Across Quotes - page 92
Historically, anything that gets information to people is good for the world. The most important human being who ever lived, if you want to leave out religious figures, would be Johannes Gutenberg... that's when the liberation of human thought happened, because people could read the thoughts of people across the world, and have thoughts of their own, and publish them and spread information around. Anything that gets information to people is good. America has prospered because we're the most information-friendly society in the world.
Tom Clancy
India is witnessing a golden historic moment with the blessings of the mighty Lord Bhaskara on the banks of the auspicious river Saryu. Across the length and breadth of India, from Kanyakumari to KsheerBhawani, from Koteshwar to Kamakhya, from Jagannath to Kedarnath, from Somnath to Kashi Vishwanath, SametShikhar to Shravanabelagola, from Bodhgaya to Sarnath, from Amritsar to Patna Sahib, from Andaman to Ajmer, from Lakshadweep to Leh, the entire country is encompassed by and for Lord Rama!
Narendra Modi
These are stories, then, about Man and Nature. We've been telling ourselves such stories forever, as a way of making sense of what we call our "relationship to nature”-to borrow that curious, revealing phrase. (What other species can even be said to have a "relationship” to nature?) For a long time now, the Man in these stories has gazed at Nature across a gulf of awe or mystery or shame. Even when the tenor of these narratives changes, as it has over time, the gulf remains. There's the old heroic story, where Man is at war with Nature; the romantic version, where Man merges spiritually with Nature (usually with some help from the pathetic fallacy); and, more recently, the environmental morality tale, in which Nature pays Man back for his transgressions, usually in the coin of disaster-three different narratives (at least), yet all of them share a premise we know to be false, but can't seem to shake: that we somehow stand outside, or apart from, nature.
Michael Pollan
My sister Lisa had an apartment over by the university and said that I could come stay with her as long as I didn't bring my Joni Mitchell record. My mother offered to drive me over, and after a few bong hits I took her up on it. It was a fifteen-minute trip across town, and on the way we listened to the rebroadcast of a radio call-in show in which people phoned the host to describe the various birds gathered around their backyard feeders. Normally the show came on in the morning, and it seemed strange to listen to it at night. The birds in question had gone to bed hours ago and probably had no idea they were still being talked about.
David Sedaris
The memory of all things is in all things, Danlo remembered. Nothing is ever truly lost.
"The true Elder Eddas," he said "are universal memories. The One memory is just the memory of the universe itself. The way the universe evolves in conscioiusness of itself and causes itself to be. We are just this blessed consciousness, nothing more, nothing less. We are the light inside light that fuses into the atoms of our bodies; we are the fire that whirls across the stellar deeps and dances all things into being."
"Now you are speaking mystically again, Little Fellow."
"About some things there is no other way to speak."
David Zindell
On Wednesday my watch broke, so yesterday I went across the street to the saddest mall in America. Half the stores were shuttered up and the fountain had been drained. The food court was gone except for a place called Granny's Fudgery, a wooden cart surrounded by card tables. I imagine the mall started going downhill when it accepted Walmart as a tenant. Anything you could find at Bill's Card Shop and the Record Bin could also be found there, where a customer could pay less and buy everything in one shot. I'd been to only one Walmart in my life before this and I was shocked at how ugly it was, even by American standards. It was a mammoth jumble of absolute shit made more chaotic by brightly colored signs and promotional displays. Yesterday's Walmart was even worse than the first, but the employees were incredibly friendly.
David Sedaris
During the year just past there came to this country from across the sea a man - a leader of men. He was a tall man, clear of eye, imposing in stature and lofty in mien who had met and wrestled with this "greatest scourge of mankind" and who understands fully the determining concepts and the motivating forces of international Communism. He shapes his every utterance, act and deed in consonance with this understanding. He is a man of such broad vision and knowledge that the Atlantic Ocean becomes merely a peaceful lake, although enclosed by the shores of continents, and the broad Pacific, a benign moat but on which can be carried the thriving commerce of billions of men. This man has such a knowledge of the historical past and such an insight into a divinely ordained future that he fashions the deeds of today to mesh with a tomorrow of one thousand years from now. This man is known to the world as General of the Army Douglas MacArthur.
Douglas MacArthur
Sverdlov Hall was already nearly full...The provincial elite were all there. And it was all the usual things: people kissing each other and shouting greetings across the rows of seats, chattering about the snow and the harvest prospects and generally feeling themselves to be masters of their fate. In all the cacophony I didn't hear the name of Andropov mentioned once, not anything said about his death. At twenty minutes to eleven the hall hushed. The waiting began. With each minute the tension rose and the atmosphere felt charged with electricity...The tension reached a climax. All eyes turned towards the door...Who would come through it first? At precisely eleven, Chernenko's head appeared in the doorway. He was followed by Tikhonov, Gromyko, Ustinov, Gorbachev and the rest. The delegates' reaction was silence.
Konstantin Chernenko
My dad was our rock. Although he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in his early 30s, he was our provider, our champion, our hero. As he got sicker, it got harder for him to walk, it took him longer to get dressed in the morning. But if he was in pain, he never let on. He never stopped smiling and laughing - even while struggling to button his shirt, even while using two canes to get himself across the room to give my mom a kiss. He just woke up a little earlier and worked a little harder.
Michelle Obama
At Chicago, Hayek put aside his more technical economic work for the development of a social and political theory that became in time the most ambitious and complete synthesis to emerge from the ranks of the post-war Right. Among its themes - the overriding significance of the rule of law, the need for social inequality, the function of unreflective tradition, the value of a leisured class - were many cultivated by Strauss across the campus. Neither thinker, however, ever referred to the other. Did temperamental antagonism, or intellectual indifference, dictate the silence? Whatever the case, latent tensions of outlook between them were to find expression in due course. Schmitt, on the other hand, was never far from Hayek's mind – standing for the prime example of a skilled jurist whose sophistry helped to destroy the rule of law in Germany, yet a political theorist whose stark definitions of the nature of sovereignty and the logic of party, at any rate, had to be accepted.
Friedrich Hayek
I speak out of a deep sense of urgency about the anguish and anxiety I have seen across America. I speak out of a deep belief in the ideals of the Democratic Party, and in the potential of that party and of a president to make a difference. I speak out of a deep trust in our capacity to proceed with boldness and a common vision that will feel and heal the suffer- the division of our party.
Ted Kennedy
So it is with Barack Obama. He has lit a spark of hope amid the fierce urgency of now. I believe that a wave of change is moving across America. If we do not turn aside, if we dare to set our course for the shores of hope, we together will go beyond the divisions of the past and find our place to build the America of the future. My friends, I ask you to join in this historic journey - to have the courage to choose change. It is time again for a new generation of leadership. It is time now for Barack Obama.
Ted Kennedy
We can build on the Children's Health Insurance Program enacted in 1997 -- by passing the bipartisan legislation introduced last year, to enable parents to qualify for the coverage already available to their children. We can pass the bipartisan legislation now pending to provide affordable health care to families with disabled children. And we can begin, on a bipartisan basis, to fashion legislation that will require employers with more than 100 workers to be good corporate citizens and provide basic health insurance for their workforce. I know how hard it will be to hammer out an agreement here. But we must try. And if at first we cannot achieve a reasonable approach across party lines, then we must continue to press the case. I believe that we can ultimately prevail -- because I believe the American people, across the political spectrum, are ready for national health reform.
Ted Kennedy
Six years ago, when John McCain, the Arizona senator, last worked on an immigration bill, his partner was Ted Kennedy, of Massachusetts. Kennedy, especially in his final decade in the Senate, was known for working closely with ideological opponents to pass major pieces of legislation. On a recent morning, McCain sat in his dimly lit office, across the street from the Senate, and said how much he missed Kennedy.
Ted Kennedy
I read with regret that the authorities intend to remove the statue of Gordon from Trafalgar Square and send it down to Sandhurst. I hope the decision is not irrevocable. His memory is not specially suited to inspire young officers with zeal for discipline and obedience to orders.
On the other hand, he is a true national hero; his strange and tragic story is deeply written across our political and imperial annals; his personality and genius were unique, and will always remain a source of pride to Englishmen.
G. M. Trevelyan
There may be, and there ought to be, progress in the moral sphere. The moral truths which we have inherited from the past need to be expanded and restated. In times of misfortune we require for our support something of which the truth is beyond all question, in which we can put an implicit trust, " though the heavens should fall." A merely borrowed belief is, at such time, like a rotten plank across a raging torrent. The moment we step upon it, it gives way beneath our feet.
Felix Adler
At the international level we have become virtually paranoid. The world is filled with dangerous people. Every troublemaker across the globe is a communist. Our obsession is in part the product of a fear generated by Joseph McCarthy. Indeed a black silence of fear possesses the nation and is causing us to jettison some of our libertarian traditions.
William O. Douglas
[(...) here is Cernan on the subject of window gazing:] You have to literally just pinch yourself and ask yourself the question, silently: Do you know where you are at this point in time and space, and in reality and in existence, when you can look out the window and you're looking at the most beautiful star in the heavens -- the most beautiful because it's the one we understand and we know, it's home, it's people, family, love, life -- and besides that it is beautiful. You can see from pole to pole and across oceans and continents and you can watch it turn and there's no strings holding it up, and it's moving in a blackness that is almost beyond conception.
Eugene Cernan
[...] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?
Jack Kerouac
This is not the first period during which we have confronted the difficult problem of using difference as a way of bringing people together, rather than as incontrovertible evidence of separation. There are more options than sameness, opposition, or hierarchical relations. One of the basic challenges confronting women of color today, as Audre Lorde has pointed out, is to think about and act upon notions of equality across difference. There are so many ways in which we can conceptualize coalitions, alliances, and networks that we would be doing ourselves a disservice to argue that there is only one way to construct relations across racial and ethnic boundaries. We cannot assume that if it does not unfold in one particular way, then it is not an authentic coalition.
Angela Davis
The principle that I am laying down I am not laying down exceptionally for Ireland. It is the very principle upon which, within my recollection, to the immense advantage of the country, we have not only altered, but revolutionized our method of governing the Colonies. ... England tried to pass good laws for the Colonies at that period; but the Colonies said-"We do not want your good laws; we want our own." We admitted the reasonableness of that principle, and it is now coming home to us from across the seas. We have to consider whether it is applicable to the case of Ireland. ... I ask that in our own case we should practise, with firm and fearless hand, what we have so often preached-the doctrine which we have so often inculcated upon others-namely, that the concession of local self-government is not the way to sap or impair, but the way to strengthen and consolidate unity.
William Ewart Gladstone
We succeeded in finding a place shallow enough to haul our empty wagons across: but for this good fortune we should have been under the necessity of taking them to pieces (as I had before done), and of ferrying them on the 'small craft' before mentioned. Half of a wagon may thus be crossed at a time, by carefully balancing it upon the canoe, yet there is of course no little danger of capsizing during the passage.
Josiah Gregg
