In the recumbence of depression, your information-gathering system collates its intelligence and reports to you these facts: (1) there is nothing to do; (2) there is nowhere to go; (3) there is nothing to be; (4) there is no one to know. Without mean...
The claim at the heart of this book has been carefully researched by several generations of scholars and is orthodox in academic circles, if not beyond. Christians under the Roman Empire were neither constantly persecuted nor martyred in huge numbers...
The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you d...
As an editor, you develop a B.S. meter—an internal warning system that signals caution about journalism that doesn't feel trustworthy. Sometimes it's a quote or incident that's too perfect —a feeling I always had when reading stories by Stephen G...
This is the result of our choices. Literacy and knowing how to respect oneself beyond being just a marketing tool that is sold every lousy idea and impression of society could easily erase much of the crime. Ideas make us who we are and a person bank...
Yet our ability to exercise free will and transcend the most extraordinary obstacles does not make the conditions of our life irrelevant. Most of us struggle and often fail to meet the biggest challenges of our lives. Even the smaller challenges—br...
Plane Ride - In our sport it is natural and necessary to set up goals to inspire us. We all want to achieve the next level, the break-thru performance. What we (all of us) must not forget is that the journey to these goals is the best part. The daily...
Either god exists or it doesn’t exist. If a god does exist, it either interacts with the universe in some detectable way or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, that god is indistinguishable from a non-existent god. That only leaves a god who interacts w...
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish t...
Ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. That was the whole idea, right? That‘s why we went. I am reluctant to let that fact disappear down the memory hole, because if— as the war ends, or at least starts to end— if, at this time, the histo...
When my brother,…, was a young boy learning the Chinese classics, I was in the habit of listening with him and I became unusually proficient at understanding those passages that he found too difficult to grasp and memorize. Father a most learned ma...
I think the reason why people's relationships fail, really, is due to the fact that people are always putting their best feet forward all the time and not letting others actually "meet" them. The "meeting" part tends to happen later on and it shocks ...
...After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find...
Freedom is not the absence of commitment, and to be committed to something or to someone does not mean the loss of freedom. But freedom exists in the realm of the unbound and to be free is to be committed to that which is a part of the unbound realm....
Science’s skeptical core makes it a poor competitor for human hearts and minds, which recoil from its ongoing controversies and prefer the security of seemingly eternal truths. If the scientific approach were just one more interpretation of the cos...
From the many years he’d spent in the Omega Agency, the special agent understood there were no obvious good guys or bad guys on the world stage. Contrary to the PR spin generated within Congress and spoon-fed to the well-meaning American public by ...
Circumstances can have a motive force by which they bring about events without aid of human imagination or apprehension. On such occasions you yourself keep in touch with what is going on by attentively following it from moment to moment, like a blin...
Since 1849 I have studied incessantly, under all its aspects, a question which was already in my mind since 1832. I confess that my scheme is still a mere dream, and I do not shut my eyes to the fact that so long as I alone believe it to be possible,...
We are all surrounded with so much static energy, that it is actually crucial to develop the ability to remove that and to flow through the streams in life that we make— the ones that are not stagnant, the ones that are real, the energy that is flo...
Here are the facts. Coronary artery disease is the leading killer of men and women in Western civilization. In the United States alone, more than half a million people die of it every single year. Three times that number suffer known heart attacks. A...
Most of the people I worked with in my old job were pretty cool. We used to go out drinking after lights out and the less pleasant members of staff would be the topic of our pub discussions. We had a laugh. Nothing too damning. No one called anyone a...
