Other animals can make sounds, and sounds can indicate pleasure and pain. But language, a distinctly human capacity, isn´t just for registering pleasure and pain. It´s about declaring what is just and what is unjust, and distinguishing right from w...
It's amazing the things that the heart and mind can endure. No one ever told me that growing up, so I often spent my childhood thinking something was wrong with me.
For the rest of the night he sat by himself under the elm-tree. Until this moment it had never seemed to him that his magicianship set him apart from other men. But now he had glimpsed the wrong side of something. He had the eeriest feeling - as if t...
I would like to disagree. I would like to argue. But that’s the problem with the dead. You can’t fight with them, you can’t reason with them, you can’t prove them wrong or yourself right, beg them to choose you, to stay with you, to love you ...
What's wrong?" His voice was loud, so sharp that he sounded angry. I knew I should be careful, keep the secret, but I was too far gone to talk around it. My chest was working in huge spasms and I could barely breathe. "I kissed her." "And then you we...
[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are...
You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) ...
...left to ourselves we lapse into a kind of collusion with entrophy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there's nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present...is to live as res...
Unconditional love is like a contry of two with no laws and no government. Which is all fine if everyone is peaceful and law abiding. In the wrong hands, though, you got looting and crime sprees, and let me tell you, the people who demand uncondition...
We get a lot of on the weather reports, so when something big does hit, people never expect it. If it's not as bad as the reports predicted, we complain. If it's worse than expected, we complain. If it's just as bad as predicted, we complain about th...
She murmured, in that particular Nancy way of hers that grates most when my inner bitch is aching to be let loose, 'Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.' My eyes popped open to see her lemon face standing over me. 'SOMEONE,' I h...
America, I think, is about poor people playing music and poor people sharing food and poor people dancing, even when everything else in their life is so desperate, and so dismal that it doesn't seem there should be any room for any music, any extra f...
I throw my arms around her without even thinking first, the way I used to with Daddy when he came home from a trip. "Thank you," I say into her waist. Her clothes smell so good. I feel her hand resting on my head, and for that second I feel like noth...
You've a pretty good nerve," said Ratchett. "Will twenty thousand dollars tempt you?" It will not." If you're holding out for more, you won't get it. I know what a thing's worth to me." I, also M. Ratchett." What's wrong with my proposition?" Poirot ...
Women have got it all wrong now. They give it up too soon, and the men don't respect them. And before you tell me I don't have a clue, let me tell you something. By the time I let my future husbands climb into my bed, I'd made them work for it. And y...
Couldn't the wrong sort of living turn anyone mean? I remembered very well that one day back in Yoroido, a boy pushed me into a thorn bush near the pond. By the time I clawed my way out I was mad enough to bite through wood. If a few minutes of suffe...
Not only is democracy mystical nonsense, it is also immoral. If one man has no right to impose his wishes on another, then ten million men have no right to impose their wishes on the one, since the initiation of force is wrong (and the assent of even...
remember this: When you cross my doorstep, you have already been raised. With what you have learned...you know the difference between right and wrong. Do right. Don't anybody raise you from the way you have been raised. Know you will have to make ada...
Her entire life, she’d been told sin was wrong, a black and white interpretation of what is evil and what is holy in the world—colored like a priest’s robe and collar—but she never believed it to be true. Sin was colorful: scarlet like rose b...
The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find...
Our best moral stories don’t tell us what is right or wrong in every situation, but they show us what one character did in one situation at one time. Readers, viewers, and listeners are supposed to extrapolate the moral meaning from the story. We�...
