As long as a population can be induced to believe in a supernatural hereafter, it can be oppressed and controlled. People will put up with all sorts of tyranny, poverty, and painful treatment if they're convinced that they'll eventually escape to som...
An empty bottle of Jack is almost just as beautiful as a new and unopened bottle...in the same sense as looking down at muddied feet, and looking back the way you came. The journey you've taken to get to this point, the experiences and sights and mus...
It may take years of struggle and confession, battle and failure. The places in my life where I struggle with deadly sins are matters of a decade or more of focus, repentance, shame, and grace. I’ve traveled some long roads simply to lessen the dep...
A story, I had learned, through my own constant knitting and reknitting of remembered words, can lead us back to ourselves, to our lost innocence, and in the shadow it casts over our present world, we begin to understand what we only intuited in our ...
I suppose men, even myself, are perpetually boys. The sons of parents who provide the staples of what makes up a life— a home, an example of what it means to be human, however fucked up that may be. We are molded by impressions and an example, sing...
Là est la différence entre toi et moi. Le monde où tu vis est éclairé par tous les côtés par ta présence en son centre; mais moi il faut que je frotte chaque fois une allumette pour que l'humanité voie ma figure.
Although science is not easy in complex human systems, we cannot afford to throw our hands in the air and give up. It may take decades, but it is a game worth playing and winning.
Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be 'fixed' by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society. There is...
A simple intuition, a single observation, can open vistas of unimagined potential. Once caught in the web of an idea, the researcher is happily doomed, for the outcome is always uncertain, and the resolution of the mystery may take years to unfold. S...
You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming ...
The power of reason is thought small in these days, but I remain an unrepentant rationalist. Reason may be a small force, but it is constant, and works always in one direction, while the forces of unreason destroy one another in futile strife. Theref...
This is worth an eternity of torture,” he whispered. “I’m quite certain I love you more than anyone I’ve ever loved, in any life. I may have lost my soul when I was turned, but it’s been replaced by you, Cassandra. I’ll never let you go.
Well, and there is the end of our little drama," I remarked, after we had sat some time smoking in silence. "I fear that it may be the last investigation in which I shall have the chance of studying your methods. Miss Morstan has done me the honour t...
God is not an employer looking for employees. He is an Eagle looking for people who will take refuge under his wings. He is looking for people who will leave father and mother and homeland or anything else that may hold them back from a life of love ...
Maybe he, like me, is engaged in the kind of unspoken rebellion you don't want to perform too brightly since you're never certain anyone in your family will notice your darkened eyes, skeleton shoes, tousled hair, patchy attendance record. You may be...
Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others - priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior - hold us to the path of history. They keep us chained to the rock, that the vultures may eat out our hearts. It is ...
The Blessing Heads are covered by the Tallit, or prayer shawl; hands are extended out with the fingers splayed to form the shape of the letter Shin, the first letter in the word Shaddai, a name for the Almighty. The chant, in Hebrew, is loud and ecst...
Have you ever wanted something so desperately that you imagine it, day in and day out, until you have created an image of perfection that becomes the 'real thing'? Suddenly, all you have to live for is the image in your head that may not be real to a...
Now the twelfth canto of Book II is an almost literal translation from Tasso description in the Jerusalem Delivered of the island of Armida. That poem was not printed till 1582. It is likely enough that Spenser may have seen part of it in manuscript,...
May your dreams be fleeting,” Gravier says to us and I smile. I don't want my dreams to be fleeting tonight. Tonight I hope I would see something, anything to put my mind at ease. I fear I would get the opposite but I still drift off in the hope if...
Jimmi manages a laugh that makes my skin crawl. “Do you really think what you read in those books is true? Sure, some of it may be but have you ever actually paid attention to it? It's all false set upon us as truth. You can't coat something with l...
