The conflicting missions of the two armies seemed to have no fog, no gray, only black-and-white clarity. I had lived my life in terms of compromise, rule-bending, trade-offs, concessions, bargaining, striking deals, finding middle ground. In these tw...
Time is just common, it's like water for a fish. Everybody's in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the litt...
For most of us, the most common and unfortunate side effect of skin problems is isolation. We don't want to be seen the way we look. You can hide a lot of physical flaws, but not acne. It's right there, on the first thing people notice about us - our...
Well, Hell was worse, of course, by definition. But Crowley remembered what Heaven was like, and it had quite a few things in common with Hell. You couldn’t get a decent drink in either of them, for a start. And the boredom you got in Heaven was al...
Pah…commoners, traders." Ergus made a disparaging gesture. Traders with money, Ergus. Money they put at the disposition of young Tanahkos," Lmachdan said in a dry tone. "Money that turns into soldiers. Soldiers who are used to extort tribute from u...
All love stories have much in common. I wen through the same thing at one point in my life. But that's not what I remember. What I remember is that love returned in the form of another man, new hopes, and new dreams.
The Kikuyu, when left to themselves, do not bury their dead, but leave them above ground for the hyenas and vultures to deal with. The custom had always appealed to me, I thought that it would be pleasant thing to be laid out to the sun and the stars...
The failure of Popper's demarcation criterion throws up an important question. Is it actually possible to find some common feature shared by all the things we call 'science...'? It may be that they share some fixed set of features that define what it...
When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquer...
Besides its content and methods, the cuisine devised by squaws and hillbilly women, as well as slave women, had another thing in common, which was the belief that you made do with whatever you could lay hands on--pigs' entrails, turnip tops, cowpeas,...
Gods are fragile things, they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense. They thrive on servility and shrink before independence. They feed upon worship as kings do upon flattery. That is why the cry of gods at all times is “Wor...
I don't think that I could ever be a strict dad. I never grew up with anybody strict in my life... I'm not saying I'm a role model by any means or anything. I think the fact that I wasn't told what not to do all the time - my spirit kind of told me t...
Now all my tales are based on the fundemental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.... To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension...
The Chechen: Joker-man, what you do with all your money? The Joker: You see, I'm a guy of simple taste. I enjoy dynamite, and gunpowder, and gasoline! [he pours gasoline on the mountain of cash] The Chechen: [panicked] What the...? The Joker: Ah-ta-t...
There is still no cure for the common birthday.
Life is lived in common, but not in community.
Exclusive homosexuality is not very common in nature.
Should we tolerate the blatant incorrectness of religion? Tolerating ignorance, superstition and stupidity will not provide for a healthy advancement of our society. Religion is cancer for modern thought, rationality, and even common sense.
Obvious? Possibly. Sometimes, common sense is only obvious once you have been shown it to be so. Only after a shortcut has been revealed is it an obvious time saver. Before that, it had remained completely unknown to everyone but the enlightened. You...
If one divided all of human science into two parts - the one common to all men, the other particular to the learned - the latter would be quite small in comparison with the former. But we are hardly aware of what is generally attained, because it is ...
When interpreted as infallible, the truth claims of powerful institutions — whether religious or secular — tend to emphasise the fallibility of individuals and their subjective ethical intuitions; thus, undermining self-reliance, including people...