“
I feel moderately bad about this whole thing. On the one hand, I am providing myself with urgently required survival skills. Other lessons in this series include Shoplifting, Beating People Up, Picking Locks, Climbing Trees, Driving, Housebreaking, Dumpster Diving, and How to Use Oddball Things like Venetian Blinds and Garbage Can Lids as Weapons. On the other hand, I’m corrupting my poor innocent little self. I sigh. Somebody’s got to do it.
”
”
Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)
“
The four highest-impact things an individual can do to tackle climate change are eat a plant-based diet, avoid air travel, live car-free, and have fewer children. Of those four actions, only plant-based eating immediately addresses methane and nitrous oxide, the most urgently important greenhouse gases.
”
”
Jonathan Safran Foer (We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast)
“
Stranger, think long before you enter,
For these corridors amuse not passing travellers.
But if you enter, keep your voice to yourself.
Nor should you tinkle and toll your tongue.
These columns rose not, for the such as you.
But for those urgent pilgrim feet that wander
On lonely ways, seeking the roots of rootless trees.
The earth has many flowery roads; choose one
That pleases your whim, and gods be with you.
But now leave! - leave me to my dark green solitude
Which like the deep dream world of the sea
Has its moving shapes; corals; ancient coins;
Carved urns and ruins of ancient ships and gods;
And mermaids, with flowing golden hair
That charm a patch of silent darkness
Into singing sunlight.
”
”
G.A. Kulkarni
“
Debarred from public worship, David was heartsick. Ease he did not seek, honour he did not covet, but the enjoyment of communion with God was an urgent need of his soul; he viewed it not merely as the sweetest of all luxuries, but as an absolute necessity, like water to a stag. Like the parched traveler in the wilderness, whose skin bottle is empty, and who finds the wells dry, he must drink or die – he must have his God or faint. His soul, his very self, his deepest life, was insatiable for a sense of the divine presence. . . . Give him his God and he is as content as the poor deer which at length slakes its thirst and is perfectly happy; but deny him his Lord, and his heart heaves, his bosom palpitates, his whole frame is convulsed, like one who gasps for breath, or pants with long running. Dear friend, dost thou know what this is, by personally having felt the same? It is a sweet bitterness. The next best thing to living in the light of the Lord’s love is to be unhappy till we have it, and to pant hourly after it – hourly, did I say? Thirst is a perpetual appetite, and not to be forgotten, and even thus continually is the heart’s longing after God. When it is as natural for us to long for God as for an animal to thirst, it is well with our souls, however painful our feelings
”
”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
“
Because around a crisis point, even the tiniest action can assume importance all out of proportion to its size. Consequences multiply and cascade, and anything—a missed telephone call, a match struck during a blackout, a dropped piece of paper, a single moment—can have empire-tottering effects. The Archduke Ferdinand’s chauffeur makes a wrong turn onto Franz-Josef Street and starts a world war. Abraham Lincoln’s bodyguard steps outside for a smoke and destroys a peace. Hitler leaves orders not to be disturbed because he has a migraine and finds out about the D-Day invasion eighteen hours too late. A lieutenant fails to mark a telegram “urgent” and Admiral Kimmel isn’t warned of the impending Japanese attack. “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost.
”
”
Connie Willis (To Say Nothing of the Dog (Oxford Time Travel, #2))
“
My mouth went dry. All the fluid in my body had traveled south on an urgent lubrication mission.
”
”
Colette Rhodes (Luxuria (Shades of Sin, #1))
“
At my urgent request the Curie laboratory, in which radium was discovered a short time ago, was shown to me. The Curies themselves were away travelling. It was a cross between a stable and a potato-cellar, and, if I had not seen the worktable with the chemical apparatus, I would have thought it a practical joke.
(Wilhelm Ostwald on seeing the Curie's laboratory facilities.)
”
”
Ostwald Wilhelm
“
Seven days from the time they pulled into Dawson, they dropped down the steep bank by the Barracks to the Yukon Trail, and pulled for Dyea and Salt Water. Perrault was carrying despatches if anything more urgent than those he had brought in; also, the travel pride had gripped him, and he purposed to make the record trip of the year. Several things favored him in this. The week's rest had recuperated the dogs and put them in thorough trim. The trail they had broken into the country was packed hard by later journeyers. And further, the police had arranged in two or three places deposits of grub for dog and man, and he was travelling light.
”
”
Jack London (The Call of the Wild)
“
At the time I vaguely knew that when anything stirs us that deeply, moves us to the point of distraction, and urgently invites us to follow, we must pack up, go, and be not afraid. Never fear the less-traveled road. Respect such mysterious calls always and take them seriously. Never ever minimize or regard them as foolishness.
”
”
Karol Jackowski (Ten Fun Things to Do Before You Die)
“
Since the local church is “the pillar and support of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15b), its leaders must be rock-solid pillars of biblical doctrine or the house will crumble. Since the local church is also a small flock traveling over treacherous terrain that is infested with “savage wolves,” only those shepherds who know the way and see the wolves can lead the flock to its safe destination. An elder, then, must be characterized by doctrinal integrity.
”
”
Alexander Strauch (Biblical Eldership: An Urgent Call to Restore Biblical Church Leadership)
“
Am I a terrible person?” she whispered, more for her ears than for his. “Does this mean I am fallen?”
But he heard her, and his voice was hot and moist on the skin of her cheek.
“No.”
He moved to her ear and made her listen more closely.
“No.”
He traveled to her lips and forced her to swallow the word.
“No.”
Kate felt her head fall back. His voice was low and seductive, and it almost made her feel like she’d been born for this moment.
“You’re perfect,” he whispered, his large hands moving urgently over her body, one settling on her waist and the other moving up toward the gentle swell of her breast. “Right here, right now, in this moment, in this garden, you’re perfect.”
-Kate & Anthony
”
”
Julia Quinn (The Viscount Who Loved Me (Bridgertons, #2))
“
But no literature grows in isolation, and looking at the history of Indian writing in English is like looking at a silent movie made up of static postcards of Delhi, or Mumbai, or any other thronged Indian city: the life, the colour, the hubbub of hundreds of eager new writers and high-minded editors, peacocking poets and fiery-eyed pamphleteers, all of that has been bled out of collective memory. In the same year that Dean Mahomet wrote his Travels, the Madras Hircarrah (1794) started up, joining Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (1780) and the India Gazette (1781); the first in a flood of periodicals and journals that would breathlessly, urgently take the news of India running along from one province to another. The
”
”
Nilanjana Roy (The Girl Who Ate Books: Adventures in Reading)
“
Lewis was also disturbed by the mobility which the masses were displaying, abetted by increasing leisure and access to travel. He saw that global tourism would become an increasingly urgent problem as world populations increased. People moved ‘in great herds’ to the seaside, only to find that a sea of people rather than of water awaited them. It was exhausting, and they did not enjoy it. If a travel permit were required before tickets could be bought, much congestion and wear and tear on the roads would be avoided. Most people are ‘born molluscs’ and would be much happier staying at home. Mass tourism is, in any case, an ‘absurdity’, since only scholars are really interested in cathedrals and artworks. The tourists who gawp at them are filled with boredom and self-reproach, and would never, Lewis contends, have dreamed of such a pastime had not holiday advertisements contrived to turn them into sham students and fake cosmopolitan aristocrats.
”
”
John Carey (The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939)
“
• The four highest-impact things an individual can do to tackle climate change are eat a plant-based diet, avoid air travel, live car-free, and have fewer children. • Of those four actions, only plant-based eating immediately addresses methane and nitrous oxide, the most urgently important greenhouse gases. • Most people are not in the process of deciding whether to have a baby. • Eighty-five percent of Americans drive to work. Few drivers can simply decide to stop using their cars. • For Americans, 29 percent of air travel in 2017 was for business purposes, and 21 percent was for “personal non-leisure purposes.” Businesses must rely more on remote communication, “personal non-leisure” flights must be reduced, and personal leisure flights can and must be cut, but the fact remains that a sizable portion of air travel is unavoidable. • Everyone will eat a meal relatively soon and can immediately participate in the reversal of climate change.
”
”
Jonathan Safran Foer (We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast)
“
The sole object of revolution was the abolition of senseless suffering. But it had turned out that the removal of this second kind of suffering was only possible at the price of a temporary enormous increase in the sum total of the first. So the question now ran: Was such an operation justified? Obviously it was, if one spoke in the abstract of “mankind”; but, applied to “man” in the singular, to the cipher 2—4, the real human being of bone and flesh and blood and skin, the principle led to absurdity. As a boy, he had believed that in working for the Party he would find an answer to all questions of this sort. The work had lasted forty years, and right at the start he had forgotten the question for whose sake he had embarked on it. Now the forty years were over, and he returned to the boy’s original perplexity. The Party had taken all he had to give and never supplied him with the answer. And neither did the silent partner, whose magic name he had tapped on the wall of the empty cell. He was deaf to direct questions, however urgent and desperate they might be. And yet there were ways of approach to him. Sometimes he would respond unexpectedly to a tune, or even the memory of a tune, or of the folded hands of the Pietà, or of certain scenes of his childhood. As if a tuning-fork had been struck, there would be answering vibrations, and once this had started a state would be produced which the mystics called “ecstasy” and saints “contemplation”; the greatest and soberest of modern psychologists had recognized this state as a fact and called it the “oceanic sense”. And, indeed, one’s personality dissolved as a grain of salt in the sea; but at the same time the infinite sea seemed to be contained in the grain of salt. The grain could no longer be localized in time and space. It was a state in which thought lost its direction and started to circle, like the compass needle at the magnetic pole; until finally it cut loose from its axis and travelled freely in space, like a bunch of light in the night; and until it seemed that all thoughts and all sensations, even pain and joy itself, were only the spectrum lines of the same ray of light, disintegrating in the prisma of consciousness.
”
”
Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon)
“
Working with chocolate always helps me find the calm centre of my life. It has been with me for so long; nothing here can surprise me. This afternoon I am making pralines, and the little pan of chocolate is almost ready on the burner.
I like to make these pralines by hand. I use a ceramic container over a shallow copper pan: an unwieldy, old-fashioned method, perhaps, but the beans demand special treatment. They have traveled far, and deserve the whole of my attention. Today I am using couverture made from the Criollo bean: its taste is subtle, deceptive; more complex than the stronger flavors of the Forastero; less unpredictable than the hybrid Trinitario. Most of my customers will not know that I am using this rarest of cacao beans; but I prefer it, even though it may be more expensive. The tree is susceptible to disease: the yield is disappointingly low; but the species dates back to the time of the Aztecs, the Olmecs, the Maya. The hybrid Trinitario has all but wiped it out, and yet there are still some suppliers who deal in the ancient currency.
Nowadays I can usually tell where a bean was grown, as well as its species. These come from South America, from a small, organic farm. But for all my skill, I have never seen a flower from the Theobroma cacao tree, which only blooms for a single day, like something in a fairytale. I have seen photographs, of course. In them, the cacao blossom looks something like a passionflower: five-petaled and waxy, but small, like a tomato plant, and without that green and urgent scent. Cacao blossoms are scentless; keeping their spirit inside a pod roughly the shape of a human heart. Today I can feel that heart beating: a quickening inside the copper pan that will soon release a secret.
Half a degree more of heat, and the chocolate will be ready. A filter of steam rises palely from the glossy surface. Half a degree, and the chocolate will be at its most tender and pliant.
”
”
Joanne Harris (The Strawberry Thief (Chocolat, #4))
“
Nick..." She started as his mouth descended to the nest of blond curls. "Nick..."
But he did not listen, completely absorbed in her salt-scented female flesh. His breath filled the moist cleft with steamy heat. A moan rose from her throat, and her wrists twisted in his grasp. His tongue searched through the springy curls until he reached the rosy lips hidden beneath. He licked one side of her sex, then the other, the tip of his tongue teasing delicately.
His mouth ravished her so gently, his tongue slipping over her melting flesh to find the secret entrance to her body, filling her with silky heat... withdrawing... filling. Lottie went weak all over, her sex pulsing urgently. As he nuzzled and played with her, she tried to angle her body so that he would touch the peak that throbbed so desperately. He seemed not to understand what she wanted, licking all around the sensitive spot but never quite reaching it.
"Nick," she whispered, unable to find words for what she wanted. "Please. Please."
But he continued to deny her, until she realized he was doing it deliberately. Frustrated beyond bearing, she reached down to his head, and she felt the puff of his brief laugh against her. Immediately his mouth slid away and traveled downward, tasting the damp creases of her knees, moving to the hollows of her ankles. By the time he made his way back to her loins, her entire body was sweltering. His head hovered over the place between her legs again. Lottie held her breath, aware of a hot trickle of moisture from her body.
His tongue brushed the peak of her sex in a tentative lap. Lottie could not hold back a wild cry as she arched into his mouth.
"No," he murmured against her damp flesh. "Not yet, Lottie. Wait just a little longer."
"I can't, can't, oh, don't stop..." She pulled at his dark head frantically, groaning as he feathered his tongue over her once more.
Catching her wrists, Nick pulled them over her head and settled his body between her thighs, taking care not to crush her. His shaft was cradled in the hot valley between her legs. His dark blue eyes stared directly into hers as he released her hands. "Leave them there," he said, and she obeyed with a sob.
He kissed her breasts, moving from one to the other. With each incendiary swirl of his tongue, she nearly rose off the sheet. His sex slid against her in disciplined thrusts that teased and rubbed and tormented, while his mouth drew hungrily on her nipples. She arched upward with supplicating moans. Stunning pleasure built inside her, gaining intensity... she hovered on the brink, waiting, waiting... oh, please... until the culmination was finally upon her. She cried out in bashful amazement as rich spasms spread from the center of her body.
"Yes," he whispered against her taut throat, his hips working gently over hers.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Worth Any Price (Bow Street Runners, #3))
“
They hung, like mirages, shimmering in the future, and the closer you got to them the more you expected them to disappear. When his mother had gone over to work in the States for the first time and his father was supposed to have been making a special effort, Mr. Schock had still managed to turn up at Sports Day after Peter’s big race. There was always another meeting, another client, another urgent matter demanding his attention.
”
”
Linda Buckley-Archer (The Time Travelers (The Gideon Trilogy, #1))
“
The journey of the Freedom Seeker isn’t always easy. But it is essential, and it is urgent, for it is the path to coming alive again.
”
”
Beth Kempton (Freedom Seeker: Live More. Worry Less. Do What You Love.)
“
Motivate the Workforce. Have you identified each person’s “hot button” and focused on it? Do you work personal pride and shared purpose into most communications? Are you keeping your powder dry for those urgent moments when you may need it? 8. Embrace the Front Lines. Have you made your intent clear and empowered those around you to act? Do you regularly meet with those in direct contact with customers? Is everybody able to communicate their ideas and concerns to you? 9. Build Leadership in Others. Are all managers expected to build leadership among their subordinates? Does the company culture foster the effective exercise of leadership? Are leadership development opportunities available to most, if not all, managers? 10. Manage Relations. Is the hierarchy reduced to a minimum, and does bad news travel up? Are managers self-aware and empathetic? Are autocratic, egocentric, and irritable behaviors censured? 11.
”
”
Michael Useem (The Leader's Checklist)
“
Motivate the Workforce. Have you identified each person’s “hot button” and focused on it? Do you work personal pride and shared purpose into most communications? Are you keeping your powder dry for those urgent moments when you may need it? 8. Embrace the Front Lines. Have you made your intent clear and empowered those around you to act? Do you regularly meet with those in direct contact with customers? Is everybody able to communicate their ideas and concerns to you? 9. Build Leadership in Others. Are all managers expected to build leadership among their subordinates? Does the company culture foster the effective exercise of leadership? Are leadership development opportunities available to most, if not all, managers? 10. Manage Relations. Is the hierarchy reduced to a minimum, and does bad news travel up? Are managers self-aware and empathetic? Are autocratic, egocentric, and irritable behaviors censured? 11. Identify Personal Implications. Do employees appreciate how the firm’s vision and strategy impact them individually? What private sacrifices will be necessary for achieving the common cause? How will the plan affect people’s personal livelihood and quality of work life? 12. Convey Your Character. Have you communicated your commitment to performance with integrity? Do those in the organization know you as a person, and do they appreciate your aspirations and your agendas? Have you been in the same room or at least on the same call with everybody who works with you during the past year? 13. Dampen Overoptimism and Excessive Pessimism. Have you prepared the organization for unlikely but extremely consequential events? Do you celebrate success but also guard against the by-products of excessive confidence? Have you paved the way not only for quarterly results but for long-term performance?
”
”
Michael Useem (The Leader's Checklist)
“
Colin and Edmund were here. How embarrassing.
“She’s alive. Conscious too,” Edmund said in the bluff pretend-nothing’s-really-wrong tone she’d only heard him take about horses and hounds before.
Colin said something rough. He said it in a foreign tongue—not French or German—and it had a number of syllables, but Reggie knew an oath when she heard one.
“. . . gonna hope,” she managed, though her tongue was as swollen as her brain from the feel of it, “you’re not mad ’m alive.”
“For the love of God, woman,” said Colin, “don’t talk.”
Close up—and he was close up now—his voice didn’t sound normal. His accent was very thick now. More to the point, his voice had dropped at least an octave, and it sounded almost sibilant. Reggie heard more swishing grass and felt a shadow fall over her, then a hand on her arm. It was Colin’s, she thought, but even hotter than he normally was.
“…’s wrong w’ you?” she asked. She didn’t want to open her eyes to find out, because of the light needles.
“A damned fine question” he said. “Do not move. Do what I say this time.”
As Reggie wasn’t inclined to move anyhow, she held still while an equally warm set of fingers travelled gently but urgently over her head, at first avoiding the sticky place on one side and then probing lightly around its edges. No amount of gentleness could have made that not hurt, and she couldn’t manage to control herself. She cried out and batted at Colin’s arm. “Stoppit. Go ’way.”
“Damned if I will.” He caught her fingers in his free hand. “There’s a bloody great lump here,” he said, not to her, “but nothing feels broken. But she’s bleeding. Quite a bit, and would you for the love of God go get a doctor? Make yourself useful, man!”
“I—” Edmund started to retort angrily, and Reggie wondered if she’d have to get up and deal with the two of them, because she’d quite cheerfully kill both if so. Moving hurt. Thinking hurt. Edmund and Colin shouting hurt. Luckily for everyone, she heard Edmund take a long breath. “I’ll go down to the village and get Dr. Brant if you take Reggie back to the house. We can’t bring him out here, and I don’t want to leave you both waiting—not when she might come back.”
She? Reggie was puzzled for a moment, then remembered: Janet Morgan. Ghost, witch, and generally unpleasant person. Quite possibly the reason she was lying on the ground with spikes in her brain.
“Stupid cow,” she said.
“Stupid? I’d love it if she were,” said Edmund.
”
”
Isabel Cooper (The Highland Dragon's Lady (Highland Dragon, #2))
“
Asherah, Ba’alzebul, Dagon, Molech, Resheph, and Qeteb had journeyed from Sidon to the mount of assembly. Marduk and Ishtar of Babylonia, Asshur of Assyria, Kumarbi of the Hittites, even Osiris and Horus from Egypt travelled their long distances to answer the urgent call for a council of the seventy gods over the seventy nations. When Yahweh had sent the Great Flood and bound the Watcher gods into the earth and Tartarus, he left seventy of them to rule over the nations with their minions of fellow mal’akim. The lands were allotted at the Division of Tongues at Babel. This dispersion was supposed to keep mankind from ever again uniting in evil over the entire earth as they had under Nimrod the Mighty Hunter.
”
”
Brian Godawa (David Ascendant (Chronicles of the Nephilim, #7))
“
BUILDING RENEWAL INTO YOUR WORKDAY – Tony Schwartz Zeke is a creative director at a large agency. The workday he described when we first met was typical of the managers and leaders I meet in my travels. After six or six and a half hours of sleep—which never felt like enough—Zeke’s alarm went off at 5:30 a.m. each morning. His first move was to take his iPhone off the night table and check his e-mail. He told himself he did this in case something urgent had come in overnight, but the truth was he just couldn’t resist. Zeke tried to get to the gym at least two times a week, but he traveled frequently, and at home he was often just too tired to work out. Once he got to work—around 7:30 a.m. most days—Zeke grabbed a cup of coffee, sat down at his desk, and checked his e-mail again. By then, twenty-five or more new messages were typically waiting in his in-box. If he didn’t have an early meeting, he might be online for an hour or more without once looking up. Zeke’s days were mostly about meetings. They were usually scheduled one after the other with no time in between. As a result, he would race off to the next meeting without digesting what he’d just taken in at the last one. Lunch was something Zeke squeezed in. He usually brought food back to his desk from the cafeteria and worked while he ate. Around two or three in the afternoon, depending on how much sleep he’d gotten the previous night, Zeke began to feel himself fading. Given his company’s culture, taking even a short nap wasn’t an option. Instead, for a quick hit of energy, he found himself succumbing to a piece of someone’s leftover birthday cake, or running to the vending machine for a Snickers bar. With so many urgent demands, Zeke tended to put off any intensive, challenging work for later. By the end of the day, however, he rarely had the energy to get to it. Even so, he found it difficult to leave work with so much unfinished business. By the time he finally did, usually around 7:30 or 8 p.m., he was pretty much running on empty. After dinner, Zeke tried to get to some of the work he had put off earlier in the day. Much of the time, he simply ended up returning to e-mail or playing games online. Either way, he typically stayed up later than he knew he should. How closely does this match your experience? To the extent that it does resonate, how did this happen? Most important, can you imagine working the way you do now for the next ten or twenty years? YOUR CAPACITY IS LIMITED The challenge is that the demand in our lives increasingly exceeds our capacity.
”
”
Jocelyn K. Glei (Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind)
“
Emergency Phone Numbers O Lord, hear me praying; listen to my plea, O God my King, for I will never pray to anyone but you. —PSALM 5:1 TLB With cell phones we can make urgent calls to business or family contacts in a flash. But at times there are emergency calls that need to be made that don’t require a phone. The numbers for these calls are found in the Bible. Emergency Phone Numbers When in sorrow, call John 14. When men fail you, call Psalm 27. If you want to be fruitful, call John 15. When you have sinned, call Psalm 51. When you worry, call Matthew 6:19-34. When you are in danger, call Psalm 91. When God seems far away, call Psalm 139. When your faith needs stirring, call Hebrews 11. When you are lonely and fearful, call Psalm 23. When you grow bitter and critical, call 1 Corinthians 13. For Paul’s secret to happiness, call Colossians 3:12-17. For understanding of Christianity, call 2 Corinthians 5:15-19. When you feel down and out, call Romans 8:31. When you want peace and rest, call Matthew 11:25-30. When the world seems bigger than God, call Psalm 90. When you want Christian assurance, call Romans 8:1-30. When you leave home for labor or travel, call Psalm 121. When your prayers grow narrow or selfish, call Psalm 67. For a great invention/opportunity, call Isaiah 55. When you want courage for a task, call Joshua 1. For how to get along with fellow men, call Romans 12.
”
”
Emilie Barnes (Walk with Me Today, Lord: Inspiring Devotions for Women)
“
Speer’s second journey to the western front, from 26 September to 1 October – carried out at such a tempo that his travel companions found it difficult to keep up with him – emphasized the urgent need to shore up the border zone west of the Rhine, and his anxiety about the threat to the Rhineland-Westphalian industrial area,
”
”
Anonymous
“
As you can see, the two factors that define an activity are urgent and important. Urgent means it requires immediate attention. It’s “Now!” Urgent things act on us. A ringing phone is urgent. Most people can’t stand the thought of just allowing the phone to ring. You could spend hours preparing materials, you could get all dressed up and travel to a person’s office to discuss a particular issue, but if the phone were to ring while you were there, it would generally take precedence over your personal visit. If you were to phone someone, there aren’t many people who would say, “I’ll get to you in 15 minutes; just hold.” But most people would probably let you wait in an office for at least that long while they completed a telephone conversation with someone else. Urgent matters are usually visible. They press on us; they insist on action. They’re often popular with others. They’re usually right in front of us. And often they are pleasant, easy, fun to do. But so often they are unimportant!
”
”
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
“
It was Thucydides who described the dealings between states as a world in which the strong do as they like and the weak put up with what they must. Power and dominion form the basis of that system, even when a balance has been achieved within it. But neither the hegemony of a given superpower nor the attempt to prevent war by means of a balance of power have ever led to a lasting peace. The big question remains: can power be replaced as a ruling principle in international relations by justice? And how can justice, if it is not to deteriorate into mere words receive access to power? Can we, to that end, develop other forms of power, in order to establish justice between states?
Now that modern weaponry has made the danger of war even greater, this question has become even more urgent. A European fort, a sort of Switzerland on a large scale, is an illusion in today's world. The power to destroy, once the monopoly held by the state, is now in the hands of anyone who can obtain the necessary information through the internet.
The power of mass destruction, in other words, has become increasingly privatised in this world. In such a situation, can the international institutions with their joint responsibility provide justice that is accompanied by the power it needs?
For our civilisation, the ability to develop a robust international rule of law is a matter of survival. Is that a utopia? No: for half a century, Europe has been proving that it is possible.
[Max Kohnstamm]
”
”
Geert Mak (In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century)
“
down instead of from Twenty-Third Street looking up—things look quite a bit different. From that angle, the annoyed, hustling and bustling, highly important people angling their way through the obstacle course of onlookers seem insignificant. Our sun and moon and eight planets are just one little neighborhood among an estimated 200 billion neighborhoods that make up our universe.19 If we think of the Milky Way galaxy as being the size of the entire continent of North America, our solar system would fit into a coffee cup.20 Two Voyager spacecrafts are cruising toward the edge of the solar system at a rate of more than 35,000 miles per hour. They’ve been doing that for more than forty years and have traveled more than 11 billion miles, with no end in sight.21 When NASA sends communication to one of those Voyagers traveling at that velocity, it takes about seventeen hours to get there.22 That data has led scientists to estimate that to send a “speed of light” message to the edge of the universe would take more than 15 billion years to arrive.23 “So, yes, Chelsea art dealer, you are very important. But when we think about what we’re all gazing at while you make your agitation known through grunts and mumbles, you’re also impossibly young, urgently expiring, and unbelievably small.” You and I see the world with our own two eyes, and from that minuscule perspective, we tend to convince ourselves that we are (or at least should be) in control, directing our own lives, and scripting our future. We come back again to the truth that Philip Yancey reminded us of earlier in the chapter: “Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God’s point of view.” God is the one who calls us to “be still, and know that I am God.” Psalm 8 marvels at this very wonder:
”
”
Tyler Staton (Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools: An Invitation to the Wonder and Mystery of Prayer)
“
Exploratory spaceflight puts scientific ideas, scientific thinking, and scientific vocabulary in the public eye. It elevates the general level of intellectual inquiry. The idea that we've now understood something never grasped by anyone who ever lived before - that exhilaration, especially intense for the scientists involved, but perceptible to nearly everyone - propagates through the society, bounces off walls, and comes back at us. It encourages us to address problems in other fields that have also never before been solved. It increases the general sense of optimism in the society. It gives currency to critical thinking of the sort urgently needed if we are to solve hitherto intractable social issues. It helps stimulate a new generation of scientists. The more science in the media - especially if methods are described, as well as conclusions and implications - the healthier, I believe, the society is. People everywhere hunger to understand.
”
”
Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
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leaking in through the window, which told him they were now traveling into woodlands. The sharp odors of pine—wood, bark, cones, and needles—slivered through the air like blades, but beneath that, the fox recognized softer clover and wild garlic and ferns, and also a hundred things he had never encountered before but that smelled green and urgent. The boy sensed something now, too. He pulled his pet back to him and gripped his baseball glove more tightly. The boy’s anxiety surprised the fox. The few times they had traveled in the car before, the boy had been calm or even excited. The fox nudged his muzzle into the glove’s webbing, although he hated the leather smell.
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Sara Pennypacker (Pax)
“
Fuchs’s transfer of scientific secrets to the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1943 was one of the most concentrated spy hauls in history, some 570 pages of copied reports, calculations, drawings, formulae and diagrams, the designs for uranium enrichment, a step-by-step guide to the fast-moving development of the atomic weapon. Much of this material was too complex and technical to be coded and sent by radio, and so Ursula passed the documents to Sergei through a “brush contact,” a surreptitious handover imperceptible to a casual observer. If Ursula needed to pass on urgent information, or bulky files, she alerted Aptekar by means of an agreed “signal site”: “I had to travel to London and, at a certain time and in a certain place, drop a small piece of chalk and tread on it.” Two days later she would cycle to the rendezvous site, a side road six miles beyond the junction of the A40 and A34 on the road from Oxford to Cheltenham; Aptekar would drive from London in the military attaché’s car and arrive at the pickup site at an appointed time for a swift handover. At one of these meetings, the Soviet officer presented her with a new Minox camera for making microdots and copying documents, and a small but powerful transmitter measuring just six by eight inches, a sixth of the size of her homemade radio and easier to conceal. She dismantled her own equipment, but kept it in reserve “for emergency use.” Fuchs was privy to the innermost workings of the atomic project and he held nothing back. In the first year, he and Peierls wrote no fewer than eleven reports together, including seminal papers on isotope separation and calculating the destructive power of
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Ben Macintyre (Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy)
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CAXEXI K
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early 1970s to 1986 East Germans had been allowed to travel to the west, but few had the money (60 DM was a month’s wages to many), a car to travel, or the actual patience to bear the endless bureaucracy of the state, which was designed to keep the applicant in years of limbo, not knowing until the last minute whether the application had been successful. The policy of granting their citizens freedom of travel only for “urgent family business” was relaxed in 1986 and sparked a flood of more applicants. Border crossings rose from 66,000 in 1985 to well over 550,000 the following year. Within eighteen months this would shoot up to 2.2 million.
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Iain MacGregor (Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, the Berlin Wall and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth)
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He crossed to her and took her in his arms. “Oh, Zarozinia, we should never have met, never have married. We can only hurt one another at this time. Our happiness was so brief…” “If you would be hurt by me, then hurt you shall be,” she said softly, “but if you would be comforted, then I am here to comfort my lord.” He relented with a sigh. “These are loving words, my dear—but they are not spoken in loving times. I have put love aside for the nonce. Try to do likewise and thus we’ll both dispense with added complication.” Without anger, she drew slowly away from him and with a slight smile that had something of irony in it, pointed to the bed, where Stormbringer lay. “I see your other mistress still shares your bed,” she said. “And now you need never try to dismiss her again, for that black lord of Nihrain has given you an excuse to forever keep her by your side. Destiny—is that the word? Destiny! Ah, the deeds men have done in destiny’s name. And what is destiny, Elric, can you answer?” He shook his head. “Since you ask the question in malice, I’ll not make the attempt to answer it.” She cried suddenly: “Oh, Elric! I have traveled for many days to see you, thinking you would welcome me. And now we speak in anger!” “Fear!” he said urgently. “It is fear, not anger. I fear for you as I fear for the fate of the world! See me to my ship in the morning and then make speed back to Karlaak, I beg you.” “If you wish it.” She walked back into the small chamber which joined the main one.
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Michael Moorcock (Elric: The Stealer of Souls (Chronicles of the Last Emperor of Melniboné, #1))
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It’s a very simple thing, to step on a train and stop worrying about the time it takes to travel, but in this age of escalation and ever-increasing speeds, it felt like a revolutionary act. I had several offers to deliver speeches during those two weeks and could have earned a significant amount of money, but instead I sat in a railcar chatting with folks and reading mystery novels. In the end, I think I chose the most valuable use of my time. I felt transformed as I sat in the final train, headed south to my home in DC. I don’t think I checked my watch once, because I wasn’t worried about what time we were going to arrive. I wrote and read and chatted a little with the guy across the aisle. The sense that something could go wrong at any time, or that something urgent would arise that might require my immediate attention, was gone. I was no longer in fight-or-flight mode. Breaking away from the relentless pace of connected life felt uncomfortable at first, but as I ended my trip, I dreaded joining that joyless parade again.
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Celeste Headlee (Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving)
“
Evidence for climate change has been available for some time, so why has this 'urgent global response' (in Stern's words) not occurred? The IPCC (2015) have argued that we could limit the effects of climate change by changing our individual and collective behaviour. We could fly less, eat less meat, use public transport, cycle or walk, recycle, choose more low carbon products, have shorter showers, waste less food or reduce home energy use. There has been some significant change but nothing like the 'global response' required to ameliorate the further deleterious effects of climate change.
We are reminded here of a somewhat depressing statistic reported by a leading multinational, Unilever, in their 'sustainable Living Plan.' In 2013, they outlined how they were going to halve the greenhouse gas impact of their products across the life cycle by 2020. To achieve this goal, they reduced greenhouse gas emissions from their manufacturing chain. They opted for more environmentally friendly sourcing of raw materials, doubled their use of renewable energy and produced concentrated liquids and powders. They reduced greenhouse gas emissions from transport and greenhouse gas emissions from refrigeration. They also restricted employee travel. The result of all these initiatives was that their 'greenhouse gas footprint impact per consumer...
increased
by around 5% since 2010.' They concluded, 'We have made good progress in those areas under our control but ... the big challenges are those areas not under direct control like...
consumer behaviour
' (2013:16; emphasis added). It seems that consumers are not 'getting the message.' They are not opting for the low carbon alternatives in the way envisaged; they are not changing the length of their showers (to reduce energy and water consumption); they are not breaking their high-carbon habits. The question is why?
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Geoffrey Beattie (The Psychology of Climate Change (The Psychology of Everything))
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I remembered working on my last book and traveling to Ferguson, Missouri, and to Raleigh, North Carolina, to bear witness to what happened there. In those spaces, I saw and heard people saying no. In their pursuit of a more just America, they made a choice to not adjust themselves to the status quo and to put their bodies on the line for a different America where black people and those on the margins of this society might flourish.
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Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own)
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There are two seas in Palestine. One fresh, and fish are in it. Splashes of green adorn its banks. Trees spread their branches over it and stretch out their thirsty roots to sip of its healing waters.
Along its shores the children play, as children played when He was there. He loved it. He could look across its silver surface when He spoke His parables. And on a rolling plain not far away He fed five thousand people.
The river Jordan makes this sea with sparkling water from the hills. So it laughs in the sunshine. And men build their houses near to it, and birds their nests; and every kind of life is happier because it is there.
The river Jordan flows on south into another sea.
Here is no splash of fish, no fluttering leaf, no song of birds, no children's laughter. Travelers choose another route, unless on urgent business. The air hangs heavy above its water, and neither man nor beast nor fowl will drink.
What makes this mighty difference in these neighbor seas? Not the river Jordan. It empties the same good water into both. Not the soil in which they lie; not in the country round about.
This is the difference. The Sea of Galilee receives but does not keep the Jordan. For every drop that flows into it another drop flows out. The giving and receiving go on in equal measure.
The other sea is shrewder, hoarding its income jealously. It will not be tempted into any generous impulse. Every drop it gets, it keeps.
The Sea of Galilee gives and lives. This other sea gives nothing. It is named The Dead.
There are two kinds of people in the world. There are two seas in Palestine.
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Stephen R. Covey (The Divine Center)
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He found hunger, weakness, fear for his recovery, his sanity, fear of who and what he was. Guilt that she had slept instead of watching over him. An urgent need to complete her work, her research. Compassion for him, terror that he would not heal and that perhaps she had made his suffering worse. Fear they would be found before he was strong enough to go his own way.
His eyebrows went up. Our way is the same.
She sat up gingerly, swept back her tangled, wild hair. “You could have said you speak English. How do you do that? How can you talk in my head instead of aloud?”
He simply watched her curiously with his black, fathomless eyes.
Shea eyed him warily. “You aren’t getting ready to bite me again, are you? I’ve got to tell you, there isn’t a place on my body that isn’t sore.” She flashed him a wan smile. “Just out of curiosity, your rabies shots are up to date, aren’t they?” His eyes were doing something to her insides, causing a flood of warmth where it shouldn’t be.
His gaze dropped to her lips. The shape of her mouth fascinated him, along with the light so clearly shining from her soul. He raised a hand to cup her cheek, to feather his thumb along her delicate jawline; his fingertip traveled up to her chin to find the satin perfection of her full lower lip.
Her heart somersaulted and heat rushed low, pooling into a distinct ache. His hand slid around to the nape of her neck. Slowly, inexorably, he forced her head down toward his. Shea closed her eyes, wanting, yet dreading his taking her blood. “I’d hate to have to feed you every day,” she muttered rebelliously.
And then his mouth touched hers. Featherlight, a skimming brush Shea felt right down to her toes. His teeth scraped her lower lip, teasing, tempting, enticing.
Darts of fire raced through her bloodstream. Her stomach muscles clenched. Open your mouth for me, stubborn little red hair. His teeth tugged; his tongue followed with a soothing caress. Shea gasped as much at the tender, teasing note as at the feel of his lips on hers. He took advantage immediately, fastening his mouth to hers, his tongue exploring every inch of her velvet-soft interior.
”
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Christine Feehan (Dark Desire (Dark, #2))
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At some point, all the horizontal trips in the world stop compensating for the need to go deep into somewhere challenging and unexpected; movement makes most sense when grounded in stillness. In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing could feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still. Pico Iyer
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Bhavana Gesota (The Art of Slow Travel: See the World and Savor the Journey On a Budget)
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Inexhaustible Mind, such are the blessings attained by this Regarder of the Cries of the World Bodhisattva and the various forms in which he travels around in many lands to save the living. This is why all of you should wholeheartedly make offerings to Regarder of the Cries of the World Bodhisattva. This Regarder of the Cries of the World Bodhisattva, this great one, is able to bestow freedom from fear on those who are faced with a frightening, urgent, or difficult situation. This is why in this world everyone gives him the name Bestower of Freedom from Fear.
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Gene Reeves (The Lotus Sutra: A Contemporary Translation of a Buddhist Classic)
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To sum up: it's time to rewrite the maxim that practice makes perfect. The truth is, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect. And myelin operates by a few fundamental principles. The firing of the circuit is paramount. Myelin is not built to respond to fond wishes or vague ideas or information that washes over us like a warm bath. The mechanism is built to respond to actions: the literal electrical impulses traveling down nerve fibers. It responds to urgent repetition. In a few chapters we'll discuss the likely evolutionary reasons, but for now we'll simply note that deep practice is assisted by the attainment of a primal state, one where we are attentive, hungry, and focused, even desperate. Myelin is universal. One size fits all skills. Our myelin doesn't “know” whether it's being used for playing shortstop or playing Schubert: regardless of its use, it grows according to the same rules. Myelin is meritocratic: circuits that fire get insulated. If you moved to China, your myelin would wrap fibers that help you conjugate Mandarin verbs. To put it another way, myelin doesn't care who you are—it cares what you do. Myelin wraps—it doesn't unwrap. Like a highway-paving machine, myelination happens in one direction. Once a skill circuit is insulated, you can't un-insulate it (except through age or disease). That's why habits are hard to break. The only way to change them is to build new habits by repeating new behaviors—by myelinating new circuits.
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Daniel Coyle (The Talent Code: Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Everything Else)
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The setting of our urgent lives is an intricate maze whose blind corridors we learn one by one—village street, ocean vessel, forested slope—without remembering how or where they connect in space. You travel, settle, move on, stay put, go. You point your car down the riverside road to the blurred foot of the mountain. The mountain rolls back from the floodplain and hides its own height in its trees. You get out, stand on gravel, and cool your eyes watching the river move south. You lean on the car’s hot hood and look up at the old mountain, up the slope of its green western flank. It is September; the golden-rod is out, and the asters. The tattered hardwood leaves darken before they die. The mountain occupies most of the sky. You can see where the route ahead through the woods will cross a fire scar, will vanish behind a slide of shale, and perhaps reemerge there on that piny ridge now visible across the hanging valley—that ridge apparently inaccessible, but with a faint track that fingers its greenish spine. You don’t notice starting to walk; the sight of the trail has impelled you along it, as the sight of the earth moves the sun.
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Annie Dillard (An American Childhood)
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-isolated instances of beauty and in no urgent need of beholders.
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Tim Cahill (Hold the Enlightenment)
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Captain Kobzar, who had every reason to expect a leisurely refitting of the K-129, was also surprised by the abruptness of the orders. The order to embark on a new mission six months before schedule was completely out of keeping with the Soviet navy’s deployment routine for the missile boats. The sub had been in port only six weeks. What new mission could be so urgent that the normal home port call had to be drastically curtailed? Could replacements be found for the key crew members spread throughout Mother Russia on leave—most of them thousands of miles and many days’ travel away? Even if the furloughed crewmen could be contacted, most would never have time to arrange travel and return for sailing on such short notice.
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Kenneth Sewell (Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S.)
“
Rather than show contrition and resolve to finally address racism in their ranks, those appointed to serve and protect our communities engaged in further violence against Black Americans over the ensuing months, as well as nightly displays of unapologetic—indeed deliberate, performatively cruel—brutality against Black Lives Matter protesters. Cruelty and injustice are nothing new. It has always been easy to export violence and suffering to the rest of the world when we don’t imagine that the victims are real people leading real lives that matter. Weirdly, the very technologies that made the world a smaller place, that were supposed to create a global village, have only made it easier to dehumanize—to unmatter—poor people in the more remote corners of that village. Soldiers launch drone assassinations halfway around the globe from the comfort and safety of video-game consoles on American military bases.*55 Pixelated videos of innocents blown to bits in mistaken air strikes elicit yawns by those who pull the trigger and tough-minded excuses by the generals who consider such collateral murders necessary sacrifices in the ever-more-nebulous War on Terror. There’s a common theme in all this. The unmattering of Black, or brown, or transgender, or Muslim lives reveals an ever-more-defiant and deliberate refusal to imagine or care. It is a cancerous empathy deficit that could destroy our species if it is not confronted with some antidote, and a vaccine to halt its further spread. This empathy deficit may be as urgent an existential threat as the climate crisis, even if it is harder to perceive and define. I think it is what really lies at the root of that ecological catastrophe. I see the Long Self Revolution as a revolution of imagination and care, of empathy and anti-cruelty. When you directly experience your own self as a vast and sublime and unique four-dimensional formation in the block universe, you realize that every fellow traveler on this planet is similarly vast and sublime and unique—like threads in a tapestry, both irreducibly individual and completely interdependent. Precognitive dreamwork (and lifework) makes it impossible to ignore or deny the worth, value, and real reality of other, embodied lives—including lives very distant and different from ours.*56 Our planet is a splendid, multicolored tapestry woven from the intertwining of Long Selves. (Probably our universe is too, in ways we will discover in a few thousand years.) Caring for the future of the earth first requires imagining that each of its inhabitants has a future. That’s what a Long Self is: someone with a future. Thus the Long Self Revolution is incompatible both with cruelty and with the resentful apocalypticism of those who deny that our planet and our species are going somewhere, and going somewhere better.6 In a way, it recruits the future to save the present.
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Eric Wargo (Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self: Interpreting Messages from Your Future (A Sacred Planet Book))