Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.... During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride ...
Then Carrot said, "It's better to light a candle than curse the darkness, captain. That's what they say." "What?" Vimes sudden rage was like a thunderclap. "Who says that? When has that ever been true? It's never been true! It's the kind of thing peo...
Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone yo...
As a rule, theologians know nothing of this world, and far less of the next; but they have the power of stating the most absurd propositions with faces solemn as stupidity touched by fear. It is a part of their business to malign and vilify the , , ,...
By the time it has gotten dressed, it has become he; has become already more or less George — though still not the whole George they demand and are prepared to recognize. Those who call him on the phone at this hour of the morning would be bewilder...
I’ve always wanted to kill someone by stealing their sound. If you’ve got no sound, you’ve got no voice. And it’s impossible to scream with no voice. So it’s like murdering a mime, only with less movement.
Jeez, Hazel," Percy said, "tell your horse to watch his language." Hazel tried not to laugh. "What did he say?" "With the cussing removed? He said he can get us to the top." Frank looked incredulous. "I thought the horse couldn't fly!" This time Ario...
Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, des...
The new towns of the 1950s and '60s were nothing less than the spatial translation of alienation and control and in these cities power increasingly could relinquish the old forms of advertising in favor of 'the simple organization of the spectacle of...
Our view of the mind not only shapes our view of ourselves; less obviously, it also shapes our view of that part of our experience we conceive of as dealing with the external world. As we learn about the structure of this aspect of experience, we fin...
We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in 's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disa...
If the people of Old Earth, our ancestors and their descendants today who remain, could keep building, could keep trying, how can we do less? We are their children, and while we bought to the stars with us all the faults and the problems and the flaw...
There is an element of selfishness to this, I suppose. It feels pretty good to be able to so quickly help someone. That is, after all, one of the great emotional payoffs of medicine. That isn't to say that ECT is either a panacea or without flaws - b...
The difference between this waiting period and the wait that I had already been enduring was that I was no longer hoping that he would see me, wishing that he would work, or wondering if he would care. Instead, I knew that he would be at work in my m...
Natalie had what I'd call a slow beauty, the kind you don't really notice at first and then it knocks you back and grows on you and she gets more beautiful every time you see her and then you can't believe that you ever thought that she was anything ...
Saying just the right thing after a considerable, awkward pause is far less effective than saying the wrong thing with perfect timing. I'm telling you.
I dislike the phrase 'Internet friends,' because it implies that people you know online aren't really your friends, that somehow the friendship is less real or meaningful to you because it happens through Skype or text messages. The measure of a frie...
I may be permitted, like the doctors, to cure a greater evil by a less, for I shall not fall seriously in love with the young widow, I think, nor she with me - that's certain - but if I find a little pleasure in her society I may surely be allowed to...
Cross-legged on the floor, you drink, hoping each mouthful will hurt; occasional flurries of spastic movement as you try to work out what to do with your hands. When everyone else is gone, your world is just a tiny box with the walls pressing in. Mes...
Spontaneity in the therapeutic work arises when the therapist can allow creative and authentic impulses to arise from moment to moment from the inner being, from the meditative quality within, from the inner emptiness, from the capacity to surrender ...
Somewhere along the line, Made in China began to sound like a bargain. (...) When an importer told a retail buyer that an item was quoted at 65¢ and made in the USA, the buyer figured it could be purchased somewhere cheaper. When the same product wa...
