Union Strength Quotes

An empress does not concern herself with the antics of fools

What’s three?” I asked, hoping to move away from this uncomfortable topic. The smile pulled at his lips again. “Three.” One of his hands cupped my face and the other slid around my back. He pulled my body against his and my heart began to pound. I took advantage of my free hand and pushed at his chest. “I don’t think so, Lily,” he said. “If you want to get rid of me, you’ll need to do better than that.” I drew a sharp breath and tried to wiggle away, but he held me firmly in place, watching me struggle. He grinned as he lifted me up onto the sink. “What are you doing?” I started to panic. “Someone could come in!” “If they see us, they’ll just turn around and get out of here,” he murmured, lips touching my ear. “No one crosses me.” His hips pressed against my knees, opening them, pushing my skirt up my legs. I gripped his shirt, clinging to him so I wouldn’t fall into the sink. His hand pushed into my lower back. I gasped as his body fitted against mine. Heat flooded my chest, my pelvis. I thought I would drown in it. “We can’t—” His lips stopped my words. The kiss just made me dizzier. I dug my fingers into his shoulders. “You said you didn’t want to be left alone.” His tongue flicked over my cheekbone. “This is me pestering you.” “Aren’t you breaking the rules?” I could barely get the words out. “What about the union?” “I’d rather have you on my own terms.” His hand slipped between my thighs. All strength fled my limbs. “I can’t breathe.” “That means you like it.” He kissed me again.

Always remember, wherever you are, whether near or far, you had a mother who really, really loved you. The original mother. Once you've found your true inner guru you can never again be divided. Perfect union with the divine, through the grace of your real teacher, transcends time, space, death and all worldly limitations. Your real teacher is the original mother - regardless in which manifest or non-manifest form, or gender, she appears. The one who nurtures you and the one who also, out of wisdom and compassion, corrects you if you are misguided.

In the moment we're born, we're drawn to form a union with others. An abiding drive to connect, to love, to belong. In a perfect union, we find the strength we cannot find in ourselves. But the strength of the union cannot be known until it is tested.

Stop comparing or boast at your victories. He was referring to enormous vitality and strength of God of Jesus seeking union with us. The living acts of a Christian become somehow the acts of Christ.

The One created us all to be free. To learn. To find common cause with others and to grow stronger and wiser. But the ancient enemy perverts that union of strengths. With the enemy, there is no choice, no freedom. They take. They force a joining of all things, until nothing else remains. --Doroga

Could one small divot in the stainless steel of fidelity begin a relentless rust that would eat out the strength of a union?

In union, there is strength.

Everything I have learned about love, I learned from my mother. For it is mothers who bend, twist, flex, and break most dramatically before our uninitiated eyes. Fathers bear, conceal, inflict, sometimes vanish, so the mythology of domestic union tells us. But mothers absorb, accept, give in, all to tutor daughters in the syntax, the grammar of yearning and love.

And to all those who have wondered if Americas beacon still burns as bright - tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope. For that is the true genius of America - that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

But our strategy for peace with freedom must also be based on strength—economic strength and military strength.

When one of England’s finest writers, G. K. Chesterton, spoke of “the furious love of God,” he was referencing the enormous vitality and strength of the God of Jesus seeking union with us.

A mutually fulfilled sexual union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide. But it is not quite real. It stops when the telephone rings. Such a passion can be kept at its early strength only by adding to it either more and more unhappiness (jealousy, separation, doubt, renunciation), or more and more artificiality (drink, technique, stage-illusions). Whoever has missed this has never lived, who lives for it alone is but partly alive.

Live real strong in union with Christ". ~R. Alan Woods [2013]

Had I never loved, I never would have been unhappy; but I turn to Him who can save, and if His wisdom does not will my expected union, I know He will give me strength to bear my lot.

It is this Good which we are commanded to love with our whole heart, with our whole mind, and with all our strength. It is toward this Good that we should be led by those who love us, and toward this Good we should lead those whom we love. In this way, we fulfill the commandments on which depend the whole Law and the Prophets: 'Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God with thy whole heart, and thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind'; and 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' For, in order that a man might learn how to love himself, a standard was set to regulate all his actions on which his happiness depends. For, to love one's own self is nothing but to wish to be happy, and the standard is union with God. When, therefore, a person who knows how to love himself is bidden to love his neighbor as himself, is he not, in effect, commanded to persuade others, as far as he can, to love God?

But when men have at hand a remedy more agreeable to their corrupt will, marriage is almost expulsed. And therefore there are with you seen infinite men that marry not, but chose rather a libertine and impure single life, than to be yoked in marriage; and many that do marry, marry late, when the prime and strength of their years is past. And when they do marry, what is marriage to them but a very bargain; wherein is sought alliance, or portion, or reputation, with some desire (almost indifferent) of issue; and not the faithful nuptial union of man and wife, that was first instituted.

I have never forgotten these visitors, or ceased to marvel at them, at how they have gone on from strength to strength, continuing to lighten our darkness, and to guide, counsel and instruct us; on occasion, momentarily abashed, but always ready to pick themselves up, put on their cardboard helmets, mount Rosinante, and go galloping off on yet another foray on behalf of the down-trodden and oppressed. They are unquestionably one of the wonders of the age, and I shall treasure till I die as a blessed memory the spectacle of them travelling with radiant optimism through a famished countryside, wandering in happy bands about squalid, over-crowded towns, listening with unshakeable faith to the fatuous patter of carefully trained and indoctrinated guides, repeating like schoolchildren a multiplication table, the bogus statistics and mindless slogans endlessly intoned to them. There, I would think, an earnest office-holder in some local branch of the League of Nations Union, there a godly Quaker who once had tea with Gandhi, there an inveigher against the Means Test and the Blasphemy Laws, there a staunch upholder of free speech and human rights, there an indomitable preventer of cruelty to animals; there scarred and worthy veterans of a hundred battles for truth, freedom and justice--all, all chanting the praises of Stalin and his Dictatorship of the Proletariat. It was as though a vegetarian society had come out with a passionate plea for cannibalism, or Hitler had been nominated posthumously for the Nobel Peace Prize.

One major reason why radical economic reform was almost impossibly difficult to introduce in the Soviet Union was the strength of vested interests – in the first place, the bureaucracies of the economic ministries and the regional party organizations.

Union may be strength, but it is mere brute strength unless wisely directed.

Come to Him and let Him hold you—find peace and life and strength and grace and satisfaction in His arms alone.

I am the Vine; you are the branches. Whoever lives in Me and I in him bears much (abundant) fruit. However, apart from Me [cut off from vital union with Me] you can do nothing.

These quasi-faithful are growing in strength. They are the fundamentalists today, and they abound in all the religions.

What I mean when I say “Vilnius” is the strength of a people to be the first to vote to leave the Soviet Union in 1991, and the persistence to make that vote mean something.

I could give one, if you wish,” Sazed said, “but I do not think you need one. I have known you both for some time, and am willing to give my blessing to this union. I simply offer counsel. Those who take lightly promises they make to those they love are people who find little lasting satisfaction in life. This is not an easy time in which to live. That does not mean that it has to be a difficult time to love, but it does mean that you will find unusual stresses upon your lives and your relationship. “Do not forget the love oath you made to each other this evening. It will give you much strength in the days to come, I think.

Eliza has no use for the foolish romantic tradition that all women love to be mastered, if not actually bullied and beaten. "When you go to women," says Nietzsche, "take your whip with you." Sensible despots have never confined that precaution to women: they have taken their whips with them when they have dealt with men, and been slavishly idealized by the men over whom they have flourished the whip much more than by women. No doubt there are slavish women as well as slavish men; and women, like men, admire those that are stronger than themselves. But to admire a strong person and to live under that strong person's thumb are two different things. The weak may not be admired and hero-worshipped; but they are by no means disliked or shunned; and they never seem to have the least difficulty in marrying people who are too good for them. They may fail in emergencies; but life is not one long emergency: it is mostly a string of situations for which no exceptional strength is needed, and with which even rather weak people can cope if they have a stronger partner to help them out. Accordingly, it is a truth everywhere in evidence that strong people, masculine or feminine, not only do not marry stronger people, but do not show any preference for them in selecting their friends. When a lion meets another with a louder roar "the first lion thinks the last a bore." The man or woman who feels strong enough for two, seeks for every other quality in a partner than strength. The converse is also true. Weak people want to marry strong people who do not frighten them too much; and this often leads them to make the mistake we describe metaphorically as "biting off more than they can chew." They want too much for too little; and when the bargain is unreasonable beyond all bearing, the union becomes impossible: it ends in the weaker party being either discarded or borne as a cross, which is worse. People who are not only weak, but silly or obtuse as well, are often in these difficulties.

As to industrial conditions, however, Babbitt had thought a great deal, and his opinions may be coordinated as follows: "A good labor union is of value because it keeps out radical unions, which would destroy property. No one ought to be forced to belong to a union, however. All labor agitators who try to force men to join a union should be hanged. In fact, just between ourselves, there oughtn't to be any unions allowed at all; and as it's the best way of fighting the unions, every business man ought to belong to an employers'-association and to the Chamber of Commerce. In union there is strength. So any selfish hog who doesn't join the Chamber of Commerce ought to be forced to.

Litvak knew that charisma was a real if indefinable quality, a chemical fire that certain half-fortunate men gave off. Like any fire or talent, it was amoral, unconnected to goodness or wickedness, power or usefulness or strength.

The devil delights in reminding us daily of all our mistakes from the past. On Monday he reminds us of Saturday and Sunday’s failures; on Tuesday he reminds us of sins committed on Monday, and so on. One morning I was spending my time with the Lord, thinking about my problems and all the areas in which I had failed, when suddenly the Lord spoke to my heart: “Joyce, are you going to fellowship with Me or with your problems?” It is our fellowship with God that helps and strengthens us to overcome our problems. We are strengthened through our union with Him. If we spend our time with God fellowshipping with our mistakes from yesterday, we never receive strength to overcome them today. Meditating on all of our faults and failures weakens us, but meditating on God’s grace and willingness to forgive strengthens us: For by the death He died, He died to sin [ending His relation to it] once for all; and the life that He lives, He is living to God [in unbroken fellowship with Him]. Even so consider yourselves also dead to sin and your relation to it broken, but alive to God [living in unbroken fellowship with Him] in Christ Jesus. (Romans 6:10-11, emphasis mine) Our

Rabbi Heskel Shpilman is a deformed mountain, a giant ruined desert, a cartoon house with the windows shut and the sink left running. A little kid lumped him together, a mob of kids, blind orphans who never laid eyes on a man. They clumped the dough of his arms and legs to the dough of his body, then jammed his head down on top. A millionaire could cover a Rolls-Royce with the fine black silk-and-velvet expanse of the rebbe’s frock coat and trousers. It would require the brain strength of the eighteen greatest sages in history to reason through the arguments against and in favor of classifying the rebbe’s massive bottom as either a creature of the deep, a man-made structure, or an unavoidable act of God.

Men were created to reflect the strength, love, and self-sacrifice of Christ. Women were created to reflect the responsiveness, grace, and beauty of the bride He redeemed. And marriage was created to reflect the covenant union of Christ and His bride.

May I express the hope that the present union may happily exemplify that which we find in a first-class port—strength of body fortified by a first-class spirit and mellowing through many years to a noble maturity. My lord and my lady—your very good health!

The West has beaten back the totalitarian pretensions of both Hitler’s would-be master race in Germany and Stalin’s would-be master class in the Soviet Union. But it now stands weak and unsure of itself before its three current menaces: first, the equally totalitarian, would-be master faith of Islamism from the Middle East; second, the increasingly totalitarian philosophy and zero-sum strategies of illiberal liberalism; and third, the self-destructive cultural chaos of the West’s own chosen ideas and lifestyles that are destroying its identity and sapping its former strength.

The next year, Kroger refused to negotiate a new contract, and Hoffa’s victory was short-lived. But on the strength of his stand with the Strawberry Boys, Jimmy Hoffa was recruited by Detroit’s Teamsters Local 299 as an organizer. Hoffa’s job was to encourage men to join the union and through solidarity and organization to better their lives and the lives of their families. Detroit was home to America’s auto industry. As the auto industry’s chief spokesman, Henry Ford’s position on the labor movement in general was that “labor unions are the worst thing that ever struck the earth.” In

I shall be glad to do all I can to make a success of what we began in the café, but I think that the primary condition on which success depends is to set aside all petty jealousies, for only union is strength. Surely the common interest is worth the sacrifice of that selfishness of every man for himself.

Philip, who had been given the title Duke of Edinburgh, then cut the wedding cake with his sword and thus began an enduring royal union. Fifty years later, in 1997, the Queen said this of her husband: “He has quite simply been my strength and stay all these years, and I owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim.

There have been ample opportunities since 1945 to show that material superiority in war is not enough if the will to fight is lacking. In Algeria, Vietnam and Afghanistan the balance of economic and military strength lay overwhelmingly on the side of France, the United States, and the Soviet Union, but the will to win was slowly eroded. Troops became demoralised and brutalised. Even a political solution was abandoned. In all three cases the greater power withdrew. The Second World War was an altogether different conflict, but the will to win was every bit as important - indeed it was more so. The contest was popularly perceived to be about issues of life and death of whole communities rather than for their fighting forces alone. They were issues, wrote one American observer in 1939, 'worth dying for'. If, he continued, 'the will-to-destruction triumphs, our resolution to preserve civilisation must become more implacable...our courage must mount'. Words like 'will' and 'courage' are difficult for historians to use as instruments of cold analysis. They cannot be quantified; they are elusive of definition; they are products of a moral language that is regarded sceptically today, even tainted by its association with fascist rhetoric. German and Japanese leaders believed that the spiritual strength of their soldiers and workers in some indefinable way compensate for their technical inferiority. When asked after the war why Japan lost, one senior naval officer replied that the Japanese 'were short on spirit, the military spirit was weak...' and put this explanation ahead of any material cause. Within Germany, belief that spiritual strength or willpower was worth more than generous supplies of weapons was not confined to Hitler by any means, though it was certainly a central element in the way he looked at the world. The irony was that Hitler's ambition to impose his will on others did perhaps more than anything to ensure that his enemies' will to win burned brighter still. The Allies were united by nothing so much as a fundamental desire to smash Hitlerism and Japanese militarism and to use any weapon to achieve it. The primal drive for victory at all costs nourished Allied fighting power and assuaged the thirst for vengeance. They fought not only because the sum of their resources added up to victory, but because they wanted to win and were certain that their cause was just. The Allies won the Second World War because they turned their economic strength into effective fighting power, and turned the moral energies of their people into an effective will to win. The mobilisation of national resources in this broad sense never worked perfectly, but worked well enough to prevail. Materially rich, but divided, demoralised, and poorly led, the Allied coalition would have lost the war, however exaggerated Axis ambitions, however flawed their moral outlook. The war made exceptional demands on the Allied peoples. Half a century later the level of cruelty, destruction and sacrifice that it engendered is hard to comprehend, let alone recapture. Fifty years of security and prosperity have opened up a gulf between our own age and the age of crisis and violence that propelled the world into war. Though from today's perspective Allied victory might seem somehow inevitable, the conflict was poised on a knife-edge in the middle years of the war. This period must surely rank as the most significant turning point in the history of the modern age.

The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit root yug, which means “to yoke or harness.” Since 500 B.C., yoga has traditionally referred to the art of “yoking.” or hooking up, the lower (or individual) consciousness with the higher (or universal) consciousness. Over the centuries the word yoga has also been used to mean “union,” and often refers not only to the union between lower and higher levels of consciousness, but union between mind and body.

Such was the bridal-hour of Genius and Humanity. Who shall rehearse the tale of their after-union? Who shall depict its bliss and bale? Who shall tell how He, between whom and the Woman God put enmity, forged deadly plots to break the bond or defile its purity? Who shall record the long strife between Serpent and Seraph? How still the Father of Lies insinuated evil into good - pride into wisdom - grossness into glory - pain into bliss - poison into passion? How the 'dreadless Angel' defied, resisted, and repelled? How, again and again, he refined the polluted cup, exalted the debased emotion, rectified the perverted impulse, detected the lurking venom, baffled the frontless temptation - purified, justified, watched, and withstood? How, by his patience, by his strength, by that unutterable excellence he held from God - his Origin - this faithful Seraph fought for Humanity a good fight through time; and, when Time's course closed, and Death was encountered at the end, barring with fleshless arms the portals of Eternity, how Genius still held close his dying bride, sustained her through the agony of the passage, bore her triumphant into his own home - Heaven; restored her, redeemed, to Jehovah - her Maker; and at last, before Angel and Archangel, crowned her with the crown of Immortality. Who shall, of these things, write the chronicle?

Keller, who devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind, never wavered in her belief that our society needed radical change. Having herself fought so hard to speak, she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union to fight for the free speech of others. She sent $100 to the NAACP with a letter of support that appeared in its magazine The Crisis—a radical act for a white person from Alabama in the 1920s. She supported Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate, in each of his campaigns for the presidency. She composed essays on the women’s movement, on politics, on economics. Near the end of her life, she wrote to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, leader of the American Communist Party, who was then languishing in jail, a victim of the McCarthy era: “Loving birthday greetings, dear Elizabeth Flynn! May the sense of serving mankind bring strength and peace into your brave heart!

There is no way to know Jackson’s thought process as he prepared to engage the Union army in front of him. He knew very little about it and certainly he had no idea that, at the moment he ordered his men to advance, he was actually outnumbered five to one. But it was characteristic of the man that his means of determining the enemy’s strength was to hit the enemy in the face and then see what happened. Typical, too, was his impatience to fight. As at Port Republic, he chose to attack before his full force had arrived.

We want union with something, even if the opposite seems true.  Bring two atomic nuclei together and their positive electrostatic forces will repel each other, but, with the patience and strength of the blind god of the galaxies, there comes a point where something bigger takes over and welds them together. Physicists call it the Strong Nuclear Force; I’ve called this magic glue God. All the elements heavier than hydrogen were so formed, forged in the great hearts of the stars: sulphur, potassium, gold, radium. Everything you can think of.  

He who has the divine has the human added to him; but he who has lost the greater is deprived of both. The lesser goods are health, beauty, strength, and, lastly, wealth; not the blind God, Pluto, but one who has eyes to see and follow wisdom. For mind or wisdom is the most divine of all goods; and next comes temperance, and justice springs from the union of wisdom and temperance with courage, which is the fourth or last. These four precede other goods, and the legislator will arrange all his ordinances accordingly, the human going back to the divine, and the divine to their leader mind.

The right approach is to supplement ministrations to the body with those directed to the soul; this is essential. The benefit is intensified by reason of the interrelation between the two. Man’s constitution is from both his soul and body; there is no conceiving that he may endure, except by their union, giving rise to human actions. The two participate in events, both joyful and sorrowful, and in accidental pain. Thus when the body is undergoing illness and pain, and when stricken by harmful symptoms, these also hamper the strength of the soul conversely, the onset of mental pain leads to corporeal diseases

Now that I have been so immersed in the true nature of God and his kingdom, now that I have thoroughly put to death the self-sufficiency and self-preservation of the false self, now that I have been resurrected and restored to my true self, now that I have become in my essence what God meant when he meant man, now that I have become uniquely who God meant, when he meant me, now that I have trained and become practiced in living a life in experiential union with God himself, now that it is no longer the separate-I who lives but the very breath, strength, and life of God-with-me who lives in me, I am ready for anything, anywhere.

What is this you bring my America? Is it uniform with my country? Is it not something that has been better told or done before? Have you not imported this or the spirit of it in some ship? Is it not a mere tale? a rhyme? a prettiness?—is the good old cause in it? Has it not dangled long at the heels of the poets, politicians, literats, of enemies' lands? Does it not assume that what is notoriously gone is still here? Does it answer universal needs? will it improve manners? Does it sound with trumpet-voice the proud victory of the Union in that secession war? Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside? Will it absorb into me as I absorb food, air, to appear again in my strength, gait, face? Have real employments contributed to it? original makers, not mere amanuenses? Does it meet modern discoveries, calibres, facts, face to face? What does it mean to American persons, progresses, cities? Chi- cago, Kanada, Arkansas? Does it see behind the apparent custodians the real custodians standing, menacing, silent, the mechanics, Manhattanese, Western men, Southerners, significant alike in their apathy, and in the promptness of their love? Does it see what finally befalls, and has always finally befallen, each temporizer, patcher, outsider, partialist, alarmist, infidel, who has ever ask'd any thing of America?

I've been ordered to take you men with me. I've been told that if you don't come I can shoot you. Well, you know I won't do that. Not Maine men. I won't shoot any man who doesn't want this fight. Maybe someone else will, but I won't. So that's that." He paused again. There was nothing on their faces to lead him. "Here's the situation. I've been ordered to take you along, and that's what I'm going to do. Under guard if necessary. But you can have your rifles if you want them. The whole Reb army is up the road a ways waiting for us and this is no time for an argument like this. I tell you this: we sure can use you. We're down below half strength and we need you, no doubt of that. But whether you fight or not is up to you. Whether you come along, well, you're coming." Tom had come up with Chamberlain's horse. Over the heads of the prisoners Chamberlain could see the regiment falling into line out in the flaming road. He took a deep breath. "Well, I don't want to preach to you. You know who we are and what we're doing here. But if you're going to fight alongside us there's a few things I want you to know." He bowed his head, not looking at eyes. He folded his hands together. "This regiment was formed last fall, back in Maine. There were a thousand of us then. There's not three hundred of us now." He glanced up briefly. "But what is left is choice." He was embarrassed. He spoke very slowly, staring at the ground. "Some of us volunteered to fight for Union. Some came in mainly because we were bored at home and this looked like it might be fun. Some came because we were ashamed not to. Many of us came...because it was the right thing to do. All of us have seen men die. Most of us never saw a black man back home. We think on that, too. Freedom...is not just a word." He looked into the sky, over silent faces. "This is a different kind of army. If you look at history you'll see men fight for pay, or women, or some other kind of loot. They fight for land, or because a king makes them, or just because they like killing. But we're here for something new. I don't...this hasn't happened much in the history of the world. We're an army going out to set other men free." He bent down, scratched the black dirt into his fingers. He was beginning to warm to it; the words were beginning to flow. No one in front of him was moving. He said, "This is free ground. All the way to the Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow. No man born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by what your father was. Here you can be something. Here's a place to build a home. It isn't the land- there's always more land. It's the idea that we all have value, you and me, we're worth something more than the dirt. I never saw dirt I'd die for, but I'm not asking you to come join us and fight for dirt. What we're all fighting for, in the end, is each other.

To those readers who have found the moral strength to overcome the darkness and suffering of the first two volumes, the third volume will disclose a space of freedom and struggle. The secret of this struggle is kept by the Soviet regime even more zealously than that of the torments and annihilation it inflicted upon millions of its victims. More than anything else, the Communist regime fears the revelation of the fight which is conducted against it with a spiritual force unheard of and unknown to many countries in many periods of their history. The fighters' spiritual strength rises to the greatest height and to a supreme degree of tension when their situation is most helpless and the state system most ruthlessly destructive.

To celebrate the Russian/Ukrainian partnership, in 1954 the 300th anniversary of the Pereiaslav Treaty was marked throughout the Soviet Union in an unusually grandiose manner. In addition to numerous festivities, myriad publications, and countless speeches, the Central Committee of the all-union party even issued thirteen "thesis", which argued the irreversibility of the "everlasting union" of the Ukrainians and the Russians: "The experience of history has shown that the way of fraternal union and alliance chosen by the Russians and Ukrainians was the only true way. The union of two great Slavic peoples multiplied their strength in the common struggle against all external foes, against serf owners and the bourgeoisie, again tsarism and capitalist slavery. The unshakeable friendship of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples has grown and strengthened in this struggle." To emphasize the point that the union with Moscow brought the Ukrainians great benefits, the Pereiaslav anniversary was crowned by the Russian republic's ceding of Crimea to Ukraine "as a token of friendship of the Russian people." But the "gift" of the Crimea was far less altruistic than it seemed. First, because the peninsula was the historic homeland of the Crimean Tatars whom Stalin had expelled during the Second World War, the Russians did not have the moral right to give it away nor did the Ukrainians have the right to accept it. Second, because of its proximity and economic dependence on Ukraine, the Crimea's links with Ukraine were naturally greater than with Russia. Finally, the annexation of the Crimea saddled Ukraine with economic and political problems. The deportation of the Tatars in 1944 had created economic chaos in the region and it was Kiev's budget that had to make up loses. More important was the fact that, according to the 1959 census, about 860,000 Russians and only 260,000 Ukrainians lived in the Crimea. Although Kiev attempted to bring more Ukrainians into the region after 1954, the Russians, many of whom were especially adamant in rejecting any form of Ukrainization, remained the overwhelming majority. As a result, the Crimean "gift" increased considerably the number of Russians in the Ukrainian republic. In this regard, it certainly was an appropriate way of marking the Pereiaslav Treaty.

13. SOVIET UNION, FRANCE, AND UNITED KINGDOM VS. GERMANY Period: Mid-twentieth century Ruling powers: Soviet Union, France, United Kingdom Rising power: Germany Domain: Land and sea power in Europe Outcome: World War II (1939–45) Adolf Hitler led a simultaneous recovery of Germany’s economic power, military strength, and national pride, abrogating the Treaty of Versailles and flouting the postwar order maintained by France and the United Kingdom. Seeking Lebensraum, or living space, Hitler methodically expanded Nazi dominance over Austria and Czechoslovakia. Recognizing his ambitions too slowly, France and the UK declared war only after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, unable to stop German domination of the Continent until millions of Soviet and American forces turned the tide at the end of World War II.

Washington is a city of spectacles. Every four years, imposing Presidential inaugurations attract the great and the mighty. Kings, prime ministers, heroes and celebrities of every description have been feted there for more than 150 years. But in its entire glittering history, Washington had never seen a spectacle of the size and grandeur that assembled there on August 28, 1963. Among the nearly 250,000 people who journeyed that day to the capital, there were many dignitaries and many celebrities, but the stirring emotion came from the mass of ordinary people who stood in majestic dignity as witnesses to their single-minded determination to achieve democracy in their time. They came from almost every state in the union; they came in every form of transportation; they gave up from one to three days' pay plus the cost of transportation, which for many was a heavy financial sacrifice. They were good-humored and relaxed, yet disciplined and thoughtful. They applauded their leaders generously, but the leaders, in their own hearts, applauded their audience. Many a Negro speaker that day had his respect for his own people deepened as he felt the strength of their dedication. The enormous multitude was the living, beating heart of an infinitely noble movement. It was an army without guns, but not without strength. It was an army into which no one had to be drafted. It was white and Negro, and of all ages. It had adherents of every faith, members of every class, every profession, every political party, united by a single ideal. It was a fighting army, but no one could mistake that its most powerful weapon was love.

In Moscow I asked how these things were achieved. I was told that the whole theory of the Communist state was opposed to the separation of peoples on religious or racial grounds, and that workers had no strength divided up into warring camps. I was told the Soviet schools taught that all men are equal. I said, "The theory of our American democracy is that all men are equal, too--except that where I live it does not seem to work out that way. Theories are all right--but how do you make them work in Russia?" "Here we have laws against racial intolerance," they said. I said, "We have such laws in some of our American cities, too, but often the laws do not work." The Russians said, "In the Soviet Union, we make them work. Here nobody dares insult or spit on or hurt a Jew simply because he is a Jew any more.

The Islamic revolution in Iran is a positive development. At the same time, the Islamic revolution of Afghanistan, sprung exclusively from spiritual roots, dealt a heavy blow to the communist regime in the former Soviet Union. In face of that revolution, the red Soviet empire had to concede that it is incapable, in spite of its military superiority, to defeat the Mujaheddin, whose main weapons were their right and their spiritual strength. Another quite new situation appeared as a consequence of the Islamic revolution in Iran, that destroyed the Zionist rule in that country and shook its foundations in that part of the world. Khomeini's letter to Gorbachev, in which he was inviting the latter to convert to Islam, had great symbolic power! What is new again is the movement of Islamic rebirth and the continuous decay of the strength of the colonial government bodies directed from afar by Israel in many Islamic countries." "The Islamic system has remained stable in Iran even after the death of Khomeini and the change in the person of the leader and of the leadership group the only one to remain stable in the entire Islamic world. On the contrary, the demise of the Shah meant at the same time the collapse of his regime, his artificial form of government, and his army. All that went to the dust-bin of history. The same fate awaits the other regimes that prevail in the muslim world. Israel knows that very well. She tries desperately to cause the wheel of history to stand still. However, any strike against Iran or against the growing Islamic movements, will cause the anger of the muslim masses to grow, and the fire of the Islamic revolution to ignite. Nobody will be able to suppress that revolution.

His plan was too clever by half, and he became its main victim. In fact, as he admitted to a visiting American in 1969, the U-2 was the beginning of the end. Dr. A. McGehee Harvey came to Moscow to treat Khrushchev’s daughter Yelena, who was suffering from collagenitis. During a dinner at Khrushchev’s house (itself not easy to arrange since Khrushchev then lived under virtual house arrest), Dr. Harvey asked why his host had fallen from power. “Things were going well until one thing happened,” Khrushchev answered. “From the time Gary Powers was shot down in a U-2 over the Soviet Union, I was no longer in full control.” After that, “those who felt that America had imperialist intentions and that military strength was the most important thing had the evidence they needed, and when the U-2 incident occurred, I no longer had the ability to overcome that feeling.

With a handful of men, such a union would be ineffectual; with an unwieldy host, it would be impracticable; and the powers of the machine would be alike destroyed by the extreme minuteness or the excessive weight of its springs. To illustrate this observation, we need only reflect, that there is no superiority of natural strength, artificial weapons, or acquired skill, which could enable one man to keep in constant subjection one hundred of his fellow-creatures: the tyrant of a single town, or a small district, would soon discover that a hundred armed followers were a weak defence against ten thousand peasants or citizens; but a hundred thousand well-disciplined soldiers will command, with despotic sway, ten millions of subjects; and a body of ten or fifteen thousand guards will strike terror into the most numerous populace that ever crowded the streets of an immense capital.

No less dispiriting to FDR than the actual defeat on the World Court treaty was the manner of its accomplishment. As Coughlin moved to consolidate and wield his political influence, he exhibited a wicked genius for unsealing some of the dankest chambers of the national soul. He played guilefully on his followers' worst instincts: their suspicious provincialism, their unworldly ignorance, their yearning for simple explanations and extravagant remedies for their undeniable problems, their readiness to believe in conspiracies, their sulky resentments, and their all too human capacity for hatred. The National Union for Social Justice remained an inchoate entity in early 1935, and Coughlin's sustainable political strength was still a matter of conjecture. But if the Radio Priest could succeed in shepherding his followers into an alliance with some of the other dissident protest movements

If community is for growth of the personal consciousness and freedom, and not just for the collective consciousness, with the security it brings, there will be times when some people find themselves in conflict with their community . . . This happens particularly when someone is called to personal growth and is in a group which has become lukewarm, mediocre and closed in on itself. The loneliness and anguish felt by this person can lead to a more intimate and mystical union with God. The person no longer finding support from the group cries out to God, "Let those who thirst come to me and drink," says Jesus. Those who suffer in this way find a new strength and love in the heart of God. Their communion with the father deepens. The authenticity of their communion with God is shown as they continually try to love their brothers and sisters with greater fidelity, without judgment or condemnation.

Given that members of strong unions are highly paid, the obvious question is: are they highly paid because their unions are strong, or are their unions strong because they are highly paid? Defenders of the unions claim that the high pay of their members is a tribute to the strength of union organization, and that if only all workers were members of unions, all workers would be highly paid. The situation is, however, much more complex. Unions of highly skilled workers have unquestionably been able to raise the wages of their members; however, people who would in any event be highly paid are in a favorable position to form strong unions. Moreover, the ability of unions to raise the wages of some workers does not mean that universal unionism could raise the wages of all workers. On the contrary, and this is a fundamental source of misunderstanding, the gains that strong unions win for their members are primarily at the expense of other workers.

Friendship: the word has come to mean many different things among the various races and cultures of both the Underdark and the surface of the Realms. In Menzoberranzan, friendship is generally born out of mutual profit. While both parties are better off for the union, it remains secure. But loyalty is not a tenet of drow life, and as soon as a friend believes that he will gain more without the other, the union - and likely the other's life - will come to a swift end. I have had few friends in my life, and if I live a thousand years, I suspect that this will remain true. There is little to lament in this fact, though, for those who have called me friend have been persons of great character and have enriched my existence, given it worth. First there was Zaknafein, my father and mentor who showed me that I was not alone and that I was not incorrect in holding to my beliefs. Zaknafein saved me, from both the blade and the chaotic, evil, fanatic religion that damns my people. Yet I was no less lost when a handless deep gnome came into my life, a svirfneblin that I had rescued from certain death, many years before, at my brother Dinin's merciless blade. My deed was repaid in full, for when the svirfneblin and I again met, this time in the clutches of his people, I would have been killed - truly would have preferred death - were it not for Belwar Dissengulp. My time in Blingdenstone, the city of the deep gnomes, was such a short span in the measure of my years. I remember well Belwar's city and his people, and I always shall. Theirs was the first society I came to know that was based on the strengths of community, not the paranoia of selfish individualism. Together the deep gnomes survive against the perils of the hostile Underdark, labor in their endless toils of mining the stone, and play games that are hardly distinguishable from every other aspect of their rich lives. Greater indeed are pleasures that are shared. - Drizzt Do'Urden

George Washington clearly shared the foundational Virginian concern to “Christianize the savages” dwelling in the Virginia Colony. On July 10, 1789, in response to an address from the directors of the Society of The United Brethren for Propagating the Gospel Among the Heathen, Washington stated: In proportion as the general Government of the United States shall acquire strength by duration, it is probable they may have it in their power to extend a salutary influence to the Aborigines in the extremities of their Territory. In the meantime, it will be a desirable thing for the protection of the Union to co-operate, as far as circumstances may conveniently admit, with the disinterested [unselfish] endeavours of your Society to civilize and Christianize the Savages of the Wilderness.28 A Deist, by definition, rejected Christianity and accepted the equivalence of all religions’ worship of God. So no Deist could see the plan for the “conversion of the heathen” outlined by Bishop Ettwein and the Brethren as both “laudable” and “earnestly desired.” Yet those are Washington’s words.

No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler. The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it. At the crest of their popular strength, in July 1932, the National Socialists had attained but 37 per cent of the vote. But the 63 per cent of the German people who expressed their opposition to Hitler were much too divided and shortsighted to combine against a common danger which they must have known would overwhelm them unless they united, however temporarily, to stamp it out. The Communists, at the behest of Moscow, were committed to the last to the silly idea of first destroying the Social Democrats, the Socialist trade unions and what middle-class democratic forces there were, on the dubious theory that although this would lead to a Nazi regime it would be only temporary and would bring inevitably the collapse of capitalism, after which the Communists would take over and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. Fascism, in the Bolshevik Marxist view, represented the last stage of a dying capitalism; after that, the Communist deluge!

All my films are about Hong Kong." Wong Kar Wai once told me, "even if they're set in Argentina." While many in the West saw Happy Together primarily as a love story, his compatriots saw it something more timely and relevant: Wong grappling with the meaning of the handover to China. They knew it wasn't coincidental that the film should open in Hong Kong one month before that historical transfer of power. Nor was it coincidental that it should begin with a shot of Hong kong passports and end with Tony Leung's Lai on a train in Taipei, not Hong Kong, heading into an indeterminate future as the soundtrack plays Danny Chung's cover of the pop song "Happy Together" --a title that could be read as predicting a successful union, or as a slash of bitter irony. Even the movie's defining image, the aerial shot of water rushing down Iguazu Falls, is layered with political intimations that cut in different directions. At once thrillingly spectacular and patently dangerous--Chris Doyle, who's terrified of heights, shot it while hanging out of a chopper--the roaring waters that combine in these falls are an expression of the inexorably rushing power of reunion that can be seen as both a symbol of great strength or the downward pull of destruction.

Soviets had their own atomic bomb, Kennan argued that it made no sense for the United States to get into a spiraling nuclear arms race. Like Oppenheimer, he believed that the bomb was ultimately a suicidal weapon and therefore both militarily useless and dangerous. Besides, Kennan was confident that the Soviet Union was politically and economically the weaker of the two adversaries, and that in the long run America could wear down the Soviet system by means of diplomacy and the “judicious exploitation of our strength as a deterrent to world conflict. . . .” Kennan’s eighty-page “personal document” might well have been coauthored with Oppenheimer, reflecting as it did so many of Robert’s views. Indeed, both he and Kennan took its reception as a plunging barometer, indicating the approach of violent political storms. Circulated within the State Department, Kennan’s memo was quietly and firmly rejected by all who read it. Acheson called Kennan into his office one day and said, “George, if you persist in your view on this matter, you should resign from the Foreign Service, assume a monk’s habit, carry a tin cup and stand on the street corner and say, ‘The end of the world is nigh.’ ” Acheson didn’t even bother to show the document to President Truman.

Red: Maintaining health, bodily strength, physical energy, sex, passion, courage, protection, and defensive magic. This is the color of the element of fire. Throughout the world, red is associated with life and death, for this is the color of blood spilled in both childbirth and injury. Pink: Love, friendship, compassion, relaxation. Pink candles can be burned during rituals designed to improve self-love. They’re ideal for weddings and for all forms of emotional union. Orange: Attraction, energy. Burn to attract specific influences or objects. Yellow: Intellect, confidence, divination, communication, eloquence, travel, movement. Yellow is the color of the element of air. Burn yellow candles during rituals designed to heighten your visualization abilities. Before studying for any purpose, program a yellow candle to stimulate your conscious mind. Light the candle and let it burn while you study. Green: Money, prosperity, employment, fertility, healing, growth. Green is the color of the element of earth. It’s also the color of the fertility of the earth, for it echoes the tint of chlorophyll. Burn when looking for a job or seeking a needed raise. Blue: Healing, peace, psychism, patience, happiness. Blue is the color of the element of water. This is also the realm of the ocean and of all water, of sleep, and of twilight. If you have trouble sleeping, charge a small blue candle with a visualization of yourself sleeping through the night. Burn for a few moments before you get into bed, then extinguish its flame. Blue candles can also be charged and burned to awaken the psychic mind. Purple: Power, healing severe diseases, spirituality, meditation, religion. Purple candles can be burned to enhance all spiritual activities, to increase your magical power, and as a part of intense healing rituals in combination with blue candles. White: Protection, purification, all purposes. White contains all colors. It’s linked with the moon. White candles are specifically burned during purification and protection rituals. If you’re to keep but one candle on hand for magical purposes, choose a white one. Before use, charge it with personal power and it’ll work for all positive purposes. Black: Banishing negativity, absorbing negativity. Black is the absence of color. In magic, it’s also representative of outer space. Despite what you may have heard, black candles are burned for positive purposes, such as casting out baneful energies or to absorb illnesses and nasty habits. Brown: Burned for spells involving animals, usually in combination with other colors. A brown candle and a red candle for animal protection, brown and blue for healing, and so on.

Night does not communicate with the day. it burns up in it. Night is carried to the stake at dawn. And its people along with it — the drinkers, the poets, the lovers. We are a people of the banished, of the condemned. I do not know you. You want to join us. Your fear and confusion propel you into our arms; you want to nestle in there, but your tough body keeps clinging to its certainties; it pushes desire away, refuses to surrender. I don’t blame you. You live in another prison, a world of strength and bravery where you think you can be carried aloft in triumph; you think you can win the goodwill of the powerful, you seek glory and wealth. But when night falls, you tremble. You don’t drink, for you are afraid; you know that the burning sensation of alcohol plunges you into weakness, into an irresistible need to find caresses, a vanished tenderness, the lost world of childhood, gratification, the need to find peace when faced with the glistering uncertainty of darkness. You think you desire my beauty, the softness of my skin, the brilliance of my smile, the delicacy of my limbs, the crimson of my lips, but actually, what you want without realizing it is for your fears to disappear, for healing, union, return, oblivion. This power inside you devours you in solitude. So you suffer, lost in an infinite twilight, one foot in day and the other in night.

we hear “the first,” our false self immediately presumes that loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength is the all-important thing. So we engage in various types of spiritual practices; we may become rigorously religious; we become very “spiritual” in our efforts to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. We figure once we really get our act together in loving God as we should, perhaps we can then work on loving our neighbor as our self. After all, didn’t Jesus say this comes second? This is not what Jesus is saying. The best translation is: “ ‘You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.’ Another way to say the same thing is, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ” If you think I’m playing fast and loose with Scripture, you haven’t read 1 John lately. John got it. He understood that our relationship with God and our relationships with others are two sides of a single coin, the symbiosis of life in loving union with God for others.3 The place where we live out our relationship of loving union with God is not in the quiet of our prayer closet but in our relationships with one another. Here is where we “put to death” the manipulative, coercive, controlling dynamics of the false self. Here is where we abandon the dehumanizing and abusive practices of the false self. We love others.

Fourteen years of sharing political power in the Republic, of making all the compromises that were necessary to maintain coalition governments, had sapped the strength and the zeal of the Social Democrats until their party had become little more than an opportunist pressure organization, determined to bargain for concessions for the trade unions on which their strength largely rested. It might be true, as some Socialists said, that fortune had not smiled on them: the Communists, unscrupulous and undemocratic, had split the working class; the depression had further hurt the Social Democrats, weakening the trade unions and losing the party the support of millions of unemployed, who in their desperation turned either to the Communists or the Nazis. But the tragedy of the Social Democrats could not be explained fully by bad luck. They had had their chance to take over Germany in November 1918 and to found a state based on what they had always preached: social democracy. But they lacked the decisiveness to do so. Now at the dawn of the third decade they were a tired, defeatist party, dominated by old, well-meaning but mostly mediocre men. Loyal to the Republic they were to the last, but in the end too confused, too timid to take the great risks which alone could have preserved it, as they had shown by their failure to act when Papen turned out a squad of soldiers to destroy constitutional government in Prussia.

Music by and for itself is not so portentous for our inward nature, so deeply moving, that it ought to be looked upon as the direct language of the feelings; but its ancient union with poetry has infused so much symbolism into rhythmical movement, into loudness and softness of tone, that we now imagine it speaks directly to and comes from the inward nature. Dramatic music is only possible when the art of harmony has acquired an immense range of symbolical means, through song, opera, and a hundred attempts at description by sound. "Absolute music" is either form per se, in the rude condition of music, when playing in time and with various degrees of strength gives pleasure, or the symbolism of form which speaks to the understanding even without poetry, after the two arts were joined finally together after long development and the musical form had been woven about with threads of meaning and feeling. People who are backward in musical development can appreciate a piece of harmony merely as execution, whilst those who are advanced will comprehend it symbolically. No music is deep and full of meaning in itself, it does not speak of "will," of the "thing-in-itself"; that could be imagined by the intellect only in an age which had conquered for musical symbolism the entire range of inner life. It was the intellect itself that first gave this meaning to sound, just as it also gave meaning to the relation between lines and masses in architecture, but which in itself is quite foreign to mechanical laws.

In the absence of expert [senior military] advice, we have seen each successive administration fail in the business of strategy - yielding a United States twice as rich as the Soviet Union but much less strong. Only the manner of the failure has changed. In the 1960s, under Robert S. McNamara, we witnessed the wholesale substitution of civilian mathematical analysis for military expertise. The new breed of the "systems analysts" introduced new standards of intellectual discipline and greatly improved bookkeeping methods, but also a trained incapacity to understand the most important aspects of military power, which happens to be nonmeasurable. Because morale is nonmeasurable it was ignored, in large and small ways, with disastrous effects. We have seen how the pursuit of business-type efficiency in the placement of each soldier destroys the cohesion that makes fighting units effective; we may recall how the Pueblo was left virtually disarmed when it encountered the North Koreans (strong armament was judged as not "cost effective" for ships of that kind). Because tactics, the operational art of war, and strategy itself are not reducible to precise numbers, money was allocated to forces and single weapons according to "firepower" scores, computer simulations, and mathematical studies - all of which maximize efficiency - but often at the expense of combat effectiveness. An even greater defect of the McNamara approach to military decisions was its businesslike "linear" logic, which is right for commerce or engineering but almost always fails in the realm of strategy. Because its essence is the clash of antagonistic and outmaneuvering wills, strategy usually proceeds by paradox rather than conventional "linear" logic. That much is clear even from the most shopworn of Latin tags: si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war), whose business equivalent would be orders of "if you want sales, add to your purchasing staff," or some other, equally absurd advice. Where paradox rules, straightforward linear logic is self-defeating, sometimes quite literally. Let a general choose the best path for his advance, the shortest and best-roaded, and it then becomes the worst path of all paths, because the enemy will await him there in greatest strength... Linear logic is all very well in commerce and engineering, where there is lively opposition, to be sure, but no open-ended scope for maneuver; a competitor beaten in the marketplace will not bomb our factory instead, and the river duly bridged will not deliberately carve out a new course. But such reactions are merely normal in strategy. Military men are not trained in paradoxical thinking, but they do no have to be. Unlike the business-school expert, who searches for optimal solutions in the abstract and then presents them will all the authority of charts and computer printouts, even the most ordinary military mind can recall the existence of a maneuvering antagonists now and then, and will therefore seek robust solutions rather than "best" solutions - those, in other words, which are not optimal but can remain adequate even when the enemy reacts to outmaneuver the first approach.

After experience had taught me that all things which frequently take place in ordinary life are vain and futile, and when I saw that all the things I feared, and which feared me, had nothing good or bad in them save in so far as the mind was affected by them; I determined at last to inquire whether there was anything which might be truly good, and able to communicate its goodness, and by which the mind might be affected to the exclusion of all other things; I determined, I say, to inquire whether I might discover and attain the faculty of enjoying throughout eternity continual supreme happiness.. I could see the many advantages acquired from honor and riches, and that I should be debarred from acquiring these things if I wished seriously to investigate a new matter…But the more one possesses of either of them, the more the pleasure is increased, and the more one is in con- sequence encouraged to increase them; whereas if at any time our hope is frustrated, there arises in us the deepest pain. Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it we must direct our lives in such a way as to please the fancy of men, avoiding what they dislike and seeking what pleases them. . .. But the love towards a thing eternal and infinite alone feeds the mind with a pleasure secure from all pain… The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of nature….The more the mind knows, the better it understands its forces and the order of nature; the more it understands its forces or strength, the better it will be able to direct itself and lay down the rules for itself; and the more it understands the order of nature, the more easily it will be able to liberate itself from useless things; this is the whole method.

Sometimes our heart is moved to tenderness when we consider God's great wisdom with regard to each of us. At other times we can be softened only through suffering. We may then feel utterly destroyed to the point of despairing of life itself. But if, with help from on high, we gather the strength to turn to God at that point, He will find an opening so as to enter our heart with His grace. Nowadays, people are familiar with acute suffering of one kind or another. Pain and suffering have become the common language of humankind. God may well be using this to break through into our hardened and loveless world with His grace and the result would be a spiritual renaissance. He has already changed the lives of so many people, and He can easily change many more, and even extend it to the whole world. We might also be moved by the thought that our life has been nothing but a chain of errors, a chain of betrayals, a long series of failures. We see that nothing in our life is worthy of God and nothing in us is fit to look upon the Face of God. Neither can He look upon us, nor can we stand in His presence. If we turn to God with such awareness He will unfailingly find and opening for His grace. In this way, we can make a new start at any moment of our life, for we know that our God will respond. But if He is to visit man with His grace, He will first require our cooperation. He requires the presence of our human factor, little and weak though it is. He created us out of nothing, but He does not create us anew unless we consent to work with Him. Our tiny human factor is absolutely necessary to Him, so we need to align it with His infinitely great and divine factor, and the miracle of the union of our heart with His grace will then take place.

The American republic now extended across a third of a continent, and was unlikely to stop there. How then could the British time bomb of generosity—the ocean of land ceded in 1783—fail to revive familiar protests of “no taxation without representation”? Where, if that happened, would Hamilton’s “UNION” be? Madison solved these issues of time and space by shifting scale. In doing so he drew, knowingly or not, 65 on Machiavelli. For only in republics, the Florentine had observed, could the “common good” be “looked to properly.” By expanding the number who benefited, the influence of the few who didn’t could be reduced: not all parts, submerged in wholes, need drown. 66 Scale could be the life preserver. There were, Madison acknowledged, dangers in this: By enlarging too much the number of electors [voters], you render the representative too little acquainted with all their local circumstances and lesser interests; as by reducing it too much, you render him unduly attached to these, and too little fit to comprehend and pursue great and national objects. But surely there existed “a mean, on both sides of which inconveniences will be found to lie.” In this way balancing factions—a Burkean enterprise—could put “inconveniences” to good use: Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. The proposed Constitution “forms a happy combination in this respect; the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local and particular to the State legislatures.” 67

A more complex way to understand this is the method used by Hermann Minkowski, Einstein’s former math teacher at the Zurich Polytechnic. Reflecting on Einstein’s work, Minkowski uttered the expression of amazement that every beleaguered student wants to elicit someday from condescending professors. “It came as a tremendous surprise, for in his student days Einstein had been a lazy dog,” Minkowski told physicist Max Born. “He never bothered about mathematics at all.”63 Minkowski decided to give a formal mathematical structure to the theory. His approach was the same one suggested by the time traveler on the first page of H. G. Wells’s great novel The Time Machine, published in 1895: “There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time.” Minkowski turned all events into mathematical coordinates in four dimensions, with time as the fourth dimension. This permitted transformations to occur, but the mathematical relationships between the events remained invariant. Minkowski dramatically announced his new mathematical approach in a lecture in 1908. “The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength,” he said. “They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”64 Einstein, who was still not yet enamored of math, at one point described Minkowski’s work as “superfluous learnedness” and joked, “Since the mathematicians have grabbed hold of the theory of relativity, I myself no longer understand it.” But he in fact came to admire Minkowski’s handiwork and wrote a section about it in his popular 1916 book on relativity.

He was in love with France before he even reached Paris. Jefferson’s work in Europe offered him a new battlefield in the war for American union and national authority that he had begun in the Congress. His sojourn in France is often seen as a revolutionary swoon during which he fell too hard for the foes of monarchy, growing overly attached to—and unhealthily admiring of—the French Revolution and its excesses. Some of his most enduring radical quotations, usually considered on their own with less appreciation of the larger context of Jefferson’s decades-long political, diplomatic, and philosophical careers, date from this era. His relationship to France and to the French, however, should be seen for what it was: a political undertaking in which Jefferson put the interests of America first. He was determined to create a balance of global power in which France would help the United States resist commercial and possible military threats from the British.5 From the ancien régime of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette to the French Revolution to the Age of Napoleon, Jefferson viewed France in the context of how it could help America on the world stage.6 Much of Jefferson’s energy was spent striving to create international respect for the United States and to negotiate commercial treaties to build and expand American commerce and wealth. His mind wandered and roamed and soared, but in his main work—the advancement of America’s security and economic interests—he was focused and clear-headed. Countries earned respect by appearing strong and unified. Jefferson wanted America to be respected. He, therefore, took care to project strength and a sense of unity. The cause of national power required it, and he was as devoted to the marshaling of American power in Paris as he had been in Annapolis. E

But in the Petit Palais, which Daphne had not visited in thirty years, Roland had what she liked to call ‘a moment’. He retired early from the paintings and waited in the main hall. After she had joined him and they were walking away he let rip. He said that if he ever had to look at one more Madonna and Child, Crucifixion, Assumption, Annunciation and all the rest he would ‘throw up’. Historically, he announced, Christianity had been the cold dead hand on the European imagination. What a gift, that its tyranny had expired. What looked like piety was enforced conformity within a totalitarian mind-state. To question or defy it in the sixteenth century would have been to take your life in your hands. Like protesting against Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was not only science that Christianity had obstructed for fifty generations, it was nearly all of culture, nearly all of free expression and enquiry. It buried the open-minded philosophies of classical antiquity for an age, it sent thousands of brilliant minds down irrelevant rabbit holes of pettifogging theology. It had spread its so-called Word by horrific violence and it maintained itself by torture, persecution and death. Gentle Jesus, ha! Within the totality of human experience of the world there was an infinity of subject matter and yet all over Europe the big museums were stuffed with the same lurid trash. Worse than pop music. It was the Eurovision Song Contest in oils and gilt frames. Even as he spoke he was amazed by the strength of his feelings and the pleasure of release. He was talking – exploding – about something else. What a relief it was, he said as he began to cool down, to see a representation of a bourgeois interior, of a loaf of bread on a board beside a knife, of a couple skating on a frozen canal hand in hand, trying to seize a moment of fun ‘while the fucking priest wasn’t looking. Thank God for the Dutch!

Eliza has no use for the foolish romantic tradition that all women love to be mastered, if not actually bullied and beaten. "When you go to women," says Nietzsche, "take your whip with you." Sensible despots have never confined that precaution to women: they have taken their whips with them when they have dealt with men, and been slavishly idealized by the men over whom they have flourished the whip much more than by women. No doubt there are slavish women as well as slavish men; and women, like men, admire those that are stronger than themselves. But to admire a strong person and to live under that strong person's thumb are two different things. The weak may not be admired and hero-worshipped; but they are by no means disliked or shunned; and they never seem to have the least difficulty in marrying people who are too good for them. They may fail in emergencies; but life is not one long emergency: it is mostly a string of situations for which no exceptional strength is needed, and with which even rather weak people can cope if they have a stronger partner to help them out. Accordingly, it is a truth everywhere in evidence that strong people, masculine or feminine, not only do not marry stronger people, but do not show any preference for them in selecting their friends. When a lion meets another with a louder roar "the first lion thinks the last a bore." The man or woman who feels strong enough for two, seeks for every other quality in a partner than strength. The converse is also true. Weak people want to marry strong people who do not frighten them too much; and this often leads them to make the mistake we describe metaphorically as "biting off more than they can chew." They want too much for too little; and when the bargain is unreasonable beyond all bearing, the union becomes impossible: it ends in the weaker party being either discarded or borne as a cross, which is worse. People who are not only weak, but silly or obtuse as well, are often in these difficulties

The most interesting aspects of the story lie between the two extremes of coercion and popularity. It might be instructive to consider fascist regimes’ management of workers, who were surely the most recalcitrant part of the population. It is clear that both Fascism and Nazism enjoyed some success in this domain. According to Tim Mason, the ultimate authority on German workers under Nazism, the Third Reich “contained” German workers by four means: terror, division, some concessions, and integration devices such as the famous Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude) leisure-time organization. Let there be no doubt that terror awaited workers who resisted directly. It was the cadres of the German Socialist and Communist parties who filled the first concentration camps in 1933, before the Jews. Since socialists and communists were already divided, it was not hard for the Nazis to create another division between those workers who continued to resist and those who decided to try to live normal lives. The suppression of autonomous worker organizations allowed fascist regimes to address workers individually rather than collectively. Soon, demoralized by the defeat of their unions and parties, workers were atomized, deprived of their usual places of sociability, and afraid to confide in anyone. Both regimes made some concessions to workers—Mason’s third device for worker “containment.” They did not simply silence them, as in traditional dictatorships. After power, official unions enjoyed a monopoly of labor representation. The Nazi Labor Front had to preserve its credibility by actually paying some attention to working conditions. Mindful of the 1918 revolution, the Third Reich was willing to do absolutely anything to avoid unemployment or food shortages. As the German economy heated up in rearmament, there was even some wage creep. Later in the war, the arrival of slave labor, which promoted many German workers to the status of masters, provided additional satisfactions. Mussolini was particularly proud of how workers would fare under his corporatist constitution. The Labor Charter (1927) promised that workers and employers would sit down together in a “corporation” for each branch of the economy, and submerge class struggle in the discovery of their common interests. It looked very imposing by 1939 when a Chamber of Corporations replaced parliament. In practice, however, the corporative bodies were run by businessmen, while the workers’ sections were set apart and excluded from the factory floor. Mason’s fourth form of “containment”—integrative devices—was a specialty of fascist regimes. Fascists were past masters at manipulating group dynamics: the youth group, the leisure-time association, party rallies. Peer pressure was particularly powerful in small groups. There the patriotic majority shamed or intimidated nonconformists into at least keeping their mouths shut. Sebastian Haffner recalled how his group of apprentice magistrates was sent in summer 1933 on a retreat, where these highly educated young men, mostly non-Nazis, were bonded into a group by marching, singing, uniforms, and drill. To resist seemed pointless, certain to lead nowhere but to prison and an end to the dreamed-of career. Finally, with astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute. These various techniques of social control were successful.

The ability of the Malay political leadership through UMNO to mobilize Malay public opinion caught the British by surprise. A people who only a decade earlier had seemed docile and apathetic were suddenly making their views known through mass demonstrations. The strength and emotion of the Malay reaction convinced the British that they had miscalculated. The British sat down with the Malay political leadership to come up with an alternative to the Malayan Union.

I told him that neither he nor anyone else should ever underestimate the strength and power of the United States: those who had—Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union—were all now in the ashcan of history.

He is rest from the constant pressure of the soul’s desire to perform and conger up. One of the greatest hindrances to the spiritual life is the soul’s itch to make something happen. And all God is wanting is for someone to simply come to Him. “My soul, wait in silence for God only, for my hope is from Him. He only is my rock and my salvation, my stronghold; I shall not be shaken. On God my salvation and my glory rest; the rock of my strength, my refuge is in God. Trust in Him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before Him; God is a refuge for us.”39

The moral panic about supposedly unpatriotic educators was driven by international war hysteria combined with agitation over the growing domestic political strength of teachers unions. In 1917 and 1918, Congress passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which sought to ban public speech and actions “disloyal” to the United States military and government, especially among socialists, communists, pacifists, immigrants, and other groups perceived as affiliated with European leftism. More than any other force, the American Legion, a veterans’ organization, pushed this ethos of unquestioning patriotism onto the nation’s public schools. The Legion was influential: 16 U.S. senators and 130 congressmen identified as members. It promoted the idea that the Communist Party in Moscow actively recruited American teachers in order to enlist them in brainwashing the nation’s youth. The Legion saw all left-of-center political activity as unacceptably anti-American.

That the true apostolic preacher must have the prayers of others—good people to give to his ministry its full quota of success, Paul is a preeminent example. He asks, he covets, he pleads in an impassionate way for the help of all God’s saints, He knew that in the spiritual realm as elsewhere, in union there is strength; that the consecration and aggregation of faith, desire, and prayer increased the volume of spiritual force until it became overwhelming and irresistible in its power. Units of prayer combined, like drops of water, make an ocean that defies resistance”—E. M. B.

he would be met not only with the united strength of the Arab countries but also with strong opposition from the Soviet Union and all peace-loving peoples.

He was probably never married. Some suppose that he was a widower. Jewish and rabbinical custom, the completeness of his moral character, his ideal conception of marriage as reflecting the mystical union of Christ with his church, his exhortations to conjugal, parental, and filial duties, seem to point to experimental knowledge of domestic life. But as a Christian missionary moving from place to place, and exposed to all sorts of hardship and persecution, he felt it his duty to abide alone.357 He sacrificed the blessings of home and family to the advancement of the kingdom of Christ.358 His "bodily presence was weak, and his speech contemptible" (of no value), in the superficial judgment of the Corinthians, who missed the rhetorical ornaments, yet could not help admitting that his "letters were weighty and strong."359  Some of the greatest men have been small in size, and some of the purest souls forbidding in body. Socrates was the homeliest, and yet the wisest of Greeks. Neander, a converted Jew, like Paul, was short, feeble, and strikingly odd in his whole appearance, but a rare humility, benignity, and heavenly aspiration beamed from his face beneath his dark and bushy eyebrows. So we may well imagine that the expression of Paul’s countenance was highly intellectual and spiritual, and that he looked "sometimes like a man and sometimes like an angel."360 He was afflicted with a mysterious, painful, recurrent, and repulsive physical infirmity, which he calls a "thorn in the flesh, " and which acted as a check upon spiritual pride and self-exultation over his abundance of revelations.361  He bore the heavenly treasure in an earthly vessel and his strength was made perfect in weakness.362  But all the more must we admire the moral heroism which turned weakness itself into an element of strength, and despite pain and trouble and persecution carried the gospel salvation triumphantly from Damascus to Rome.

President Truman’s message to Stalin could not have been clearer if written in blood. It was a warning not to contemplate starting a new war in Europe trusting in the Red Army’s old-fashioned strength in numbers. And it signaled more concisely than any speech that Truman had accepted the central argument of George Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram,” sent from the U.S. embassy in Moscow six months before the tests: the Soviet Union had to be contained. As Truman himself put it: “If we could just have Stalin and his boys see one of these things, there wouldn’t be any question about another war.

I choose you,” I said, leaning toward him, and his mouth met mine with such ardor that my senses reeled all over again. He lay down with me on top of him, and it took all my strength of will to pull away. “But we have to be married.” He studied me, concluding that I truly believed in what I said. “Then let’s go get married.” “Now?” I blurted, eyes wide. “Is now a problem?” “The banns need to be published six weeks in advance of the wedding!” “Banns?” He rolled me sideways off him so that we lay facing each other, his voice dubious. “The banns announce our betrothal,” I elaborated, hoping not to dampen his enthusiasm or his readiness to tolerate Hytanican tradition. “They give time for anyone who might have an objection to our union to come forward.” I recognized the problem even as the words left my mouth, but he was first to say it. “And when the entire province objects, what then?” He pushed himself into a sitting position, then took my hands and gently pulled me up beside him. “Alera, how important is this custom to you?” I peered out the window at the stars while I gave the matter serious thought, pondering Narian’s way of life and if I could reconcile myself to it. I wanted to, but part of me was afraid of it--of going against the doctrines I had been raised to follow. I believed strongly in my kingdom’s religion. I also knew I had to uphold the traditions my people valued if they were to believe in me and accept me as their leader. If I were to switch now to Cokyrian custom, their trust would be betrayed. “It’s very important,” I ultimately answered, not looking at him. “Don’t be embarrassed,” he said, cupping my chin to raise my eyes to his. “I wouldn’t deserve you if I didn’t respect your beliefs.” He gave me a light kiss, signifying that things were resolved between us, although the real problem remained. “I don’t know when the people will accept you, but I cannot go behind their backs. It may be a long wait.” Narian’s expression was resigned. “So we wait.” His attitude lifted my spirits, and a splendid idea struck me. “Our priests are sworn to keep confidences--we could be betrothed.” “And betrothal--it doesn’t involve banns or ceremonies or parades in this kingdom?” He was teasing me, assuring me he was fine with my decision. “No.” I laughed. “Just an exchange of rings. I’ll wear mine around my neck.” “I’ll wear mine on my hand where I should. My soldiers will be oblivious.” He smirked, then added, “And it will confirm your countrymen’s suspicions that I am ignorant.” I gazed into his eyes, at the love that shone within them, and laid my head upon his chest, content, for now, to have him hold me.

To my dear daughters, granddaughters, and all future brides, I thought it would be a wonderful tradition for each bride to write a little note and leave a legacy for those who come after her. How I wish my own mother had lived to see my wedding day and been present to share her wisdom! I make no pretense at being wise, but God is. The bible says we can ask for wisdom, and God will honor our request. As you consider marriage, first seek God's will and ask Him to direct your heart. Do not hasten to take your vows. Pause and reflect before you take such a momentous step, and be sure your mate honors God. A marriage is not just between a man and a woman--it is a holy union which must include the Lord to flourish. Ethan was God's gift to me. His patience, strength, and companionship were like a balm to my grief. We learned to work together and rely on one another until respect and affection sparked. Love came softly and grew in our hearts. How I thank God for bringing us together and blessing our union! Though hardships test us and extraordinary things thrill us, life is made up of mundane days. Love each other in the little, commonplace matters of life to strengthen your marriage, or it will wither from neglect. Appreciate what you have, and forgive as freely as you laugh. My darlings, my prayer is for you to make wise decisions of the heart--first in devoting your spirit to the Lord, then in giving your hand to a man. May each of you be blessed with a godly mate and know the joy of growing close together and growing old with him.

I have said that the abilities you possess are only shadows of your real strength, and that perception, which is inherently judgmental, was introduced only after the separation. No one has been sure of anything since. I have also made it clear that the resurrection was the means for the return to knowledge, which was accomplished by the union of my will with the Father’s.

Not Suffering Alone Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me; still, not my will but yours be done. Luke 22:42 The “Agony in the Garden” has always moved me deeply. Up to this moment, even at the Last Supper, Jesus has appeared to be strong and in control. Now, however, he is weak, vulnerable and very much alone. Jesus is in a state of profound fear over his upcoming passion and death. Along with the fear is a terrible loneliness; Jesus can find no human support. Like any of us, he would hope that at least one of his disciples would notice his pain and come to his side. But they are sound asleep. Perhaps this is why Luke includes the note that “an angel from heaven appeared to him” to strengthen him, as if the angel were saying, “Be assured: countless souls will be willing to suffer their own agony and death for love of you and your teachings.” As our own Lenten journey nears its conclusion this Holy Week, may we find the spiritual strength we need to bear our cross in union with Jesus and support our brothers and sisters in their times of suffering. Fr. Martin Pable, O.F.M. Cap.

About the same time, Ronald Reagan stepped into the Oval Office and began to pursue policies that reminded many Americans of TR's Big Stick diplomacy. Roosevelt, who had doubled the size of the navy and sent his Great White Fleet on a voyage around the world, surely would have approved of Reagan's plans for a six-hundred ship navy, dramatically increased military spending, and eagerness to challenge the Soviet Union. These policies fit perfectly with TR's philosophy of deterrence (which Reagan expressed succinctly as "peace through strength"), and they were promoted in the same unequivocal moral terms--the American "shining city on a hill" versus the Soviet "evil empire"--that Roosevelt habitually used when describing enemies, foreign and domestic.

The worst form of inequality, is the inequality of ideals A people united by the same ideal, irrespective of religion, social status, race, political preference or sexual, would have the strength to fight for a fairer country.

Buffett observed that it was out of his hands. If the union had decided to strike long enough, his investment and their jobs would have been lost. The Buffalo News’ weakness proved to be its bargaining strength. The

The Marshall Plan,” New York Times correspondent William White wrote, “appears to draw its greatest strength not from any special feeling that other peoples should be helped for their own sake, but only as a demonstration against the spread of communism.”67 Communist “overlords,” South Dakota Republican Karl Mundt said, were disrupting economic activity “so as to produce chaos and put an end to freedom.” We must, he said, “turn the Red tide.” Herter himself cited the danger posed by Communist-controlled labor unions in western Europe. Freshman California Republican Richard Nixon, assigned to tour Italy, wrote that “the great difficulty [here] is not so much the physical destruction of the war, but the fact that the Communists have chosen this country as the scene of one of their most clever and well-financed operations against the forces of democracy.” Alabama Democrat Pete Jarman, who traveled in eastern Europe, spoke of the “feeling of strangulation that one has behind the iron curtain.” We in the United States, he concluded, had to recognize “the absolute necessity of our doing whatever is necessary to prevent [communism’s] spread.

He would have us not only remember our union to Christ, but specially that it is not our own doing, but the work of God Himself. As the Holy Spirit teaches us to realize this, we shall see what a source of assurance and strength it must become to us. If it is of God alone that I am in Christ, then God Himself, the Infinite One, becomes my security for all I can need or wish in seeking to abide in Christ.

Predictions of Nazi decline ignore the very potent electoral advantages the party retained even after the November setback. To begin with, they had made themselves the most diverse, most wide-ranging political party in the country. The other right-wing parties were devoted to the past, enmeshed with the hated economic establishment or, worse from a popular point of view, yearning for a restoration of the monarchy. (They often referred to the Weimar years as the “Kaiserless time.”) Those positions would do nothing to enhance their electability in popular elections. The left-wing parties, on the other hand, preached a Marxism either in its hard version (Communism) or soft version (Socialism) that alienated more people than it attracted. And the centrist parties had simply evaporated as weak alternatives with no real ideas or solutions. Gregor Strasser explained the inherent strength of his party’s political thinking: “From the right we shall take nationalism, which has so disastrously allied itself with capitalism, and from the left we shall take socialism, which has made such an unhappy union with internationalism. Thus we shall form the National Socialism which will be the motive force of a new Germany and a new Europe.” Hitler was more succinct; no one summed up the political situation better than he did: “The nationalists on the right lacked social awareness,” he said, and “the socialists on the left lacked national awareness.” The political genius of the Nazis was to recognize an opening that once taken advantage of became so large that a Panzer division could drive through it.

UNION AND CHANGE The third article was union. To those who were small and few against the wilderness, the success of liberty demanded the strength of union. Two centuries of change have made this true again. No longer need capitalist and worker, farmer and clerk, city and countryside, struggle to divide our bounty. By working shoulder to shoulder, together we can increase the bounty of all. We have discovered that every child who learns, every man who finds work, every sick body that is made whole--like a candle added to an altar--brightens the hope of all the faithful. So let us reject any among us who seek to reopen old wounds and to rekindle old hatreds. They stand in the way of a seeking nation. Let us now join reason to faith and action to experience, to transform our unity of interest into a unity of purpose. For the hour and the day and the time are here to achieve progress without strife, to achieve change without hatred--not without difference of opinion, but without the deep and abiding divisions which scar the union for generations. THE AMERICAN BELIEF Under this covenant of justice, liberty, and union we have become a nation--prosperous, great, and mighty. And we have kept our freedom. But we have no promise from God that our greatness will endure. We have been allowed by Him to seek greatness with the sweat of our hands and the strength of our spirit. I do not believe that the Great Society is the ordered, changeless, and sterile battalion of the ants. It is the excitement of becoming--always becoming, trying, probing, falling, resting, and trying again--but always trying and always gaining. In each generation, with toil and tears, we have had to earn our heritage again. If we fail now, we shall have forgotten in abundance what we learned in hardship: that democracy rests on faith, that freedom asks more than it gives, and that the judgment of God is harshest on those who are most favored. If we succeed, it will not be because of what we have, but it will be because of what we are; not because of what we own, but, rather because of what we believe. For we are a nation of believers. Underneath the clamor of building and the rush of our day's pursuits, we are believers in justice and liberty and union, and in our own Union. We believe that every man must someday be free. And we believe in ourselves. Our enemies have always made the same mistake. In my lifetime--in depression and in war--they have awaited our defeat. Each time, from the secret places of the American heart, came forth the faith they could not see or that they could not even imagine. It brought us victory. And it will again. For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest sleeping in the unplowed ground. Is our world gone? We say "Farewell." Is a new world coming? We welcome it--and we will bend it to the hopes of man. To these trusted public servants and to my family and those close friends of mine who have followed me down a long, winding road, and to all the people of this Union and the world, I will repeat today what I said on that sorrowful day in November 1963: "I will lead and I will do the best I can." But you must look within your own hearts to the old promises and to the old dream. They will lead you best of all. For myself, I ask only, in the words of an ancient leader: "Give me now wisdom and knowledge, that I may go out and come in before this people: for who can judge this thy people, that is so great?

It would be logical for any group whose only sense of identity is the negative one of wickedness and oppression to dilute its wickedness by mixing with more virtuous groups. This is, upon reflection, exactly what celebrating diversity implies. James Carignan, a city councilor in Lewiston, Maine, encouraged the city to welcome refugees from the West African country of Togo, writing, “We are too homogeneous at present. We desperately need diversity.” He said the Togolese—of whom it was not known whether they were literate, spoke English, or were employable—“will bring us the diversity that is essential to our quest for excellence.” Likewise in Maine, long-serving state’s attorney James Tierney wrote of racial diversity in the state: “This is not a burden. This is essential.” An overly white population is a handicap. Gwynne Dyer, a London-based Canadian journalist, also believes whites must be leavened with non-whites in a process he calls “ethnic diversification.” He noted, however, that when Canada and Australia opened their borders to non-white immigration, they had to “do good by stealth” and not explain openly that the process would reduce whites to a minority: “Let the magic do its work, but don’t talk about it in front of the children. They’ll just get cross and spoil it all.” Mr. Dyer looked forward to the day when politicians could be more open about their intentions of thinning out whites. President Bill Clinton was open about it. In his 2000 State of the Union speech, he welcomed predictions that whites would become a minority by mid-century, saying, “this diversity can be our greatest strength.” In 2009, before a gathering of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, he again brought up forecasts that whites will become a minority, adding that “this is a very positive thing.” [...] Harvard University professor Robert Putnam says immigrants should not assimilate. “What we shouldn’t do is to say that they should be more like us,” he says. “We should construct a new us.” When Marty Markowitz became the new Brooklyn borough president in 2002, he took down the portrait of George Washington that had hung in the president’s office for many years. He said he would hang a picture of a black or a woman because Washington was an “old white man.” [...] In 2000, John Sharp, a former Texas comptroller and senator told the state Democratic Hispanic Caucus that whites must step aside and let Hispanics govern, “and if that means that some of us gringos are going to have to give up some life-long dreams, then we’ve got to do that.” When Robert Dornan of California was still in Congress, he welcomed the changing demographics of his Orange County district. “I want to see America stay a nation of immigrants,” he said. “And if we lose our Northern European stock—your coloring and mine, blue eyes and fair hair—tough!” Frank Rich, columnist for the New York Times, appears happy to become a minority. He wrote this about Sonya Sotomayor’s Senate confirmation hearings: “[T]his particular wise Latina, with the richness of her experiences, would far more often than not reach a better [judicial] conclusion than the individual white males she faced in that Senate hearing room. Even those viewers who watched the Sotomayor show for only a few minutes could see that her America is our future and theirs is the rapidly receding past.” It is impossible to imagine people of any other race speaking of themselves this way.

This process of justifying expenditures as counters to Soviet expenditures conditioned U.S. actions on Soviet strengths, expressed as threats, not on Soviet weaknesses and constraints. We had a war strategy—a catastrophic spasm—but no plan about how to compete with the Soviet Union over the long term.” Soft-spoken, Marshall watched my eyes, checking that I understood the implications of his statements. He took out a document, a thin sheaf of paper, and began to explain its meaning: “This document reflects thoughts about how to actually use U.S. strengths to exploit Soviet weaknesses, a very different approach.

As you see, the point is not which class today constitutes the majority, or which class is poorer, but which class is gaining strength and which is decaying.

If the theory of the balance of power has any applicability at all, it is to the politics of the first period, that pre-industrial, `dynastic` period when nations were kings and politics a sport, when there were many nations of roughly equivalent power, and when nations could and did increase their power largely through clever diplomacy, alliance and military adventures. The theories of this book, and the theory of the power transition in particular, apply to the second period, when the major determinant of national power are population size, political organization, and industrial strength, and when shifts in power through internal development are consequently of great importance. Differential industrialization is the key to understanding the shifts in power in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it was not the key in the years before 1750 or so and it will not always be the key in the future. Period 3 will require new theories. We cannot predict yet what they will be, for we cannon predict what the world will be like after all the nations are industrialized. Indeed, we may not have nations at all. By projecting current trends we can make guessed about the near future, but we cannon see very far ahead. What will the world be like when China and India are two major powers, as it seems likely they will be? (1958 n.n.)... We are all bound by our own culture and our own experience, social scientists no less than other men... Social theories may be adequate for their day, but as time passes, they require revision. One of the most serious criticisms that can be made of the balance of power theory is that it has not been revised. Concepts and hypotheses applicable to the 16th century and to the politics of such units as the Italian city states have been taken and applied, without major revision, to the international politics of the twentieth-century nations such as the United States, England, and the Soviet Union. (p. 307)