People were intrinsically selfish, and many hated the idea of a woman in charge of the Institute. They would not put themselves at risk for her. Only a few weeks ago he would have said the same thing about himself. Now, knowing Charlotte, he realized...
The Japanese had no idea what elements of Western culture and institutions where the crucial ones, so they ended up copying everything, from western clothes and hair styles to the European practice of colonizing foreign people. Unfortunately, they to...
...Reason should take on anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a court of justice, by which reason may secure its rightful claims while dismissing all its groundless pretensions, and this not by me...
I sometimes wonder if God calls us into the church because it represents not the people of God at their best but us at our worst. I wonder if he calls us to become embedded in this wretched institution precisely because it is wretched. And calls us t...
Howard was almost as fond of this hall as he was of his own shop. The Brownies used it on Tuesdays, and the Women's Institute on Wednesdays. It had hosted jumble sales and Jubilee celebrations, wedding receptions and wakes, and it smelled of all of t...
Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the propheti...
Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic-it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize...
Barbee had always wondered about mental institutions. He thought of taking notes for a feature story on this adventure at Glennhaven, as the evening wore on, began to seem remarkable for utter lack of anything noteworthy. It began to appear as a frag...
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...
Probably one of those sinister organisations that lurked behind the mask of amusing acronym, such as BUM, for example - the Bermondsey Union of Minstrels. Or WILLY, the Whitechapel Institution for Long-Legged Yodellers. It could be any one of a hundr...
Having an affair with your good friend's wife while he's in an institution and your wife is in a hospital ranks somewhere between Benedict Arnold and the guy who invented Girls Gone Wild on the spectrum of Total Dickheads in American History.
If women cut back on their ambitions en masse, institutional change will never happen and the glass ceiling will lower. We need to be there to demand equal pay, mandatory maternity leave, more human hours. Leaving the “dirty work” of working to t...
But the toaster was quite satisfied with itself, thank you. Though it knew from magazines that there were toasters who could toast four slices at a time, it didn't think that the master, who lived alone and seemed to have few friends, would have want...
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. . All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christ...
Three out of ten women in the United States have an abortion by the time they are forty-five years old. And women who need abortions get abortions, whether or not the procedure is legal or safe, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Blaming women wh...
In a way, the futile excuses many people use to cover their superstitions are demolished. They think it is enough to have some sort of religious fervor, however ridiculous, not realizing that true religion must be according to God's will as the perfe...
We should consider that the brightness of the Divine countenance, which even an apostle declares to be inaccessible, (1Ti 6: 16) is a kind of labyrinth — a labyrinth to us inextricable, if the Word do not serve us as a thread to guide our path; and...
Fire, ice, asteroids and pole shifts are bogeymen with which we distract ourselves from the real threat of our time. In an age when everyone invents his own truth, there is no community, only factions. Without community, there can be no consensus to ...
Here is the secret to surviving one of these [airplane] crashes: Be male. In a 1970 Civil Aeromedical institute study of three crashes involving emergency evacuations, the most prominent factor influencing survival was gender (followed closely by pro...
One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an ins...
We are known to be anti-authoritarian, anti-institutional, and notoriously anti-religious—more likely to quote Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Monty Python, or Star Trek than the Bible.