Walter Williams Quotes

But let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn belongs to you - and why?

Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.

Nothing can come of nothing.

Democracy and liberty are not the same. Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual.

The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.

I'm not afraid of werewolves or vampires or haunted hotels, I'm afraid of what real human beings to do other real human beings.

How does something immoral, when done privately, become moral when it is done collectively? Furthermore, does legality establish morality? Slavery was legal; apartheid is legal; Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist purges were legal. Clearly, the fact of legality does not justify these crimes. Legality, alone, cannot be the talisman of moral people.

As merry as the day is long.

No matter how worthy the cause, it is robbery, theft, and injustice to confiscate the property of one person and give it to another to whom it does not belong

Discrimination is simply the act of choice. Scarcity requires us to choose; scarcity is the cause of discrimination!

The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.

They say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. In the case of William Jessup Brady, it’s been hand carved with a lever-action Henry rifle over his shoulder and a Smith & Wesson six-gun strapped to his hip.’ – Solace Walters

French economist/philosopher Frederic Bastiat (1801–50) gave a test for immoral government acts: “See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

Philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe explained that “no one is as hopelessly enslaved as the person who thinks he’s free.” That’s becoming an apt description for Americans who are oblivious to—or ignorant of—the liberties we’ve lost.

There are many farm handouts; but let's call them what they really are: a form of legalized theft. Essentially, a congressman tells his farm constituency, "Vote for me. I'll use my office to take another American's money and give it to you.

There was something else that [Christopher] Reeve told me privately, off camera, and it made me grin. While he was lying in the hospital, just becoming conscious with tubes connected to all parts of his body, a doctor in a white coat came in and with a Russian accent, commanded: "Turn over!" Are you nuts? Reeve thought. I said: 'Turn over!'" the doctor repeated. As Reeve was about to answer "the imbecile", he realized there was something familiar about the man in the white coat. He wasn't a doctor at all. He was Reeve's old buddy from acting school at Julliard, Robin Williams. Reeve waited for a breath, and almost choked with laughter. He realized, he told me, "If I can laugh, I can live.

Social Security is unsustainable because it is not meeting the first order condition of a Ponzi scheme, namely expanding the pool of suckers.

It’s government people, not rich people, who have the power to coerce and make our lives miserable. Coercive power goes a long way toward explaining political corruption.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. (Quoting Adam Smith)

Our founders, in the words of Thomas Paine, recognized that, “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

Do-gooders fail to realize that most good is not done in the name of good but done in the name of self-interest.

The War between the States... produced the foundation for the kind of government we have today: consolidated and absolute, based on the unrestrained will of the majority, with force, threats, and intimidation being the order of the day. Today's federal government is considerably at odds with that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. ... [The War] also laid to rest the great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that 'Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed'.

Believing that presidents have taxing and spending powers leaves Congress less politically accountable for our deepening economic quagmire. Of course, if you’re a congressman, not being held accountable is what you want.

if a person of authority talks only to those who agree with him he soon finds himself out of authority. Luke

What our nation needs is a separation of “business and state” as it has a separation of “church and state.” That would mean crony capitalism and crony socialism could not survive.

The recognition of the fact that Congress has no resources of its own forces us to acknowledge that the only way Congress can give one American one dollar is to first, through intimidation, threats, and coercion, confiscate that dollar from some other American. If a private citizen did the same thing that Congress does, we would call it an immoral act—namely theft. Acts such as theft that are immoral when done privately do not become moral when done collectively. The moral tragedy that has befallen Americans is our belief that it is okay for government to forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another

The Rev. Jesse Jackson once said, “There is nothing more painful for me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.

The beginning of Christendom, is, strictly, at a point out of time. A metphysical trigonometry finds it among the spiritual Secrets, at the meeting of two heavenward lines, one drawn from Bethany along the Ascent of the Messias, the other from Jerusalem against the Descent of the Paraclete. That measurement, the measurement of eternity in operation, of the bright cloud and the rushing wind, is, in effect, theology.

One of the things that economics brings to the analysis is explicit recognition that people will not engage in activities—including racial discrimination—no matter what the cost.

A man's heart is small, but it is surrounded by the immensity of its soul. Sometimes our words may appear silent, but they are certainly heading for infinity.

I hate it!" he said. "I don't want to be human anymore." "Neither do I," she said. "It's not a good place to be.

Terror skittered around the fringes of his consciousness on fast rodent feet.

If you wish to find the unclouded truth, he told himself, do not concern yourself with right or wrong. Conflicts with right and wrong are a sickness of the mind. The

Some say it's wrong to profit from the misfortune of others. I ask my students whether they'd support a law against doing so. But I caution them with some examples. An orthopedist profits from your misfortune of having broken your leg skiing. When there's news of a pending ice storm, I doubt whether it saddens the hearts of those in the collision repair business. I also tell my students that I profit from their misfortune—their ignorance of economic theory.

The moral tragedy that has befallen Americans is our belief that it is okay for government to forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another—that in my book is a working definition of slavery.

The real problem is that workers are not so much underpaid as they are under-skilled. And the real task is to help those people become skilled. Congress cannot do this simply by declaring that as of such-and-such a date, everybody’s productive output is now worth $7.25 per hour. This makes about as much sense, and does just about as much harm, as doctors “curing” patients simply by declaring that they are cured.

The law-abiding black citizen who is passed up by a taxi, refused pizza delivery, or stopped by the police can rightfully feel a sense of injustice and resentment. But the bulk of those feelings should be directed at those who have made race synonymous with higher rates of criminal activity rather than the taxi driver or pizza deliverer who is trying to earn a living and avoid being a crime victim.

Employer substitution of higher-skilled for lower-skilled workers is not the only effect of the minimum wage law. It also gives employers an economic incentive to make other changes: substitute machines for labor; change production techniques; relocate overseas; and eliminate certain jobs altogether. The substitution of automatic dishwashers for hand washing, and automatic tomato-picking machines for manual pickers, are examples of the substitution of machines for labor in response to higher wages.

I respect ordinary thieves much more than I respect politicians. Ordinary thieves take my money without pretense. Unlike typical politicians, these thieves don’t bore me with silly explanations of why their thievery is for the greater good. Nor do ordinary thieves insult my intelligence by proclaiming that they’ll use the money that they steal from me to make my life better than I would have made my life had my money not been swiped from me.

Europeans are a people with little willingness to defend themselves. They are people who believe that peace treaties, appeasement, and disarmament produce peace.

I have no sword, Steward thought, and the thought was triumphant. From the state which is above and beyond, from thought I make my sword.

Walt’s grandson, Walter Disney Miller, told me, “EPCOT was my grandfather’s biggest dream—the city of the future that would point the way to a better world. His dream remains unbuilt.

at their disposal. So they assemble in protests to convey their objections. What’s wrong with that? A similar outpouring came recently from American Walter Williams, one of my favorite columnists and a conservative economist known

The Reverend Jesse Jackson once said, “There is nothing more painful for me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”[

The names of the English have changed. Before the invasion of William I the common names were those such as Leofwine, Aelfwine, Siward and Morcar. After the Norman arrival these were slowly replaced by Robert, Walter, Henry and of course William.

Gabriel knew that he had let himself in for a certain amount of ridicule when he decided to allow himself to be worshiped. In the end he decided that the precedent of actually forbidding a religion was more distasteful than being plagued by the devout.

With a combination of nimble counsel, exasperating ego, studied patience, and street-fighter tactics, William D. Leahy, Ernest J. King, Chester W. Nimitz, and William F. Halsey, Jr., built the modern United States Navy and won World War II on the seas. Each

My dear Gorgas, Instead of being simply satisfied to make friends and draw your pay, it is worth doing your duty, to the best of your ability, for duty’s sake; and in doing this, while the indolent sleep, you may accomplish something that will be of real value to humanity. Your good friend, Reed Dr. Walter Reed encouraging Dr. William Gorgas who went on to make history eradicating Yellow Fever in Havana, 1902 and Panama, 1906, liberating the entire North American continent from centuries of Yellow Fever epidemics.

The 2000 election of George W. Bush as president gave Republicans what the Democrats have now, total control of the legislative and executive branches of government. When Bush came to office, federal spending was $1.788 trillion. When he left office, federal spending was $2.982 trillion.

One annoyance is people’s seeming inability or unwillingness to differentiate between the number zero and the letter “o.” I’ve had conversations with telephone operators who have told me that I can reach my party by dialing, for example, 31o-3o55. Sometimes I’ve asked, “If I follow your instructions, by dialing the letter ‘o’ instead of the number zero, will I reach my party?” They always answer no and that I must dial the zero. Then I ask, “Why did you tell me ‘o’ when you meant zero?” Our chitchat usually degrades after that. It’s not only telephone operators. How many times have you heard a student or teacher say, “He has a 4 point o GPA”? I

So many of the professional foreign policy establishment, and so many of their hangers-on among the lumpen academics and journalists, had become worried by the frenzy and paranoia of the Nixonian Vietnam policy that consensus itself was threatened. Ordinary intra-mural and extra-mural leaking, to such duly constituted bodies as Congress, was getting out of hand. It was Kissinger who inaugurated the second front or home front of the war; illegally wiretapping the telephones even of his own staff and of his journalistic clientele. (I still love to picture the face of Henry Brandon when he found out what his hero had done to his telephone.) This war against the enemy within was the genesis of Watergate; a nexus of high crime and misdemeanour for which Kissinger himself, as Isaacson wittily points out, largely evaded blame by taking to his ‘shuttle’ and staying airborne. Incredibly, he contrived to argue in public with some success that if it were not for democratic distempers like the impeachment process his own selfless, necessary statesmanship would have been easier to carry out. This is true, but not in the way that he got newspapers like Rees-Mogg’s Times to accept.

I lost the job because one of Jack's employees complained to the department of labor that he was in violation of child labor laws.

Poetry enriches the human soul, as it nurtures love, conscience, goodness, honesty, justice, character, compassion, freedom and faith in people.

When you revealed that the Rani was in fact the Nagi," Charlie said, "the players collectively pissed their pants." "I'd rather they creamed their jeans.

Gabriel flashed him the one-fingered Mudra of Contempt.

SuTopo was less a person than a presence, a calm source of authority, like a reigning monarch. Aside

If only the heart’s advice were infallible.

The most important technology for the region’s growth was, of course, the semiconductor. William Shockley, who had been one

If the Force is life and the Yuuzhan Vong are alive and you cannot see them in the Force then is the problem with the Yuuzhan Vong or is it with your perceptions Vergere to Luke

Richard Alther's Bedside Matters offers readers an insightful and moving end-of-life narrative in the spirit of Paul Harding's Tinkers and William Gaddis's Agapē Agape. Challenged by physical decline and family intrigue, Walter transcends his corporeal prison to find larger meaning in art, philosophy, and literature. A work of depth, carefully wrought with nuance and delicately wrapped in wisdom and humor, Bedside Matters serves up a worthy exploration of and an antidote to the shortcomings of our material age. — Jacob M. Appel, author of Millard Salter's Last Day.

Maybe your college professor taught that the legacy of colonialism explains Third World poverty. That’s nonsense as well. Canada was a colony. So were Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. In fact, the richest country in the world, the United States, was once a colony. By contrast, Ethiopia, Liberia, Tibet, Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan were never colonies, but they are home to the world’s poorest people.

How much of a barrier to self-improvement is discrimination? What kinds of tools are in the ready grasp of those subjected to it? Surely one doesn't want to sit around waiting for the end to discrimination.

When I look at the divine sun that melts human souls into harmony like a heavenly blacksmith, I think to myself: ‘If people would love each other like the sun loves all of us, the world would be a fairy tale’..

Such was the vainglory of a black boy who may have been alone among his race in bondage to have actually read pages from Sir Walter Scott and who knew the product of nine multiplied by nine, the name of the President of the United States, the existence of the continent of Asia, the capital of the state of New Jersey, and could spell words like Deuteronomy, Revelation, Nehemiah, Chesapeake, Southampton, and Shenandoah.

It is late afternoon. The world has paused to catch its breath, and the ice-cream streets melt slowly in the sun. The people of Pennsylvania wait in the hush for the twilight that will soften the tempered Gerber edges of their world.

The Church expected the Second Coming of Christ immediately, and no doubt this was so in the ordinary literal sense. But it was certainly expected also in another sense. The converts in all the cities of Asia and (soon) of Europe where the small groups were founded had known, in their conversion, one way or another, a first coming of their Redeemer. And then? And then! That was the consequent task and trouble — the then. He had come, and they adored and believed, they communicated and practiced, and waited for his further exhibition of himself. The then lasted, and there seemed to be no farther equivalent Now. Time became the individual and catholic problem. The Church had to become as catholic — as universal and as durable — as time.

Steward felt closest to Reese. However cautious they were, however little they knew each other, there was a friendship there, a mutual respect. Steward was careful not to presume on it, to tread on Reese’s privacy. That, he concluded, was what friends did. *

An interesting example is found in an article by Dr. Jennifer Roback titled “The Political Economy of Segregation: The Case of Segregated Streetcars,” in the Journal of Economic History (1986). During the late 1800s, private streetcar companies in Augusta, Houston, Jacksonville, Mobile, Montgomery, and Memphis were not segregated, but by the early 1900s, they were. Why? City ordinances forced them to segregate black and white passengers. Numerous Jim Crow laws ruled the day throughout the South mandating segregation in public accommodations.

McGrath briefly notes Bertrand Russell's Why I am not a Christian, and J. J. C. Smart gets a single mention, as does Adolf Grünbaum, but the other major defenders of philosophical atheism of the last half-century do not even merit a nod. His index contains no listings for Antony Flew, Wallace Matson, Kai Nielsen, Richard Gale, William L. Rowe, Michael Martin, J. L. Mackie, Daniel Dennett, Evan Fales, Michael Tooley, Quentin Smith, Jordan Howard Sobel, Robin Le Poidevin, Theodore Drange, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Nicholas Everitt, J. L. Schellenberg, or Graham Oppy.

Scientists shall clone the human embryo in their laboratories tomorrow, and they shall reprogram somatic cells, thus creating a human clone, but never will there be a scientist who will be able to create a soul, which provides humans with feelings, and we know that feelings give birth to compassion and love.

Curzon stood up. He gestured with a fist. “I don’t want you to think about anything,” he said. “I want you to feel. Feel the rightness of this. The correctness of this vision. The necessity of it.” Steward could see patches of sweat under Curzon’s arms. “I want you to sense, Steward, that this is something worth having.

What is America to do about the rising tide of horror? Visitors from Europe or Japan shake their heads in wonder at the squalor and barbarity of America’s cities. They could be forgiven for thinking that the country had viciously and deliberately neglected its poor and its blacks. Of course, it has not. Since the 1960s, the United States has poured a staggering amount of money into education, housing, welfare, Medicaid, and uplift programs of every kind. Government now spends $240 billion a year to fight poverty,1278 and despite the widespread notion that spending was curtailed during Republican administrations, it has actually gone up steadily, at a rate that would have astonished the architects of the Great Society. Federal spending on the poor, in real 1989 dollars, quadrupled from 1965 to 1975, and has nearly doubled since then.1279 As the economist Walter Williams has pointed out, with all the money spent on poverty since the 1960s, the government could have bought every company on the Fortune 500 list and nearly all the farmland in America.1280 What do we have to show for three decades and $2.5 trillion worth of war on poverty? The truth is that these programs have not worked. The truth that America refuses to see is that these programs have made things worse.

The key to innovation—at Bell Labs and in the digital age in general—was realizing that there was no conflict between nurturing individual geniuses and promoting collaborative teamwork. It was not either-or. Indeed, throughout the digital age, the two approaches went together. Creative geniuses (John Mauchly, William Shockley, Steve Jobs) generated innovative ideas. Practical engineers (Presper Eckert, Walter Brattain, Steve Wozniak) partnered closely with them to turn concepts into contraptions. And collaborative teams of technicians and entrepreneurs worked to turn the invention into a practical product. When part of this ecosystem was lacking, such as for John Atanasoff at Iowa State or Charles Babbage in the shed behind his London home, great concepts ended up being consigned to history’s basement. And when great teams lacked passionate visionaries, such as Penn after Mauchly and Eckert left, Princeton after von Neumann, or Bell Labs after Shockley, innovation slowly withered.

The Pass and Lona Hanson and, to some extent, The Power of the Dog may be seen as late novels from the golden age of American landscape fiction, a period that falls roughly in the first half of the last century. In these novels landscape is used not just as decorative background, but to drive the story and control the characters’ lives, as in the work of Willa Cather, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Walter D. Edmonds, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, John Steinbeck, and nearly all that Hemingway wrote, all resonant with the sense of place, a technique well suited to describing the then strikingly different regions of America, the pioneer ethos, the drive of capitalist democracy on the hunt for resources.

The entire world has benefited and prospered since the decisive defeat of Yellow Fever, an unconventional and far-reaching military victory derived from the field medical discoveries of U.S. Army Major Dr. Walter Reed, designed and carried out by U.S. Army Major Dr. William Gorgas with the overall support under the command of U.S. Army General Leonard Wood.

With that, the officer approached the cab with his hand on his pistol and opened the door, demanding that I get out and asking me who in the hell did I think I was talking to him that way. I attempted to get my passenger's name and address as a witness to the incident; but the officer warned him he'd better be on his way lest he be charged with interfering with a policeman.

To a poet, his works aren't just a reflection of life itself, but an entire life in the boundless invisible. Isn't the heavenly oasis of all human emotions - the soul - invisible? I reaped: We cannot see the wind, but we can feel it, we cannot see the warmth of the sun, but we can also feel it. This bond between nature and humans is the best proof of the Creator’s existence.

Another significant factor in the problem that blacks faced in getting over-the-road truck driving positions was the refusal of white truck drivers to ride with them. In 1966, The Wall Street Journal reported that one Teamster official asked, “Would you like to climb in a bunk bed that a nigger just got out of?” Another said, “To my knowledge no law has been written yet that says a white man has to bed down with Negroes.”[102] Teamster officials protected union men who were discharged by a company for refusing to ride with a black driver.[103] Seniority rules, the refusal of white drivers to ride with black drivers, and the Teamsters’ highly discriminatory job-referral practices contributed to reducing black opportunities for jobs in the trucking industry.[104]

On one occasion Walter Brueggemann said, "If you are a coward by nature, don't worry. We can still use you. You can get down behind the biblical text. You can peek out from behind the text, saying, 'I don't know if I would say this, but I do think the text does.' " I like that image—the preacher hunkered down, taking cover behind the biblical text, speaking a word not of the preacher's devising.

TV stars are cool. Even if their characters are less than admirable, they come across as somehow sympathetic, maybe even neighborly. They are, after all, people you invite into your home every week. If you don't like them, you won't watch them. Movie stars, by contrast, are hot. They have to blaze so fiercely that they fill a screen forty feet high and demand the attention of a crowded theater. That's why very few TV stars have graduated successfully to features. It requires not only different skills but a different personality. You have to go from amiable to commanding. Likewise, some movie stars are simply too big for television. Jack Nicholson is riveting on-screen, but you wouldn't want him in your living room week after week. The television simply couldn't contain his personality.

Congress will raise taxes and/or slash promised Social Security benefits. Each year the situation will get worse since the number of retirees is predicted to increase relative to the number in the workforce paying taxes. In 1940, there were forty-two workers per retiree, in 1950 there were sixteen, today there are three, and in twenty or thirty years there will be two or fewer workers per retiree.

Earth, the startlingly pure blue and white, the brown and silver snakes that are rivers filled with erosion, the fragmented coastlines where the rising seas are eating the land, just as Earth’s remaining resources are being eaten by the population. Soon the population may be the only resource left. The Orbitals were once their hope, a gateway to new resources. Now the Orbitals stand like a wall between Earth and its broken dreams, claiming the future for their own. Reno

The fighting is never over,” she says. “All truces are temporary. All wars are the same war, with occasional pauses for readjustment. War and politics are different facets of the same phenomenon, which is the conflict of human will, the will for power, for greatness, for enlarged scope. . . . The rest, the medium through which one will challenges another — war or peace, law or politics — that is mere mechanics.” Her green eyes glitter. “Learn that if you wish to survive.

There’s more deceit and dishonesty. In 1950, I was fourteen years old and applied for a work permit for an after-school job. One of the requirements was to obtain a Social Security card. In bold letters on my Social Security card, which I still possess, are the words “For Social Security Purposes—Not For Identification.” That’s because earlier Americans feared that their Social Security number would become an identity number. According to the Social Security Administration website, “this legend was removed as part of the design changes for the 18th version of the card, issued beginning in 1972.” That statement assumes we’re idiots. We’re asked to believe that the sole purpose of the removal was for design purposes. Apparently, the fact that our Social Security number had become a major identification tool, to be used in every aspect of our lives, had nothing to do with the SSA’s getting rid of the legend saying “For Social Security Purposes—Not For Identification.” I

PERSONS OF THE PLAY JAMES HOW, solicitor WALTER HOW, solicitor ROBERT COKESON, their managing clerk WILLIAM FALDER, their junior clerk SWEEDLE, their office-boy WISTER, a detective COWLEY, a cashier MR. JUSTICE FLOYD, a judge HAROLD CLEAVER, an old advocate HECTOR FROME, a young advocate CAPTAIN DANSON, V.C., a prison governor THE REV. HUGH MILLER, a prison chaplain EDWARD CLEMENT, a prison doctor WOODER, a chief warder MOANEY, convict CLIFTON, convict O’CLEARY, convict RUTH HONEYWILL, a woman

This was obviously directed at an audience beyond that of his son, who was already 40 and the governor of New Jersey. There was, however, a subtext directed at him: William had taken on airs since becoming a governor, and he was far more enamored of the aristocracy and establishment than his father. The autobiography would be a reminder of their humble origins and a paean to hard work, thrift, shopkeeping values, and the role of an industrious middle class that resisted rather than emulated the pretensions of the well-born elite.

I that in heill was and gladnèss Am trublit now with great sickness And feblit with infirmitie:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. Our plesance here is all vain glory, This fals world is but transitory, The flesh is bruckle, the Feynd is slee:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. The state of man does change and vary, Now sound, now sick, now blyth, now sary, Now dansand mirry, now like to die:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. No state in Erd here standis sicker; As with the wynd wavis the wicker So wannis this world's vanitie:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. Unto the Death gois all Estatis, Princis, Prelatis, and Potestatis, Baith rich and poor of all degree:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. He takis the knichtis in to the field Enarmit under helm and scheild; Victor he is at all mellie:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. That strong unmerciful tyrand Takis, on the motheris breast sowkand, The babe full of benignitie:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. He takis the campion in the stour, The captain closit in the tour, The lady in bour full of bewtie:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. He spairis no lord for his piscence, Na clerk for his intelligence; His awful straik may no man flee:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. Art-magicianis and astrologgis, Rethoris, logicianis, and theologgis, Them helpis no conclusionis slee:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. In medecine the most practicianis, Leechis, surrigianis, and physicianis, Themself from Death may not supplee:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. I see that makaris amang the lave Playis here their padyanis, syne gois to grave; Sparit is nocht their facultie:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. He has done petuously devour The noble Chaucer, of makaris flour, The Monk of Bury, and Gower, all three:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. The good Sir Hew of Eglintoun, Ettrick, Heriot, and Wintoun, He has tane out of this cuntrie:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. That scorpion fell has done infeck Maister John Clerk, and James Afflek, Fra ballat-making and tragedie:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. Holland and Barbour he has berevit; Alas! that he not with us levit Sir Mungo Lockart of the Lee:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. Clerk of Tranent eke he has tane, That made the anteris of Gawaine; Sir Gilbert Hay endit has he:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. He has Blind Harry and Sandy Traill Slain with his schour of mortal hail, Quhilk Patrick Johnstoun might nought flee:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. He has reft Merseir his endite, That did in luve so lively write, So short, so quick, of sentence hie:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. He has tane Rowll of Aberdene, And gentill Rowll of Corstorphine; Two better fallowis did no man see:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. In Dunfermline he has tane Broun With Maister Robert Henrysoun; Sir John the Ross enbrast has he:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. And he has now tane, last of a, Good gentil Stobo and Quintin Shaw, Of quhom all wichtis hes pitie:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. Good Maister Walter Kennedy In point of Death lies verily; Great ruth it were that so suld be:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. Sen he has all my brether tane, He will naught let me live alane; Of force I man his next prey be:- Timor Mortis conturbat me. Since for the Death remeid is none, Best is that we for Death dispone, After our death that live may we:- Timor Mortis conturbat me

Computer cores made if liquid crystal that can re-form itself into any configuration, creating the ultimate efficiency for any particular piece of cybernetic business that needs doing, shifting from storage of data to moving it to analyzing it and the altering to a form most efficient for acting on the analysis.Hearts that can make minds, from little bits if brightness in Cowboy's skull that let him move his panzer, to large models that create working analogs of the human brain, the vast artificial intelligences that keep things moving smoothly for the Orbitals and the governments of the planet. All in miniature potential, here in the cardboard box.

Computer cores made of liquid crystal that can re-form itself into any configuration, creating the ultimate efficiency for any particular piece of cybernetic business that needs doing, shifting from storage of data to moving it to analyzing it and the altering to a form most efficient for acting on the analysis. Hearts that can make minds, from little bits if brightness in Cowboy's skull that let him move his panzer, to large models that create working analogs of the human brain, the vast artificial intelligences that keep things moving smoothly for the Orbitals and the governments of the planet. All in miniature potential, here in the cardboard box.

I can't help but wonder how the old Empire would have handled the crisis. I hope you will forgive my partisan attitude but it seems to me that the Emperor would have mobilized his entire armament at the first threat and dealt with the Yuuzhan Vong in an efficient and expeditious manner through the use of overwhelming force. Certainly better than Borsk Fey'lya's policy if I understood it correctly as a policy of negotiating with the invaders at the same time as he was fighting them sending signals of weakness to a ruthless enemy who used negotiation only as a cover for further conquests." "That's not what the Empire would have done Commander. What the Empire would have done was build a super-colossal Yuuzhan Vong-killing battle machine. They would have called it the Nova Colossus or the Galaxy Destructor or the Nostril of Palpatine or something equally grandiose. They would have spent billions of credits employed thousands of contractors and subcontractors and equipped it with the latest in death-dealing technology. And you know what would have happened It wouldn't have worked. They'd forget to bolt down a metal plate over an access hatch leading to the main reactors or some other mistake and a hotshot enemy pilot would have dropped a bomb down there and blow the whole thing up. Now that's what the Empire would have done." Dorja Han

Shortly after finding Phantastes, Jack ordered a copy of British Ballads in the Everyman edition with a chocolate binding, a style of book binding that Arthur liked but Jack formerly did not. He joked to Arthur about being converted to all of Arthur’s views and then, adding to the joke, suggested that Arthur might even make a Christian of him.107 Jack’s jokes had a way of being prophetic. The extent to which his lust for beautiful editions of books had gotten the better of him is evident from an episode shortly after he had promised himself to read one of William Morris’s translations of the Icelandic sagas as soon as he finished The Faerie Queene. He found the very book he wanted in the cheap Walter Scott Library edition, but decided not to buy it because the edition simply was not pretty enough.

He put the point of the knife against what he thought was the cricothyroid membrane, steadied it with the right hand, then slammed the butt with his left palm. Pain shrieked through him as the knife went in. Blood spurted over his hands. He hoped he hadn't hit the carotid artery--local variation in the throat was considerable, and blood vessels were tricky. He still couldn't breath. Panic flailed in him and he slapped the butt of the knife again, as hard as he could. He felt the point strike the back of his throat, gagged, felt more pain. He took a grip on the grainy plastic handle of the knife and twisted, felt cartilage grind as he forced it apart-- --and he breathed. Blood spattered as the long, full breath whistled out. He gurgled as he breathed in. [...] When he felt ready he got to his feet. He found a fork and jabbed the tines into his incision, then twisted to keep it open. His lungs kept going into spasm in an attempt to cough the obstruction out.

The key to innovation-at Bell Labs and in the digital age in general-was realizing that there was no conflict between nurturing individual geniuses and promoting collaborative teamwork. It was not either-or. Indeed, throughout the digital age, the two approaches went together. Creative geniuses (John Mauchly, William Shockley, Steve Jobs) generated innovative ideas. Practical engineers (Presper Eckert, Walter Brattain, Steve Wozniak) partnered closely with them to turn concepts into contraptions. And collaborative teams of technicians and entrepreneurs worked to turn the invention into a practical product. When part of this ecosystem was lacking, such as for John Atanasoff at Iowa State or Charles Babbage in the shed behind his London home, great concepts ended up being consigned to history's basement. And when great teams lacked passionate visionaries, such as Penn after Mauchly and Eckert left, Princeton after von Neumann, or Bell Labs after Shockley, innovation slowly withered.

I could visualize them then, the men who had decided sometime in the distant past what the purpose of human life on earth really was and had set up dormitories and Population Control and the Rules of Privacy and the dozens of inflexible, solipsistic Edicts and Mistakes and Rules that the rest of mankind would live by until we all died out and left the world to the dogs and cats and birds. They would have thought of themselves as grave, serious, concerned men—the words “caring” and “compassionate” would have been frequently on their lips. They would have looked like William Boyd or Richard Dix, with white hair at the temples and rolled-up sleeves and, possibly, pipes in their mouths, sending memos to one another across paper-and-book-piled desks, planning the perfect world for Homo sapiens, a world from which poverty, disease, dissension, neurosis, and pain would be absent, a world as far from the world of the films of D. W. Griffith and Buster Keaton and Gloria Swanson—the world of melodrama and passions and risks and excitement—as all their powers of technology and “compassion” could devise.

... The influence of the Pre-Raphaelites was felt less through their paintings than through a book, The Poems of Tennyson, edited by Moxon and wonderfully illustrated by Rossetti and Millais. The influence on Maeterlinck stems less from the poems themselves than from the illustrations. The revival of illustrated books in the last two years of the century derives from this Tennyson, the books printed at William Morris' press, the albums of Walter Crane. These last two and the ravishing little books for children by Kate Greenaway were heralded by Huysmans as early as 1881. Generally speaking, it is the English Aesthetic Movement rather than the Pre-Raphaelites which influenced the Symbolists, a new life-style rather than a school of painting. The Continent, passing through the Industrial Revolution some fifty years after England, found valuable advice on how to escape from materialism on the other side of the Channel. Everything that one heard about the refinements practised in Chelsea enchanted Frenchmen of taste: furniture by Godwin, open-air theatricals by Lady Archibald Campbell, the Peacock Room by Whistler, Liberty prints. As the pressure of morality was much less pronounced in France than in England, the ideal of Aestheticism was not a revolt but a retreat towards an exquisite world which left hearty good living to the readers of the magazine La Vie Parisienne ('Paris Life') and success to the readers of Zola. If one could not write a beautiful poem or paint a beautiful picture, one could always choose materials or arrange bouquets of flowers. Aesthetic ardour smothered the anglophobia in the Symbolist circle. The ideal of a harmonious life suggested in Baudelaire's poem L' Invitation au Voyage seemed capable of realization in England, whose fashions were brought back by celebrated travellers: Mallarmé after 1862, Verlaine in 1872. Carrière spent a long time in London, as did Khnopff later on. People read books by Gabriel Mourey on Swinburne, and his Passé le Détroit ('Beyond the Channel') is particularly important for the artistic way of life ... Thus England is represented in this hall of visual influences by the works of Burne-Jones and Watts, by illustrated books, and by objets d'art ...

After three weeks of lectures and receptions in New York, Einstein paid a visit to Washington. For reasons fathomable only by those who live in that capital, the Senate decided to debate the theory of relativity. Among the leaders asserting that it was incomprehensible were Pennsylvania Republican Boies Penrose, famous for once uttering that “public office is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and Mississippi Democrat John Sharp Williams, who retired a year later, saying, “I’d rather be a dog and bay at the moon than stay in the Senate another six years.” On the House side of the Capitol, Representative J. J. Kindred of New York proposed placing an explanation of Einstein’s theories in the Congressional Record. David Walsh of Massachusetts rose to object. Did Kindred understand the theory? “I have been earnestly busy with this theory for three weeks,” he replied, “and am beginning to see some light.” But what relevance, he was asked, did it have to the business of Congress? “It may bear upon the legislation of the future as to general relations with the cosmos.” Such discourse made it inevitable that, when Einstein went with a group to the White House on April 25, President Warren G. Harding would be faced with the question of whether he understood relativity. As the group posed for cameras, President Harding smiled and confessed that he did not comprehend the theory at all. The Washington Post carried a cartoon showing him puzzling over a paper titled “Theory of Relativity” while Einstein puzzled over one on the “Theory of Normalcy,” which was the name Harding gave to his governing philosophy. The New York Times ran a page 1 headline: “Einstein Idea Puzzles Harding, He Admits.

Jobs later explained, “We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same, it’s think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.” In order to evoke the spirit of Dead Poets Society, Clow and Jobs wanted to get Robin Williams to read the narration. His agent said that Williams didn’t do ads, so Jobs tried to call him directly. He got through to Williams’s wife, who would not let him talk to the actor because she knew how persuasive he could be. They also considered Maya Angelou and Tom Hanks. At a fund-raising dinner featuring Bill Clinton that fall, Jobs pulled the president aside and asked him to telephone Hanks to talk him into it, but the president pocket-vetoed the request. They ended up with Richard Dreyfuss, who was a dedicated Apple fan. In addition to the television commercials, they created one of the most memorable print campaigns in history. Each ad featured a black-and-white portrait of an iconic historical figure with just the Apple logo and the words “Think Different” in the corner. Making it particularly engaging was that the faces were not captioned. Some of them—Einstein, Gandhi, Lennon, Dylan, Picasso, Edison, Chaplin, King—were easy to identify. But others caused people to pause, puzzle, and maybe ask a friend to put a name to the face: Martha Graham, Ansel Adams, Richard Feynman, Maria Callas, Frank Lloyd Wright, James Watson, Amelia Earhart. Most were Jobs’s personal heroes. They tended to be creative people who had taken risks, defied failure, and bet their career on doing things in a different way.

Because we were raised in a bigoted and hate-filled home, we simply assumed that calling someone a “cheap Jew” or saying someone “Jewed him down” were perfectly acceptable ways to communicate. Or at least we did until the day came when I called one of the cousins, a Neanderthal DeRosa boy, “a little Jew,” and he told me he wasn’t the Jew, that I was the Jew, and he even got Helen and Nana to confirm it for him. It came as a shock to me to find out we were a part of this obviously terrible tribe of skinflint, trouble-making, double-dealing, shrewdly smart desert people. When Denny found out, he was crestfallen because he had assumed that being Jewish meant, according to what his former foster family the Skodiens had taught him, a life behind a desk crunching numbers. “And I hate math,” he said, shaking his head. So here we were, accused Jews living in a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Not a good situation. Walter’s father was the worst. Learning about our few drops of Jewish blood seemed to ignite a special, long-held hatred in him. He became vile over nothing, finding any excuse to deride the Jews in front of us until Helen made him stop. We didn’t know what to make of it, except to write it off as another case of Wozniak-inspired insanity, but as young as we were, we could tell that at some point in his life he had crossed swords with a Jew someplace and came out on the losing end and we were going to pay for it. But because we really didn’t feel ourselves to be Jews, it didn’t sink in that he intended to hurt us with his crazy tirades. As I said, it’s hard to insult somebody when they don’t understand the insult, and it’s equally hard to insult them when they out and out refuse to be insulted. Word got around quickly.

American DEWAR FAMILY Cameron Dewar Ursula “Beep” Dewar, his sister Woody Dewar, his father Bella Dewar, his mother PESHKOV-JAKES FAMILY George Jakes Jacky Jakes, his mother Greg Peshkov, his father Lev Peshkov, his grandfather Marga, his grandmother MARQUAND FAMILY Verena Marquand Percy Marquand, her father Babe Lee, her mother CIA Florence Geary Tony Savino Tim Tedder, semiretired Keith Dorset OTHERS Maria Summers Joseph Hugo, FBI Larry Mawhinney, Pentagon Nelly Fordham, old flame of Greg Peshkov Dennis Wilson, aide to Bobby Kennedy Skip Dickerson, aide to Lyndon Johnson Leopold “Lee” Montgomery, reporter Herb Gould, television journalist on This Day Suzy Cannon, gossip reporter Frank Lindeman, television network owner REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth U.S. president Jackie, his wife Bobby Kennedy, his brother Dave Powers, assistant to President Kennedy Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press officer Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Lyndon B. Johnson, thirty-sixth U.S. president Richard Nixon, thirty-seventh U.S. president Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth U.S. president Ronald Reagan, fortieth U.S. president George H. W. Bush, forty-first U.S. president British LECKWITH-WILLIAMS FAMILY Dave Williams Evie Williams, his sister Daisy Williams, his mother Lloyd Williams, M.P., his father Eth Leckwith, Dave’s grandmother MURRAY FAMILY Jasper Murray Anna Murray, his sister Eva Murray, his mother MUSICIANS IN THE GUARDSMEN AND PLUM NELLIE Lenny, Dave Williams’s cousin Lew, drummer Buzz, bass player Geoffrey, lead guitarist OTHERS Earl Fitzherbert, called Fitz Sam Cakebread, friend of Jasper Murray Byron Chesterfield (real name Brian Chesnowitz), music agent Hank Remington (real name Harry Riley), pop star Eric Chapman, record company executive German FRANCK FAMILY Rebecca Hoffmann Carla Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive mother Werner Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive father Walli Franck, son of Carla Lili Franck, daughter of Werner and Carla Maud von Ulrich, née Fitzherbert, Carla’s mother Hans Hoffmann, Rebecca’s husband OTHERS Bernd Held, schoolteacher Karolin Koontz, folksinger Odo Vossler, clergyman REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Walter Ulbricht, first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (Communist) Erich Honecker, Ulbricht’s successor Egon Krenz, successor to Honecker Polish Stanislaw “Staz” Pawlak, army officer Lidka, girlfriend of Cam Dewar Danuta Gorski, Solidarity activist REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Anna Walentynowicz, crane driver Lech Wałesa, leader of the trade union Solidarity General Jaruzelski, prime minister Russian DVORKIN-PESHKOV FAMILY Tanya Dvorkin, journalist Dimka Dvorkin, Kremlin aide, Tanya’s twin brother Anya Dvorkin, their mother Grigori Peshkov, their grandfather Katerina Peshkov, their grandmother Vladimir, always called Volodya, their uncle Zoya, Volodya’s wife Nina, Dimka’s girlfriend OTHERS Daniil Antonov, features editor at TASS Pyotr Opotkin, features editor in chief Vasili Yenkov, dissident Natalya Smotrov, official in the Foreign Ministry

The mixture of a solidly established Romance aristocracy with the Old English grassroots produced a new language, a “French of England,” which came to be known as Anglo-Norman. It was perfectly intelligible to the speakers of other langues d’oïl and also gave French its first anglicisms, words such as bateau (boat) and the four points of the compass, nord, sud, est and ouest. The most famous Romance chanson de geste, the Song of Roland, was written in Anglo-Norman. The first verse shows how “French” this language was: Carles li reis, nostre emperere magnes, set anz tuz pleins ad estéd en Espaigne, Tresqu’en la mer cunquist la tere altaigne… King Charles, our great emperor, stayed in Spain a full seven years: and he conquered the high lands up to the sea… Francophones are probably not aware of how much England contributed to the development of French. England’s court was an important production centre for Romance literature, and most of the early legends of King Arthur were written in Anglo-Norman. Robert Wace, who came from the Channel Island of Jersey, first evoked the mythical Round Table in his Roman de Brut, written in French in 1155. An Englishman, William Caxton, even produced the first “vocabulary” of French and English (a precursor of the dictionary) in 1480. But for four centuries after William seized the English crown, the exchange between Old English and Romance was pretty much the other way around—from Romance to English. Linguists dispute whether a quarter or a half of the basic English vocabulary comes from French. Part of the argument has to do with the fact that some borrowings are referred to as Latinates, a term that tends to obscure the fact that they actually come from French (as we explain later, the English worked hard to push away or hide the influence of French). Words such as charge, council, court, debt, judge, justice, merchant and parliament are straight borrowings from eleventh-century Romance, often with no modification in spelling. In her book Honni soit qui mal y pense, Henriette Walter points out that the historical developments of French and English are so closely related that anglophone students find it easier to read Old French than francophones do. The reason is simple: Words such as acointance, chalenge, plege, estriver, remaindre and esquier disappeared from the French vocabulary but remained in English as acquaintance, challenge, pledge, strive, remain and squire—with their original meanings. The word bacon, which francophones today decry as an English import, is an old Frankish term that took root in English. Words that people think are totally English, such as foreign, pedigree, budget, proud and view, are actually Romance terms pronounced with an English accent: forain, pied-de-grue (crane’s foot—a symbol used in genealogical trees to mark a line of succession), bougette (purse), prud (valiant) and vëue. Like all other Romance vernaculars, Anglo-Norman evolved quickly. English became the expression of a profound brand of nationalism long before French did. As early as the thirteenth century, the English were struggling to define their nation in opposition to the French, a phenomenon that is no doubt the root of the peculiar mixture of attraction and repulsion most anglophones feel towards the French today, whether they admit it or not. When Norman kings tried to add their French territory to England and unify their kingdom under the English Crown, the French of course resisted. The situation led to the first, lesser-known Hundred Years War (1159–1299). This long quarrel forced the Anglo-Norman aristocracy to take sides. Those who chose England got closer to the local grassroots, setting the Anglo-Norman aristocracy on the road to assimilation into English.