Ensenada, Mexico brings the best of Ensenada's fresh Seafood mixed with a great family friendly ambience. Famous for the best oyster shots in town, Nerida has set a precedence for an amazing experience. Since it's opening, Nerida Seafood Bar has become a local favorite as well as a popular destination for the many thousands of visitors to Ensenada. Our menu is uniquely tailored, offering you a boatload of fresh fish selections to choose from, your preferred seasoning and a choice between having it all tucked within a taco, sandwich, salad, or on a plate.
Nerida Seafood Bar
America’s environmentally oriented social scientists did not need the mailed fist of a Stalin to triumph over their opponents. With such forceful intellects as [Franz] Boas, [A. L.] Kroeber, [Margaret] Mead, [Ruth] Benedict, [John B.] Watson, and [B. F.] Skinner fighting their cause, they sailed to victory, greatly aided by the political winds at their rear. Heady with success, they made ever wilder claims for the environment’s molding power over humans—and made ever more disdainful dismissals of genetic contributions. As with many who announce new concepts about human behavior, the innovators, emboldened by the cordial reception their insights received, leap from moderate positions of partial environmental influence to sweeping pronouncements of total governance. And if the founders themselves didn’t raise the stakes in this way, their disciples were sure to do it for them. This dynamic held true for the theories of Freud, Boas, and Watson. In the latter case, Watson did the escalating himself. While Watson’s writings continued to acknowledge inherited traits, his euphoria at having unlocked the secrets of human behavior moved him to make the now famous statement: “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocation, and race of his ancestors.
William Wright (Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality)
When human feelings collide, emotions cultivate their distinctive sensitivities.
Bhuwan Thapaliya (Safa Tempo: Poems New & Selected)
The famous and rich, even the learned and wise, Singly or in pairs went to her dwelling To press their civilized lips to her thighs Or learn at first hand her buttocks' swelling "Old nicoise whore
Irving Layton (The Selected Poems)
And then we watched, as if on cue, a bull charge Jidada’s most famous celebrity Prophet, lift him by the horns, and fling him, shrieking, so high up in the air it actually looked like he’d reach heaven. We roared and cheered in tremendous applause that said we were done with false prophets and false pastors and false religious leaders who fleeced us of our hard-earned moneys in the name of God, who connived with the Seat of Power to keep us oppressed by telling us who to vote for, by telling us the blatant lie that our leaders were selected by God, by telling us to stay away from politics.
NoViolet Bulawayo (Glory)
If there were captions explaining their history next to these dedications they would be proof of the richness of relationships in Panikkar’s life and of how my collection came from many directions. In order to sing my glories, I will select names of several famous authors who gave their books with dedications to Panikkar and to me: Francesco Alberoni, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Bettina Baümer, Massimo Cacciari, Enrico Castelli, Emil Cioran, Victoria Cirlot, Oscar Cullman, Jacques Albert Cuttat, Henri e Lubac, Mircea Eliade, Jean Guitton, Alois Maria Haas, Martin Heidegger, Johannes Kakichi Kadowaki, Károly Kerényi, Ursula King, Serge Latouche, Javier Meloni, Salvador Pániker, Octavio Paz, Emanuele Severino, Raniero La Valle, Amador Vega, Uma Marina Vesci,
Maciej Bielawski (The Song of a Library (Calligrammi))
The Secret on How to Write Comedy In a fashionable context, comedy is a subjective element. Making humans funny is an incredibly difficult job and developing a chunk of comedy is even more difficult. If you are an aspiring comedy writer, there is loads to be found out and Filipino concert in Las Vegas( ticklemecomedy.com) in case you lack that writing skills, there's no way you may produce an excellent comedy piece. So how do you write stuff that is actually funny and will make everyone roll round in laughter? Are there definitely techniques on how to write comedy or steps with a view to decorate your comedic writing? Maybe these are the questions rambling around your thoughts now. Well, happily, there are some easy strategies on for writing humorous cloth. Tips on How to Write Comedy Like all different forms of writing, comedy writing is no one of a kind. It additionally takes exercise to get it right. Some comedic writers might also master the artwork of comedy writing with only a little exercise while a few conflict lots before getting Filipino show in Las Vegas to know it. With that being said, every person who wants to realize the secret to writing high-quality comedy need to consider some easy pointers. Whether you come to be being funny or no longer, the most essential element is which you have discovered how to excellent write comedic cloth and are capable of produce quality comedy pieces. To assist you emerge as a very good comedic writer, beneath are some guidelines. • Choose the type of comedy - One tip on how to write comedic portions is to pick out the type of humor you need to exhibit. There are various forms of comedy along with slapstick, parody, dark humor, edgy humor, own family humor, dry observational humor, and plenty of others. You simply need to select one in your comedy piece and paintings on it. Failure to consciousness on one sort of humor will end result on your audience being careworn. • Use warfare - Another golden rule is to discover the battle in anything and play on the boundaries. Professional comedic writers say that anger is frequently the middle of all comedy. But this doesn't suggest however that you need to be a raging psycho simply so one can realize the way to write comedy. This virtually approach that you got to have the ability to address a conflict in a humorous manner. • Carefully choose your words - Successful comedic playwrights realize nicely the way to maximize the comedic impact. Obviously, they are experts in finding the funniest in everything. Choose phrases that sound funny and discover ways to tweak your paintings to give you actual funny piece. • Know how and whilst to magnify - In comedy, "extra" is generally better. Think approximately conditions that might be funnier if things have been exaggerated a chunk. Something mildly humorous can quickly Las Vegas Filipino shows become hilarious with a little bit of embellishment. • Timing - In comedy, timing is the whole thing. It is a totally critical component in writing comedy. You want to inject the proper joke inside the proper location and in the right time. This is in which your punch traces ought to appear. This also manner understanding whilst to end. But take word that timing depends significantly at the sort of comedy you're pursuing. Practice makes best After being given these few hints on how to write comedy, you need to have a terrific begin composing fine, comedic work. But as the famous adage says "Practice makes best" so preserve to exercise and work at your stuff. You don't always want to be intrinsically humorous to study comedic writing but it'll help.
Saima Mir
In November of 1997, the New Jersey–based independent radio station WFMU broadcast a live forty-seven-minute interview with Ronald Thomas Clontle, the author of an upcoming book titled Rock, Rot & Rule. The book, billed as “the ultimate argument settler,” was (theoretically) a listing of almost every musical artist of the past fifty years, with each act designated as “rocking,” “rotting,” or “ruling” (with most of the research conducted in a coffeehouse in Lawrence, Kansas). The interview was, of course, a now semi-famous hoax. The book is not real and “Ronald Thomas Clontle” was actually Jon Wurster, the drummer for indie bands like Superchunk and (later) the Mountain Goats. Rock, Rot & Rule is a signature example of what’s now awkwardly classified as “late-nineties alt comedy,” performed at the highest possible level—the tone is understated, the sensibility is committed and absurd, and the unrehearsed chemistry between Wurster and the program’s host (comedian Tom Scharpling) is otherworldly. The sketch would seem like the ideal comedic offering for the insular audience of WFMU, a self-selecting group of sophisticated music obsessives from the New York metropolitan area. Yet when one relistens to the original Rock, Rot & Rule broadcast, the most salient element is not the comedy. It’s the apoplectic phone calls from random WFMU listeners. The callers do not recognize this interview as a hoax, and they’re definitely not “ironic” or “apathetic.” They display none of the savvy characteristics now associated with nineties culture. Their anger is almost innocent.
Chuck Klosterman (The Nineties: A Book)
Freedom emanates light and illuminates our life.
Bhuwan Thapaliya (Safa Tempo: Poems New & Selected)
Life is not shallow. We have to dig deep to live.
Bhuwan Thapaliya (Safa Tempo: Poems New & Selected)
It takes a while, but all of us will find our path. That day is not far away.
Bhuwan Thapaliya (Safa Tempo: Poems New & Selected)
One day, we’ll be part of the eternal silence and vanish as the mist.
Bhuwan Thapaliya (Safa Tempo: Poems New & Selected)
Dart initially echoed Darwin’s theory that bipedalism freed the hands of early hominins to make and use hunting tools, which in turn selected for big brains, hence better hunting abilities. Then, in a famous 1953 paper, clearly influenced by his war experiences, Dart proposed that the first humans were not just hunters but also murderous predators.18 Dart’s words are so astonishing, you have to read them: The loathsome cruelty of mankind to man forms one of his inescapable characteristics and differentiative features; and it is explicable only in terms of his carnivorous, and cannibalistic origin. The blood-bespattered, slaughter-gutted archives of human history from the earliest Egyptian and Sumerian records to the most recent atrocities of the Second World War accord with early universal cannibalism, with animal and human sacrificial practices of their substitutes in formalized religions and with the world-wide scalping, head-hunting, body-mutilating and necrophilic practices of mankind in proclaiming this common bloodlust differentiator, this predaceous habit, this mark of Cain that separates man dietetically from his anthropoidal relatives and allies him rather with the deadliest of Carnivora. Dart’s killer-ape hypothesis, as it came to be known, was popularized by the journalist Robert Ardrey in a best-selling book, African Genesis, that found a ready audience in a generation disillusioned by two world wars, the Cold War, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, political assassinations, and widespread political unrest.19 The killer-ape hypothesis left an indelible stamp on popular culture including movies like Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange. But the Rousseauians weren’t dead yet. Reanalyses of bones in the limestone pits from which fossils like the Taung Baby came showed they were killed by leopards, not early humans.20 Further studies revealed these early hominins were mostly vegetarians. And as a reaction to decades of bellicosity, many scientists in the 1970s embraced evidence for humans’ nicer side, especially gathering, food sharing, and women’s roles. The most widely discussed and audacious hypothesis, proposed by Owen Lovejoy, was that the first hominins were selected to become bipeds to be more cooperative and less aggressive.21 According to Lovejoy, early hominin females favored males who were better at walking upright and thus better able to carry food with which to provision them. To entice these tottering males to keep coming back with food, females encouraged exclusive long-term monogamous relationships by concealing their menstrual cycles and having permanently large breasts (female chimps advertise when they ovulate with eye-catching swellings, and their breasts shrink when they are not nursing). Put crudely, females selected for cooperative males by exchanging sex for food. If so, then selection against reactive aggression and frequent fighting is as old as the hominin lineage.22
Daniel E. Lieberman (Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding)
JFK Assassination The general premise of the situation is that President John F. Kennedy rode through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. Shots rang out, and the resulting barrage of bullets ended with the President being fatally shot in the head. An event that was caught on tape by the famous film shot by Abraham Zapruder. [1] The assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was caught the same day after shooting a Dallas police officer. Two days later, he was killed, again on camera, by Jack Ruby with one shot to the abdomen. The new President, former Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, put together the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination. They concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, and closed the book on the case. This conclusion meant that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine with questionable marksman skills using an archaic bolt-action rifle, would have to fire 3 shots within 8 to 11 seconds. It required that he aim and fire at a moving target, pull back the bolt to release the shell, and then aim and fire again. He would aim and fire one more time before it was over, but was he the only one firing? This wasn't good enough for the American people, and the case was revisited with a new investigation in 1978. The House Select Committee on Assassinations simply concluded that the killing was the result of a conspiracy, and that was it. For 50+ years, we have been left to theorize and hypothesize about what happened in Dealey Plaza that day. A new idea was presented to the public on the 50th anniversary of the event in November 2013 that theorized the final shot that exploded Kennedy's head was accidental. This idea theorized that the shot came from a Secret Service agent in the follow-up vehicle. The agent had retrieved an assault rifle from the floorboard of the limo, and when the vehicle lunged, he fired the fatal shot. This action was followed by an extensive cover-up to save the agency from public embarrassment. I don't think we will ever know what really happened that day. [2]
Ava Fails (Conspiracy Theory 101: A Researcher's Starting Point)
That’s frustratingly common. “I’ve evaluated thousands of quartz samples from all over the world,” said John Schlanz, chief minerals processing engineer at the Minerals Research Laboratory in Asheville, about an hour from Spruce Pine. “Near all of them have contaminate locked in the quartz grains that you can’t get out.” Some Spruce Pine quartz is flawed in this way. Those grains, the washouts from the Delta Force of the quartz selection process, are used for high-end beach sand and golf course bunkers—most famously the salt-white traps of Augusta National Golf Club,16 site of the iconic Masters Tournament. A golf course in the oil-drunk United Arab Emirates imported 4,000 tons of this sand in 2008 to make sure its sand traps were world-class, too.
Vince Beiser (The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization)
Nietzsche’s most famous views are his earliest ones: the accounts of the Apollonian and Dionysian “art-drives” (Kunsttrieben) in The Birth of Tragedy. Already there, let’s note, Nietzsche is explaining aesthetic experience by “drives”. But in that first book these drives are mainly thought of in Schopenhauer’s way, as manifestations of a metaphysical, noumenal will. This early aesthetics is premised as responding to this noumenal reality: both Apollonian and Dionysian art drives are ways of coping with that reality of Schopenhauerian will. But Nietzsche soon insists on thinking of drives scientifically—not only of what they are (the body’s abilities), but of why we have them (evolution by selection)... It’s in aesthetics that this step into naturalism moves Nietzsche furthest from Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer had depicted our aesthetic experience as (unlike intellect) genuinely a disengagement from willing: it really achieves the objectivity we only thought we could have in our science. But Nietzsche insists that it too expresses a (naturalized) will and drive—and “serves life” by making us more fit. As such, the aesthetic attitude is not “disinterested” or “disengaged” at all, as not just Schopenhauer but Kant had found it. Nietzsche now scorns their notion of it. The aesthetic attitude in fact involves a heightening of our engagement and feeling. These drives, in which art and aesthetic experience are ultimately rooted, are something ancient and fixed in us. Indeed, artistic drives have been designed into all organisms. They were set into our bodies and our “blood” in our presocietal deep history, and persist there today beneath the layers of customs and habits that societies have superimposed on them (to exploit them, or counteract them, or both). By acting on these drives, beauty works on the “animal” in us—directly on the body, on the “muscles and senses” (WP809 [1888]), and the drives embedded in them. Our bodies themselves have a taste for certain kinds of beauty—above all the beauty of human bodies.
John Richardson (Nietzsche's New Darwinism)
Committing himself to the freelance’s life he lived at the edge of poverty, a southerner he stood outside of the literary establishment of new England. Poe’s pale expression in his most famous photo shows a man who believed he was born to suffer. If circumstances in his life were not propitious to suffering, he made sure to change them until they were, deep in his understanding almost as to be unconscious was a respect for the driving power of his misery. That it could take manifold forms in ways that he didn’t have to be aware of as if not he, but it could create. “ E.L. Doctorow on Edgar Allan Poe
E.L. Doctorow (Creationists: Selected Essays: 1993-2006)
In 1974, San Francisco newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by a radical group called the Symbionese Liberation Army, whose goals included “death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.” After being kept in a closet for a while, she came to identify with her new peer group. Before long, she was enthusiastically helping them generate income, at one point brandishing a machine gun during a bank robbery. When left alone, with an opportunity to escape, she didn’t take it. She later described the experience: “I had virtually no free will until I was separated from them for about two weeks. And then it suddenly, you know, slowly began to dawn that they just weren’t there anymore. I could actually think my own thoughts.” Hearst didn’t just accept her captors’ “subjective” beliefs, such as ideology; she bought into their views about how the physical world works. One of her captors “didn’t want me thinking about rescue because he thought that brain waves could be read or that, you know, they’d get a psychic in to find me. And I was even afraid of that.” Hearst’s condition of coerced credulity is called the Stockholm syndrome, after a kidnapping in Sweden. But the term “syndrome” may be misleading in its suggestion of abnormality. Hearst’s response to her circumstances was probably an example of human nature functioning properly; we seem to be “designed” by natural selection to be brainwashed. Some people find this prospect a shocking affront to human autonomy, but they tend not to be evolutionary psychologists. In Darwinian terms, it makes sense that our species could contain genes encouraging blind credulity in at least some situations. If you are surrounded by a small group of people on whom your survival depends, rejecting the beliefs that are most important to them will not help you live long enough to get your genes into the next generation. Confinement with a small group of people may sound so rare that natural selection would have little chance to take account of it, but it is in a sense the natural human condition. Humans evolved in small groups—twenty, forty, sixty people—from which emigration was often not a viable option. Survival depended on social support: sharing food, sticking together during fights, and so on. To alienate your peers by stubbornly contesting their heartfelt beliefs would have lowered your chances of genetic proliferation. Maybe that explains why you don’t have to lock somebody in a closet to get a bit of the Stockholm syndrome. Religious cults just offer aimless teenagers a free bus ride to a free meal, and after the recruits have been surrounded by believers for a few days, they tend to warm up to the beliefs. And there doesn’t have to be some powerful authority figure pushing the beliefs. In one famous social psychology experiment, subjects opined that two lines of manifestly different lengths were the same length, once a few of their “peers” (who were in fact confederates) voiced that opinion.
Robert Wright
Vestiges of this kind of crude learning mechanism in the human brain may incline people to see objects or places as inhabited by evil, a perception that figures in various religions. Hence, perhaps, the sense of dread that has been associated by some anthropologists with primitive religious experience. And what of the sense of awe that has also been identified with religious experience—most famously by the German theologian Rudolf Otto (who saw primordial religious awe as often intermingled with dread)? Was awe originally “designed” by natural selection for some nonreligious purpose? Certainly feelings of that general type sometimes overtake people confronted by other people who are overwhelmingly powerful. They crouch abjectly, beg desperately for mercy. (In the Persian Gulf War of 1991, after weeks of American bombing, Iraqi soldiers were so shaken that they knelt and kissed the hands of the first Americans they saw even when those Americans were journalists.) On the one hand, this is a pragmatic move—the smartest thing to do under the circumstances. But it seems fueled at least as much by instinctive emotion as by conscious strategy. Indeed, chimpanzees do roughly the same thing. Faced with a formidable foe, they either confront it with a “threat display” or, if it’s too formidable, crouch in submission. There’s no telling what chimps feel in these instances, but in the case of humans there have been reports of something like awe. That this feeling is naturally directed toward other living beings would seem to lubricate theological interpretations of nature; if a severe thunderstorm summons the same emotion as an ill-tempered and potent foe, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine an ill-tempered foe behind the thunderstorm.
Robert Wright (The Evolution of God)
In early 2019, while I was still at the White House, BuzzFeed News published an article laying out the origins of the “Soros conspiracy.” It had originated in 2008, when two prominent political consultants in New York, Arthur Finkelstein and George Birnbaum, were recruited by Viktor Orbán to assist his political campaign. They had previously worked for Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu, who was friendly with Orbán. Netanyahu recommended them. Finkelstein and Birnbaum decided they should create an external political enemy to help Orbán mobilize support for his bid to become Hungarian prime minister. They selected Soros, a prominent Hungarian Jew whose family had fled Budapest during the Holocaust. Soros was both famous and controversial, and still connected to Hungary.
Fiona Hill (There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century)
The right way is always the difficult way but it’s the only way that connects us with our soul.
Bhuwan Thapaliya (Safa Tempo: Poems New & Selected)
When you’re too tired and feel like giving up on life, sit down and ponder over the journey of water.
Bhuwan Thapaliya (Safa Tempo: Poems New & Selected)
There’s a famous quote which goes something like, ‘You are what you are, having secretly become what you wanted to be’. Maybe there’s some truth to that. We like to think that society shapes us, but I don’t think that that’s the way it happens. Select, 1991
Mark Simpson (Saint Morrissey)
If there were a multitude of schools almost as good as these in every city, so that applicants for high school could select from dozens of good options—so that even parents who did not have the sophistication or connections to assist their children in obtaining entrance to selective schools would not see their kids attending truly bad schools, since there would be none—then it would do little harm if certain of these schools were even better than the rest. In such a situation, kids who couldn’t be admitted to a famous school such as Bronx Science might be jealous of the ones who did get in, but would not, for this reason, be condemned to third-rate education and would not be written off by the society.
Jonathan Kozol (Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools)
In 1921, Terman decided to make the study of the gifted his life work. Armed with a large grant from the Commonwealth Foundation, he put together a team of fieldworkers and sent them out into California’s elementary schools. Teachers were asked to nominate the brightest students in their classes. Those children were given an intelligence test. The students who scored in the top 10 percent were then given a second IQ test, and those who scored above 130 on that test were given a third IQ test, and from that set of results Terman selected the best and the brightest. By the time Terman was finished, he had sorted through the records of some 250,000 elementary and high school students, and identified 1,470 children whose IQs averaged over 140 and ranged as high as 200. That group of young geniuses came to be known as the “Termites,” and they were the subjects of what would become one of the most famous psychological studies in history. For the rest of his life, Terman watched over his charges like a mother hen. They were tracked and tested, measured and analyzed. Their educational attainments were noted, marriages followed, illnesses tabulated, psychological health charted, and every promotion and job change dutifully recorded. Terman wrote his recruits letters of recommendation for jobs and graduate school applications. He doled out a constant stream of advice and counsel, all the time recording his findings in thick red volumes entitled Genetic Studies of Genius.
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
The famous British child psychologist D. W. Winnicott called these aspects of personality our True Self and False Self. It is the True Self that lets us know what is authentic and what has become artificial, while the False Self is a diplomat of distrust, enforcing a lifestyle of guardedness, secrecy, and complaint.
Mark Nepo (The Little Book of Awakening: 52 Weekly Selections from the #1 New York Times Bestselling The Book of Awakening)
5SupernormalASIAN$$ MAP GOOGLE MAP Drawing on his years spent in Shanghai and Hong Kong, chef Andrew McConnell presents a creative selection of pan-Asian sharing dishes, from dumplings to raw seafood to slow-cooked Sichuan lamb. Even if you don't dine in, stop by for his now-famous takeaway New England lobster roll. No dinner bookings, so get here early to put your name on the list.
Lonely Planet (Lonely Planet Pocket Melbourne (Travel Guide))
In Japan, meanwhile, the United States quickly moved to restore fascist-era leaders to power to ensure that Japan would not turn to socialism, and so that it would be a reliable ally in suppressing anticolonial movements in Korea, Vietnam, and Indonesia. The chief leader the United States selected to secure its interests in Japan and the Pacific was Nobusuke Kishi, also known as the “Shōwa (Emperor) era monster/devil”—the war criminal, famous for his brutality, who oversaw the use of coerced Korean and Chinese labor in Japan’s Manchurian munitions factories.22 The United States exonerated Kishi for his WWII-era war crimes, and he went on to serve two terms as Japan’s prime minister in the 1950s, becoming widely known as “America’s favorite war criminal.”23 In addition, the United States and Britain got busy right after WWII in helping to install and prop up fascist regimes in countries like Greece as a bulwark against Communism.
Dan Kovalik (The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran)
Experiments published in 1983 clearly showed that subjects could choose not to perform a movement that was on the cusp of occurring (that is, that their brain was preparing to make) and that was preceded by a large readiness potential. In this view, although the physical sensation of an urge to move is initiated unconsciously, will can still control the outcome by vetoing the action. Later researchers, in fact, reported readiness potentials that precede a planned foot movement not by mere milliseconds but by almost two full seconds, leaving free won’t an even larger window of opportunity. “Conscious will could thus affect the outcome of the volitional process even though the latter was initiated by unconscious cerebral processes,” Libet says. “Conscious will might block or veto the process, so that no act occurs.” Everyone, Libet continues, has had the experience of “vetoing a spontaneous urge to perform some act. This often occurs when the urge to act involves some socially unacceptable consequence, like an urge to shout some obscenity at the professor.” Volunteers report something quite consistent with this view of the will as wielding veto power. Sometimes, they told Libet, a conscious urge to move seemed to bubble up from somewhere, but they suppressed it. Although the possibility of moving gets under way some 350 milliseconds before the subject experiences the will to move, that sense of will nevertheless kicks in 150 to 200 milliseconds before the muscle moves—and with it the power to call a halt to the proceedings. Libet’s findings suggest that free will operates not to initiate a voluntary act but to allow or suppress it. “We may view the unconscious initiatives for voluntary actions as ‘bubbling up’ in the brain,” he explains. “The conscious will then selects which of these initiatives may go forward to an action or which ones to veto and abort…. This kind of role for free will is actually in accord with religious and ethical strictures. These commonly advocate that you ‘control yourself.’ Most of the Ten Commandments are ‘do not’ orders.” And all five of the basic moral precepts of Buddhism are restraints: refraining from killing, from lying, from stealing, from sexual misconduct, from intoxicants. In the Buddha’s famous dictum, “Restraint everywhere is excellent.
Jeffrey M. Schwartz (The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force)
Laxmi Nagar, a heaven for sweet tooths, boasts an array of renowned mithai shops. But amidst these gems, Shagun Sweets shines brightly, captivating hearts with its delectable offerings. For generations, we've crafted authentic Indian sweets using time-honored recipes and the finest ingredients. Step into our welcoming space and be greeted by the irresistible aroma of freshly prepared pedas, soan papdis, and barfis. Explore our diverse selection, from melt-in-your-mouth kalakhands to rich and creamy rasgullas. We proudly present traditional favorites like kaju katlis and ladoos alongside innovative creations that tantalize your taste buds. Visit us today and discover why we're a beloved name among the famous sweet shops in Laxmi Nagar.
Shagun sweets
The American psychologist Elliot Aronson, who studied this phenomenon, famously assembled a discussion group of pompous, dull people. Some of the participants were made to endure an arduous selection process; others were allowed to join immediately, without expending any effort. Those who were given the runaround reported enjoying the group far more than the ones who were simply let in. Aronson explained what was happening here: whenever we’ve invested time, money or energy into something and it ends up being a complete waste of time, this creates dissonance, which we try to reduce by finding ways of justifying our bad decision. Aronson’s participants focused unconsciously on what might be interesting, or at least bearable, about being part of a deliberately boring group. The people who had invested very little effort in joining therefore had less dissonance to reduce, and more readily admitted what a waste of time it had been.
Steven Bartlett (The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life)
It is time to accept that most of our heroes were not, are not, heroes. They were just good actors selected by the cult, due to bloodlines, or secret society membership.
Jack Freestone