As long as a population can be induced to believe in a supernatural hereafter, it can be oppressed and controlled. People will put up with all sorts of tyranny, poverty, and painful treatment if they're convinced that they'll eventually escape to som...
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road. Healthy, free, the world before me. The long brown path before me leading me wherever I choose. Henceforth, I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune. Henceforth, I whimper no more, postpone no ...
People are weary of politicians who make promises they are either unwilling or unable to keep. Society longs for statesmen but it gets politicians. Statesmen are leaders who uphold what is right regardless of the popularity of the position. Statesmen...
Hey, if you'd wanted to avoid 'this,' you shouldn't have lured me last night. Now it's too late. You might as well avoid the long, drawn-out pain and get it over with quickly. Sort of like taking off a Band-Aid. Or cutting off a limb." "Wow, who says...
It may take years of struggle and confession, battle and failure. The places in my life where I struggle with deadly sins are matters of a decade or more of focus, repentance, shame, and grace. I’ve traveled some long roads simply to lessen the dep...
I know I do everything. I've been doing everything for an awfully long time, and I've seen and lived as hard as I could, and it's been unbelievable, I tell you, unbelievable. But now I have the feeling everything is gliding away from me, and I don't ...
But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and grow...
At the end of the school day, we walked the long, cold way home feeling happy and hungry. There we found a warm fire, country ham with gravy and hot biscuits, and a mother to hug us! If snow blew under the doors that night, what did it matter? Christ...
We have minds that are equipped for certainty, linearity and short-term decisions, that must instead make long-term decisions in a non-linear, probabilistic world.
As he was about to press the button to shut the doors, a young woman stepped in. She had that sort of beauty that deserved to be prosecuted for appearing without notice. Professor Khupe was confident that an appropriate law existed for such a purpose...
There should be an age limit for patients, he thinks as he takes off his shoes. You just have to say to them, "You lived long enough. From now on, think of what's left as a bonus, a gift without an exchange slip. It hurts? Stay in bed. It still hurts...
I would not wish depression on anybody. And yet, it taught me a lot. I have not become suddenly mawkishly grateful for my life but I am more interested in it, more engaged you might say. When you have spent long years in the dark, there is joy in see...
Yes, the saint was underrated quite a bit, then, mostly by people who didn’t like things that were ineffable… …a lot of people don’t like things that are unearthly, the things of this earth are good enough for them, and they don’t mind tell...
Oh, and they said I have ADD, too." He lit a cigarette, his first of the day, and took a long, grateful drag. "But listen mate, I once sucked a geezer for twenty minutes to get him off. The clock was just over his shoulder and I timed it. Attention d...
Life is too short to spend your precious time trying to convince a person who wants to live in gloom and doom otherwise. Give lifting that person your best shot, but don't hang around long enough for his/her bad attitude to pull you down. Instead, su...
It is good," he thought "to taste for yourself everything you need to know. That worldly pleasures and wealth are not good things, I learned even as a child. I knew it for a long time, but only now have I experienced it. And now I know it, I know it ...
He could find out if Tasev was guilty, then make him wish he'd never been born. A quick death for Tasev would be too easy. No way in hell would that happen. The man would suffer for a long time before he took his last breath. That part of Levi had ch...
Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was sma...
Belief is not subject to the will. Men think as they must. Children do not, and cannot, believe exactly as they were taught. They are not exactly like their parents. They differ in temperament, in experience, in capacity, in surroundings. And so ther...
You thought you had the choice to stay still or move forward, but your didn't. As long as your heart kept pumping an your blood kept blowing and your lungs kept filling, you didn't. The pang she felt for Tibby carried something like envy. You couldn'...
Although it was autumn and not summer the dark-gold sunlight and the inky shadows, long and slender in the shape of felled cypresses, were the same, and there was the same sense of everything drenched and jewelled and the same ultramarine glitter on ...
