Writ Large Quotes

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I'm never going to accomplish anything; that's perfectly clear to me. I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.
Dorothy Parker (Here Lies: The Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker)
It’s in our nature to want to watch our human frailties played out on a huge, epic canvas. Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama: fathers and sons, star-crossed lovers, warring brothers, martyred heroes. Tales that taught us the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility. It’s the everyday stuff of everyman’s life, but it’s writ large, and we love it.
Tom Hiddleston
If the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the State, if it were convinced that the State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the State would soon collapse to take on no more status or breadth of existence than another Mafia gang.
Murray N. Rothbard (The Ethics of Liberty)
I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me.)
Martin Amis (Experience: A Memoir)
Cathy's a nice person, in a forceful sort of way. She makes you notice her niceness. Her niceness is writ large, it is her defining quality and she needs it acknowledged, often, daily almost, which can be tiring.
Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train)
War is the ultimate criminal act, an armed robbery writ large. And it’s always about greed. It’s always a nation that wants something another nation has. And you defeat that nation by recognizing what it wants and denying it to them.
Tom Clancy (Debt of Honor (Jack Ryan, #7; Jack Ryan Universe, #8))
Cathy's a nice person, in a forceful sort of way. She makes you notice her kindness. Her niceness is writ large, it is her defining quality and she needs it acknowledged.
Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train)
Science is a powerful tool, but like any tool, it doesn’t care whether it hurts you. Fire warms us, cooks our food, protects us from predators, but it will burn us if we let it. Fire is more than happy to eat us all alive. Science is fire writ large.
Mira Grant (Chimera (Parasitology, #3))
A rare objectivity and insight can be imparted regarding this world's struggle for spiritual integrity. In the land of Faerie, the reader may see his small battles writ large in the wars of titans or elves and understand for the first time, his own worth.
Michael D. O'Brien
So much was lost—names, faces, ages, ethnic identities—that African Americans must do what no other ethnic group writ large must do: take a completely shattered vessel and piece it together,
Michael W. Twitty (The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South)
Politics is ethics writ large.
Brent Weeks (Beyond the Shadows (Night Angel, #3))
Evolution writ large is the belief that a cloud of hydrogen will spontaneously invent extreme-ultraviolet lithography, perform Swan Lake, and write all the books in the British Museum.
Fred Reed
As we age and plasticity declines, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to change in response to the world, even if we want to. We find familiar types of stimulation pleasurable; we seek out like-minded individuals to associate with, and research shows we tend to ignore or forget, or attempt to discredit, information that does not match our beliefs, or perception of the world, because it is very distressing and difficult to think and perceive in unfamiliar ways. Increasingly the aging individual acts to preserve the structures within, and when there is a mismatch between his internal neurocognitive structures and the world, he seek to change the world. In small ways he begins to micromanage his environment, to control it, and make it familiar. But this process, writ large, often leads whole cultural groups to try to impose their view of the world on other cultures, and they often become violent, especially in the modern world, where globalization has brought different cultures closer together, exacerbating the problem. Wexler's point, then, is that much of the cross-cultural conflict we see is a product of the relative decrease in plasticity. One could add that totalitarian regimes seem to have an intuitive awareness that it becomes hard for people to change after a certain age, which is why so much effort is made to indoctrinate the young from an early age.
Norman Doidge (The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science)
In the beginning, there was physics. "Physics" describes how matter, energy, space, and time behave and interact with one another. The interplay of these characters in our cosmic drama underlies all biological and chemical phenomena. Hence everything fundamental and familiar to us earthlings begins with, and rests upon, the laws of physics. When we apply these laws to astronomical settings, we deal with physics writ large, which we call astrophysics.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away.
Gertrude Stein (The Making of Americans)
This is glorious!' I cried, and then i looked at the sinner by my side. He sat with his head sunk on his breast and said 'Yes', without raising his eyes, as if afraid to see writ large on the clear sky of the offing the reproach of his romantic conscience.
Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim)
The mind, it occurs to me, is an engine. There is an ambient mode in which the mind sits idling, before there is information. Some minds idle in a kind of dreading crouch, waiting to be offended. Others stand up straight, eyes slightly wide, expecting to be pleasantly surprised. Some minds, imagining the great What Is Out There, imagine it intends doom for them; others imagine there is something out there that may be suffering and in need of their help. Which is right? Neither. Both. Maybe all of our politics is simply neurology writ large. Maybe there are a finite number of idling modes. Maybe there are just two broad modes, and out of this fact comes our current division.
George Saunders (The Braindead Megaphone)
We have been focusing on the role that psychiatry and its medications may be playing in this epidemic, and the evidence is quite clear. First, by greatly expanding diagnostic boundaries, psychiatry is inviting and ever-greater number of children and adults into the mental illness camp. Second, those so diagnosed are then treated with psychiatric medications that increase the likelihood they will become chronically ill. Many treated with psychotropics end up with new and more severe psychiatric symptoms, physically unwell, and cognitively impaired. This is the tragic story writ large in five decades of scientific literature.
Robert Whitaker (Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America)
The world we imagine seems as real as the ones we’ve experienced. We suffuse the model with the emotional values of past realities. And in the thrall of that vision (call it “the plan,” writ large), we go forth and take action. If things don’t go according to the plan, revising such a robust model may be difficult. In an environment that has high objective hazards, the longer it takes to dislodge the imagined world in favor of the real one, the greater the risk. In nature, adaptation is important; the plan is not. It’s a Zen thing. We must plan. But we must be able to let go of the plan, too.
Laurence Gonzales (Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why)
...the writing is writ large on the wall: Mother Earth will continue to punish us with floods, famines, and fires until we learn to behave as custodians of the natural world rather than as its conquerors.
Nancy Atherton (Aunt Dimity and the King's Ransom (Aunt Dimity Mystery, #23))
They are still unblooded, Catelyn thought as she watched Lord Bryce goad Ser Robar into juggling a brace of daggers. It is all a game to them still, a tourney writ large, and all they see is the chance for glory and honor and spoils. They are boys drunk on song and story, and like all boys, they think themselves immortal.
George R.R. Martin (A Clash of Kings (A Song of Ice and Fire, #2))
In spite of this awareness of fate, or perhaps because of it, the picture of man's qualities which emerges from the myths is a noble one. The gods are heroic figures, men writ large, who led dangerous, individualistic lives, yet at the same time were part of a closely-knit small group, with a firm sense of values and certain intense loyalties. They would give up their lives rather than surrender these values, but they would fight on as long as they could, since life was well worth while. Men knew that the gods whom they served could not give them freedom from danger and calamity, and they did not demand that they should. We find in the myths no sense of bitterness at the harshness and unfairness of life, but rather a spirit of heroic resignation: humanity is born to trouble, but courage, adventure, and the wonders of life are matters of thankfulness, to be enjoyed while life is still granted to us. The great gifts of the gods were readiness to face the world as it was, the luck that sustains men in tight places, and the opportunity to win that glory which alone can outlive death.
H.R. Ellis Davidson (Gods and Myths of Northern Europe)
Is there any sight more exquisite than a field of canary yellow rapeseed on a day of blinding sunlight? The colour appears to transcend structure and live and dance and breathe. Nature reveals its primordial palette and invites insects to pollinate and Man to dare to dream of creating something so vibrant, shockingly intense and timeless. It is the golden ignition of the divine spark of creativity writ large.
Stewart Stafford
An Internet of Things is not a consumer society. It’s a materialised network society. It’s like a Google or Facebook writ large on the landscape.  Google and Facebook don’t have “users” or “customers”. Instead, they have participants under machine surveillance, whose activities are algorithmically combined within Big Data silos.
Bruce Sterling (The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things)
The problem with the New World Order that has been advancing over the past century is that it works towards an intense Global centralization of financial, political, cultural and military power that will ultimately reduce all peoples into a proletarian mass of rootless, cultureless, alienated worker-bee tax & debt slaves; New York City writ large.
M.S. King (The War Against Putin: What the Government-Media Complex Isn't Telling You About Russia)
Any problems writ small in courtship loomed large in marriage
Patrick Gale (Tree Surgery for Beginners)
You go around and you do things and you don't know why you do them," she said. "And that's the story of your gender writ large.
Gary Shteyngart (Lake Success)
Human culture is early human cooperation writ large.
Michael Tomasello (A Natural History of Human Thinking)
Needless to say, the dynamic of the resurrection and a God who cannot be buried for long is the dynamic of a child’s jack-in-the-box writ large in golden cosmic letters.
Os Guinness (Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion)
An election is just a romance writ large, with an entire community, rather than a single woman, as the object of one's pursuit.
Bill Willingham (Fables, Vol. 4: March of the Wooden Soldiers)
The gothic vampire is the sociopath writ large, charismatic and sophisticated, a predator walking among us undetected
M.E. Thomas
The index fund is a most unlikely hero for the typical investor. It is no more (nor less) than a broadly diversified portfolio, typically run at rock-bottom costs, without the putative benefit of a brilliant, resourceful, and highly skilled portfolio manager. The index fund simply buys and holds the securities in a particular index, in proportion to their weight in the index. The concept is simplicity writ large.
John C. Bogle (Common Sense on Mutual Funds)
Cathy’s a nice person, in a forceful sort of way. She makes you notice her niceness. Her niceness is writ large, it is her defining quality and she needs it acknowledged, often, daily almost, which can be tiring.
Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train)
Because let’s be honest: The fascination with “true crime” is actually fascination with what writers and philosophers call the human condition. We all want to know and understand the basis of human behavior and motivation, why we do the things we do. And with crime, we are seeing the human condition writ large and at the extremes, both for the perpetrator and for the victim. In a very real sense, the television audience was after the same thing I was: a wider and deeper understanding of the criminal mind.
John E. Douglas (The Killer Across the Table)
This is glorious!” I cried, and then I looked at the sinner by my side. He sat with his head sunk on his breast and said “Yes,” without raising his eyes, as if afraid to see writ large on the clear sky of the offing the reproach of his romantic conscience.
Joseph Conrad (Joseph Conrad: The Complete Novels)
By the end of the second day a very fine head was revealed. Yes, a very fine head indeed, sharp beard, drooped mustache, heavy-lidded eyes outlined black. And no cinnabar on the lips; that was a measure of my painter’s caliber: excitingly as cinnabar first comes over, he’d known that, given twenty years, lime would blacken it. And, as the first tinges of garment appeared, that prince of blues, ultramarine ground from lapis lazuli, began to show—that really confirmed his class—he must have fiddled it from a monastic job—no village church could have run to such expense. (And abbeys only took on the top men.) But it was the head, the face, which set a seal on his quality. For my money, the Italian masters could have learned a thing or two from that head. This was no catalogue Christ, insufferably ethereal. This was a wintry hardliner. Justice, yes there would be justice. But not mercy. That was writ large on each feature for when, by the week’s end, I reached his raised right hand, it had not been made perfect: it was still pierced. This was the Oxgodby Christ, uncompromising… no, more—threatening. “This is my hand. This is what you did to me. And, for this, man shall suffer the torment, for thus it was with me.
J.L. Carr (A Month in the Country)
All that you have to do is make proper use of imitation in what you write, and the more perfect the imitation the better will your writing be. Inasmuch as you have no other object in view than that of overthrowing the authority and prestige which books of chivalry enjoy in the world at large and among the vulgar, there is no reason why you should go begging maxims of the philosophers, counsels of Holy Writ, fables of the poets, orations of the rhetoricians, or miracles of the saints; see to it, rather, that your style flows along smoothly, pleasingly, and sonorously, and that your words are the proper ones, meaningful and well placed, expressive of your intention in setting them down and of what you wish to say, without any intricacy or obscurity. Let it be your aim that, by reading your story, the melancholy may be moved to laughter and the cheerful man made merrier still; let the simple not be bored, but may the clever admire your originality; let the grave ones not despise you, but let the prudent praise you. And keep in mind, above all, your purpose, which is that of undermining the ill-founded edifice that is constituted by those books of chivalry, so abhorred by many but admired by many more; if you succeed in attaining it, you will have accomplished no little.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote)
Always remember, the arch-conservative view of the law trumpeted by the Federalist Society is a minority opinion. It’s a minority opinion in law school, in academia, and within the legal profession writ large. Anything that can be done to drown out conservative voices on the Court should be done, and the quickest and easiest way to do that is simply to add more voices.
Elie Mystal (Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution)
I’m never going to accomplish anything; that’s perfectly clear to me. I’m never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don’t do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don’t even do that any more. I don’t amount to the powder to blow me to hell. I’ve turned out to be nothing but a bit of flotsam.
Dorothy Parker (Complete Stories (Penguin Classics))
Ash’s smile grew darker, and he looked at the woman. “I knew the instant Margaret spoke that she intended to use me as a weapon. What you fail to understand is this: I am her weapon to use.” Margaret’s lungs burned. So much for not occasioning gossip. But she couldn’t fault him. She couldn’t reprimand him. She couldn’t even stop her own smile from spilling out, stupidly, over her face, the truth writ large for anyone to see.
Courtney Milan (Unveiled (Turner, #1))
Man is homo religiosus, by “nature” religious: As much as he needs food to eat and air to breathe, he needs a faith for living…. But—and this is the challenging word of Jewish-Christian faith—so long as he pursues this quest in self-sufficiency, relying on his own virtue, wisdom, or piety, it will not be God that he finds, but an idol—the self, or some aspect of the self, writ large, projected, objectified, and worshiped.—Will Herberg, Protestant–Catholic–Jew
Ross Douthat (Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics)
Lady Cosgrove gasped louder but recovered quickly. “Mr. Turner,” she said, reaching out for Ash’s cuff. “Do listen to me. I know that you may believe that Lady Margaret has your best interests at heart, as she is some kind of a relation, if only a distant one. But if you intend to be a duke, you must not let yourself be guided so easily, not by one such as her. Take my warning to heart: she’s using you to punish me, because I kept my distance from her these past months. You know that any woman of good sense and decency would have done the same.” No, Margaret had never been like Lady Cosgrove. For one thing, she had never been so stupid. Ash’s smile grew darker, and he looked at the woman. “I knew the instant Margaret spoke that she intended to use me as a weapon. What you fail to understand is this: I am her weapon to use.” Margaret’s lungs burned. So much for not occasioning gossip. But she couldn’t fault him. She couldn’t reprimand him. She couldn’t even stop her own smile from spilling out, stupidly, over her face, the truth writ large for anyone to see.
Courtney Milan
Hubble was lucky in a way. The Hubble Space Telescope could easily have been given another name had certain events turned out differently: if someone had not prematurely died (Keeler), if someone else had not taken a promotion (Curtis), or if another (Shapley) was not mulishly wedded to a flawed vision of the cosmos. The discovery of the modern universe is a story filled with trials, errors, serendipitous breaks, battles of wills, missed opportunities, herculean measurements, and brilliant insights. In other words, it is science writ large.
Marcia Bartusiak (The Day We Found the Universe)
The youth and wealth of empires had been poured out onto bloody mud, but Mr. Wilson went to Versailles intending to ask still more of them. His Fourteen Points called not just for free seas, free trade, and arms reduction, and not only for the voluntary withdrawal of all armies from all conquered territories. Why, he demanded the end of all colonial claims! He intended to fight for the right of the whole world's conquered and colonized peoples to determine their own autonomous development. His peace plan was simply this" America writ large.
Mary Doria Russell (Dreamers of the Day)
If each person is a law unto himself or herself, on what basis can a society be ordered? Who has ultimate authority when we are our own little gods? Postmodernism's grounding of reality in the autonomous, sovereign individual turns out to be unworkable. It leads to social chaos--with every idea (except Judeo-Christian theism) accorded a place of honor in the public square, with people no longer sure of their own sex, with vicious hatreds writ large on social media, in the streets, and in politics, with irreconcilable differences being the norm.
Scott David Allen (Why Social Justice Is Not Biblical Justice: An Urgent Appeal to Fellow Christians in a Time of Social Crisis)
Individual killings and wars on the largest scale are, he said, two ends of a continuum, an unbroken curve. It follows, not only in a trivial sense but also I believe in a very deep psychological sense, that war is murder writ large. When our well-being is threatened, when our illusions about ourselves are challenged, we tend - some of us at least - to fly into murderous rages. And when the same provocations are applied to nation states, they, too, sometimes fly into murderous rages, egged on often enough by those seeking personal power or profit.
Carl Sagan (Cosmos)
And then, suddenly, we broke free from the trees. The rolling plain beyond was almost overwhelming in its openness, especially lit by a brilliant, almost awful sunset, the sky never redder, every cloud seemingly blazing from within, suffused with fire and vengeance, roiling, churning, nothing but fury in every direction. Some poets spoke of red sunsets as things of sublime beauty, prefacing good fortune or romance, but they always seemed to be foretelling some bloodletting, murder, or tragedy writ large for all the world to see, and never more so than now.
Jeff Salyards (Veil of the Deserters (Bloodsounder's Arc, #2))
I loved the exuberance of the place. A sense of liberation and love of life penetrated every room. His home was like his poetry, full of hints of fantasy, allegory and hedonism. Neruda's presence was everywhere writ large on the house. He had build it, seemingly haphazardly without any architect's plans or permission from authority. In a sense, the house had the same structure as a poem on first reading - awkward and confused. Yet wandering through it was like wandering through his poems. Suddenly everything fell in to place. A romantic avant-garde poet could not have lived anywhere else.
Brian Keenan (Between Extremes)
Groups have powerful self-reinforcing mechanisms at work. These can lead to group polarization—a tendency for members of the group to end up in a more extreme position than they started in because they have heard the views repeated frequently. At the extreme limit of group behavior is groupthink. This occurs when a group makes faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of “mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment.” The original work was conducted with reference to the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. However, it rears its head again and again, whether it is in connection with the Challenger space shuttle disaster or the CIA intelligence failure over the WMD of Saddam Hussein. Groupthink tends to have eight symptoms: 1 . An illusion of invulnerability. This creates excessive optimism that encourages taking extreme risks. [...] 2. Collective rationalization. Members of the group discount warnings and do not reconsider their assumptions. [...] 3. Belief in inherent morality. Members believe in the rightness of their cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions. 4. Stereotyped views of out-groups. Negative views of “enemy” make effective responses to conflict seem unnecessary. Remember how those who wouldn't go along with the dot-com bubble were dismissed as simply not getting it. 5. Direct pressure on dissenters. Members are under pressure not to express arguments against any of the group’s views. 6. Self-censorship. Doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus are not expressed. 7. Illusion of unanimity. The majority view and judgments are assumed to be unanimous. 8. "Mind guards" are appointed. Members protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group's cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions. This is confirmatory bias writ large.
James Montier (The Little Book of Behavioral Investing: How not to be your own worst enemy)
in some cases, we minimize slavery’s significance so much that we render its impact—on people and on the nation—inconsequential.” This, Jeffries continues, “is profoundly troubling” because it leaves Americans ill-equipped to understand racial inequality today, and that, in turn, leads to intolerance, opposition to efforts to address racial injustice, and the enacting of laws and policies detrimental to Black communities and America writ large. “Our narrow understanding of the institution…prevents us from seeing this long legacy and leads policymakers to try to fix people instead of addressing the historically rooted causes of their problems,
Nikole Hannah-Jones (The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story)
Our society is awash with founders, all listening to the same leadership podcasts, doing the same kettlebell lunges to improve grip and leg strength at the same time, then dissolving identical Tim Ferriss–approved muscle-building complexes into their post-workout shakes to transform their previously similar mesomorph bodies into something even more metabolically equivalent. All while making parallel grandiose-style projections about their own app, disruption, or innovation whereby their personal self-interest miraculously aligns with the interest of society writ large and places them as CEO/founder/servant-leader on the very prow of the vessel of civilization.
Benjamin Lorr (The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket)
let not thy sword skip one: Pity not honour'd age for his white beard; He is an usurer: strike me the counterfeit matron; It is her habit only that is honest, Herself's a bawd: let not the virgin's cheek Make soft thy trenchant sword; for those milk-paps, That through the window-bars bore at men's eyes, Are not within the leaf of pity writ, But set them down horrible traitors: spare not the babe, Whose dimpled smiles from fools exhaust their mercy; Think it a bastard, whom the oracle Hath doubtfully pronounced thy throat shall cut, And mince it sans remorse: swear against objects; Put armour on thine ears and on thine eyes; Whose proof, nor yells of mothers, maids, nor babes, Nor sight of priests in holy vestments bleeding, Shall pierce a jot. There's gold to pay soldiers: Make large confusion; and, thy fury spent, Confounded be thyself! Speak not, be gone.
William Shakespeare (Timon of Athens)
For the Hebrew slaves of the Exodus story, a cyclical cosmos implied a repeating pattern of “good and evil” in which one side never ultimately triumphed over the other. The Egyptian cosmos could not account for slaves that escaped the “cosmic” system. But to completely break out of the cyclical conception of the cosmos in the cause of life over death was to posit an end goal of history. The Exodus paradigm of evil slavery followed by the good of freedom in God would be writ large. A directional conception of history would culminate in the ultimate, messianic triumph of good over evil. Instead of the eternal recurrence of repression, the theory went, the ultimate pattern of human history would begin from the trough of Egyptian slavery and peak with the coming of the messianic era. In this idea, alien to the ancient Greeks but central for seventeenth century Puritans, one can discern the seed of the modern idea of progress.
Mitchell Heisman (Suicide Note)
Specious, but wrongful deem The speech of those ill-taught ones who extol The letter of their Vedas, saying, "This Is all we have, or need;" being weak at heart With wants, seekers of Heaven: which comes—they say—As "fruit of good deeds done;" promising men Much profit in new births for works of faith; In various rites abounding; following whereon Large merit shall accrue towards wealth and power; Albeit, who wealth and power do most desire Least fixity of soul have such, least hold On heavenly meditation. Much these teach, From Veds, concerning the "three qualities;" But thou, be free of the "three qualities," Free of the "pairs of opposites,"[ FN# 2] and free From that sad righteousness which calculates; Self-ruled, Arjuna! simple, satisfied![ FN# 3] Look! like as when a tank pours water forth To suit all needs, so do these Brahmans draw Text for all wants from tank of Holy Writ. But thou, want not! ask not! Find full reward Of doing right in right! Let right deeds be Thy motive, not the fruit which comes from them. And live in action! Labour! Make thine acts Thy piety, casting all self aside, Contemning gain and merit; equable In good or evil: equability Is Yog, is piety! Yet, the right act Is less, far less, than the right-thinking mind. Seek refuge in thy soul; have there thy heaven! Scorn them that follow virtue for her gifts! The mind of pure devotion—even here—Casts equally aside good deeds and bad, Passing above them. Unto pure devotion Devote thyself: with perfect meditation Comes perfect act, and the right-hearted rise—More certainly because they seek no gain—Forth from the bands of body, step by step, To highest seats of bliss.
Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Song celestial; or, Bhagabad-gîtâ (from the Mahâbhârata) being a discourse between Arjuna, prince of India, and the Supreme Being under the form of Krishna)
The argument of Chapter 2, applied to any interference phenomenon destroys the classical idea that there is only one universe. Logically, the possibility of complex quantum computations adds nothing to a case that is already unanswerable. But it does add psychological impact. With Shor’s algorithm, the argument has been writ very large. To those who still cling to a single-universe world-view, I issue this challenge: explain how Shor’s algorithm works. I do not merely mean predict that it will work, which is merely a matter of solving a few uncontroversial equations. I mean provide an explanation. When Shor’s algorithm has factorized a number, using 10500 or so times the computational resources that can be seen to be present, where was the number factorized? There are only about 1080 atoms in the entire visible universe, an utterly minuscule number compared with 10500. So if the visible universe were the extent of physical reality, physical reality would not even remotely contain the resources required to factorize such a large number. Who did factorize it, then? How, and where, was the computation performed?
David Deutsch (The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes--and Its Implications)
The Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel had lived only for God during his childhood in Hungary; his life had been shaped by the disciplines of the Talmud, and he had hoped one day to be initiated into the mysteries of Kabbalah. As a boy, he was taken to Auschwitz and later to Buchenwald. During his first night in the death camp, watching the black smoke coiling to the sky from the crematorium where the bodies of his mother and sister were to be thrown, he knew that the flames had consumed his faith forever. He was in a world which was the objective correlative of the Godless world imagined by Nietzsche. “Never should I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live,” he wrote years later. “Never shall I forget these moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.”33 One day the Gestapo hanged a child. Even the SS were disturbed by the prospect of hanging a young boy in front of thousands of spectators. The child who, Wiesel recalled, had the face of a “sad-eyed angel,” was silent, lividly pale and almost calm as he ascended the gallows. Behind Wiesel, one of the other prisoners asked: “Where is God? Where is He?” It took the child half an hour to die, while the prisoners were forced to look him in the face. The same man asked again: “Where is God now?” And Wiesel heard a voice within him make this answer: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.”34 Dostoevsky had said that the death of a single child could make God unacceptable, but even he, no stranger to inhumanity, had not imagined the death of a child in such circumstances. The horror of Auschwitz is a stark challenge to many of the more conventional ideas of God. The remote God of the philosophers, lost in a transcendent apatheia, becomes intolerable. Many Jews can no longer subscribe to the biblical idea of God who manifests himself in history, who, they say with Wiesel, died in Auschwitz. The idea of a personal God, like one of us writ large, is fraught with difficulty. If this God is omnipotent, he could have prevented the Holocaust. If he was unable to stop it, he is impotent and useless; if he could have stopped it and chose not to, he is a monster. Jews are not the only people who believe that the Holocaust put an end to conventional theology.
Karen Armstrong (A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam)
The peculiar fascination with Davis reflected the way sports-crazed Southerners were struggling with race: On the one hand, they were steeped in the white South's revulsion at the presence of blacks, but on the other, they couldn't suppress their admiration of—and need for—the black physical presence. It was writ large in the South in 1966, but it's a paradigm that continues to define the dilemma of race and racism in sports in the United States: Behind the cheering often lurks angry resentment.
William C. Rhoden (Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete)
One of the first things to catch your eye on arriving in Rugeley is the obtrusively large red shopfront advertising private detectives. Is your partner cheating? Ask about our tracking service, reads the huge white lettering in the window. The shop also advertises lie-detector tests for hire. This is the paranoid world of The Jeremy Kyle Show writ large. Fidelity and faithfulness have been slowly chipped away by more ephemeral, market-driven principles promising instant gratification. You ditch one lover and take another, just as you might throw away an iPhone and buy a newer model in an emotional flight of fancy. For working-class communities this adds yet another layer of impermanence to an already insecure existence, especially for those men whose sense of masculine inadequacy is reinforced by the lack of any purposeful employment.
James Bloodworth (Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain)
Yet, in H.R Ellis Davidson's wise words: In spite of this awareness of fate, or perhaps because of it, the picture of man's qualities which emerges from the myths is a noble one. The gods are heroic figures, men writ large, who led dangerous, individualistic lives, yet at the same time were part of a closely-knit small group, with a firm sense of values and certain intense loyalties. They would give up their lives rather than surrender these values, but they would fight on as long as they could, since life was well worth while. Men knew that the gods whom they served could not give them freedom from danger and calamity, and they did not demand that they should. We find in the myths no sense of bitterness at the harshness and unfairness of life, but rather a spirit of heroic resignation: humanity is born to trouble, but courage, adventure, and the wonders of life are matters of thankfulness, to be enjoyed while life is still granted to us. The great gifts of the gods were readiness to face the world as it was, the luck that sustains men in tight places, and the opportunity to win that glory which alone can outlive death. Reading the myths, we can identify the Norseman's spirit and confidence, his boundless curiosity, extreme bravery, clannish loyalty, generosity and discipline; we can also detect his arrogance and lack of compassion, his cunning if not treachery (amply reflected in the figure of Loki), his ruthlessness and his cruelty.
Kevin Crossley-Holland (The Norse Myths)
Every medium of communication, I am claiming, has resonance, for resonance is metaphor writ large.
Neil Postman
Batman as a Greek god is not too far off, because it’s the same idea at work: creating a superhuman version of humanity so that we can explore our problems, strengths, and weaknesses writ large. If the novel puts life under the microscope, mythology blows it up to billboard size.
Rick Riordan (Demigods and Monsters: Your Favorite Authors on Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians Series)
King Aenys himself. His scorn drove others to offer their swords. The names of the four Maegor chose are writ large in the history of Westeros: Ser Bramm of Blackhull, a hedge knight; Ser Rayford Rosby; Ser Guy Lothston, called Guy the Glutton; and Ser Lucifer Massey, Lord of Stonedance. The names of the seven Warrior’s Sons have likewise come down to us. They were: Ser Damon Morrigen, called Damon the Devout, Grand Captain of the Warrior’s Sons; Ser Lyle Bracken; Ser Harys Horpe, called Death’s Head Harry; Ser Aegon Ambrose; Ser Dickon Flowers, the Bastard of Beesbury; Ser Willam the Wanderer; and Ser Garibald of the Seven Stars, the septon knight. [Dick Bean] F&B
George R.R. Martin
And to look upon the fall of her dark hair falling was to feel as if falling. It also promised a hap of haps whose writ was writ large both in alphabetic and wedge-seal. As if to say, "Hear me, ye poor man thing. I am all the desire of the world that you missed when ye were away at war mating with the Shadow instead of lying beside me, as you might have. In the calm and restful delights of the coupling of lips and hips between a man and a woman. I am all the desire of the world that you could wish for in your remaining years. For you have taken life too seriously, Old Man. Even the crocodiles in the inlets of the Deltaland know the delicacies of courtship, of cooing and wooing. But among men of blood, such as ye, it hath been pushed far to the rear. Is it meet that men should coo and woo less than ferocious-mouthed crocodiles?
Al Sundel
College admissions have become the focus not only of secondary schooling but of contemporary American childhood writ large.
Malcolm Harris (Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials)
The media writ large was unprepared to cover a political candidate who lied as freely as Trump did, on matters big and small. Even those of us who had covered Trump for years struggled with how to handle the gush of falsehoods that dotted his sentences. The word “lie” was infrequently used by mainstream outlets, which tended not to write more than they felt they could glean about a politician’s motivations. And few large media institutions had truly accepted what was clear since February—that Trump would likely be the nominee—leaving many people scrambling to deal with the reality.
Maggie Haberman (Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America)
Part of this struggle involves an unrelenting critique of liberal multicultural “tolerance” (in the West as much as the rest), which despite all pretenses, prioritizes dominant white European culture (or in such countries as India, dominant Hindu culture), while patronizingly “tolerating” others (see Iqtidar and Sarkar 2018). Here, Muslim culture is fixed and stereotyped, most often reduced to a religious category, thereby ignoring the dynamic, diverse, and indeed secular mix that makes up the “Muslim world” (both outside and inside the “West”). What is most often missing is a properly politicized view of Muslim culture (or indeed culture writ large), in which political-economic antagonisms play a key role: thus, violence against women is not the result of some pathological religious practice, but most often imbricated with unequal state property/inheritance laws (and their lack of enforcement) and/or male domination in the advancing cash economy (Visweswaran 1994, 510; Salhi 2013). A universal politics worthy of its name cannot, as a result, engage in a purely “cultural politics” that avoids the key question of the politicization of the economy; this would merely play into the hands of postpolitical global capitalism, which, as underlined already, seeks to keep culture and economy apart. Linking the two spheres is precisely what enables universality: seeing the antagonisms of culture/identity (struggles of representation, violence against women, queer rights, racialization) as intimately linked to the antagonisms of global capitalism (socioeconomic and spatial inequality, environmental catastrophe) is what opens the door to shared struggle. It helps establish bonds of solidarity between those who struggle for justice in the West and those who participate in the same struggle in the “Muslim world” (and elsewhere). Perhaps those of us Westerners engaging in universalizing struggles can learn from the political vitality and truculence of the “Muslim world”: at a time when engagement, energy, and commitment to change the system are often so fickle in the West, the Islamic resurgence, despite often being misdirected, can teach us something about a refusal to be so easily co-opted and seduced by Western hegemony. The challenge, though, is to channel such “rage” to the right target, that is, to make it anti-systemic rather than anti-symptomatic.
Zahi Zalloua (Universal Politics)
Wealthy LA neighbourhoods are their own grotesque spectacle. A pastiche of every imaginable genre and style, writ large into the buildings themselves.
Winnie M. Li (Complicit)
But where it differs markedly from “classical” prejudices—such as anti-Semitism, homophobia, misogyny, and racism—is on the dimension of power. Jews, gays and lesbians, women, and ethnic minorities rarely if ever have any actual power in and over the majority populations or dominant gender of most countries. However, the real existing United States does have considerable power, which has increasingly assumed a global dimension since the end of the nineteenth century and which has, according to many scholarly analysts and now as a commonplace, become unparalleled in human history with the passing of the Cold War in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Because of this unique paradox, the separation between what America is—i.e., its way of life, its symbols, products, people—and what America does—its foreign policy writ large—will forever be jumbled and impossible to disentangle.
Andrei S. Markovits (Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (The Public Square Book 5))
A true shift to a carbon-neutral power system would require the capacity to camel not hours, but months of electricity for the seasons that are not as windy or sunny. We don’t know everything about the world of energy, but we know for certain that there is not enough lithium ore on the entire planet to enable a rich country like the United States to achieve such a goal, much less the world writ large.
Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
It is evident that our national economy in the United States (writ large as “globalization”), is largely in the hands of Pharaonic interests.[12] The acquisitive oligarchy now largely manages the government and controls the media. It has, moreover, supported a sustained process of deregulation alongside rigged credit laws, inequitable tax arrangements, and low wages that has resulted in a growing gap between a small party of “haves” and a large company of “have-nots” who are economically vulnerable and without leverage.
Walter Brueggemann (Tenacious Solidarity: Biblical Provocations on Race, Religion, Climate, and the Economy)
True-crime narratives represent the human condition writ large: ordinary people operating at the terrifying extremes of those instincts and emotions. In this vein, every mystery we relate, every case we report, every outcome we track, becomes its own morality play, complete with heroes, villains, and victims.
John E. Douglas (Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit)
Some multinational corporations have become mightier than many countries. In effect, the old principles of national sovereignty have become obsolete. What we need is a transnational power, capable of establishing law and order at a global level.” Kofi Annan looked at John with even more concern writ large on his face. “Surely you don’t mean the United Nations?” he asked. “No,” said John Fontanelli, “I don’t mean the United Nations.
Andreas Eschbach (One Trillion Dollars: An absolutely gripping page turning thriller about a man who inherits a life-changing fortune)
the New Urban Crisis is also a crisis of the suburbs, of urbanization itself, and of contemporary capitalism writ large.
Richard Florida (The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class-and What We Can Do About It)
This is not just a land grab by some aging wannabe dictator. This is Breaking Bad, writ large on a global scale, by many of the world’s most powerful assholes with nothing to lose, and the world will not be the same for anyone in the end.
Kristopher Justin (Wasteland By Wednesday: An Introduction To The Collapse Of Civilization, Coming "Faster Than Expected" To A Neighborhood Near You.)
If all things work together for good for them that love God and are called according to His purpose, then this means that billions of plot points are going to come together in the most satisfying cathartic release possible at the end of all time. The great day of resurrection, the eschatological climax, will be what Tolkien called eucatastrophe, and will be literary catharsis writ large, although large is far too small a word for it.
Douglas Wilson (God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything)
It was camaraderie writ large. A synonym for loyalty that was stronger than the concept that it echoed. (Alex's) experience of real family, of blood relations, was a lot more like having a lot of people who had all wound up on the same mailing list without knowing why they had signed up for it.
James S.A. Corey (Nemesis Games)
[...] I mean for monkeys to speak of Truth is hubris of the highest degree. I mean, where is it writ large that the talking monkey should be able to model the cosmos? If a sea urchin or a raccoon were to propose to you that it had a viable Truth about the universe, the absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident. But in our own case, we make an exception... too bad.
Terence McKenna
Many of those insects have critical impacts on their ecosystems. They are the Pleistocene megafauna writ small. They chew up and decompose the dead to keep things clean and keep energy circulating through its natural cycle. They riddle the soil with holes to aerate it. They spread seeds. They pollinate a third of the foods Americans eat. They are useful, in other words. But the large majority are also characterless and ugly—not quick to draw our sympathy. And
Jon Mooallem (Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America)
The Secrets of Skunk: Part Two At the Lockheed skunk works, Kelly Johnson ran a tight ship. He loved efficiency. He had a motto—“be quick, be quiet, and be on time”—and a set of rules.6 And while we are parsing the deep secrets of skunk, it’s to “Kelly’s rules” we must now turn. Wall the skunk works off from the rest of the corporate bureaucracy—that’s what you learn if you boil Johnson’s rules down to their essence. Out of his fourteen rules, four pertain solely to military projects and can thus be excluded from this discussion. Three are ways to increase rapid iteration (a topic we’ll come back to in a moment), but the remaining seven are all ways to enforce isolation. Rule 3, for example: “The number of people with any connection to the project should be restricted in an almost vicious manner.” Rule 13 is more of the same: “Access by outsiders to the project and its personnel must be strictly controlled by appropriate security measures.” Isolation, then, according to Johnson, is the most important key to success in a skunk works. The reasoning here is twofold. There’s the obvious need for military secrecy, but more important is the fact that isolation stimulates risk taking, encouraging ideas weird and wild and acting as a counterforce to organizational inertia. Organizational inertia is the notion that once any company achieves success, its desire to develop and champion radical new technologies and directions is often tempered by the much stronger desire not to disrupt existing markets and lose their paychecks. Organizational inertia is fear of failure writ large, the reason Kodak didn’t recognize the brilliance of the digital camera, IBM initially dismissed the personal computer, and America Online (AOL) is, well, barely online. But what is true for a corporation is also true for the entrepreneur. Just as the successful skunk works isolates the innovation team from the greater organization, successful entrepreneurs need a buffer between themselves and the rest of society. As Burt Rutan, winner of the Ansari XPRIZE, once taught me: “The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.” Trying out crazy ideas means bucking expert opinion and taking big risks. It means not being afraid to fail. Because you will fail. The road to bold is paved with failure, and this means having a strategy in place to handle risk and learn from mistakes is critical. In a talk given at re:Invent 2012, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos7 explains it like this: “Many people misperceive what good entrepreneurs do. Good entrepreneurs don’t like risk. They seek to reduce risk. Starting a company is already risky . . . [so] you systematically eliminate risk in those early days.
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
the second paragraph of the Declaration that is very much an expression of Jefferson’s imagination. It envisions a perfect world, at last bereft of kings, priests, and even government itself. In this never-never land, free individuals interact harmoniously, all forms of political coercion are unnecessary because they have been voluntarily internalized, people pursue their own different versions of happiness without colliding, and some semblance of social equality reigns supreme. As Lincoln recognized, it is an ideal world that can never be reached on this earth, only approached. And each generation had an obligation to move America an increment closer to the full promise, as Lincoln most famously did. The American Dream, then, is the Jeffersonian Dream writ large, embedded in language composed during one of the most crowded and congested moments in American history by an idealistic young man who desperately wished to be somewhere else.
Joseph J. Ellis (Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence)
Within the city is another city, located on the periphery of our vision and beyond the tourist maps. It has become the setting of the world’s next chapter, driven by exertion and promise, battered by violence and death, strangled by neglect and misunderstanding. History is being writ-ten, and largely ignored, in places like Liu Gong Li on the fringes of Chongqing, in Clichy-sous-Bois on the outskirts of Paris, in the almost million-strong arrival city of Dharavi in Mumbai, and in Compton on the edge of Los Angeles—all places settled by people who have arrived from the village, all places that function to propel people into the core life of the city and to send support back to the next wave of arrivals. These places are known around the world by many names: as the slums, favelas, bustees, bidonvilles, ashwaiyyat, shantytowns, kampongs, urban villages, gecekondular, and barrios of the developing world, but also as the immigrant neighborhoods, ethnic districts, banlieues difficiles, Plattenbau developments, Chinatowns, Little Indias, Hispanic quarters, urban slums, and migrant suburbs of wealthy countries, which are themselves each year absorbing 2 million people, mainly villagers, from the developing world.
Foreign Policy
course, innovation writ large is related to anything and everything, so the phenomena and the literatures I will discuss here are only those hanging closest on the intellectual tree. My goal is to enable interested readers to migrate to further branches as they wish, assisted by the provision of a few important references. With respect to phenomena, I will first point out the relationship of user innovation to
Eric von Hippel (Democratizing Innovation)
As an economic doctrine it does not stand up to scientific probing. Marx’s economic theories are not a scientific account of the nature and extent of exploitation under capitalism. They nevertheless offer a vivid picture of an uncontrolled society in which the productive workers unconsciously create the instruments of their own oppression. It is a picture of human alienation, writ large as the dominance of past labour, or capital, over living labour.
Anonymous
What his humanism says to us is that the human subject should stand apart from his or her circumstances emotionally and intellectually, even as he or she experiences the flux of Fortuna—the Chaucerian “job” writ large in a life—and the mesmerizing power of the moment. Only in this can we find our voice.
Robert Atwan (Best American Essays 2012)
This is the kind of corruption we understand, the corruption of the petty clerk writ large, and so this is the kind of corruption we look for. This is the kind of guilt we expect and understand: personal, targeted, involving suitcases. We really need suitcases.
Mihir S. Sharma (Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy)
in Edward Glaeser, The Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin, 2011).   2. The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery (ed. Leland Ryken, James C. Wilhoit, and Tremper Longman III [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1998], 150) speaks of the city as “humanity en masse” and therefore “humanity ‘writ large.’”   3. The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery (p. 150) defines city as a “fortified habitation.”   4. See Frank Frick, The City
Timothy J. Keller (Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City)
About Anna Faktorovich's "Romances of George Sand": “What a read! Not lacking in action and very imaginative.
Belinda Jack (George Sand: A Woman's Life Writ Large)
So much was lost - names, faces, ages, ethnic identities - that African Americans must do what no other ethnic group writ large must do: take a completely shattered vessel and piece it together, knowing that some pieces will never be recovered. This is not quite as harrowing or hopeless as it might sound I liken it to the Japanese art of kintsugi, repairing broken vessels using gold. The scars of the object are not concealed, but highlighted and embraced, thus giving them their own dignity and power. The brokenness and its subsequent repair are a recognized part of the story of the journey of the vessel, not to be obscured, and change, transition, and transformation are seen as important as honoring the original structure and its traditional meaning and beauty.
Michael W. Twitty (The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South)
When enough people share a short-lived delusion, vast sums of money can be acquired overnight. The ‘tulip mania’ in Holland in the mid-seventeenth century was such a time. Tulips had been imported into Holland for forty years before the madness hit. By 1635, a single tulip bulb was swapped for a collection of valuable articles, which included the following: four tons of wheat eight tons of rye a bed four oxen eight pigs a suit of clothes two caskets of wine four tonnes of beer two tons of butter one thousand pounds of cheese a silver drinking cup The current value of the above would be $50,000 or more. And this was for a single tulip bulb! Fortunes were made or lost, especially the latter, when the music stopped. Within a few years, a tulip bulb was worth less than a dollar in today’s money. Here is the wonder of collective short-term delusion writ large.
Felix Dennis (How to Get Rich)
The fascination with “true crime” is actually fascination with what writers and philosophers call the human condition. We all want to know and understand the basis of human behavior and motivation, why we do the things we do. And with crime, we are seeing the human condition writ large and at the extremes, both for the perpetrator and for the victim.
John E. Douglas (The Killer Across the Table)
A plume-dominated fire, more commonly known as a fire storm, is this same cycle writ large. In this case the three legs of the fire triangle not only
Sebastian Junger (Fire)
Humankind is now moving toward a time, possibly as soon as within a few generations, when we will no longer be able to expect nature to adjust rapidly enough to ensure our own survival. Rather, civilization on Earth will either have to adapt to the natural environment with ever-accelerating speed, or generate artificial environmental conditions needed for our ecological existence. From two magnificent yet local systems—society and machines—will likely emerge a symbiotically functioning technoculture, the epitome (as far as we know) of complexity writ large in nature[.]
Steven J. Dick (Cosmos & Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context)
Paul has heard stories of wartime brutality more appalling than anything he encountered while working in the NYPD; they are repeated with a clarity of recall that suggests they might have happened yesterday rather than decades ago. He has seen pain borne like a precious inheritance through the ages and writ large on the faces of those left behind.
Jojo Moyes (The Giver of Stars)
Cute is the worst way to be. Cute is an act of erasure. Cute is gynophobia writ large.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Gold Fame Citrus)
It is time for a new role for American business, one that moves away from single bottom-line thinking and toward a more holistic balance sheet that includes the health of our great nation, writ large.
Katherine M. Gehl (The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy)
He did not talk… He just stayed quiet. And left. He could have just talked. The same old Rumi, my Rumi, did not talk and just left me. My Rumi, who could talk to me through his eyes, did not even look into mine, maybe from fear that I would see what was writ large in them. He did not let me. He just left. My Rumi, is no more my Rumi. He is, just Rumi.
Vidhu Kapur (LOVE TOUCHES ONCE & NEVER LEAVES ...A Blooming & Moving Love Saga!)
Is Indian democracy simply going to be an excuse for an unbridled and open competition, in which those who can raise their banner the highest, declaim in the loudest voices, and mobilize the maximum amount of muscle power, can make their writ run large? Will India's democracy sustain itself, if at all, not by even a dim sense of the values democracy is meant to honour, but by the sheer contingencies of power in Indian society? While Indian democracy has been successful, we cannot take it for granted that the shifting balance of power may not produce forms of state action which jeopardize and put at risk every defensible ideal to which this republic was committed.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta (The Burden of Democracy)
Or perhaps the act of conquering was simply a penny dreadful writ large, with one nation as the dashing highwayman and another as the abducted maiden. First one ravished, then one loved.
Isabel Cooper (The Highland Dragon's Lady (Highland Dragon, #2))
Dear friends, gathered again together in a place That has become so familiar to all of us, We might wish to forget the world outside, Might wish to think that here, with our friends, We are the world. Would that were true: The world outside is not the world We would like it to be; I don’t need To enumerate its woes – they are legion, And greet us each time we open a newspaper. But it would be wrong to become cynical, Would be wrong to dismiss the possibility Of making bearable the suffering of so many By acts of love in our own lives, By acts of friendship, by the simple cherishing Of those who daily cross our path, and those who do not. By these acts, I think, are we shown what might be; By these acts can we transform that small corner Of terra firma that is given to us, In our case this little patch of earth That we call Scotland, into a peaceable Kingdom, a place where love and friendship Are writ large not doubted, nor laughed at, But embraced and proclaimed, made the tenor Of our quotidian lives, made the register In which we conduct ourselves. How foolish I once thought I was To believe in all this; how warmly I now return to that earlier belief; How fervently I hope that it is true, How fervently I hope that this is so.
Alexander McCall Smith (Bertie Plays the Blues (44 Scotland Street #7))
The values of large cities, espoused by evangelist mayors like Rahm Emmanuel in Chicago or Sadiq Khan in London, are considered so self-evidently superior that only a bigot could reject them. Large cities are ethnically and socially diverse, are constantly changing, and tend to have low social cohesion and high inequality. Ethnic ties to neighbourhood are always provisional, until the next wave of immigrants moves in. In terms of tradition, 'all that is solid melts into air', to quote Marx. Thus the only approach to life, especially for whites or those of mixed background who lack an ethnic enclave, is modernist: namely, to be an individualist, seek immediate experience, suppress the desire for continuity with previous generations and eschew ethnic ties to the landscape. The goal of left-modernism is a kind of New York-writ large: to universalize the metropolitan condition. All else is darkness. The problem is that the metropolitan version of nationhood alienates conservatives who prefer stability and order-seekers who prefer higher cohesion, reducing their trust in society and politics.
Eric Kaufmann (Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities)