Sergeant JT Sanborn: Welcome to Bravo Company. Welcome to Camp Victory. Staff Sergeant William James: Ah, Camp Victory? I thought this was Camp Liberty. Sergeant JT Sanborn: Ah, no, they changed that about a week ago. 'Victory' sounds better. Staff S...
Marv Loach: What department is that again? Kent Mansley: Frankly, I'm not at liberty to divulge the particulars of the agency I work for, and all that that implies. Marv Loach: You mean, national security? Kent Mansley: Let me put it this way. Every ...
Christopher Gardner: It was right then that I started thinking about Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence and the part about our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I remember thinking how did he know to put the p...
The Emperor: [to the Senate] In order to ensure our security and continuing stability, the Republic will be reorganized into the first Galactic Empire, for a safe and secure society which I assure you will last for ten thousand years. [Senate fills w...
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people w...
It is above all in the present democratic age that the true friends of liberty and human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general...
For those who think religious people live in a constant state of fear and quaking, compare Ps 111:10 to Ps 112:7. There, you will find that the person who fears God will not fear anyone, or anything else. This is not living in fear. By choosing one f...
So when modern-day religious conservatives wax nostalgic about how marriage is a sacred tradition that reaches back into history for thousands of uninterrupted years, they are absolutely correct, but in only one respect—only if they happen to be ta...
After I consumed Frost in his entirety, my days of exploration began. I read The Diving Comedy while leafing through E. E. Cummings. I read Sidney and Milton and Shelley, piecing together my own aesthetics, my own defence of poetry. I felt alone and ...
... forgiveness is a religious imperative: forgive those who trespass against you. But it is also a very practical strategy based on the belief that there are profound limits to what the formal mechanisms of retribution can accomplish.
Believing, as they now did, that the heavenly powers took part in human affairs, they became so much absorbed in the cultivation of religion and so deeply imbued with the sense of their religious duties, that the sanctity of an oath had more power to...
No it's not!" said Constable Visit. "Atheism is a denial of a god." "Therefore It Is A Religious Position," said Dorfl. "Indeed, A True Atheist Thinks Of The Gods Constantly, Albeit In Terms of Denial. Therefore, Atheism Is A Form Of Belief. If The A...
It was a stretch to imagine that Barbara Walters might want to give it all up for Ed Couch, but Evelyn tried her hardest. Of course, even though she was not religious, it was a comfort to know that the Bible backed her up in being a doormat.
Perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction.
I'm as religious as the next man - which is to say I'll keep in with the local parson for form's sake and read the lessons on feast-days because my tenants expect it, but I've never been fool enough to confuse religion with belief in God. That's wher...
Religion and ethics were not always - or even frequently - mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often deflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system...
Like all religious people, Christians repress, remember, and retell their core stories selectively. They emphasize this episode at the expense of that episode, in keeping with their own biases and the preoccupations of their times.
Unless you're in an early seventies-era Eagles cover band, a founding member of a religious cult, or sleeping under a bridge in Seattle, lose the beard and get a haircut. Power doesn't have time for any form of hirsute hipster self expression.
Hell was never God's intention. It is man's invention. It is a human-manufactured religious icon, no less idolatrous than deifying a statue.
O, how easy it is to do religious things if other people are watching! Preaching, praying, attending church, reading the bible, acts of kindness and charity-they all take on a certain pleasantness of the ego if we know that others will find out about...
Environmentalists and secular humanists insist that humans will destroy the planet. Corporate capitalists and many religious fundamentalists have no regard for wildlife and nature. Ultimately, this dualistic battle is based on false premises. In fact...