(Taft's mother's) losing her firstborn had convinced her that children are treasures lent not given and that they may be recalled at any time. Parents, she firmly believed, could never love their children too much.
Real life is messy and hard and never turns out like I’ve imagined. Usually it’s better. So, I try not to dream but rather to pray. If there is one thing I know, it’s that I have no clue what I want. I’m fickle. I’m picky. And I’m scared ...
For no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are. It is not important that those who ask the questions arrive at my answers or Marshall McLuhan's (quite different answers, by the way). This is an instance in which t...
Think of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham, or even Albert Einstein, and what will come to your mind is an image, a picture of face, (in Einstein's case, a photograph of a face). Of words, nothing will come to mind. This is the difference...
Of course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may see the Now...this" mode of discourse in it's boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without con...
Anarchy has the flexibility to overcome many of the traditional problems of activism by focusing on revolution not as another cause but as a philosophy of living. This philosophy is as concrete as a brick being thrown through a window or flowers grow...
Live with the consequences of your deeds and enjoy the warmth they create. The only warmth in the cold, indifferent universe is that which we create ourselves. And that is what a work of art is, it is what a constructed life is, a fulfilled life, the...
The 1970s was the decade of liberation, of anger at injustice and demands for recognition and rights. But over time, the demand for specific rights degraded into a generalized sense of entitlement, the demand for specific recognition into a generaliz...
She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted." Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged su...
Law reflects but in no sense determines the moral worth of a society. The values of a reasonably just society will reflect themselves in a reasonably just law. The better the society, the less law there will be. In heaven there will be no law, and th...
I'd grown up hearing stories about the special hazards that girls faced. I knew where the bodies were found: naked on beaches or cut into pieces, parts frozen in freezers or buried in cement. These stories were never kept from us girls. Instead they ...
That night, when the creature sleeps, when he sleeps, the mother escapes into her daughters’ room. She tells her daughter that the creature’s afraid of her having too much love, too much heart. She takes a tube of lipstick and drags it across her...
Hierarchy and discipline gave shape to the world;that was what he had always believed.Life was made easy by adherence toa rigid structure.But maybe that only really worked when you were at the top of the ladder,when you were doing well.The further do...
Had it been the object or the intention of Jesus Christ to establish a new religion, he would undoubtedly have written the system himself, or procured it to be written in his life time. But there is no publication extant authenticated with his name. ...
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...
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, t...
But no: he was empty, he was confronted by a vast anger, a desperate anger, he saw it and could almost have touched it. But it was inert - if it were to live and find expression and suffer, he must lend it his own body. It was other people's anger. "...
It is not then the existence or the non-existence, of the persons that I trouble myself about; it is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend. The story, taki...
He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amaze...
The Jews have made him [Yahweh] the assassin of the human species, to make room for the religion of the Jews. The Christians have made him the murderer of himself, and the founder of a new religion to supersede and expel the Jewish religion. And to f...
Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course. But we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time. It is...
