We defend with our lives the petty principles which divide us. The common principle, which is the establishment of the empire of man on earth, we never lift a finger to defend. We are frightened of any urge which would lift us out of the muck. We fig...
The Sufi Islam practiced in northern India is quite different from the Shi'a Islam practiced in Lebannon, which in turn is different from the Sunni Islam practiced in Pakistan. Even within a single branch of Islam there are customs and practices that...
The theories of the social sciences do not consist of “laws” in the sense of empirical rules about the behavior of objects definable in physical terms. All that the theory of the social sciences attempts is to provide a technique of reasoning whi...
Augustine recast how people should view history, that history was not the story of the rise and fall of empires because those are human things. Those are the city of man. Rather, true history should be the history of salvation, of man moving toward G...
One of the tragedies of current Christianity in America is that we have so few compelling illustrations of this life that Jesus lived and the type of radical community he came to create. Leading pastors and preachers are little more than family-frien...
Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain wa...
Air traffic control is going to have a steamy old fit on your dime, boy. They can get in line behind the police, the people whose cars we trashed, the Empire of Ob'enn, the Partnership Collective, and the Wormgate Corporation. Oh, and I think maybe s...
Kahneman’s evidence shows that we suck at remembering and predicting our own well-being. We as a culture still ignore this empirical evidence, recommending to live our lives so as to avoid deathbed regrets. Deathbed regrets are like Hollywood films...
Behind him the Master of Ceremonies cleared his throat. His eyes took on a distant, glazed look. "The Stealer of Souls," he said in the faraway voice of one whose ears aren't hearing what his mouth is saying, “Defeater of Empires, Swallower of Ocea...
Adam and Eve had first-hand empirical evidence of God’s existence. He walked in the Garden with them. Their problem was that God told them they could not eat of a certain tree. – p. 113
Every nation ends and every empire. Every baby born was going to die, given enough time. If being fated for destruction were enough to take the joy out of things, we’d slaughter children fresh from the womb. But we don’t. We wrap them in warm clo...
Since its sudden birth the city had expanded, swallowing up acre upon acre of the surrounding grasslands and drawing thousands into its domain. Hardly built on the most advantageous ground, miles from the open waters, decades from the mines at the mo...
Everything that rises will fall. Empires, societies, governments. None of them lasts forever. Why? Because even though they are the products of change, they become resistant to change. The longer a society survives, the more it clings to its power, a...
Lenin and Stalin created the idiosyncratic Soviet system in the image of their ruthless little circle of conspirators before the Revolution. Indeed much of the tragedy of Leninism-Stalinism is comprehensible only if one realizes that the Bolsheviks c...
Forbes did, in fact, break new ground for women...She was an irrepressible and independent traveler who took risky and difficult trips, braved the hostility of the colonial officials and bureaucrats of the British empire, and invaded the male sphere ...
And hoops, like rings aflame set to jump through for a world fit for someone else The cold harsh feel of steel on skin, the unloved touch of an industry used to deprave all mankind of its creativity and cast us out as a solider of fortune. Working to...
Mohammad never assigned himself a status more than a common man and a messenger of God. People had faith in him when he was surrounded by poverty and adversity and trusted him while he was the ruler of a great Empire. He was a man of spotless charact...
On the philosophical level, both Buddhism and modern science share a deep suspicion of any notion of absolutes, whether conceptualize as a transcendent being, as an eternal, unchanging principle such as soul, or as a fundamental substratum of reality...
If there is, to be sure, something more terrifying than the history of the fall of great empires, it is the history of the death of religions. Volney himself was overcome by this feeling as he visited the innumerable ruins of once-sacred buildings. T...
We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, pre...
Jim: If the Americans land, the Japanese will fight. Dr. Rawlins: You admire the Japanese? Jim: Well, they're brave, aren't they? Dr. Rawlins: That's important, is it, Jim? Jim: It's a good thing if you want to win a war. Dr. Rawlins: But we don't wa...
