Carrying Quotes - page 21
I agree ... that a professorship of Theology should have no place in our institution. But we cannot always do what is absolutely best. Those with whom we act, entertaining different views, have the power and the right of carrying them into practice. Truth advances, and error recedes step by step only; and to do to our fellow men the most good in our power, we must lead where we can, follow where we cannot, and still go with them, watching always the favorable moment for helping them to another step.
Thomas Jefferson
Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d'état, still use tanks. If a country has reached a high degree of industrialization the whole scene changes. The day after the fall of Khrushchev, the editors of Pravda, Izvestiia, the heads of the radio and television were replaced; the army wasn't called out. Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.
Umberto Eco
If we had been as ready in 1924 with definite concrete proposals as we are today, we could have gone to the Labour Party and said: "Here are our proposals with regard to the land, electricity, and the mines, and the condition of our support is that you should deal with them." We should have now been in the third year of carrying out a great programme of social reform instead of being in the horrible muddle we are in at the present moment. Are we going to get another chance? I think we are.
David Lloyd George
There are over seventeen thousand golf courses in America. They average over one hundred and fifty acres a piece – that's three million plus acres, four thousand, eight hundred and twenty square miles – you could build two Rhode Islands and a Delaware for the homeless on the land currently being wasted on this meaningless, mindless, arrogant, elitist, racist-there's another thing; the only blacks you'll find at country clubs are carrying trays-and a boring game. A boring game for boring people. You ever watch golf on television? It's like watching flies fuck! And a mindless game, too.
George Carlin
When so many adult critics were carrying on about the "incredible originality" of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid's fantasy crossed with a "school novel", good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.
Ursula K. Le Guin
When 9-11 happened, Pat Tillman quit the NFL. He gave up his million-dollar career, and humbled himself as a U.S. Army [sic] Soldier. And not just a Soldier, but as a U.S. Army Infantryman, a Ranger. Who can ever forget that picture of Tillman, an Army Private, marching in his graduation carrying his platoon guidon, that look of purpose, discipline, Americanism.
Allen West (politician)
Toby-Dog: It seems to me that of the two of us it's you they make the most of, and yet you do all the grumbling.
Kiki-The-Demure: A dog's logic, that! The more one gives the more I demand.
Toby-Dog: That's wrong. It's indiscreet.
Kiki-The-Demure: Not at all. I have a right to everything.
Toby-Dog: To everything? And I?
Kiki-The-Demure: I don't imagine you lack anything, do you?
Toby-Dog: Ah, I don't know. Sometimes in my very happiest moments, I feel like crying. My eyes grow dim, my heart seems to choke me. I would like to be sure, in such times of anguish, that everybody loves me; that there is nowhere in the world a sad dog behind a closed door, that no evil will ever come...
Kiki-The-Demure: And then what dreadful thing happens?
Toby-Dog: You know very well! Inevitably, at that moment She appears, carrying a bottle with horrible yellow stuff floating in it - Castor Oil!
Colette
I don't want to overdo discussing my experience of motherhood, its too private and profound to parade around. I will say that carrying a child, giving birth to a child and raising that child up has made me feel more engaged and connected to others. I have a greater understanding of people (living past & present). We all begin so pure, so innocent and so hungry for physical and emotional comfort. It's so important that every baby be generously cherished, fed and comforted. I can see now how withholding these essentials can do irreparable damage. Now (post-baby) when I encounter a sad or aggressive character, I wonder what the first three years of his or her life were like. Imaging them alone, crying in their cribs has given me much more compassion.
Natalie Merchant
The essence of Vassar is mythic. Today, despite much competition, it still figures in the public mind as the archetypal woman's college. [...] It signifies a certain je ne sais quoi; a whiff of luxury and the ineffable; plain thinking and high living. [...] For different people, in fact, at different periods, Vassar can stand for whatever is felt to be wrong with the modern female: humanism, atheism, Communism, short skirts, cigarettes, psychiatry, votes for women, free love, intellectualism. Pre-eminently among American college women, the Vassar girl is thought of as carrying a banner. The inscription on it varies with the era or with the ideas of the beholder and in the final sense does not matter - the flushed cheek and tensed arm are what count.
Mary McCarthy
I invented something called The Oxford Muse. The Muses were women in mythology. They did not teach or require to be worshipped, but they were a source of inspiration. They taught you how to cultivate your emotions through the different arts in order to reach a higher plane. What is lacking now, I believe, is somewhere you can get that stimulation not information, but stimulation where you can meet just that person, or find just that situation, which will give you the idea of invention, of carrying out some project which interests you, and show how it can become a project of interest to other people.
Theodore Zeldin
If we alone, among the great Powers, gave up the competition and sank into a position of inferiority, what good should we do? None whatever-no good to ourselves because we cannot realise great ideals of social reform at home when we are holding our existence at the mercy, the caprice if you like, of another nation. That is not feasible. If we fall into a position of inferiority our self-respect is gone, and it removes that enterprise which is essential both to the material success of industry and to the carrying out of great ideals, and you fall into a state of apathy. We should cease to count for anything amongst the nations of Europe, and we should be fortunate if our liberty was left, and we did not become the conscript appendage of some stronger Power. That is a brutal way of stating the case, but it is the truth.
Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon
The Church's method is not syncretist any more than it is naïve. Syncretism is artificial, generally the work of rulers or literary men, and presupposes declining faith. It is an insult to the living God. In the energetic language of the prophets, syncretism is fornication. In the spiritual order it is barren, like the political system or philosophy from which it springs. It lowers and vulgarizes all the elements it combines[...]. But here again the history of the Church can teach us. Christianity rejected Gnosticism, a representative of the syncretist system; but such an uncompromising boldness has not hindered her in carrying out her work of assimilation with a breadth of vision that is more clearly manifest every day.
Henri de Lubac
At about the age of eleven, I was reading the thrillers of Sax Rohmer and Edgar Wallace concerning Dr. Fu Manchu and other sophisticated Chinese villains, nurturing a secret admiration for these gentlemen because of their opposition to the suet-pudding heroism of our own culture, and because of their refined and mysterious style of life. While other boys dreamed of becoming generals, cowboys, mountain climbers, explorers, and engineers, I wanted to be a Chinese villain. I wanted servants carrying knives in their sleeves, appearing or vanishing without the slightest sound. I wanted a house with secret doors and passages, with Coromandel screens, with ancient scrolls, with ivory and lacquer boxes of exotic poisons, with exquisite brands of tea, with delicate blue porcelain, with jade idols and joss-sticks, and with sonorous gongs.
Alan Watts
The chant was audible but at that distance still wordless. Behind Jack walked the twins, carrying a great stake on their shoulders. The gutted carcass of a pig swung from the stake, swinging heavily as the twins toiled over the uneven ground. The pig's head hung down with gaping neck and seemed to search for something on the ground. At last the words of the chant floated up to them, across the bowl of blackened wood and ashes.
"Kill the pig! Cut her throat! Spill the blood!"
Yet as the words became audible, the procession reached the steepest part of the mountain, and in a minute or two the chant had died away.
William Golding
