Symbolically, what the rabbis say is that at Passover, what we have to do is try to get rid of our hot air - our pride, our feeling that we are the most important people in the whole entire world and that everything should revolve round us.
Since 1775, when the first Continental Congress called for a national day of prayer, there have been such events called for by almost every President. I saw the figures - 34 out of 44 Presidents have called for a national day of prayer. Some of those...
Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world…concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers ...
But after he was pleased to reveal himself to me I did presently, like Abraham, run to Hagar. And after that he did let me see the atheism of my own heart, for which I begged of the Lord that it might not remain in my heart.
When I first moved to New York, I wanted to be a dancer. I danced professionally for years, living a hand-to-mouth existence. I never tapped into nightlife; all I knew was dancers. We went to bed early and got up early and went to free concerts at th...
With the Lincoln assassination, the South didn't feel it could mourn along with the North. But Garfield was beloved by all the American people. He was trusted and respected by North and South, by freed slaves and former slave owners. Also by pioneers...
People don't realize what a brilliant politician Lincoln was. Looking back, we want to ascribe a level of providence to his every decision but he was a cunning and calculating politician; from the cultivation of his image as a hayseed from Illinois, ...
I was able to sit at Lincoln's side and see how he thought and how he acted, and how he felt about what was going on around him. I felt the pressures that were on him. You can see what people were writing to him, how they were nudging him.
Archie: Your brother didn't bring you here this time, did he? Wanda: No. Archie: He's no idea? Wanda: He doesn't have a clue. Archie: What? Wanda: He's so dumb... Archie: Really? Wanda: ...he thought that the Gettysburg Address was where Lincoln live...
Terence Fletcher: Everybody remember, Lincoln Center and its ilk use these competitions to decide who they are interested in and who they are not. And I am not gonna have my reputation in that department tarnished by a bunch of fucking limp-dick, sou...
Dogmatism of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political--are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative...
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from con...
Be a good listener in the special way a story requires: note the manner of presentation; the development of plot, character; the addition of new dramatic sequences; the emphasis accorded to one figure or another in the recital; and the degree of enth...
The great sage Thales once put the general matter succinctly "Oh master," he was asked, "what is the most difficult thing to do?" "To know thyself", he replied. "And the easiest?" "To give advice to others.
However much we champion freedom of thought, we actually spend much of our time censoring input. We seek out publications that mirror or support our prior views and largely avoid those that don't.
..Such practices and beliefs, which interfere with happiness, are neither inevitable nor necessary; they evolved by chance, as a result of random responses to accidental conditions. But once they become part of the norms and habits of a culture, peop...
The destructive effects of video games are not on boys' cognitive abilities or their reaction times, but on their motivation and their connectedness with the real world.
When we look at Abraham, Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael, we see that God's grace can survive our three-ring-circuses of compromise, rationalization and weak faith.
Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality —people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal ...
When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
I was ten,” I said. “Give me a little credit.” “To a boy with aspirations like that, I would extend my respect—but not credit. Or life insurance.” Abraham sounded amused. “You are an interesting man, David Charleston, but you sound like...
