Calling Quotes - page 42
Governments around the world say they're engaged in a war against the coronavirus. [...] This kill-or-die idiom is more than casual rhetorical overkill. Many governments are symbolically but very deliberately calling, in this time of fear and uncertainty, for general conscription along military lines. This is so they can, while pointing to an insidious foreign enemy, aim their firepower against some of the most valuable institutions of domestic public life. They have been very successful so far.
Pankaj Mishra
A terrible commotion rages among them, the populace shouts and loudly weeps, when suddenly, before the cathedral door, appears the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor himself... He pauses before the crowd and observes. He has seen all. He has witnessed the placing of the little coffin at His feet, the calling back to life. And now, his dark, grim face has grown still darker; his bushy grey eyebrows nearly meet, and his sunken eye flashes with sinister light. Slowly raising his finger, he commands his minions to arrest Him...
Jesus Christ
It's in those moments that you start to think about being white and male and over thirty and too smart for your own fuckin good. You start to get pretty down in the dumps sometimes. Besides, every group was into calling the other an imposter and fights were breaking out all over the place. The left was moving into Stalinism and the hippies were moving to the country (as usual). It was mighty lonely on the fence.
Abbie Hoffman
[Q:] Would the assassination of, say, Tony Blair by a suicide bomber - if there were no other casualties - be justified as revenge for the war on Iraq? [...]
[A:] Yes, it would be morally justified. I am not calling for it - but if it happened it would be of a wholly different moral order to the events of 7/7. It would be entirely logical and explicable. And morally equivalent to ordering the deaths of thousands of innocent people in Iraq - as Blair did.
George Galloway
A tremor ran through him. He had chosen, he reminded himself. He alone was responsible. The psychological test had proved that.
And yet, how responsible were the psychologists who had given him the test? How responsible was Mike Terry for offering a poor man so much money? Society had woven the noose and put it around his neck, and he was hanging himself with it, and calling it free will.
Robert Sheckley
"For information concerning the afterlife,” Miss Ophelia said, "kindly contact your nearest priest, minister, rabbi, mullah or anyone else on the accredited list of God's representatives. Thank you for calling.”
There was a sweet tinkle of chimes. Then the line went dead.
"What did the Big Fellow say?” asked General Muller.
"All I got was double-talk from his secretary.”
"Personally, I don't believe in superstitions like God,” General Muller said. "Even if it happens to be true, I find it healthier not to believe. Shall we get on with it?”
They got on with it.
Robert Sheckley
I see Christ as the incarnation of the piper who is calling us. He dances that shape and pattern which is at the heart of our reality. By Christ I mean not only Jesus; in other times and places, other planets, there may be other Lords of the Dance. But Jesus is the one I know of first and best. I sing of the dancing pattern in the life and words of Jesus.
Whether Jesus ever leaped in Galilee to the rhythm of a pipe or drum I do not know. We are told that David danced (and as an act of worship too), so it is not impossible. The fact that many Christians have regarded dancing as a bit ungodly (in a church, at any rate) does not mean that Jesus did. The Shakers didn't...
Sydney Carter
Looting. Rape. Kidnappings. Murder. Where no one had cared about Pakistan when I arrived at Harvard, now everyone did. And the condemnation of my country was universal. At first, I refused to believe the accounts in the Western press of atrocities being committed by our army in what the East Bengal rebels were now calling Bangladesh. According to the government-controlled Pakistani papers my parents sent me every week, the brief rebellion had been quelled. What were these charges then that Dacca had been burned to the ground and firing squads sent into the university to execute students, teachers, poets, novelists, doctors and lawyers? I shook my head in disbelief. Refugees were reportedly fleeing by the thousands, so many of them strafed and killed by Pakistani planes that their bodies were being used to erect road blocks.
Benazir Bhutto
Between the darkness on the street
And the houses filling up with light.
Between the stillness in my heart
And the roar of the approaching night.
Somebody's calling after somebody,
Somebody turns the corner out of sight,
Looking for somebody
Somewhere in the night.Tender is the night.
When you hold your baby tight,
Tender are the motions, tender is the night.
Jackson Browne
The philosopher John Toland, in the early 18th century, insisted that the terms 'Spinozism' and 'pantheism' are synonymous. Toland says that "Moses was, to be sure, a Pantheist, or, if you please, in more current terms, a Spinosist", while Spinoza's pantheism was taken for granted by Moses Mendelssohn, Gotthold Lessing and Friedrich Jacobi, in their famous Pantheismusstreit of 1785. More recently, this interpretation also appears in both the scholarly literature and popular representations of Spinoza's thought. In the recently published Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy we read that "Spinoza is the most distinguished pantheist in Western philosophy". But the problem with calling Spinoza a 'pantheist' is that pantheism is still a kind of theism.
Baruch Spinoza
I am the tender voice calling 'Away,'
Whispering between the beatings of the heart,
And inaccessible in dewy eyes
I dwell, and all unkissed on lovely lips,
Lingering between white breasts inviolate,
And fleeting ever from the passionate touch,
I shine afar, till men may not divine
Whether it is the stars or the beloved
They follow with wrapt spirit.
George William Russell
Israeli-American actress Natalie Portman again lashed at Israeli policies in an interview published in a Palestinian-owned newspaper Thursday, calling the controversial Nation-State Law "racist" and a "mistake." Portman, born Neta-Lee Hershlag in Jerusalem, also told the London-based Al- Quds Al-Arabi that law "oppressed Palestinians.”... The Nation-State Law... defines Israel as "the national home of the Jewish people.” It also drops Arabic as an official language... it has stoked anger among critics who, like Portman, argue that it is racist. Portman said she "doesn't agree” with the principle of the contentious law. "It's a mistake... I only hope that we will really love our neighbors and work together," she said.
Natalie Portman
"Harold, if you'll excuse me-" "But whatever can you be doing, my child?" The unreality was trying to creep back in again, and she found herself wondering just how much the human brain could be expected to stand before snapping like an overtaxed rubber band. My parents are dead, but I can take it. Some weird disease seems to have spread across the entire country, maybe the entire world, mowing down the righteous and the unrighteous alike- I can take it. I'm digging a hole in the garden my father was weeding only last week, and when it's deep enough I guess I'm going to put him in it- I think I can take it. But Harold Lauder in Roy Brannigan's Cadillac, feeling me up with his eyes and calling me "my child"? I don't know, my Lord, I just don't know.
Stephen King
"It's gonna be all right,” he told her, and rocked her, not really believing it, but it was the litany, it was the Psalter, the voice of the adult calling down the black well of years into the miserable pit of terrorized childhood; it was what you said when things went wrong; it was the nightlight that could not banish the monster from the closet but perhaps only keep it at bay for a little while; it was the voice without power that must speak nevertheless.
"It's gonna be all right,” he told her, not really believing it, knowing as every adult knows in his secret heart that nothing is really all right, ever.
Stephen King
Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say. In the West, some "friends" turned against me, calling me by yet another set of insulting names. Now I was spineless, pathetic, debased; I had betrayed myself, my Cause; above all, I had betrayed them .
I also found myself up against the granite, heartless certainties of Actually Existing Islam, by which I mean the political and priestly power structure that presently dominates and stifles Muslim societies. Actually Existing Islam has failed to create a free society anywhere on Earth, and it wasn't about to let me, of all people, argue in favor of one.
Salman Rushdie
If the rich man regarded the sermon as a means of grace, as a kind of rope thrown by the minister to a man just above the falls; if he regarded it as a lifeboat, or as a lighthouse, he would not allow his coachman to remain outside. If he really believed that the coachman had an immortal soul, capable of eternal joy, liable to everlasting pain, he would do his utmost to make the calling and election of the said coachman sure. As a matter of fact the rich man now cares but little for servants. They are not included in the scheme of salvation, except as a kind of job lot. The church has become a club. It is a social affair, and the rich do not care to associate in the week days with the poor they may happen to meet at church. As they expect to be in heaven together forever, they can afford to be separated here. There will certainly be time enough there to get acquainted.
Robert G. Ingersoll
I've never had any other loving heartfelt desire. From the minute I heard music I knew why I was born. To make music to play to listen to music, and for some reason I have been lucky enough to llive this beautiful life as a musicisan. I don't know. I love all things "nature". I'm an animal lover, but I don't have the smarts to be a vet, or the heart to have been a vet cause I cry over any wounded animal. ... I might have been maybe a zoo keeper helping feed the animals. Feeding or petting the big cats or whatever. I don't know what else I would have done, because I love music too much. For anyone who has that calling and is trying also to make a living at it, it is really hard. Getting gigs and getting listened to. Getting respect, it's hard. Its what bonds us all because we have been so rejected and dejected. Yet we know in our hearts why we are here.
Julie Gold
