A few years ago, Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, wanted to figure out why placebos were so effective. His experiment was brutally straightforward: he gave college students electric shocks while they were stuck in an fMRI machine. ...
The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies canno...
Philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator, warrior, conqueror of ideas, restorer of rational dogmas, of a cult without images, the founder of twenty terrestrial empires and of one spiritual empire: that is MUHAMMAD. As regards all the standards by whi...
God has always been about the business of shattering expectations, and in our culture, the standards of leadership are extroverted. It perfectly follows the biblical trend that God would choose the unexpected and the culturally "unfit" - like introve...
Auntie An-mei had cried before she left for China, thinking she would make her brother very rich and happy by communist standards. But when she got home, she cried to me that everyone had a palm out and she was the only one who left with an empty han...
The typical atheist rebels against God as a teenager rebels against his parents. When his own desires or standards are not fulfilled in the way that he sees fit, he, in revolt, storms out of the house in denial of the Word of God and in scrutiny of a...
The ideal-worker standard and norm of work devotion push mothers to the margins of economic life. And a society that marginalizes its mothers impoverishes its children. That is why the paradigmatic poor family in the United States is a single mother ...
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to ...
I believe that anyone can be successful in life, regardless of natural talent or the environment within which we live. This is not based on measuring success by human competitiveness for wealth, possessions, influence, and fame, but adhering to God's...
In all societies, women are in double jeopardy; on the one hand we are expected to conform to certain emotional standards in our relationships with others at the penalty of being declared insane; on the other, our political perceptions are labeled "i...
I'm giving you everything I have, Triss. I want to be yours, and I want you to be mine. No matter what storms lay ahead of us, I know that as one we can make it. I'm not perfect by anyone's standards but you make me want to strive to be the best pers...
Maybe – let’s not rule it out – this will be the song that cuts clean, the one that matters, the one that sheds standard-issue romance and reveals, under its old skin, a raw blood-red devotion deeper than comfort, a desire profounder than schoo...
You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You...
In peace-armies discipline meant the hunt, not of an average but of an absolute; the hundred per cent standard in which the ninety-nine were played down to the level of the weakest man on parade…. The deeper the discipline, the lower was the indivi...
Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will ou...
Women who are harassed, at work, on the street, or even online, are subject to the same rigid purity standards as women who are sexually assaulted, Just by virtue of being out in public, we're overstepping certain boundaries.
...the standard for moral behaviour must be part of God's nature. He did not create morality, he is morality.
Never judge yourself by the narrow standards of others. What we do together here is our business, nobody else's. Never, never doubt what we have just done is anything but love. Never let yourself be restricted by thoughts of what society would have y...
The beginning of the most materialistic age in the history of the world, when wars would be fought without patriotism, when men would forget God and only pay attention to moral standards, when the will to power would replace the will to serve and bea...
It's absolutely critical that we audit the Fed so the American people can see what's going on over there. Do it from top to bottom so that we can have transparency in this entity called the Federal Reserve. Hopefully, the American people will see tha...
Writing a novel - unlike operating a piece of heavy machinery, say, or cooking a chicken - is not a skill that can be taught. There is no standard way of doing it, just as there is no means of telling, while you're doing it, whether you're doing it w...
