Wheel Of Morality Quotes

A consumerist attitude may lubricate the wheels of the economy; it sprinkles sand into the bearings of morality.

We laugh at a man who, stepping out of his room at the very minute when the sun is rising, says, “It is my will that the sun shall rise”; or at him who, unable to stop a wheel, says, “I wish it to roll”; or, again, at him who, thrown in a wrestling match, says, “Here I lie, but here I wish to lie.” But, joking apart, do we not act like one of these three persons whenever we use the expression “I wish”?

My ancestor acquired this power when he came mysteriously to this world. A potent ability to do anything. He was a moral man, perhaps borne out of experience and so he passed down the power stripped of its ability to kill. I had never desired to kill so this limitation did not bother me.

Well, what, what new thing can they say to me that I don't know myself? And is that the point? The point here is that--one turn of the wheel, and everything changes, and these same moralizers will be the first (I'm sure of it) to come with friendly jokes to congratulate me. And they won't all turn away from me as they do now. Spit on them all! What am I now? Zéro. What may I be tomorrow? Tomorrow I may rise from the dead and begin to live anew! I may find the man in me before he's lost!

There is very little deliberate wickedness in the world. The stupidity of our selfishness gives much the same results indeed, but in the ethical laboratory it shows a different nature.

The wayward morality of the country’s “flaming youth” was blamed, at least in part, on their easy access to enclosed automobiles, which one outraged critic described as “bordellos on wheels.

Because those events are so real that they cast their shadow forward and backwards through all time, whenever men think of these matters at all. Even if they are mired in ignorace, they will see...fragments of the Truth, as men imprisoned in a cave see shadows cast by the sun. Likewise, all men derive their moral intuitions from God; how not? There is no other source, just as there is no other way to make a wheel than to make it round.

The wheels rolled on, and rolled down by the Monument, and by the Tower; and by the Docks; down by Ratcliffe, and by Rotherhithe; down by where accumulated scum of humanity seemed to be washed from higher grounds, like so much moral sewage, and to be pausing until its own weight forced it over the bank and sunk it in the river.

Fine, I’ll pick ‘Sleeping Beauty,’” he decided. “Interesting selection,” Alex said, intrigued. “What do you suppose the moral of that story is?” “Don’t piss off your neighbors, I guess,” Conner said. Alex grunted disapprovingly. “Be serious, Conner! That is not the moral of ‘Sleeping Beauty,’” she reprimanded. “Sure it is,” Conner explained. “If the king and queen had just invited that crazy enchantress to their daughter’s party in the first place, none of that stuff ever would have happened.” “They couldn’t have stopped it from happening,” said Alex. “That enchantress was evil and probably would have cursed the baby princess anyway. ‘Sleeping Beauty’ is about trying to prevent the unpreventable. Her parents tried protecting her and had all the spinning wheels in the kingdom destroyed. She was so sheltered, she didn’t even know what the danger was, and she still pricked her finger on the first spindle she ever saw.” Conner thought about this possibility and shook his head. He liked his version much better. “I disagree,” Conner told her. “I’ve seen how upset you get when people don’t invite you places, and you usually look like you would curse a baby, too.” Alex gave Conner a dirty look Mrs. Peters would have been proud of. “While there’s no such thing as a wrong interpretation, I have to say that is definitely a misread,” Alex said. “I’m just saying to be careful who you ignore,” Conner clarified. “I always thought Sleeping Beauty’s parents had it coming.” “Oh?

An ignorant man, who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is however sufficiently confident to think he can safely take to pieces, and put together at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise, importance and complexity, composed of far other wheels, and springs, and balances, and counteracting and co-operating powers. Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption. They who truly mean well must be fearful of acting ill.

The notion that a vast gulf exists between "criminals" and those of us who have never served time in prison is a fiction created by the racial ideology that birthed mass incarceration, namely that there is something fundamentally wrong and morally inferior about "them." The reality, though, is that all of us have done wrong. As noted earlier, studies suggest that most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime. Indeed, most of us break the law not once but repeatedly throughout our lives. Yet only some of us will be arrested, charged, convicted of a crime, branded a criminal or a felon, and ushered into a permanent undercaste. Who becomes a social pariah and excommunicated from civil society and who trots off to college bears scant relationship to the morality of the crimes committed. Who is more blameworthy: the young black kid who hustles on the street corner, selling weed to help his momma pay rent? Or the college kid who deals drugs out of his dorm room so that he'll have cash to finance his spring break? Who should we fear? The kid in the 'hood who joined a gang and now carries a gun for security, because his neighborhood is frightening and unsafe? Or the suburban high school student who has a drinking problem but keeps getting behind the wheel? Our racially biased system of mass incarceration exploits the fact that all people break the law and make mistakes at various points in their lives with varying degrees of justification. Screwing up-failing to live by one's highest ideals and values-is part of what makes us human.

Best not to look back. Best to believe there will be happily ever afters all the way around- and so there may be; who is to say there will to be such endings? Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question… And if you spare a last though, maybe it’s ghosts you wonder about… the ghosts of children standing in the water at sunset, standing in a circle, standing with their hands joined together, their faces young, sure, but tough… tough enough, anyway, to give birth to the people they will become, tough enough understand, maybe, that the people they will become must necessarily birth the people they were before they can get on with trying to understand simple morality. The circle closes, the wheel rolls, and that’s all there is. You don’t have to look back to see those children; part of you mind wills them forever, live with them forever, love with them forever. They are not necessarily the best part of you, but were once the repository of all you could become. Children I love you. I love you so much. So drive away quick, drive away while the last of the light slips away,drive away from Derry, from memory… but not from desire. That stays, the bright cameo of all we were and all we believed as children, all that shone in our eyes even when we were lost and the wind blew in the night. Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand. All the rest is darkness.

There are occasions when a moralising novelist can merely wring his hands and leave matters to take their course.

the world was not black and white—it wasn’t even gray. It was full of colors that sometimes didn’t fit into any spectrum of morality.

It is said that in those days one could hear seventy languages in the streets of Istanbul. The vast Ottoman Empire, shrunken and weakened though it now was, had made it normal and natural for Greeks to inhabit Egypt, Persians to settle in Arabia and Albanians to live with Slavs. Christians and Muslims of all sects, Alevis, Zoroastrians, Jews, worshippers of the Peacock Angel, subsisted side by side in the most improbable places and combinations. There were Muslim Greeks, Catholic Armenians, Arab Christians and Serbian Jews. Istanbul was the hub of this broken-felloed wheel, and there could be found epitomised the fantastical bedlam and babel, which although no one realised it at the time, was destined to be the model and precursor of all the world's great metropoles a hundred years hence, by which time Istanbul itself would, paradoxically, have lost its cosmopolitan brilliance entirely. It would be destined, perhaps, one day to find it again, if only the devilish false idols of nationalism, that specious patriotism of the morally stunted, might finally be toppled in the century to come.

The wheels of our cultural “moral compass” run on the racist belief that women are somehow less privileged than males – and therefore many women don’t ever belong to even the sense of belonging.

Glaza - zerkalo dushi,” I murmured, the Russian words tumbling off my tongue. Curiosity etched on his features, he quirked an eyebrow and asked softly, “What does that mean?” “That’s a Russian saying. It means that the eyes are the mirror of one’s heart. Your eyes were one of the first things I noticed about you. So bright. So mysterious. So beautiful. Like your heart,” I replied, pointing to his chest with my finger and telling his heart, “Ya budu zashchishchat’ vas do samogo kontsa.” I will protect you to the end. I saw how the wheels were turning in his brain as he tried to translate it with his little knowledge of Russian. “I... will,” he tried to translate. A smile formed on my lips. Cute.

It was the task of industrial society to destroy all of that. All that "community" implies -- self-sufficiency, mutual aid, morality in the marketplace, stubborn tradition, regulation by custom, organic knowledge instead of mechanistic science -- had to be steadily and systematically disrupted and displaced. All of the practices that kept the individual from being a consumer had to be done away with so that the cogs and wheels of an unfettered machine called "the economy" could operate without interference, influenced merely by invisible hands and inevitable balances and all the rest of that benevolent free-market system guided by what Cobbett called, his lip curled toward Hume and James Steuart and Adam Smith, "Scotch Feelosophy.

What is today’s date? Who is the President? How great a danger do you pose, on a scale of one to ten? What does “people who live in glass houses” mean? Every symphony is a suicide postponed, true or false? Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the avalanche? Name five rivers. What do you see yourself doing in ten minutes? How about some lovely soft Thorazine music? If you could have half an hour with your father, what would you say to him? What should you do if I fall asleep? Are you still following in his mastodon footsteps? What is the moral of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”? What about his Everest shadow? Would you compare your education to a disease so rare no one else has ever had it, or the deliberate extermination of indigenous populations? Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent absence? Should an odd number be sacrificed to the gods of the sky, and an even to those of the underworld, or vice versa? Would you visit a country where nobody talks? What would you have done differently? Why are you here?

No. I'm trying to think like a human, trying to decide if it's selfish to kiss you. If it's not in your best interest. I don't always understand how to be thoughtful." He really did look like he was having an internal struggle over right and wrong. I could practically see the wheels grinding in his skull. "Here's a clue," I told him. "If I ask you if you're going to kiss me, it means I want you to, which means it's not selfish of you." He frowned. "Are you sure?" A demon with a moral streak stronger than any guy I'd ever met. Who would have imagined that.

With a glance back towards the house, he pulled the secret sketches from within. He'd been working at them on and off for a fortnight now, ever since he'd come across Cousin Eliza's fairy tales among Rose's things. Though they were written for children, magical stories of bravery and morality, they had made their way beneath his skin. The characters had seeped inside his mind and come alive, their simple wisdom a balm for his swirling mind, his ugly adult troubles. He had found himself in moments of distraction scribbling lines that had turned themselves into a crone at a spinning wheel, the Fairy Queen with her long thick plait, the Princess bird trapped in her golden cage.

It is the Left that secrets and desperately reproduces power, because it wants power, and therefore the Left believes in it and revives it precisely where the system puts an end to it. The system puts an end one by one to all its axioms, to all its institutions, and realizes one by one all the objectives of all the historical and revolutionary Left that sees itself constrained to revive the wheels of capital in order to lay siege to them one day: from private property to small business, from the army to national grandeur, from puritan morality to petit bourgeois culture, justice at the university—everything that is disappearing, that the system, in its atrocity, certainly, but also in its irreversible impulse, has liquidated, must be conserved.

As noted earlier, studies suggest that most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime. Indeed, most of us break the law not once but repeatedly throughout our lives. Yet only some of us will be arrested, charged, convicted of a crime, branded a criminal or felon, and ushered into a permanent undercaste. Who becomes a social pariah and excommunicated from civil society and who trots off to college bears scant relationship to the morality of crimes committed. Who is more blameworthy: the young black kid who hustles on the street corner, selling weed to help his momma pay the rent? Or the college kid who deals drugs out of his dorm room so that he’ll have cash to finance his spring break? Who should we fear? The kid in the ’hood who joined a gang and now carries a gun for security, because his neighborhood is frightening and unsafe? Or the suburban high school student who has a drinking problem but keeps getting behind the wheel? Our racially biased system of mass incarceration exploits the fact that all people break the law and make mistakes at various points in their lives and with varying degrees of justification. Screwing up—failing to live by one’s highest ideals and values—is part of what makes us human.

Christmas was a response of the choice of mankind to take its existence into its own hands and chart its own course, liberally scripting its own ethics, crafting its own moral system, and choosing to believe that it was the creator and therefore master of its fate. Christmas is a response to mankind reeling off the pages of history and splattering the blood of lives and generations wasted along its free-wheeling course.

Smith denied the traditional contradiction between wealth and morality, and threw open the gates of heaven for the rich. Being rich meant being moral. In Smith’s story, people become rich not by despoiling their neighbours, but by increasing the overall size of the pie. And when the pie grows, everyone benefits. The rich are accordingly the most useful and benevolent people in society, because they turn the wheels of growth for everyone’s advantage. All

If you are a member of a WEIRD society, your eyes tend to fall on individual objects such as people, and you don’t automatically see the relationships among them. Having a concept such as social capital is helpful because it forces you to see the relationships within which those people are embedded, and which make those people more productive. I propose that we take this approach one step further. To understand the miracle of moral communities that grow beyond the bounds of kinship we must look not just at people, and not just at the relationships among people, but at the complete environment within which those relationships are embedded, and which makes those people more virtuous (however they themselves define that term). It takes a great deal of outside-the-mind stuff to support a moral community. For example, on a small island or in a small town, you typically don’t need to lock your bicycle, but in a big city in the same country, if you only lock the bike frame, your wheels may get stolen. Being small, isolated, or morally homogeneous are examples of environmental conditions that increase the moral capital of a community. That doesn’t mean that small islands and small towns are better places to live overall—the diversity and crowding of big cities makes them more creative and interesting places for many people—but that’s the trade-off. (Whether you’d trade away some moral capital to gain some diversity and creativity will depend in part on your brain’s settings on traits such as openness to experience and threat sensitivity, and this is part of the reason why cities are usually so much more liberal than the countryside.) Looking

If a medical misfortune sends you into the country of the sick—which has its own rituals, customs, traditions, and rules—then an Alkaitis sends you into an unstable territory, the country of the cheated. Things that were impossible after Alkaitis: retirement, a home without wheels, trusting other people besides Marie. Things that were impossible after visiting Germany with Michael Saparelli: any certainty of his own morality, maintaining his previous belief that he was essentially incorruptible, calling Miranda to ask about other consulting opportunities.

It is a year and eight months since I last looked at these notes of mine. I do so now only because, being overwhelmed with depression, I wish to distract my mind by reading them through at random. I left them off at the point where I was just going to Homburg. My God, with what a light heart (comparatively speaking) did I write the concluding lines!—though it may be not so much with a light heart, as with a measure of self-confidence and unquenchable hope. At that time had I any doubts of myself? Yet behold me now. Scarcely a year and a half have passed, yet I am in a worse position than the meanest beggar. But what is a beggar? A fig for beggary! I have ruined myself—that is all. Nor is there anything with which I can compare myself; there is no moral which it would be of any use for you to read to me. At the present moment nothing could well be more incongruous than a moral. Oh, you self-satisfied persons who, in your unctuous pride, are forever ready to mouth your maxims—if only you knew how fully I myself comprehend the sordidness of my present state, you would not trouble to wag your tongues at me! What could you say to me that I do not already know? Well, wherein lies my difficulty? It lies in the fact that by a single turn of a roulette wheel everything for me, has become changed. Yet, had things befallen otherwise, these moralists would have been among the first (yes, I feel persuaded of it) to approach me with friendly jests and congratulations. Yes, they would never have turned from me as they are doing now! A fig for all of them! What am I? I am zero—nothing. What shall I be tomorrow? I may be risen from the dead, and have begun life anew. For still, I may discover the man in myself, if only my manhood has not become utterly shattered.

The thought of the novelist that matters most is the thought that makes him a novelist. The thought of the novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters or even in their introspection but in the plight he has invented for his characters, in the juxtaposition of those characters and in the lifelike ramifications of the ensemble they make — their density, their substantiality, their lived existence actualized in all its nuanced particulars, is in fact his thought metabolized. The thought of the writer lies in his choice of an aspect of reality previously unexamined in the way that he conducts an examination. The thought of the writer is embedded everywhere in the course of the novel’s action. The thought of the writer is figured invisibly in the elaborate pattern — in the newly emerging constellation of imagined things — that is the architecture of the book: what Aristotle called simply “the arrangement of the parts,” the “matter of size and order.” The thought of the novel is embodied in the moral focus of the novel. The tool with which the novelist thinks is the scrupulosity of his style. Here, in all this, lies whatever magnitude his thought may have. The novel, then, is in itself his mental world. A novelist is not a tiny cog in the great wheel of human thought. He is a tiny cog in the great wheel of imaginative literature.

On the few occasions when we did visit my grandfather at the Evergreen Moral Home for the Aged Sick and Handicapped, I never wanted to go back. It's the smells that hit you first, the nauseatingly sweet smell of open sores and wet bandages, reeking of urine, saliva, sweat, pus -— the stench of incurable sickness blanketed by the pungent odour of strong medicine. I stood at the doorway, gagging, my lungs fighting to adapt to the atmosphere. This wasn't the smell of death — that is bearable — no, this was the noxious smell of decomposition, when flesh and soul and heart and bone separate, then rot, deteriorate until all is reduced to a putrid pile of rubbish ready to be wheeled out. The syrupy smell of decay.

Their degeneration was even more rapid than their rise. Astyages, who succeeded his father Cyaxares, proved again that monarchy is a gamble, in whose royal succession great wits and madness are near allied. He inherited the kingdom with equanimity, and settled down to enjoy it. Under his example the nation forgot its stern morals and stoic ways; wealth had come too suddenly to be wisely used. The upper classes became the slaves of fashion and luxury, the men wore embroidered trousers, the women covered themselves with cosmetics and jewelry, the very horses were often caparisoned in gold.7 These once simple and pastoral people, who had been glad to be carried in rude wagons with wheels cut roughly out of the trunks of trees,8 now rode in expensive chariots from feast to feast.

Whoever looks for the writer’s thinking in the words and thoughts of his characters is looking in the wrong direction. Seeking out a writer’s “thoughts” violates the richness of the mixture that is the very hallmark of the novel. The thought of the novelist that matters most is the thought that makes him a novelist. The thought of the novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters or even in their introspection but in the plight he has invented for his characters, in the juxtaposition of those characters and in the lifelike ramifications of the ensemble they make — their density, their substantiality, their lived existence actualized in all its nuanced particulars, is in fact his thought metabolized. The thought of the writer lies in his choice of an aspect of reality previously unexamined in the way that he conducts an examination. The thought of the writer is embedded everywhere in the course of the novel’s action. The thought of the writer is figured invisibly in the elaborate pattern — in the newly emerging constellation of imagined things — that is the architecture of the book: what Aristotle called simply “the arrangement of the parts,” the “matter of size and order.” The thought of the novel is embodied in the moral focus of the novel. The tool with which the novelist thinks is the scrupulosity of his style. Here, in all this, lies whatever magnitude his thought may have. The novel, then, is in itself his mental world. A novelist is not a tiny cog in the great wheel of human thought. He is a tiny cog in the great wheel of imaginative literature. Finis.

The life of man is a story; an adventure story; and in our vision the same is true even of the story of God. The Catholic faith is the reconciliation because it is the realisation both of mythology and philosophy. It is a story and in that sense one of a hundred stories; only it is a true story. It is a philosophy and in that sense one of a hundred philosophies; only it is a philosophy that is like life. But above all, it is a reconciliation because it is something that can only be called the philosophy of stories. That normal narrative instinct which produced all the fairy tales is something that is neglected by all the philosophies—except one. The Faith is the justification of that popular instinct; the finding of a philosophy for it or the analysis of the philosophy in it. Exactly as a man in an adventure story has to pass various tests to save his life, so the man in this philosophy has to pass several tests and save his soul. In both there is an idea of free will operating under conditions of design; in other words, there is an aim and it is the business of a man to aim at it; we therefore watch to see whether he will hit it. Now this deep and democratic and dramatic instinct is derided and dismissed in all the other philosophies. For all the other philosophies avowedly end where they begin; and it is the definition of a story that it ends differently; that it begins in one place and ends in another. From Buddha and his wheel to Akhen Aten and his disc, from Pythagoras with his abstraction of number to Confucius with his religion of routine, there is not one of them that does not in some way sin against the soul of a story. There is none of them that really grasps this human notion of the tale, the test, the adventure; the ordeal of the free man. Each of them starves the story-telling instinct, so to speak, and does something to spoil human life considered as a romance; either by fatalism (pessimist or optimist) and that destiny that is the death of adventure; or by indifference and that detachment that is the death of drama; or by a fundamental scepticism that dissolves the actors into atoms; or by a materialistic limitation blocking the vista of moral consequences; or a mechanical recurrence making even moral tests monotonous; or a bottomless relativity making even practical tests insecure. There is such a thing as a human story; and there is such a thing as the divine story which is also a human story; but there is no such thing as a Hegelian story or a Monist story or a relativist story or a determinist story; for every story, yes, even a penny dreadful or a cheap novelette, has something in it that belongs to our universe and not theirs. Every short story does truly begin with creation and end with a last judgement.

The extraordinary value of the I Ching is that it reveals the secrets of dynamic natural law. Working with its changes opens up access to the middle level of the Positive Paradigm Wheel, the “e” energy layer of Einstein's Unified Theory. This middle level serves as mediating, two-directional gate-keeper between the ever-changing surface rim and the universal, timeless center. You can't get from here to there, except through the middle layer which, in Western thinking, is effectively taboo, buried in the inaccessible "unconscious." To the extent that natural law is a blind spot in the prevailing, linear and exclusively empirical paradigm, we are left powerless to move beyond the surface level of experience. The realm of light and conscience which rests beyond, on the far side of the dynamic energy level, remains functionally inaccessible. Moral codes promoted by religionists or politicians are sometimes equated with conscience. But they're no substitute for direct experience. Only by becoming intelligently competent in managing the subtle energies of the middle level is it possible to travel further inwards for the immediate, personal experience of inner light. When the middle level becomes clogged with painful memories, negative emotions and socially taboo urges, it becomes a barrier to deeper knowing. The Book of Change is indispensable as a tool for restoring the unnecessarily "unconscious" to conscious awareness, so that the levels of human potential can be linked and unified. In Positive Paradigm context, survivors who prevail in dangerous times aren't those with the most material wealth, possessions or political power. They're the ones who've successfully navigated the middle realm, reached the far shore of enlightenment and returned to the surface with their new information intact. Those who succeed in linking the levels of experience are genius-leaders in whatever fields they choose to engage. They're the fortunate ones who've acquired the inner wealth necessary to both hear the inner voice of conscience and act on the guidance they receive.

In marked contrast to the relaxed, typically Latin attitude of the Dominicans the Protestant missionaries were still proceeding at full blast with the fight for souls. These North American evangelists of strictly fundamentalist inclination combined in a curious fashion strict adhesion to the literal meaning of the Old Testament With mastery of the most modern technology. Most of them came from small towns in the Bible Belt, armed with unshakably clear consciences and a rudimentary smattering of theology, convinced that they alone were the repositories of Christian values now abolished elsewhere. Totally ignorant of the vast world, despite their transplantation, and taking the few articles of morality accepted in the rural Amenca of their childhoods to be a universal credo, they strove bravely to spread these principles of salvation all around them. Their rustic faith was well served by a flotilla of light aircraft, a powerful radio, an ultra-modern hospital and four-wheel-drive vehicles -- in short, all the equipment that a battalion of crusaders dropped behind enemy lines needed.

The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that’s why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world. The notion that a vast gulf exists between “criminals” and those of us who have never served time in prison is a fiction created by the racial ideology that birthed mass incarceration, namely that there is something fundamentally wrong and morally inferior about “them.” The reality, though, is that all of us have done wrong. As noted earlier, studies suggest that most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime. Indeed, most of us break the law not once but repeatedly throughout our lives. Yet only some of us will be arrested, charged, convicted of a crime, branded a criminal or felon, and ushered into a permanent undercaste. Who becomes a social pariah and excommunicated from civil society and who trots off to college bears scant relationship to the morality of crimes committed. Who is more blameworthy: the young black kid who hustles on the street corner, selling weed to help his momma pay the rent? Or the college kid who deals drugs out of his dorm room so that he’ll have cash to finance his spring break? Who should we fear? The kid in the ’hood who joined a gang and now carries a gun for security, because his neighborhood is frightening and unsafe? Or the suburban high school student who has a drinking problem but keeps getting behind the wheel? Our racially biased system of mass incarceration exploits the fact that all people break the law and make mistakes at various points in their lives and with varying degrees of justification. Screwing up—failing to live by one’s highest ideals and values—is part of what makes us human.

The centre of the conception of wisdom in the Bible is the Book of Ecclesiastes, whose author, or rather, chief editor, is sometimes called Koheleth, the teacher or preacher. Koheleth transforms the conservatism of popular wisdom into a program of continuous mental energy. Those who have unconsciously identified a religious attitude either with illusion or with mental indolence are not safe guides to this book, although their tradition is a long one. Some editor with a “you’d better watch out” attitude seems to have tacked a few verses on the end suggesting that God trusts only the anti-intellectual, but the main author’s courage and honesty are not to be defused in this way. He is “disillusioned” only in the sense that he has realized that an illusion is a self-constructed prison. He is not a weary pessimist tired of life: he is a vigorous realist determined to smash his way through every locked door of repression in his mind. Being tired of life is in fact the only mental handicap for which he has no remedy to suggest. Like other wise men, he is a collector of proverbs, but he applies to all of them his touchstone and key word, translated in the AV [the Authorized Version] as “vanity.” This word (hebel) has a metaphorical kernel of fog, mist, or vapour, a metaphor that recurs in the New Testament (James 4:14). It this acquires a derived sense of “emptiness,” the root meaning of the Vulgate’s vanitas. To put Koheleth’s central intuition into the form of its essential paradox: all things are full of emptiness. We should not apply a ready-made disapproving moral ambience to this word “vanity,” much less associate it with conceit. It is a conception more like the shunyata or “void” of Buddhist though: the world as everything within nothingness. As nothing is certain or permanent in the world, nothing either real or unreal, the secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal. All goals and aims may cheat us, but if we run away from them we shall find ourselves bumping into them. We may feel that saint is a “better” man than a sinner, and that all of our religious and moral standards would crumble into dust if we did not think so; but the saint himself is most unlikely to take such a view. Similarly Koheleth went through a stage in which he saw that wisdom was “better” than folly, then a stage in which he saw that there was really no difference between them as death lies in wait for both and finally realized that both views were equally “vanity”. As soon as we renounce the expectation of reward, in however, refined a guise, for virtue or wisdom, we relax and our real energies begin to flow into the soul. Even the great elegy at the end over the failing bodily powers of old age ceases to become “pessimistic” when we see it as part of the detachment with which the wise man sees his life in the context of vanity. We take what comes: there is no choice in the matter, hence no point in saying “we should take what comes.” We soon realize by doing so that there is a cyclical rhythm in nature. But, like other wheels, this is a machine to be understood and used by man. If it is true that the sun, the seasons, the waters, and human life itself go in cycles, the inference is that “there is a time for all things,” something different to be done at each stage of the cycle. The statement “There is nothing new under the sun” applies to wisdom but not to experience , to theory but not to practice. Only when we realize that nothing is new can we live with an intensity in which everything becomes new.

Science began with a gadget and a trick. The gadget was the wheel; the trick was fire. We have come a long way from the two-wheel cart to the round-the-world transport plane, or from the sparking flint to man-made nuclear fission. Yet I wonder whether the inhabitants of Hiroshima were more aware of the evolution of science than ancient man facing an on-storming battle chariot. It isn't physics that will make this a better life, nor chemistry, nor sociology. Physics may be used to atom-bomb a nation and chemistry may be used to poison a city and sociology has been used to drive people and classes against classes. Science is only an instrument, no more than a stick or fire or water that can be used to lean on or light or refresh, and also can be used to flail or burn or drown. Knowledge without morals is a beast on the loose.

Wall Street and corporate American know there is no deal considered beneath the Clintons. If they will, as reported, wheel and deal off the human tragedy of the Haitian disaster, then they will indeed do anything. If they are willing to defame and destroy women abused by Bill Clinton, they will not only do that, but proclaim themselves feminists. They have created a huge shakedown conglomerate in the Clinton Foundation in Machiavellian fashion: the philanthropy brilliantly masks the cynical tapping of such funds for personal aggrandizement. Quid pro quos go through the foundation to “help” the helpless while providing the family the moral veneer to moonlight and rake in huge fees from foundation donors, who do not give such largess for nothing. Hitting up corporate finaglers for $70 million in tag-along private jet travel would be burdensome; but creating a tax-free “philanthropy” to provide such corporate one-percent travel for the three Clintons (whether to lecture on global warming or the unfair tax policies of the one-percent) is brilliant in the Medieval sense.

If I craft my own ethics, they will serve my agendas rather than guide them. And that is something akin to racing a car down a mountain road without a steering wheel and somehow assuming that all is well.

Fortune turns like a wheel. One man it lifts, another it sets down! Does not the old man grieve over all he has lost?” “Who can tell? He lives quietly and peacefully, and works well.

The final salute, on the day of his funeral, was to be the cutoff of all electric current in the nation for one minute. But this was deemed too costly and dangerous. Instead, only certain lights were dimmed. The wheels of progress were not stilled, even for an instant. Thomas Edison, I am sure, would have wanted it that way.

You should avoid being drawn into things, and especially into other people's business. ... If you're tough, and ballsy, and well... not as wimpish and idiotic as everyone else... shouldn't you offer people support? Don't you have kind of a moral obligation?

sounded calm when she answered the phone. Which meant that Jody had probably left. They had begun the day with the two women arguing about whose phone the government had legal and moral authority to tap. Pearl and her daughter could discuss such subjects until they were all talked out and Quinn had long since fled to wherever it might be legal and moral to smoke a cigar. “Still reeling from the Minnie Miner show?” Pearl asked him. “Not per se,” Quinn said. “That sounds like something Winston Castle would say. He must have gotten to you with his member-of-parliament persona.” “I suppose that’s why I’m calling,” Quinn said. “There’s something familiar about Winston Castle’s act. It reminds me of a magician’s patter, designed to get you looking at one hand while he’s doing something with the other. Just when everybody’s attention is distracted, Presto! Out of the hat pops the rabbit.” “Or the right card,” “Never play poker with them,” Quinn said. “Rabbits?” “People. Like the ones in Winston Castle’s whack-job family, or whatever it is. They have their patter.” “Meaning?” “Maybe somebody has a real Michelangelo up a sleeve.” “Magicians,” Pearl said, not quite understanding. “I’ve always kind of liked them.” “Their act wouldn’t work if you didn’t.” “I still like them.” “They cut people in half, you know.” “Only beautiful girls. And it doesn’t seem to hurt.” “I wouldn’t want to see you proved wrong.” “Where are you going with this,” Pearl asked with a sigh. Jody had apparently worn her down. “We are going to stake out the Far Castle’s Garden.” “I thought we were concentrating on D.O.A.” “Maybe we are,” Quinn said. “My guess is he’s not one of the many people who think Bellazza isn’t in the garden, just because an imitation has already been found there.” “Are we among the many, Quinn?” “On one hand, yes.” “But on the other?” “Presto!” 78 The searcher came by night, as Quinn had suspected he would, and hours after the restaurant had closed. Quinn was slouching low behind the steering wheel in the black Lincoln. He’d parked where he had a catty-corner view across the intersection and the Far Castle’s outdoor dining area. Beyond the stacked and locked tables and chairs loomed the shadowed topiary forms of the garden. Beginning several feet behind the flower beds was the larger garden, wilder and less arranged than the beds, with a variety of

There is an extinguished guest from the SCB medical college Dr Satya Narayan Mishra, who has been kind enough to address the students today. The meeting dias is very well decorated today based on the theme. Headmaster, Dr Satya and few other teachers are seating there, facing the children. Dr Satya links his success in his life to the moral values he learnt at schools and speaks on dreams, which shaped his life.

Conceptual Games. Dr Nathan pondered the list on his desk-pad. (1) The catalogue of an exhibition of tropical diseases at the Wellcome Museum; (2) chemical and topographical analyses of a young woman’s excrement; (3) diagrams of female orifices: buccal, orbital, anal, urethral, some showing wound areas; (4) the results of a questionnaire in which a volunteer panel of parents were asked to devise ways of killing their own children; (5) an item entitled ‘self-disgust’ - someone’s morbid and hate-filled list of his faults. Dr Nathan inhaled carefully on his gold-tipped cigarette. Were these items in some conceptual game? To Catherine Austin, waiting as ever by the window, he said, ‘Should we warn Miss Novotny?’ Biomorphic Horror. With an effort, Dr Nathan looked away from Catherine Austin as she picked at her finger quicks. Unsure whether she was listening to him, he continued: ‘Travers’s problem is how to come to terms with the violence that has pursued his life - not merely the violence of accident and bereavement, or the horrors of war, but the biomorphic horror of our own bodies. Travers has at last realized that the real significance of these acts of violence lies elsewhere, in what we might term “the death of affect”. Consider our most real and tender pleasures - in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture-bed of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our own perversions, in voyeurism and self-disgust, in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game, and in our ever greater powers of abstraction. What our children have to fear are not the cars on the freeways of tomorrow, but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths. The only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of conceptualizations. Violence is the conceptualization of pain. By the same token psychopathology is the conceptual system of sex.’ Sink Speeds. During this period, after his return to Karen Novotny’s apartment, Travers was busy with the following projects: a cogent defence of the documentary films of Jacopetti; a contribution to a magazine symposium on the optimum auto-disaster; the preparation, at a former colleague’s invitation, of the forensic notes to the catalogue of an exhibition of imaginary genital organs. Immersed in these topics, Travers moved from art gallery to conference hall. Beside him, Karen Novotny seemed more and more isolated by these excursions. Advertisements of the film of her death had appeared in the movie magazines and on the walls of the underground stations. ‘Games, Karen,’ Travers reassured her. ‘Next they’ll have you filmed masturbating by a cripple in a wheel chair.

A great mind without God is like a muscle car without a steering wheel. The only thing about it that’s fast is how quickly it totals itself.

What if, instead of fear, we used the power of loyalty? Inspire others to follow by benevolence, grace, compassion, and morality. These virtues can give you the purer power, not the power of your fist.

Thiel’s Randian ethical framework makes it easy to cast Parker as someone who’s “turning the wheels of history” despite the morally challenged projects his fame is built upon. The notion that Parker is a great disrupter cannot be disputed, but the fact that his businesses were built on copyright theft (Napster) and deep consumer surveillance (Facebook) leads us to question what exactly these attention harvesting industries create and whether they’re aiding the larger culture or destroying

You have no soul," he teased her. "You're right," she answered soberly. "I didn't think it showed." "You're only playing word games now." "No," she said, "what proof have I of a soul?" "How can you have a conscience if you don't have soul?" he asked despite himself - he wanted to keep things light, to get back onto a better footing after their last episode of moral wrestling and estrangement. "How can a bird feed its young if it has no consciousness of before and after? A conscience, Yero my hero, is only consciousness in another dimension, the dimension of time. What you call conscience I prefer to call instinct. Birds feed their young without understanding why, without weeping about how al that is born must die, sob, sob. I do my work with a similar motivation: the movement in the gut toward food, fairness, and safety. I am a pack animal wheeling with the herd, that's all. I'm a forgettable leaf on a tree." "Since your work is terrorism, that's the most extreme argument for crime I've ever heard. You're eschewing all personal responsibility. It's as bad as those who sacrifice their personal will into the gloomy morasses of the unknowable will of some unnamable god. If you suppress the idea of personhood then you suppress the notion of individual culpability.

Hemingway took his hands off the wheel and spat out of the window. “We’re on a nice street here, ain’t we? Nice homes, nice gardens, nice climate. You hear a lot about crooked cops, or do you?” “Once in a while,” I said. “Okey, how many cops do you find living on a street even as good as this, with nice lawns and flowers? I’d know four or five, all vice squad boys. They get all the gravy. Cops like me live in itty-bitty frame houses on the wrong side of town. Want to see where I live?” “What would it prove?” “Listen, pally,” the big man said seriously. “You got me on a string, but it could break. Cops don’t go crooked for money. Not always, not even often. They get caught in the system. They get you where they have you do what is told them or else. And the guy that sits back there in the nice big corner office, with the nice suit and the nice liquor breath he thinks chewing on them seeds makes smell like violets, only it don’t—he ain’t giving the orders either. You get me?” “What kind of a man is the Mayor?” “What kind of guy is a mayor anywhere? A politician. You think he gives the orders? Nuts. You know what’s the matter with this country, baby?” “Too much frozen capital, I heard.” “A guy can’t stay honest if he wants to,” Hemingway said. “That’s what’s the matter with this country. He gets chiseled out of his pants if he does. You gotta play the game dirty or you don’t eat. A lot of bastards think all we need is ninety thousand FBI men in clean collars and brief cases. Nuts. The percentage would get them just the way it does the rest of us. You know what I think? I think we gotta make this little world all over again. Now take Moral Rearmament. There you’ve got something. M.R.A. There you’ve got something, baby.” “If Bay City is a sample of how it works, I’ll take aspirin,“ I said. “You could get too smart,” Hemingway said softly. “You might not think it, but it could be. You could get so smart you couldn’t think about anything but bein’ smart. Me, I’m just a dumb cop. I take orders. I got a wife and two kids and I do what the big shots say. Blane could tell you things. Me, I’m ignorant.

If I ask you to do something for me will you do it?’ She frowned. ‘Well, I’d have to know what this mysterious “something” was, wouldn’t I? I mean, if it was just, “Pass me one of those Wagon Wheels,” you know the ones that you’ve got stashed in the door shelf here – I’m impressed by the way, I had you down as more of a spinach-protein shake kind of a guy – then okay. But if it’s something of a more morally dubious nature – say, “Make a snuff film graphically depicting the gruesome deaths of two enraged male hedgehogs allowed to tear each other apart in a territorial dispute over a Tangle Teaser liberally doused with female hedgehog pheromones,” or, “Vote UKIP in the upcoming by-election” – then no, I wouldn’t be on board.’ He stared at her for a moment, a heavy feeling settling in his chest as he realized just how much she meant to him, how far he would be willing to go to keep her from any form of pain.

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole. Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie to-day, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat. The "dangerous class," the social scum, that passively rotting class thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue. In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industrial labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

The six perfections of Bodhicitta described in the Prajñapāramitā Sūtras and the Lotus Sutra are: Dāna pāramitā: generosity, giving of oneself Śīla pāramitā : virtue, morality, discipline, proper conduct Kṣānti pāramitā : patience, tolerance, forbearance, acceptance, endurance Vīrya pāramitā : energy, diligence, vigour, effort Dhyāna pāramitā : one-pointed concentration, contemplation Prajñā pāramitā : wisdom, insight

In a study published in the Harvard Business Review (“Laughing All the Way to the Bank”), Fabio Sala compiled more than four decades of humor research and found, “Humor, used skillfully, greases the management wheels. It reduces hostility, deflects criticism, relieves tension, improves morale, and helps communicate difficult messages.”6

The lights went back to the green of safety—but she stood trembling, unable to move. That’s how it works for the travel of one’s body, she thought, but what have they done to the traffic of the soul? They have set the signals in reverse—and the road is safe when the lights are the red of evil—but when the lights are the green of virtue, promising that yours is the right-of-way, you venture forth and are ground by the wheels. All over the world, she thought—those inverted lights go reaching into every land, they go on, encircling the earth. And the earth is littered with mangled cripples, who don’t know what has hit them or why, who crawl as best they can on their crushed limbs through their lightless days, with no answer save that pain is the core of existence—and the traffic cops of morality chortle and tell them that man, by his nature, is unable to walk.

...one odyssey of a stone perched on a hill surrounded by colorful flowers and a grove of trees -in other words, a place like Vinci. Looking at the crowd of stones along the road below, it decided it wanted to join them. ‘What am I doing here among these plants?’ the stone asked. ‘I want to live in the company of my fellow stones.’ So it rolled down to the others. ‘After a while,’ Leonardo recounted, ‘it found itself in continual distress from the wheels of the carts, the iron hoofs of horses, and the feet of the passers-by. One rolled it over, another trod upon it. Sometimes the stone raised itself up a little as it lay covered with mud or the dung of some animal, but it was in vain that it looked up at the spot whence it come as a place of solitude and tranquil peace.’ Leonardo drew a moral: ‘This is what happens to those who leave a life of solitary contemplation and choose to dwell in cities among people full of infinite evil.

the hypothesis of value realism is superfluous—a wheel that spins without being attached to anything. From a Darwinian perspective our impressions of value, if construed realistically, are completely groundless. And if that is true for our most basic responses, it is also true for the entire elaborate structure of value and morality that is built up from them by practical reflection and cultural development—just as scientific realism would be undermined if we abandoned a realistic interpretation of the perceptual experiences on which science is based. Even a system based on the maintenance of coherence or consistency among one’s responses does not need the idea of mind-independent truth about value (as opposed to logic),

Myron shook his head. “The kid would have told us eventually.” “Doubtful. This Sam character had the boy scared.” “So you had to scare him more?” “That would be a yes,” Win said. “You can’t do that again, Win. You can’t hurt innocent people.” “Uh-hmm,” Win said again. He checked his watch. “Are you through now? Is your need to feel morally superior satiated?” “What the hell does that mean?” Win looked at him. “You know what I do,” he said slowly. “Yet you always call on me.” Silence. The echo of Win’s words hung in the air, caught in the humidity like the car fumes. Myron gripped the steering wheel. His knuckles turned white. They did not speak again until they reached Mabel Edwards’s house.

Men’s armor and women’s armor didn’t actually look much different, which he found a shame. Mat had asked a Seanchan armorer if certain areas of the female breastplate shouldn’t be emphasized, so to speak, and the armorer had looked at him like he was a half-wit. Light, these people had no sense of morality. A fellow needed to know if he was fighting a woman on the battlefield. It was only right.

Parker?” “Yeah?” He’d gotten up now, gone after his bottle of cough syrup. With one smooth motion he scooped it up, unscrewed the top, and took a satisfied gulp. “Parker, I…” Something…I know it’s there…I want to remember…“I want you to take me home.” Parker froze, the bottle at his lips, poised for another swallow. He shot her a sidelong glance. “This is so sudden, Miranda. I mean, we hardly know each other, and I do have a girlfriend. And there is, of course, the issue of my extremely high moral standards. But…okay. What the hell. I’ll take you home with me.” “Not your home. My home. Hayes House.” “What? Hayes House? Oh! Sure! Hayes House! Did you think I meant--that I wanted to--hey, I was just kidding!” The irreverence was there again, the cocky grin back in place. As Miranda climbed into the passenger seat, Parker slid behind the wheel, then gunned the engine to breakneck speed. In less than five minutes they were squealing into the driveway of Hayes House. But even when Parker reached across and shoved open her door, Miranda made no move to get out. “Let me guess.” Parker watched her expectantly. “You really do want to go home with me. You were just playing hard to get.” Slowly Miranda shook her head. She gazed down at the envelope in her lap. “I forgot to give this to Ashley.” “Forget it. Why the big rush to get here?” The sound…the rolling sound…it’s close…it’s important. “I’m not sure, Parker. There’s…something--” “No. Don’t tell me. Whatever it is, I don’t want to see it, hear it, or go through it ever again.” Getting out of the car, Miranda walked a few steps before turning back to face him. “But aren’t you even curious about what happened to you out in the storm? Don’t you even want to explore all the--” “Stop right there. There’s lots of things I want to explore, and things I most definitely will explore. But ghosts aren’t one of them. See you later.

God is not old. He/she/they were invented, all across the world, not more than ten thousand years ago. When human societies were small, they were close-knit and moral boundaries were clear. In a tribe of twelve, if you stole your fellow caveperson’s favorite club or wheel prototype, it was known and could be rectified. You were always seen, and all was known. But as societies grew, the wayward could do things unobserved, and crimes could be committed. So it became necessary to invent a being who saw everything. Watch out, God’s creators said, you are being watched by a morally righteous eye in the sky—even when no one else is around. (The concept of Santa works in a similar way.)

Croque Madame drums her fingers on the steering wheel. “Bridges are one of the first things the enemy looks to destroy.” “Why? So people can’t get to work?” Terk asks. “No,” Cardyn counters. “It’s so trucks can’t pass over and boats can’t pass through. It’s all about cutting off supply lines.” He taps his temple. “Very clever strategy.” Brohn shakes his head. “It’s to destroy morale. Bridges are symbols. They show there’s nothing human beings can’t do, no distance we can’t cross. Destroy that, and you destroy morale. Destroy morale, and you keep everyone afraid and too broken to fight back.” Rain suggests that targeting bridges has to do with a reallocation of resources. “It’s like in chess,” she says. “If I can get you to dedicate your pieces to defense on one side of the board, I’m free to launch my attack on the other.” I tell them I’m pretty sure I read that the destruction of bridges in war is to prevent the movement of enemy troops. From a few rows behind us, Manthy’s voice is smooth and even. “It’s about separation.” She seems fixated on something outside the bus—maybe the long green grass along the side of the road or the intact houses and shops up ahead—and doesn’t turn to look at us.