Nathan Arizona Sr.: All right, boy, I guess you got a reward coming. Twenty-five thousand dollars. Or, if you need home furnishings, I can give you a line of credit at any of my stores. In fact, that's the way I'd rather handle it. Tax reasons. Ed Mc...
Meeting writers is always so disappointing. I got over wanting to meet live writers quite a long time ago. There is this terrific book that has changed your life, and then you meet the author, and he has shifty eyes and funny shoes and he won't talk ...
We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. We contend that for a nation to tax itself in...
[N]early every creationist debater will mention the second law of thermodynamics and argue that complex systems like the earth and life cannot evolve, because the second law seems to say that everything in nature is running down and losing energy, no...
The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that's why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics ...
Each big idea like that is an operating system upgrade," she says, smiling. Comfortable territory. "Writers are responsible for some of it. They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue." Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue. "Bu...
Now I have very little respect for the electoral system in the United States. I could have respected it in the early days, when the country was small and we had small population. The system that we have in the United States was set up at a time when ...
The ten billion animals that are killed every year for meat and the virulent consequences of contemporary animal agricultural practices remain conspicuously absent from public discourse. How often have you seen media exposés on the violent treatment...
I spent the beginning of my focus on activism by doing what most everyone else was doing; blaming other people and institutions. Don’t like the war? Let’s blame the president, congress, or lobbyists. Don’t like ecological disregard? Let’s bla...
There will be others, many others. You’ll try desperately to digest a single word through the acronym-laden gibberish, while beginning to wonder what the point of all this is, and also why you didn’t feel that staple you just sent into your thigh...
Otter: Point of parliamentary procedure! Hoover: Don't screw around, they're serious this time! Otter: Take it easy, I'm pre-law. Boon: I thought you were pre-med. Otter: What's the difference? [Addressing the room] Otter: Ladies and gentlemen, I'll ...
If moral truths do not exist as a foundation for law, then law itself becomes merely a system of raw political power accountable to no one.
Every system of power in the world has a vested interest in weakening the individuality of its subjects and tries to weaken or it possible completely extinguish it.
The experience taught him [Salvador Allende] too late that a system cannot be changed from the government but from the power.
What is missing in our economic system is a central value that can encompass everything that can be transacted and used to assign the proper relative value to everything.
Religion is not God himself or herself. It is a system of teaching about God, an explanation of God’s way to human minds. But God doesn’t need explanations to exist.
the pattern appears so ethereally, that it is hard to remember that the shape is an attractor. It is not just any trajectory of a dynamical system. It is the trajectory toward which all other trajectories converge.
The smallest grain of natural honesty and benevolence has more effect on men’s conduct, than the most pompous views suggested by theological theories and systems.
In my experience ideology is a lot like religion; it's a belief system and most people cling to it long after it becomes clear that their ideology doesn't describe the real world.
What I condemn are our system of values and the men who don't acknowledge how great, difficult, but ultimately beautiful women's share in society is.
That we have great men in our time and recent times is not because of our educational system, but rather in spite of it. They are the ones the teachers couldn't spoil.
