There are many stories and accounts about the winners of lotteries who are jubilant when they win, but whose lives descend into a nightmare after acquiring that unearned money. (No challenge, no skill.) Thelottery looks like "the answer" to people be...
We shoot our heroes and enjoy peripeteia as a spectacle akin to sport and perhaps harshly disavowing the past protects us from the disappointment of our outsized hopes--who knows, really, but shifts in taste don't fully account for the phenomenon. At...
The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; b...
A molecule of hydrogen....whether in Sirius or in Arcturus, executes its vibrations in precisely the same time. Each molecule therefore throughout the universe bears impressed upon it the stamp of a metric system as distinctly as does the metre of th...
What is a price? It is a proposed point of agreement between a buyer and seller. The proposal is the key. It is not a marching order. Past prices represent deals done in history. Current prices represent possible deals in the future. Prices embed vas...
I am doubtful myself about the undertaking. Part of the attraction of the L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant ci...
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with v...
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the...
Jasper Sitwell: Is this little display meant to insinuate that you're gonna throw me off the roof? Because it's really not your style, Rogers. Steve Rogers: You're right. It's not. It's hers. [Natasha throws Sitwell off the roof] Natasha Romanoff: Oh...
[first lines] Bill: The following is my explanation. Well, more of an account of what happened. I'd been on my own for a while and getting kind of lonely... and bored... nothing to do all day. And that's when I started shadowing. The Policeman: Shado...
Earl McGraw: Who's the bride? Edgar McGraw: Don't know. The name on the marriage certificate is "Arlene Machiavelli." That's a fake. We've all just been calling her "The Bride" on account of the dress. Earl McGraw: You can tell she was pregnant. Man'...
Glen: Say that reminds me, how'd you get that kid so darn fast? Me and Dot went in to adopt on account a' somethin' went wrong with my semen, and they said we had to wait five years for a healthy white baby. I said, "Healthy white baby? Five years? W...
[Alvy addresses a pair of strangers on the street] Alvy Singer: Here, you look like a very happy couple, um, are you? Female street stranger: Yeah. Alvy Singer: Yeah? So, so, how do you account for it? Female street stranger: Uh, I'm very shallow and...
It is a Bush administration official on the moment when torture breaks a victim: The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely. From Neil Gaiman's account of a torturer in...
When it comes down to it, government is simply an abandonment of responsibility on the assumption that there are people, other than ourselves, who really know how to manage things. But the government, run ostensibly for the good of the people, become...
God has many reasons to make us rich, poor and happy and unhappy But he has never given more time to someone or less to others TIME continues to equalize all in the world and an unifying force never violated rule of equality, the Day you do good you ...
That which we most desire, we worship as our god; for that which is chiefly desired is the chief good in his account, who so desires it. And what he counts his chief good, that he makes his god. Desire is an act of worship . . . and to be most desire...
would never have made his great discovery of the action of galvanic currents on magnets had he stopped in his researches to consider in what manner they could possibly be turned to practical account; and so we would not now be able to boast of the wo...
If the empire had been afflicted by any recent calamity, by a plague, a famine, or an unsuccessful war; if the Tiber had, or if the Nile had not, risen beyond its banks; if the earth had shaken, or if the temperate order of the seasons had been inter...
The moon is an orbital albino, and it gets tons of sunlight, so I propose Operation Sunscreen, where astronauts coat the surface of the moon with a protective layer of sunscreen. If you care about albinos and the environment, you’ll see this is a g...
That’s the thing about the collapse of civilization, Blake. It never happens according to plan – there’s no slavering horde of zombies. No actinic flash of thermonuclear war. No Earth-shuddering asteroid. The end comes in unforeseen ways; the s...
