I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly. I will tell y...
Luke captured my gaze again and said, "If beauty were time, you'd be eternity." My heart stopped. I was paralysed to look away from him (...) Thankfully, another senior boy who apparently wasn't dating anyone spoke. And when the words came out of his...
There was a time we laughed at the old guys up on the hill. The ones who graduated a couple of years before us, and who would hang around the school and the ballpark still, and would sit on the hoods of their cars and tell us how when they were senio...
Riley shook her head. “I married Brad after I got my Associate's degree in culinary arts. I worked in the Bakery at the same grocery store as Brad, and now I'm a stay at home mom.” She paused. “If you remember my senior yearbook, I was voted mo...
[Russell comes back from his meeting with the senior soldiers, where they got mad about the tax cancellation, a soldier salutes and walks by... ] Capt. Russell: Is that the way a soldier behaves? You're SUPPOSED TO SALUTE when a superior officer pass...
Security Officer: [McCoy is half-carrying a loopy Kirk after injecting him with a vaccine. Kirk is scanned] Kirk, James T. He is not cleared for duty aboard the Enterprise. Leonard 'Bones' McCoy: Medical code states "The treatment and transport of a ...
Actually, nothing hurts like hearing the word slut, unless it is hearing the word rape dropped about carelessly. Again, a word I wouldn't have thought much about, except that when I was in high school a girl gave her senior speech on her best friend'...
That’s because both the job title and the job itself have never existed before. We used the term ‘ground-breaking’ to describe this position because that is exactly what it is.” Leonard Scott leaned forward. “The current Administration is c...
Still it is true that many same-sex couples want nothing more than to join society as fully integrated socially responsible family-centered taxpaying Little League-coaching nation-serving respectably married citizens. So why not welcome them in Why n...
When you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge military power, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it's hard to hear the whispering of the rest of the world. And I think many US citizens want to. I d...
What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of ...
Eric, you need to look at the whole picture," the PM said. "You look at the jobless as a huge pile of scrap and you're looking for what can be recycled. That's good. That's your job. But what you don't realise is that this pile of scrap itself serves...
If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we shoul...
If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost...
The work of an intellectual is not to form the political will of others; it is, through the analyses he does in his own domains, to bring assumptions and things taken for granted again into question, to shake habits, ways of acting and thinking, to d...
The first symptom of the trouble appeared when Madison studied Hamilton’s proposal for the funding of the domestic debt. On the one hand, Hamilton’s recommendation looked straightforward: All citizens who owned government securities should be rei...
As opposition leader, [Stephen Harper] wrote in the in the year before he came to power: 'Information is the lifeblood of a democracy. Without adequate access to key information about government policies and programs, citizens and parliamentarians ca...
The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the U...
Above a certain level of income, the relative value of material consumption vis-a-vis leisure time is diminished, so earning a higher income at the cost of working longer hours may reduce the quality of your life. More importantly, the fact that the ...
There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for me ...
It is interesting how one word can spark memories that one believes she has buried beyond recognition. War reminded me of the sharp and bittersweet smell of burning homes, temples, and palaces. It made my eyes cloud over with a haze of dense smoke, k...
