Tom Thomas Quotes

Tom always did anger well. Hid it well, but showed it even better

What's your name?" "Becky Thatcher. What's yours? Oh, I know. It's Thomas Sawyer." "That's the name they lick me by. I'm Tom when I'm good. You call me Tom, will you?" "Yes

The smaller your reality, the more convinced you are that you know everything.

Reading list (1972 edition)[edit] 1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus – Tragedies 4. Sophocles – Tragedies 5. Herodotus – Histories 6. Euripides – Tragedies 7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings 9. Aristophanes – Comedies 10. Plato – Dialogues 11. Aristotle – Works 12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus 13. Euclid – Elements 14. Archimedes – Works 15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections 16. Cicero – Works 17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil – Works 19. Horace – Works 20. Livy – History of Rome 21. Ovid – Works 22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia 23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic 25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion 26. Ptolemy – Almagest 27. Lucian – Works 28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus – The Enneads 32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine 33. The Song of Roland 34. The Nibelungenlied 35. The Saga of Burnt Njál 36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica 37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy 38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales 39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Thomas More – Utopia 44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises 45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion 47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays 48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies 49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene 51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis 52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays 53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences 54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World 55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals 56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan 57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy 58. John Milton – Works 59. Molière – Comedies 60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises 61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light 62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics 63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies 65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology 67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe 68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal 69. William Congreve – The Way of the World 70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge 71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man 72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws 73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary 74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones 75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

He who has conquered his own coward spirit has conquered the whole outward world;

If I did something to hurt Frankie and she said that I was never getting near her heart again, I’d spent the rest of my life trying anyway. That’s the difference between you and me, Tom. I’d go back to the moment it all fell apart and I’d start there.

Without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.

Please, enlighten me, Tom. What exactly did you observe?” “That men fly to you like a bug to a zapper.” “Lovely. That’s a lovely analogy. Yes, I’m a man-eater, Tom.

I like how you call me Tom.” Teresa rolled her eyes. “That’s your name, isn’t it?” “Yeah, but most people call me Thomas. Well, except Newt – he calls me Tommy. Tom makes me feel … like I’m at home or something. Even though I don’t know what home is.” He let out a bitter laugh. “Are we messed up or what?

I want to leave behind me the name of a fellow who never bullied a little boy, or turned his back on a big one.

I made it my job to know good music, Tom. It’s why I’m here...with you.

Worse still, he doesn’t know how to follow the piper anymore because it’s a path Tom has lost faith in. And the piper knows it. Tom can see it in his father’s eyes now. And the more he stares, the clearer it becomes.

Paine suffered then, as now he suffers not so much because of what he wrote as from the misinterpretations of others... He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds. But the attacks on those creeds - or on persons devoted to them - have served to darken his memory, casting a shadow across the closing years of his life. When Theodore Roosevelt termed Tom Paine a 'dirty little atheist' he surely spoke from lack of understanding. It was a stricture, an inaccurate charge of the sort that has dimmed the greatness of this eminent American. But the true measure of his stature will yet be appreciated. The torch which he handed on will not be extinguished. If Paine had ceased his writings with 'The Rights of Man' he would have been hailed today as one of the two or three outstanding figures of the Revolution. But 'The Age of Reason' cost him glory at the hands of his countrymen - a greater loss to them than to Tom Paine. I was always interested in Paine the inventor. He conceived and designed the iron bridge and the hollow candle; the principle of the modern central draught burner. The man had a sort of universal genius. He was interested in a diversity of things; but his special creed, his first thought, was liberty. Traducers have said that he spent his last days drinking in pothouses. They have pictured him as a wicked old man coming to a sorry end. But I am persuaded that Paine must have looked with magnanimity and sorrow on the attacks of his countrymen. That those attacks have continued down to our day, with scarcely any abatement, is an indication of how strong prejudice, when once aroused, may become. It has been a custom in some quarters to hold up Paine as an example of everything bad. The memory of Tom Paine will outlive all this. No man who helped to lay the foundations of our liberty - who stepped forth as the champion of so difficult a cause - can be permanently obscured by such attacks. Tom Paine should be read by his countrymen. I commend his fame to their hands. {The Philosophy of Paine, June 7, 1925}

Tom Friedman says China is so awesome they make kosher pigs.

Tom Paine has almost no influence on present-day thinking in the United States because he is unknown to the average citizen. Perhaps I might say right here that this is a national loss and a deplorable lack of understanding concerning the man who first proposed and first wrote those impressive words, 'the United States of America.' But it is hardly strange. Paine's teachings have been debarred from schools everywhere and his views of life misrepresented until his memory is hidden in shadows, or he is looked upon as of unsound mind. We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic. He was the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible. Where Washington performed Paine devised and wrote. The deeds of one in the Weld were matched by the deeds of the other with his pen. Washington himself appreciated Paine at his true worth. Franklin knew him for a great patriot and clear thinker. He was a friend and confidant of Jefferson, and the two must often have debated the academic and practical phases of liberty. I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles. Although the present generation knows little of Paine's writings, and although he has almost no influence upon contemporary thought, Americans of the future will justly appraise his work. I am certain of it. Truth is governed by natural laws and cannot be denied. Paine spoke truth with a peculiarly clear and forceful ring. Therefore time must balance the scales. The Declaration and the Constitution expressed in form Paine's theory of political rights. He worked in Philadelphia at the time that the first document was written, and occupied a position of intimate contact with the nation's leaders when they framed the Constitution. Certainly we may believe that Washington had a considerable voice in the Constitution. We know that Jefferson had much to do with the document. Franklin also had a hand and probably was responsible in even larger measure for the Declaration. But all of these men had communed with Paine. Their views were intimately understood and closely correlated. There is no doubt whatever that the two great documents of American liberty reflect the philosophy of Paine. ...Then Paine wrote 'Common Sense,' an anonymous tract which immediately stirred the fires of liberty. It flashed from hand to hand throughout the Colonies. One copy reached the New York Assembly, in session at Albany, and a night meeting was voted to answer this unknown writer with his clarion call to liberty. The Assembly met, but could find no suitable answer. Tom Paine had inscribed a document which never has been answered adversely, and never can be, so long as man esteems his priceless possession. In 'Common Sense' Paine flared forth with a document so powerful that the Revolution became inevitable. Washington recognized the difference, and in his calm way said that matters never could be the same again. It must be remembered that 'Common Sense' preceded the declaration and affirmed the very principles that went into the national doctrine of liberty. But that affirmation was made with more vigor, more of the fire of the patriot and was exactly suited to the hour... Certainly [the Revolution] could not be forestalled, once he had spoken. {The Philosophy of Paine, June 7, 1925}

A while back, I came across a line attributed to IBM founder Thomas Watson. If you want to achieve excellence, he said, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.

Despite the voice in his head that says he doesn’t want anything that’s owed to his father, Tom can’t wait to get his hands on it. “Just take it. Hit your old man over the head with it. You’re dying to.

Generally, when a man is rabidly for one cause, and then is just as rabidly for another cause, it is not because he loves the cause: it is because he loves the rabies

You keep me human, Tom.

However, you'll all find, if you haven't found it out already, that a time comes in every human friendship when you must go down into the depths of yourself, and lay bare what is there to your friend, and wait in fear for his answer.

Don't be in a hurry about finding your work in the world for yourself—you are not old enough to judge for yourself yet; but just look about you in the place you find yourself in, and try to make things a little better and honester there.

I have always been interested in this man. My father had a set of Tom Paine's books on the shelf at home. I must have opened the covers about the time I was 13. And I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which shone from his pages. It was a revelation, indeed, to encounter his views on political and religious matters, so different from the views of many people around us. Of course I did not understand him very well, but his sincerity and ardor made an impression upon me that nothing has ever served to lessen. I have heard it said that Paine borrowed from Montesquieu and Rousseau. Maybe he had read them both and learned something from each. I do not know. But I doubt that Paine ever borrowed a line from any man... Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp. There is nothing false, little that is subtle, and an impressive lack of the negative in Paine. He literally cried to his reader for a comprehending hour, and then filled that hour with such sagacious reasoning as we find surpassed nowhere else in American letters - seldom in any school of writing. Paine would have been the last to look upon himself as a man of letters. Liberty was the dear companion of his heart; truth in all things his object. ...we, perhaps, remember him best for his declaration: 'The world is my country; to do good my religion.' Again we see the spontaneous genius at work in 'The Rights of Man', and that genius busy at his favorite task - liberty. Written hurriedly and in the heat of controversy, 'The Rights of Man' yet compares favorably with classical models, and in some places rises to vaulting heights. Its appearance outmatched events attending Burke's effort in his 'Reflections'. Instantly the English public caught hold of this new contribution. It was more than a defense of liberty; it was a world declaration of what Paine had declared before in the Colonies. His reasoning was so cogent, his command of the subject so broad, that his legion of enemies found it hard to answer him. 'Tom Paine is quite right,' said Pitt, the Prime Minister, 'but if I were to encourage his views we should have a bloody revolution.' Here we see the progressive quality of Paine's genius at its best. 'The Rights of Man' amplified and reasserted what already had been said in 'Common Sense', with now a greater force and the power of a maturing mind. Just when Paine was at the height of his renown, an indictment for treason confronted him. About the same time he was elected a member of the Revolutionary Assembly and escaped to France. So little did he know of the French tongue that addresses to his constituents had to be translated by an interpreter. But he sat in the assembly. Shrinking from the guillotine, he encountered Robespierre's enmity, and presently found himself in prison, facing that dread instrument. But his imprisonment was fertile. Already he had written the first part of 'The Age of Reason' and now turned his time to the latter part. Presently his second escape cheated Robespierre of vengeance, and in the course of events 'The Age of Reason' appeared. Instantly it became a source of contention which still endures. Paine returned to the United States a little broken, and went to live at his home in New Rochelle - a public gift. Many of his old companions in the struggle for liberty avoided him, and he was publicly condemned by the unthinking. {The Philosophy of Paine, June 7, 1925}

Anabel shrugs. “Then take an earlier flight today so you get to see her at the airport, stupid.” Tom shakes his head. “I came to see both of you. To spend time with my womenfolk because I miss you like hell.” They’re both smiling and he knows he has said and done the right thing and that’s enough for him. Anabel reaches over and hugs him. “You’re the best brother in the world, Tom.” When she pulls away from the hug, she slaps him on the cheek. “Are you over it now?” she snaps. “Let’s go!” she says, grabbing their mother’s keys out of her hands. “I’m sick and tired of you people living interstate and overseas from people you want to be with. You’re ruining my life! All of you!

I had written a book of short stories which was published under the title of "Uncle Tom's Children". When the review of that book began to appear, I realized that I had made an awful naive mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers' daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.

A character for steadiness once gone is not easily recovered

You are no longer a boy, and one of the first duties which a man owes to his friends and to society is to live within his income.

You heard the low, snaky serpent,” said Matthew. “Come away, Tom.

...so bear in mind that majorities, especially respectable ones, are nine times out of ten in the wrong; and that if you see man or boy striving earnestly on the weak side, however wrong-headed or blundering he may be, you are not to go and join the cry against him. If you can't join him and help him, and make him wiser, at any rate remember that he has found something in the world which he will fight and suffer for....

Remember this, I beseech you, all you boys who are getting into the upper forms. Now is the time in all your lives, probably, when you may have more wide influence for good or evil on the society you live in than you ever can have again.

Down here in the street, there is a lot less of the law and a lot more personalities. Everyone has found their way around the particular law that influences their endeavors. No one absolutely adheres to the guidelines of the one true law. Everyone is just trying to get by; there’s no room or time for the law or the courts; everyone finds their own way. That’s how things get done, you get yours best you can and I get mine best I can, but sometimes we can get at crossed purposes with each other and then we sort it out ourselves. We don’t call the police, we don’t file a legal suit; we negotiate, we butt heads, but we resolve the issue. That’s what you are seeing Tom, how the real world goes around. Now have a drink, relax and see our other side of life.

They drive back home to grab his backpack and as he bends and kisses his grandma Agnes, she scrunches a one-hundred-dollar bill in his hand. “Buy yourself some chocolates, Tom.” It’s what she’d say to him as a kid with a twenty cent coin.

Boyishness—by which I mean animal life in its fullest measure, good nature and honest impulses, hatred of injustice and meanness, and thoughtlessness enough to sink a three-decker.

It’s easy to enjoy each other while on a vacation in Maui. The key is to find someone you can have fun with during the six-hour flight over there. —Tom Arnold

Girls, when I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ‘Tom, finish your dinner—people in China and India are starving.’ My advice to you is: Girls, finish your homework—people in China and India are starving for your jobs.” And in a flat world, they can have them, because in a flat world there is no such thing as an American job. There is just a job, and in more cases than ever before it will go to the best, smartest, most productive, or cheapest worker—wherever he or she resides.

Don't be led away to think this part of the world important and that unimportant. Every corner of the world is important. No man knows whether this part or that is most so, but every man may do some honest work in his own corner.

And he knew that he would never come again, and that lost magic would not come again. Lost now was all of it-the street, the heat, King's Highway, and Tom the Piper's son, all mixed in with the vast and drowsy murmur of the Fair, and with the sense of absence in the afternoon, and the house that waited, and the child that dreamed. And out of the enchanted wood, that thicket of man's memory, Eugene knew that the dark eye and the quiet face of his friend and brother-poor child, life's stranger, and life's exile, lost like all of us, a cipher in blind mazes, long ago-the lost boy was gone forever, and would not return.

43. Don’t let past failures determine what your future success will be. Walt Disney went bankrupt — twice — before finally gaining lasting momentum. The Beatles were rejected from numerous record labels, as was Tom Petty. Thomas Edison failed at creating the light bulb ten thousand times before getting it right! If he used failure as an indicator of his true path, you might be reading this by candlelight.

What about the contacts your mum had?” his dad asked. “I rang and spoke to four very polite computers who gave me all these options and then cut out on me. Then I tried the post office, because they were advertising, and I spoke to another computer. Very rude, that one. Don’t think it recognized ‘Are you shitting me?’ as an option.” “You know why that is?” “Why is that, Dominic?” Tom had asked drolly, because he knew he was going to be told why. “Because we don’t live in a society anymore, Tom. We live in an economy. We’re not citizens. We’re customers. That’s what this government’s done to us.

What is this, Tom” “It’s the beginning, January.” “Of what?” She asked me seriously. “Well have all the time in the world to talk about that. It’s too deep to get into it right now but know this, I’m tired of pretending. So weary of it. I forgot myself when I lost who I thought Kelly was to me, but you’ve shown me what I think, no, I know no one else could have shown me.” “And what’s that?” “That I don’t want to be lost anymore. I – I want you.

The one single use of things which we call our own is that they might be his who hath need of them.

He doesn’t hate you, Thomas, he admires you. And we’re often frightened and jealous of what we admire.

Life isn't all beer and skittles; but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman's education.

If your chance comes to serve, you will have to take him as he is, a pleasure-loving prince. And he will have to take you as you are, which is rather like one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes. Not that you are without a fitful charm, Tom.

Tom Truth says, ‘I do not know if I wrote this verse.’ ‘You have forgot it,’ he says. ‘As would any man of sense. Yet in the fifth stanza you write, Pardon me, your man, Tom Truth. Which you rhyme, unfortunately, with growth.’ Christophe sniggers. ‘Even I know better, and I am French.

Ah, I love you. When I'm with you, I am what you call...a hip cat. I am hip, to the jive. You set my soul on fire. It is not just a little spark. It is a flame; a big roaring flame. I can feel it now—it is burning, burning, BURNING

Blessed is the man who has the gift of making friends; for it is one of God's best gifts. It involves many things, but above all, the power of going out of oneself, and seeing and appreciating whatever is noble and living in another man.

Oh, shut up,” I grumbled. “I suck at cooking and you know it.” He got a glazed, dreamy look on his face and after a while, he said, “I’m sorry, you mentioned sucking and I got distracted. I didn’t hear a word after that.” I rolled my eyes and walked into the kitchen, but he called out, “Your cooking is fine, Tom. But your sucking skills are your true talent.

Epictetus has had a long-standing resonance in the United States; his uncompromising moral rigour chimed in well with Protestant Christian beliefs and the ethical individualism that has been a persistent vein in American culture. His admirers ranged from John Harvard and Thomas Jefferson in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth. More recently, Vice-Admiral James Stockdale wrote movingly of how his study of Epictetus at Stanford University enabled him to survive the psychological pressure of prolonged torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973. Stockdale’s story formed the basis for a light-hearted treatment of the moral power of Stoicism in Tom Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full (1998).52

At that moment his soul is fuller of the tomb and him who lies there than of the altar and Him of whom it speaks. Such stages have to be gone through, I believe, by all young and brave souls, who must win their way through hero-worship to the worship of Him who is the King and Lord of heroes.

And he knew that he would never come again, and that lost magic would not come again. Lost now was all of it - the street, the heat, King's Highway, and Tom the Piper's son, all mixed in with the vast and drowsy murmur of the Fair, and with the sense of absence in the afternoon, and the house that waited, and the child that dreamed.

Anyone who takes a decided line in certain matters, is sure to lead all the rest.

Tom Farrell had always wished Hell on his boss. On New Years Eve... Hell sent someone. -Along For The Ride-

among slaves or negroes. But they are certainly admirably delineated. The book is highly interesting and amusing, and will afford a rich treat to its reader. Thomas Jefferson.

I wasn’t Thomas Wolfe (not even Tom Wolfe or Tobias Wolff ), but I was being paid to do what I loved, and there’s no gig on earth better than that; it’s like a license to steal.

I never tire of reading Tom Paine.

Wealthy young Tom Glen had always had all he wanted until this – and now he sat miserable, unhappy – all because of a dog.

As he drove away, he recalled Jack’s last words to him. The dark, dusty well was just a hazy memory now, but he could remember Jack’s question as clear as day. Why do you do it, Tom?

Thomas rather thought Foley might ask what purpose was served by an economy whose success and protection depended on people living in ugly, sterile, unhealthy environments-he'd met that argument before and admittedly had had some difficulty refuting it-but the ex-pilot merely shrugged and said, "There's more to trees than you think. I've run across some trees I'd sooner hug than a woman.

For a moment she knew exactly what he was thinking, not just about Tom, but about her, and himself, and all of life, and she liked the way he saw things. She could spend her life tuning into the calming frequency of his thoughts. He wasn't a stiff, and he wasn't a weakling either. What was the word for it? Sensitive was the only one that came to mind, amazing as that was to consider; he was a sensitive man. He soaked up whatever you gave him.

Mrzim tu državu, pomislih, ne mogu drukčije nego mrziti tu državu i s tom državom ne želim imati nikakve veze, ili barem samo onoliko koliko je to bezuvjetno nužno, mislio sam. Ta je država već toliko puta dokazala svoju apsolutnu beskarakternost da je više nije moguće akceptirati, može se ona svakoga dana, na svim mogućim mjestima i u svim mogućim prilikama nazivati socijalističkom i naprednom, demokratskom i kako god joj drago, to je jedna stravična, beskarakterna, besramna država koja se nikas, mislio sam, nije zastidjela te svoje stravičnosti, beskarakternosti i besramnosti, nego se još u svakoj prilici koja bi joj se pružila usuđivala podičiti tim svojim odurnostima.

There’s no happy ending ... Nevertheless, we might well say that is exactly Harriet Beecher Stowe’s point. In 1852 slavery had not been abolished. Slaves were still on the plantations and many of them were in the hands of people like Legree. Her book was written to shame the collective conscience of America into action against an atrocity which was still continuing. So a happy ending would have been, frankly, a lie and a betrayal. ... Most of the charges are basically true. Stowe did stereotype. She did sentimentalize. She offered a role model which later offended African American pride. On the other hand, what she did worked. She wasn’t trying to provide a role model for African Americans. She was trying to make white Americans ashamed of themselves. ... Perhaps the short answer to her critics is to ask, “Do you want glory, approval, all those good things? Or do you want to achieve your goal?

When people pose the question, are you “coxom”, Tom Conrad? I like to pose a question back at them: Is J.K. Rowling actually a witch? Is Thomas Harris the no. 1 serial killer in the the US, did Yann Martell really spend a lifetime eating pie? Of course, as far as I know J.K. Rowling is not a witch, but instead is a rather lovely and talented writer. As for that Thomas Harris (equally talented), I very much suspect he isn’t actually a serial killer at all, or if he is, he’s involved in the biggest case of double bluff… ever! As for Yann Martell, well, as everyone with half a brain knows his book is actually concerned with a mathematical constant, so ignore the dumb pie joke. Hm :/

Whenever a new scholar came to out school, I used to confront him at recess with the following words: 'My name's Tom Bailey: what's your name?' If the name struck me favorably, I shook hands with the new pupil cordially; but if it didn't I would turn on my heel, for I was particular in this point. Such names as Higgins, Wiggins, and Spriggins were deadly afronts to my ear; while Lapgdon, Wallace, Blake, and the like, were passing words to my confidence and esteem.

You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope. —THOMAS MERTON

Livia, on the other hand, actively preferred literary characters to real-life acquaintances: Tom Sawyer stayed forever young, Viola always retained her spunk, and Mr. Darcy could never turn out to be a hypocrite who was also disappointing in bed.

Class amusements, be they for Dukes or plow-boys, always become nuisances and curses to a country. The true charm of cricket and hunting is that they are still, more or less sociable and universal; There's a place for every man who will come and take his part.

We listened, as all boys in their better moods will listen (ay, and men too for the matter of that), to a man whom we felt to be, with all his heart and soul and strength, striving against whatever was mean and unmanly and unrighteous in our little world. It was not the cold, clear voice of one giving advice and warning from serene heights to those who were struggling and sinning below, but the warm, living voice of one who was fighting for us and by our sides, and calling on us to help him and ourselves and one another.

Guilt is one of the most sickening feelings there is,” Alastair said. “Most people will do anything to avoid feeling it. I know I—” He took a deep breath. “One can either refuse to accept it, push it away and blame others, or one can take responsibility. One can bear the unbearable weight.” He sounded exhausted. “I have always wanted to bear it with you,” said Thomas quietly. “Yes,” Alastair said. His eyes were bright with cold. “Raziel knows, perhaps that is the reason I have not become like Tatiana myself. You keep me human, Tom.

Tom took Susan to his mother’s house and introduced her to Marguerite. Thereafter, when his mother referred to Susan, she called her “that slutty little girl,” which Tom and Susan found hilarious. When he sent Susan notes, Tom addressed them to “Dear Slutty Little Girl.

The pursuit of meaning — not happiness — is what makes life worthwhile. Despite Thomas Jefferson including it in the Declaration of Independence, the “pursuit of happiness” is a shortsighted aim. Putting your own well-being before well-doing pulls you in the wrong direction.

The astonishment soon passed off, the scales seemed to drop from his eyes, and the book became at once and for ever to him the great human and divine book, and the men and women, whom he had looked upon as something quite different from himself, became his friends and counsellors.

And romance is just the place for creating mythic figures doing mythic things. Like carving 'civilzation' out of the wilderness. Like showing us what a hero looks life, a real, American, sprung-from-the soil, lethal-weapon-with-leggings, bona fide hero. And for a guy who never marries, he has a lot of offspring. Shane. The Virginian. The Ringo Kid. The Man with No Name. Just think how many actors would have had no careers without Natty Bumppo. Gary Cooper. John Wayne. Alan Ladd. Tom Mix. Clint Eastwood. Silent. Laconic. More committed to their horse or buddy than to a lady. Professional. Deadly. In his Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence waxes prolix on Natty's most salient feature: he's a killer. And so are his offspring. This heros can talk, stiltedly to be sure, but he prefers silence. He appreciates female beauty but is way more committed to his canoe or his business partner (his business being death and war) or, most disturbingly, his long rifle, Killdeer. Dr. Freud, your three-o'clock is here. Like those later avatars, he is a wilderness god, part backwoods sage, part cold-blooded killer, part unwilling Prince Charming, part jack-of-all-trades, but all man. Here's how his creator describes him: 'a philosopher of the wilderness, simple-minded, faithful, utterly without fear, yet prudent.' A great character, no doubt, but hardly a person. A paragon. An archetype. A miracle. But a potentially real person--not so much.

No. I’d want to stay with him till I died. But to see it with Davy is different.” “We have to think about how he feels,” his father told him. “And what’s important to him.” “I know,” young Tom said hopelessly. “But to me it’s just Davy. I wish the world wasn’t the way it is and that things didn’t have to happen to brothers.” “I do too,” Thomas Hudson said. “You’re an awfully good boy, Tommy. But please know I would have stopped this long ago except that I know that if David catches this fish he’ll have something inside him for all his life and it will make everything else easier.

I want a job, Lady Carey. It isn't enough to be a councillor, I need an official place in the household." "I'll tell her." "I want a post in the Jewel House. Or the Exchequer." She nods. "She made Tom Wyatt a poet. She made Harry Percy a madman. I'm sure she has some ideas about what to make you.

The neglected pioneer of one revolution, the honoured victim of another, brave to the point of folly, and as humane as he was brave, no man in his generation preached republican virtue in better English, nor lived it with a finer disregard of self. {On American founding father and hero, Thomas Paine}

What we mean to say, but what Ms Spider is not equipped to understand, is that Iago is gay in the way that all the best fictional murderers are gay. Norman Bates, Tom Ripely, The titular Third Man, and he was the original. Iago is gay like a black leather whip. Like Paris in the 1920s. Like calling non-food things “delicious.” Iago is gay like cold eyes and bony hips. Like a pearl-handled pistol tucked in one’s suit pocket. Like delicate fingers that could play a Chopin prelude or crush a throat with equal grace. Iago is gay in the way that we, the F&M unit, aspired to be gay. But it’s harder for girls.

As for the family home, Tom dropped into the house on Seventeenth almost every day, walking in unannounced as if he still lived there. Even Debby told him she didn’t think that was fair to Kay. “I wouldn’t blame her for changing the locks,” she said. “I own that house,” Tom answered. “I can go there anytime I want.

The highly moralistic and uncompromising outlook of the Puritans eventually put them and their descendants on a collision course with the institution of slavery and produced. among others, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was called by Abraham Lincoln the little lady who started the Civil War" because of her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.

He wants to ask her, what did you think would come out of this? That you would sit in a turret, and Tom Truth come riding over the hills, his lyre slung behind his saddle? And you at the high window, letting down your strawberry tresses? When Mary Fitzroy stood guard outside the door, did you know how your beau would secure you, with a brutal thrust that made you bleed? Did you know how he would use and spoil you?

I have been lately introduced to the famous Thomas Paine, and like him very well. He is vain beyond all belief, but he has reason to be vain, and for my part I forgive him. He has done wonders for the cause of liberty, both in America and Europe, and I believe him to be conscientiously an honest man. He converses extremely well; and I find him wittier in discourse than in his writings, where his humour is clumsy enough.

That was Anne Marie; she had been harassed, tormented, and stalked—but upon reflection, she felt sorry for Tom because of the gloomy picture he had painted of himself during his barrage of phone calls on Saturday. While other women would have been able to tell him where to go in unladylike terms, Anne Marie could not. She was cursed with such an acute empathy for another’s pain that she had to apologize—once again—to Tom.

Tom O’ Bedlam among the Sunflowers" To have gold in your back yard and not know it. . . I woke this morning before your dream had shredded And found a curious thing: flowers made of gold, Six-sided—more than that—broken on flagstones, Petals the color of a wedding band. You are sleeping. The morning comes up gold. Perhaps I made those flowers in my head, For I have counted snowflakes in July Blowing across my eyes like bits of calcium, And I have stepped into your dream at night, A stranger there, my body steeped in moonlight. I watched you tremble, washed in all that silver. Love, the stars have fallen into the garden And turned to frost. They have opened like a hand. It is the color that breaks out of the bedsheets. This morning the garden is littered with dry petals As yellow as the page of an old book. I step among them. They are brittle as bone china.

Why could Tolkien not be more like Sir Thomas Malory, asked [Edwin] Muir, in the third Observer review of those cited above, and give us heroes and heroines like Lancelot and Guinevere, who ' knew temptation, were sometimes unfaithful to their vows,' were engagingly marked by adulterous passion? But T.H. White had already considered that paradigm, was indeed rewriting it at the same time as Tolkien in The Once and Future King; and he had seen the core of Malory's work not in romantic vice but in the human urge to murder. In White the poisonous adder that provokes the last disastrous battle is no adder but a harmless grass-snake, and the flash of the sword which brings on the two armies is not natural self-defense but natural blood-lust, creating a continuum from cruelty to animals to world wars and holocausts. Malory has to be rewritten to encompass a new view of evil.

My friend Mr. Joyce has words and expressions I’d never even heard of. I’ll bet nobody could outswear him in any language.” “Then after that he made up a whole new language,” Roger said. He was lying on his back on the beach with his eyes closed. “I can’t understand that new language,” young Tom said. “I guess I’m not old enough for it. But wait until you boys read Ulysses.” “That’s not for boys,” Thomas Hudson said. “It isn’t really. You couldn’t understand it and you shouldn’t try to. Really. You have to wait till you’re older.

Tom Paine generally took a critical stance when dealing with religion and the church, but in 1775, in an essay entitled, "Thoughts on Defensive War" he wrote as follows: "In the barbarous ages of the world, men in genernal had no liberty. the strong governed the weak a will; till the coming of Christ there was no sucht thing as political freedom in any part of the world... The Romans held the world in slavery and were themselves slaves of their emperors... Wherefore political as well as spiritual freedom is the gift of God through Christ

Individualität!... Ach, was man ist, kann und hat, scheint arm, grau, unzulänglich und langweilig; was man aber nicht ist, nicht kann und nicht hat, das eben ist es, worauf man mit jenem sehnsüchtigen Neide blickt, der zur Liebe wird, weil er sich fürchtet, zum Haß zu werden. (Serbian translation) Individualnost!...Ah,sve sto jesmo,sto umemo i imamo,izgleda jadno,sivo,nedovoljno i dosadno;a ono pak sto nismo,ne umemo i nemamo,to je bas ono na sta svak gleda sa onom ceznjivom zaviscu koja biva ljubav,zato se plasi da bude mrznja. II tom,deseti deo,224 strana

That’s good,” young Tom said. “I told the headmaster neither papa nor Mr. Joyce had dirty minds and now I can tell him about Mr. Davis if he asks me. He was pretty set on it that I had a dirty mind. But I wasn’t worried. There’s a boy at school that really has one and you can tell the difference all right. What was Mr. Pascin’s first name?” “Jules.” “How do you spell it?” David asked. Thomas Hudson told him. “What ever became of Mr. Pascin?” young Tom asked. “He hanged himself,” Thomas Hudson said. “Oh gee,” Andrew said. “Poor Mr. Pascin,” young Tom said in benediction. “I’ll pray for him tonight.” “I’m going to pray for Mr. Davis,” Andrew said. “And do it often,” Roger said.

counterintuitive notion that to best realise your musical intentions as a conductor, you have to set the frame of how the players work together – and then get out of the way. ‘That’s the hard thing,’ Rattle says, ‘that you have to learn to allow them to listen, and that means being less rather than more precise in your gestures.’ Just as the players infused themselves with Thomas Adès’s music, this is a process that comes from the ground up, from the roots of the music they’re playing, rather than being imposed on them by a stick-wielding technocrat. It’s a process that explains why the Berlin Philharmonic does not have a reputation as the most precise orchestra in the world. Rattle admits:

{From Luther Burbank's funeral. He was loved until he revealed he was an atheist, then he began to receive death threats. He tried to amiably answer them all, leading to his death} It is impossible to estimate the wealth he has created. It has been generously given to the world. Unlike inventors, in other fields, no patent rights were given him, nor did he seek a monopoly in what he created. Had that been the case, Luther Burbank would have been perhaps the world's richest man. But the world is richer because of him. In this he found joy that no amount of money could give. And so we meet him here today, not in death, but in the only immortal life we positively know--his good deeds, his kindly, simple, life of constructive work and loving service to the whole wide world. These things cannot die. They are cumulative, and the work he has done shall be as nothing to its continuation in the only immortality this brave, unselfish man ever sought, or asked to know. As great as were his contributions to the material wealth of this planet, the ages yet to come, that shall better understand him, will give first place in judging the importance of his work to what he has done for the betterment of human plants and the strength they shall gain, through his courage, to conquer the tares, the thistles and the weeds. Then no more shall we have a mythical God that smells of brimstone and fire; that confuses hate with love; a God that binds up the minds of little children, as other heathen bind up their feet--little children equally helpless to defend their precious right to think and choose and not be chained from the dawn of childhood to the dogmas of the dead. Luther Burbank will rank with the great leaders who have driven heathenish gods back into darkness, forever from this earth. In the orthodox threat of eternal punishment for sin--which he knew was often synonymous with yielding up all liberty and freedom--and in its promise of an immortality, often held out for the sacrifice of all that was dear to life, the right to think, the right to one's mind, the right to choose, he saw nothing but cowardice. He shrank from such ways of thought as a flower from the icy blasts of death. As shown by his work in life, contributing billions of wealth to humanity, with no more return than the maintenance of his own breadline, he was too humble, too unselfish, to be cajoled with dogmatic promises of rewards as a sort of heavenly bribe for righteous conduct here. He knew that the man who fearlessly stands for the right, regardless of the threat of punishment or the promise of reward, was the real man. Rather was he willing to accept eternal sleep, in returning to the elements from whence he came, for in his lexicon change was life. Here he was content to mingle as a part of the whole, as the raindrop from the sea performs its sacred service in watering the land to which it is assigned, that two blades may grow instead of one, and then, its mission ended, goes back to the ocean from whence it came. With such service, with such a life as gardener to the lilies of the field, in his return to the bosoms of infinity, he has not lost himself. There he has found himself, is a part of the cosmic sea of eternal force, eternal energy. And thus he lived and always will live. Thomas Edison, who believes very much as Burbank, once discussed with me immortality. He pointed to the electric light, his invention, saying: 'There lives Tom Edison.' So Luther Burbank lives. He lives forever in the myriad fields of strengthened grain, in the new forms of fruits and flowers, plants, vines, and trees, and above all, the newly watered gardens of the human mind, from whence shall spring human freedom that shall drive out false and brutal gods. The gods are toppling from their thrones. They go before the laughter and the joy of the new childhood of the race, unshackled and unafraid.

The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic. This may appear a surprising claim, which would not have seemed even remotely conceivable at the start of the century and which is bound to encounter fierce resistance even now. However, when the time comes to look back at the century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of our present, will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. The list could readily be extended, back to the late nineteenth century with H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and up to writers currently active like Stephen R. Donaldson and George R.R. Martin. It could take in authors as different, not to say opposed, as Kingsley and Martin Amis, Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Don DeLillo, and Julian Barnes. By the end of the century, even authors deeply committed to the realist novel have often found themselves unable to resist the gravitational pull of the fantastic as a literary mode. This is not the same, one should note, as fantasy as a literary genre – of the authors listed above, only four besides Tolkien would find their works regularly placed on the ‘fantasy’ shelves of bookshops, and ‘the fantastic’ includes many genres besides fantasy: allegory and parable, fairy-tale, horror and science fiction, modern ghost-story and medieval romance. Nevertheless, the point remains. Those authors of the twentieth century who have spoken most powerfully to and for their contemporaries have for some reason found it necessary to use the metaphoric mode of fantasy, to write about worlds and creatures which we know do not exist, whether Tolkien’s ‘Middle-earth’, Orwell’s ‘Ingsoc’, the remote islands of Golding and Wells, or the Martians and Tralfa-madorians who burst into peaceful English or American suburbia in Wells and Vonnegut. A ready explanation for this phenomenon is of course that it represents a kind of literary disease, whose sufferers – the millions of readers of fantasy – should be scorned, pitied, or rehabilitated back to correct and proper taste. Commonly the disease is said to be ‘escapism’: readers and writers of fantasy are fleeing from reality. The problem with this is that so many of the originators of the later twentieth-century fantastic mode, including all four of those first mentioned above (Tolkien, Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut) are combat veterans, present at or at least deeply involved in the most traumatically significant events of the century, such as the Battle of the Somme (Tolkien), the bombing of Dresden (Vonnegut), the rise and early victory of fascism (Orwell). Nor can anyone say that they turned their backs on these events. Rather, they had to find some way of communicating and commenting on them. It is strange that this had, for some reason, in so many cases to involve fantasy as well as realism, but that is what has happened.

The same thing, notes Brynjolfsson, happened 120 years ago, in the Second Industrial Revolution, when electrification—the supernova of its day—was introduced. Old factories did not just have to be electrified to achieve the productivity boosts; they had to be redesigned, along with all business processes. It took thirty years for one generation of managers and workers to retire and for a new generation to emerge to get the full productivity benefits of that new power source. A December 2015 study by the McKinsey Global Institute on American industry found a “considerable gap between the most digitized sectors and the rest of the economy over time and [found] that despite a massive rush of adoption, most sectors have barely closed that gap over the past decade … Because the less digitized sectors are some of the largest in terms of GDP contribution and employment, we [found] that the US economy as a whole is only reaching 18 percent of its digital potential … The United States will need to adapt its institutions and training pathways to help workers acquire relevant skills and navigate this period of transition and churn.” The supernova is a new power source, and it will take some time for society to reconfigure itself to absorb its full potential. As that happens, I believe that Brynjolfsson will be proved right and we will start to see the benefits—a broad range of new discoveries around health, learning, urban planning, transportation, innovation, and commerce—that will drive growth. That debate is for economists, though, and beyond the scope of this book, but I will be eager to see how it plays out. What is absolutely clear right now is that while the supernova may not have made our economies measurably more productive yet, it is clearly making all forms of technology, and therefore individuals, companies, ideas, machines, and groups, more powerful—more able to shape the world around them in unprecedented ways with less effort than ever before. If you want to be a maker, a starter-upper, an inventor, or an innovator, this is your time. By leveraging the supernova you can do so much more now with so little. As Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media, observed in a March 3, 2015, essay on TechCrunch.com: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

I read a heap of books to prepare to write my own. Valuable works about art crime include The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick, Master Thieves by Stephen Kurkjian, The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser, Possession by Erin Thompson, Crimes of the Art World by Thomas D. Bazley, Stealing Rembrandts by Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg, Crime and the Art Market by Riah Pryor, The Art Stealers by Milton Esterow, Rogues in the Gallery by Hugh McLeave, Art Crime by John E. Conklin, The Art Crisis by Bonnie Burnham, Museum of the Missing by Simon Houpt, The History of Loot and Stolen Art from Antiquity Until the Present Day by Ivan Lindsay, Vanished Smile by R. A. Scotti, Priceless by Robert K. Wittman with John Shiffman, and Hot Art by Joshua Knelman. Books on aesthetic theory that were most helpful to me include The Power of Images by David Freedberg, Art as Experience by John Dewey, The Aesthetic Brain by Anjan Chatterjee, Pictures & Tears by James Elkins, Experiencing Art by Arthur P. Shimamura, How Art Works by Ellen Winner, The Art Instinct by Denis Dutton, and Collecting: An Unruly Passion by Werner Muensterberger. Other fascinating art-related reads include So Much Longing in So Little Space by Karl Ove Knausgaard, What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy, History of Beauty edited by Umberto Eco, On Ugliness also edited by Umberto Eco, A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar, Art as Therapy by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, Art by Clive Bell, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke, Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton, The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe, and Intentions by Oscar Wilde—which includes the essay “The Critic as Artist,” written in 1891, from which this book’s epigraph was lifted.

Sir Thomas, poor Sir Thomas, a parent, and conscious of errors in his own conduct as a parent, was the longest to suffer. He felt that he ought not to have allowed the marriage; that his daughter’s sentiments had been sufficiently known to him to render him culpable in authorising it; that in so doing he had sacrificed the right to the expedient, and been governed by motives of selfishness and worldly wisdom. These were reflections that required some time to soften; but time will do almost everything; and though little comfort arose on Mrs. Rushworth’s side for the misery she had occasioned, comfort was to be found greater than he had supposed in his other children. Julia’s match became a less desperate business than he had considered it at first. She was humble, and wishing to be forgiven; and Mr. Yates, desirous of being really received into the family, was disposed to look up to him and be guided. He was not very solid; but there was a hope of his becoming less trifling, of his being at least tolerably domestic and quiet; and at any rate, there was comfort in finding his estate rather more, and his debts much less, than he had feared, and in being consulted and treated as the friend best worth attending to. There was comfort also in Tom, who gradually regained his health, without regaining the thoughtlessness and selfishness of his previous habits. He was the better for ever for his illness. He had suffered, and he had learned to think: two advantages that he had never known before; and the self-reproach arising from the deplorable event in Wimpole Street, to which he felt himself accessory by all the dangerous intimacy of his unjustifiable theatre, made an impression on his mind which, at the age of six-and-twenty, with no want of sense or good companions, was durable in its happy effects. He became what he ought to be: useful to his father, steady and quiet, and not living merely for himself.

[Northerners] took over the Southern myth and themselves began to revel in it. This acceptance was to culminate in Gone With the Wind, the enormous success of which novel makes a curious counterbalance to that of Uncle Tom's Cabin. But it began in the Century of the eighties with the stories of Thomas Nelson Page. Though Page had been only twelve at the end of the Civil War, so had had little experience of the old regime, he really invented for the popular mind Old Massa and Mistis and Meh Lady, with their dusky-skinned adoring retainers. The Northerners, after the shedding of so much blood, illogically found it soothing to be told that slavery had not been so bad, that the Negroes were a lovable but simple race, whose business was to work for whites. And Page also struck in his stories a note of reconciliation that everybody wanted to hear: he cooked up romances between young Northern officers, as gentlemanly as any Southerner, and spirited plantation beauties who might turn out to be the young men's cousins and who in any case would marry them after the war.

He moves through the white glare of a Key West afternoon in that curious, rolling, cantilevered, ball-of-the-foot, and just-off-kilter gait that suggests a kind of subtle menace. He’s on dense and narrow and aromatic streets bearing people’s first names—Olivia, Petronia, Thomas, Emma, Angela, Geraldine. He’s Tom Sawyer on a Saturday in Hannibal, tooting like a steamboat, rid now of Aunt Polly’s clutches, left to his own devices, not to show back home until the sun is slanting in long bars. He’s Jake Barnes on a spring morning in Paris, when the horse chestnut trees are in bloom in the Luxembourg gardens. Jake is expert at shortcutting down the Boul’Mich’ to the rue Soufflot, where he hops on the back platform of an S bus, and rides it to the Madeleine, and then jumps off and strolls along the boulevard des Capucines to l’Opéra, where he then turns in at his building and rides the elevator up to his office to read the mail and sit at the typewriter and prepare a few cables for his newspaper across the Atlantic. “There was the pleasant early-morning feel of a hot day,” is the way Jake’s creator, living in this different region of light, had said it at the start of chapter 5 of The Sun Also Rises.

Jest, i kod njega, kome je nekoć bila tako strana svaka sitničavost, razvila se neka vrsta pedanterije, premda je ta pedanterija imala svoj korijen u drugom tjelesnom ustrojistvu i rodila se iz drugačijeg raspoloženja. Osjećao se praznim; nedostajao mu jeplan koji bi mu dao poticaja, neki zanimljiv posao kome bi se mogao s veseljem i zadovoljstvom posvetiti. Njegov nagon za djelatnošću, nesposobnost njegova duha da miruje, njegova aktivnost - bijahu oduvijek nešto posve drugo negoli prirodna i ustrajna volja za radom kod njegovih predaka: naime, nešto umjetno, impuls njegovih živaca, zapravo neko opojno sredstvo, baš kao male i oštre ruske cigarete koje je stalno pušio. Ta ga aktivnost nije napustila, njome je on vladao manje no ikada, ona je gospodarila njime i mučila ga, trošeći se na sijaset trica i ništavnosti. Gubio se u tisuću beznačajnih sitnica koje su se uglavnom odnosile na održavanje kuće i njegove toalete, a koje bi odlagao, jer su mu dojadile, te ih nije više mogao ni pamtiti, ni srediti, jer su ga stajale nerazmjerno mnogo pažnje i vremena. Ono što su u gradu nazivali njegovom "taštinom" toliko se pogoršalo, da se već odavna počeo toga stideti, a ipak nije bio kadar okaniti se navika koje su se razvile u tom pravcu. Nije mogao napustiti kabinet sa sviješću da je nešto propustio ili samo površno obavio, jer se bojao da će mu izmaći onaj osjećaj svježine, mira, intaktnosti, koji ga je ipak napuštao poslije jednog sata, te ga je onda opet trebalo mukom obnoviti. U kabinetu je provodio mnogo vremena, i to ne samo ujutro, već i prije svakog ručka, svake sjednice u senatu, svake javne skupštine, ukratko, uvijek pre no što će se pokazati pred ljudima i kretati se među njima. Zaista! Život Thomasa Buddenbrooka pretvorio se u život glumca, i to takvog glumca kome je čitav život, do najmanje i najsvakodnevnije sitnice, postao samo velikom glumom koja ga stalno drži u napetosti i stalno iscrpljuje... Potpuni nedostatak nekoga iskrenog i živog interesa koji bi ga zaokupio, osiromašenje i opustošenje njegova duševnog života, uz neumoljiv osjećaj dužnosti i upornu odlučnost da pod svaku cijenu dostojno reprezentira, da svim sredstvima prikrije koliko je iznemogao - svi su ti faktori učinili od njegova života glumu. Učinili su ga izvještačenim, proračunatim i usiljenim, tako da mu se svaka riječ, svaka kretnja, svaka i najmanja djelatnost među ljudima pretvorila u napornu i silno zamornu igru.

John Adams was keenly aware of the relationship between secrecy and corruption in government and the preservation of liberty. Many of the Founding Fathers understood the importance of transparency in a nation’s rulers. James Madison wrote that “A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both.” Thomas Jefferson said that “If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed.” Judicial Watch has always believed that knowing the “characters and conduct” of the individuals who serve in the government and ensuring that the public is “informed” about what its government is doing is crucial to preserving our great republic. That is why for over twenty-two years we have been the most active user of the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to promote transparency, accountability, and integrity in government, politics, and the law. We are the nation’s largest and most effective government watchdog group that works to advance the public interest. Transparency is all about self-governance. If we don’t know what the government is doing, how is that self-governance? How is that even a republic? When we were founded in 1994, we used the FOIA open records law to root out corruption in the Clinton administration. During the Bush administration, we used it to combat that administration’s penchant for improper secrecy. But the Bush administration pales in comparison to the Obama administration. Today, our government is bigger than ever, and also the most secretive in recent memory.

Pe 8 ianuarie 1947 s‑a născut David Robert Jones la Londra. Era într‑o miercuri. Ningea. Dincolo de Atlantic, un băiețel pe nume Elvis își serba cea de‑a douăsprezecea zi de naștere. Niciunul nu a arătat vreun talent muzical de timpuriu, deși amândoi aveau să zguduie din temelii muzica, dându‑i cu totul alte forme, până când însuși cuvântul „muzică“ a devenit de nerecunoscut. Când s‑a născut micul David, legenda spune că moașa ar fi declarat: „Acest copil a mai fost și altă dată pe lumea asta.“ Peste ani, David Robert Jones a devenit David Bowie, iar lumea a început să intre la bănuieli cum că poate a mai fost și pe alte planete. Când s‑a născut Elvis, pe 8 ianuarie, cu doisprezece ani mai devreme, fratele său geamăn nu a supraviețuit. Gladys Presley le va spune prietenilor că fiul ei Elvis „avea energie cât doi“. Elvis a fost obsedat mai toată viața de moartea fratelui său și de propria supraviețuire aparent întâmplătoare. Unii oameni au mai fost pe lumea asta, pe când alții nu apucă să vină deloc. Pe 8 ianuarie 1973 s‑a lansat cu succes pe orbită o navetă spațială numită Luna 21, pilotată de la distanță. După ce a aterizat pe Lună, Luna 21 a pus în mișcare un vehicul spațial robotic sovietic pe nume Lunohod 2, care a realizat peste 80.000 de fotografii TV și 86 de imagini panoramice. Micul David s‑a făcut mare, a compus cântece despre cosmonauți și spațiu și a lansat un album chiar în luna în care a aterizat Apollo 11 pe Lună. (Printre altele, Apollo mai e și zeul muzicii.) Peste mulți ani, fiul lui David Bowie va regiza un film cu titlul Luna. Micul Elvis s‑a făcut mare și a intrat într‑o formație cu numele Blue Moon Boys. Fiica lui se va mărita mai târziu cu un star al muzicii, celebru pentru un dans cu numele de moonwalk. Mai târziu, Elvis și‑a lansat o carieră solo și și‑a ales ca manager un tip pe nume Thomas Parker. „Nu cred că aș fi devenit vreodată cineva dacă n‑ar fi fost el“, urma să declare Elvis despre Parker. Porecla lui Thomas Parker era Colonelul Tom. Colonelul Tom l‑a preschimbat pe Elvis într‑o stea. David Bowie a compus un cântec despre un maior Tom, lăsat să plutească printre stele. Luna 21 și Lunohod 2 nu mai sunt acum pe Lună. Nici micul David, micul Elvis și dansatorul de moonwalk nu mai sunt în funcțiune. Însă muzica lor n‑a murit. Doar am ascultat‑o și știu. La fel și pozele realizate de Lunohod 2. Doar le‑am văzut și știu. Mă gândesc adesea la subtilele legături din univers, întinzându‑se peste timp și spațiu, unele sărind din stea în stea ca niște pietricele pe oglinda unui iaz, iar altele rămase să plutească în marele infinit aleatoriu. Mă gândesc la cuvinte gen reîncarnare, relativitate sau paralel. Și mă întreb dacă se întâmplă să aterizeze vreo pietricică de două ori în același loc. M‑am născut pe 8 ianuarie.

Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much can be done if we are always doing. —THOMAS JEFFERSON

Vaughn nods. “Starting with our own alma mater.” Twenty years earlier, Philadelphia trial attorney Jim Beasley pledged $ 20 million to Temple University, in return for which the Temple University School of Law became the Temple University Beasley School of Law. More recently, one of Beasley’s protégés, Tom Kline, gifted $ 50 million to Drexel Law School, which became the Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law. “And ending with my boss’s acquisition of the crown jewel.