Quotes by American Authors - Page 26

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others...
Ta-Nehisi Coates
What made such a plan seem workable was that for the early pluralists and their multicultural descendants society would have fewer and fewer traditional groups. The kind of pluralist society that Dewey and Kallen envisaged would go beyond rooted ethnic communities. It would become the evolving creation of “free” individual participants, setting goals under scientific direction and having their material interests monitored by a “conductor state.” The world as conceived by pluralists was there to be managed and to be made culturally safe for its framers: Eastern and Central European Jews fearful of traditional Gentile mores and the uprooted descendants of New England Calvinists looking for the New Jerusalem under scientific management.
Paul Edward Gottfried
Current public diplomacy and foreign policy making reduces the role of American citizens to mere spectators. The USIA's model of democracy and the free market is promoted as the superpower version of economic globalization, packaged and ready for shipping to clients throughout the world. In this version, foreign capital flows freely while the movement of people, particularly the world's poor, is strictly controlled. Such a commercial package speaks first and foremost for government 'partners,' the Fortune 500 corporations, which are the primary beneficiaries as well as the bankrollers of the American political process. This is a packaged story of America that is incomplete and undemocratic. Where do workers and communities fit into the story? How do private citizens play a part in building dialogue across cultures?
Nancy Snow
Democracy cannot function or survive without a sufficient medium by which citizens remain informed and engaged in public policy debates.
Nancy Snow
LENIN = "Revolutionary Social Democracy"American Socialists = "Democratic Socialism". What is the difference? The USSR held democratic referendums too; all of which increased the power of the central planners and reduced the individual to nothingness.
A.E. Samaan
Tribal Chief 1: The will of the people is what is best. That is what democracy meansTribal Chief 2: But if the people don’t know what they are talking about, how can that be the best?
Leonard Wibberley
I like it too," Angelo said. "I love this country. Much you and anybody, and you know it.""I know it," Prew said."But I still hate this country. You love the Army. But I dont love the Army. This country's Army is why I hate this country. What did this country ever do for me? Gimme a right to vote for men I cant elect? You can have it. Gimme a right to work at a job I hate? You can have that too. Then tell I'm a Citizen of the greatest richest country on earth, if I dont believe it look at Park Avenue. Carnival prizes. All carnival prizes. [..] They shouldnt teach their immigrants' kids all about democracy unless they mean to let them have a little bit of it, it ony makes for trouble. Me and the United States is dissociating our alliance as of right now, until the United States can find time to read its own textbooks a li
James Jones
Even if Zuma was to develop the authoritarian impulses of a Mugabe, he would be checked—not least by his own party, which set a continental precedent by ousting Thabo Mbeki in 2007, after it felt he had outstayed his welcome by seeking a third term as party president. The ANC appears to have set itself against that deathtrap of African democracy: the ruler for life.
Mark Gevisser
Hamas is regularly described as 'Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.' One will be hard put to find something like 'democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus'—blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable.
Noam Chomsky
A great democracy has got to be progressive or it will soon cease to be great or a democracy.
Theodore Roosevelt
I am the unseen. For centuries I have been here, beneath this great city, this metropolis. I know your language. I know all languages. . . . My cave is broad and cool. The sun cannot send its heat down here. The damp soil is rich and fragrant. I turn softly on my back and place my eight legs to the cave ceiling. Then, I listen. I am the spider. I see sound. I feel taste. I hear touch. I spin this story. This is the story I’ve spun.
Nnedi Okorafor
Storytellers have as profound a purpose as any who are charged to guide and transform human lives. I knew it as an ancient discipline and vocation to which everyone is called.
Nancy Mellon
People live in fear of bad being out to get them, when in reality, the bad side is there only to be in polar opposite proportion to the positive that you are destined to thrive in. Conquer the negative, and thrive in the positive.
C. JoyBell C.
Spend as much time as possible with positive, joyful people and as little time as possible with negative, unhappy people.
Molly Friedenfeld
Each of us has a finite reservoir of energy in any given day. Whatever amount of energy we spend obsessing about missteps we have made, decisions that do not go our way or the belief we have been treated unfairly is energy no longer available to add value in the world.
Tony Schwartz
Someone once said that there are always flowers for those who want to find flowers. I think that's true. But I also think that there are always cakes for those who want to find cakes.
C. JoyBell C.
I pretended I had urgent business at the prosecutor's table which, in one of The System's obvious tells, was always millimeters from the jury box.
Sergio de la Pava
The relevant question is not whether back then a few extraordinary individuals could overcome a system strongly weighted against them or whether today an admittedly far greater number requiring far less talent can succeed. The real question is whether it's harder for the people in this audience to succeed be they extraordinary, average, or below average. If it is, and I think it obvious that it is, then that's untenable in a country that purports to provide equal opportunity for all. Now of course you'll dispute my claim that it is more difficult to succeed for them. You say the battle's over. I say not only is it not over but you yourself are stationed on the frontline of the battle and have been all these years. This room and the criminal justice system as a whole is the frontline. This is where modern-day segregation lives on.
Sergio de la Pava
Our modern world defined God as a ‘religious complex’ and laughed at the Ten Commandments as OLD FASHIONED. Then, through the laughter came the shattering thunder of the World War. And now a blood-drenched, bitter world — no longer laughing — cries for a way out. There is but one way out. It existed before it was engraven upon Tablets of Stone. It will exist when stone has crumbled. The Ten Commandments are not rules to obey as a personal favor to God. They are the fundamental principles without which mankind cannot live together. They are not laws — they are The Law.
Cecil B. DeMille
Outside my bike, never has anything important in my life been just mine." My body stilled, so did my heart, and my eyes locked with his. He started moving again, slowly, deeply and he kept talking. "Always castoffs, leftovers, used, sometimes even food from the dumpsters." My heart started beating again, only to trip over itself; my breath came fast, not only from what was happening to my body but what he was saying. "Vance-" His lips came to mine, his hands moved out of my hair and went to the side of my face and he stared in my eyes, pressing deep inside. "Mine," he muttered, his deep voice hoarse, that fierce undercurrent there. His tone caused a shiver to run through me, straight through to my soul. Then he kissed me.
Kristen Ashley
This is England," he explained. "Tell someone it's a procedure, and they'll believe you. The pointless procedure is one of our great natural resources.
Maureen Johnson
However, this court is constrained by law, and under the law, I can only conclude that the Government has not violated FOIA by refusing to turn over the documents sought in the FOIA requests, and so cannot be compelled by this court of law to explain in detail the reasons why its actions do not violate the Constitution and the laws of the United States. The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me; but after careful and extensive consideration, I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules—a veritable Catch-22. I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret.
Colleen McMahon
For those who believe executive branch officials will voluntarily interpret their surveillance authorities with restraint, I believe it is more likely that I will achieve my life-long dream of playing in the NBA.
Ron Wyden
With its continued dismissal of the law of God in ethics, Fundamentalism expressed both a "spiritualized" form of situational ethics and a "Christianly submissive" statism.
Greg L. Bahnsen
Of all the wicked heresies and threatening movements facing the church in our day, when Westminster Seminary finally organized their faculty to write something in unison, they gave their determined political efforts not to fight socialism, not to fight homosexuality, not abortion, not crime and mayhem in our society, not subjectivism in theology, not dispensationalism, not cultural relativism, not licentiousness, not defection from the New Testament, not defection from the Westminster Confession of Faith, all of which are out there and they can give their legitimate efforts to… boy the thing they had to write about was theonomy! How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he doesn’t see the problem?
Greg L. Bahnsen
In 1996 Dorothy Mackey wrote an Op-ed piece, “Violence from comrades a fact of life for military women.” ABC News 20/ 20 did a segment on rape in the military. By November four women came forward at Aberdeen Proving Ground, in Maryland, about a pattern of rape by drill sergeants. In 1997 the military finds three black drill sergeants to scapegoat. They were sent to prison and this left the commanding generals and colonels untouched to retire quietly. The Army appointed a panel to investigate sexual harassment. One of the panelists was the sergeant Major of the Army, Eugene McK
Diane Chamberlain
Well before she became famous — or infamous, depending on where you cast your vote — Loftus's findings on memory distortion were clearly commodifiable. In the 1970s and 1980s she provided assistance to defense attorneys eager to prove to juries that eyewitness accounts are not the same as camcorders. "I've helped a lot of people," she says. Some of those people: the Hillside Strangler, the Menendez brothers, Oliver North, Ted Bundy. "Ted Bundy?" I ask, when she tells this to me. Loftus laughs. "This was before we knew he was Bundy. He hadn't been accused of murder yet." "How can you be so confident the people you're representing are really innocent?" I ask. She doesn't directly answer. She says, "In court, I go by the evidence.... Outside of court, I'm human and entitled to my human feelings. "What, I wonder are her human feelings about the letter from a child-abuse survivor who wrote, "Let me tell you what false memory syndrome does to people like me, as if you care. It makes us into liars. False memory syndrome is so much more chic than child abuse.... But there are children who tonight while you sleep are being raped, and beaten. These children may never tell because 'no one will believe them.'" "Plenty of "Plenty of people will believe them," says Loftus. Pshaw! She has a raucous laugh and a voice with a bit of wheedle in it. She is strange, I think, a little loose inside. She veers between the professional and the personal with an alarming alacrity," she could easily have been talking about herself.
Lauren Slater
I have interacted with the police complaints and internal affairs division twice and both times I came away with the opinion that I was dealing with a blatantly corrupt group of people.
Steven Magee
When it is a law abiding common person versus the police internal affairs regarding a corrupt or incompetent police officer, the statistics show that it is the common person that most frequently loses.
Steven Magee
The last word smelled of desperation,and the old lawyer sighed. 'I can tell you that the law is an ocean of darkness and truth, and that lawyers are but vessels on the surface. We may pull one rope or another, but it is the client, in the end, who charts the course.
John Hart
The sure guaranty of the peace and security of each race is the clear, distinct, unconditional recognition by our governments, national and state, of every right that inheres in civil freedom, and of the equality before the law of all citizens of the United States, without regard to race. State enactments regulating the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race, and cunningly devised to defeat legitimate results of the war, under the pretense of recognizing equality of rights, can have no other result than to render permanent peace impossible, and to keep alive a conflict of races, the continuance of which must do harm to all concerned.
John Marshall Harlan
Sixty millions of whites are in no danger from the presence here of eight millions of blacks. The destinies of the two races, in this country, are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law.
John Marshall Harlan
...intricate stone carvings and wood trim gave the law school an almost medieval feel. You'd even sometimes hear that we went to HLS (Hogwarts Law School).
J.D. Vance
While we think of the boundary between what is legal and what is not as a clear dividing line, it is far from being so. Rather, the boundary becomes further and further indented and folded over time, yielding a jagged and complicated border, rather than a clear straight line. In the end, the law turns out to look like a fractal: no matter how much you zoom in on such a shape, there is always more unevenness, more detail to observe. Any general rule must end up dealing with exceptions, which in turn split into further exceptions and rules, yielding an increasingly complicated, branching structure.
Samuel Arbesman
I never violate my oaths or my codes... Only international laws.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
I am far more fearful of the police than I am of North Korea.
Steven Magee
That's what everyone thinks--they think being a cop is about punishing people for doing wrong. But that's not true. You know it isn't. It's about believing in people, believing in the good. In the will of people to do what's right despite their own instincts.
Scott Snyder
There are laws. There are rules. And when you break them, there are consequences. Laws of nature and laws of life. Laws of love and laws of death.
Amy Harmon
It may seem odd to say that the men who made the myths disliked the irrational and had a love for facts; but it is true, no matter how wildly fantastic some of the stories are...
Edith Hamilton
There are over a million types of fish in the sea as there are flowers in all of the world's gardens. There are at least a million different types of minerals as there are species of birds or monkeys. The possible configurations of lifeforms that could be created from a single atom are infinite. There are at least a billion people on this earth, and no two faces look the same. It is very arrogant to assume that we have seen all of God's miracles.
Suzy Kassem
A multitude of harlequin lifeforms bobbed and twirled and played in the depths of the Atlantic. Pink cucumbers with thorny backs. Algae. Starfish. Annelids with simple brains and a hundred toes. Sponges—like yellow, swollen hands—sucked in water and pushed out oxygen. Most amusing were the mysterious buggers who had no likeness on the previous earth; tiny beasts with exotic exoskeletons engraved with deep grid-like patterns, snails with horns, and slithering plants that looked like magenta weeping willows.
Jake Vander-Ark
The best don’t stick around when you treat them poorly, only the desperate do.
Shannon L. Alder
Yes, learning curves can be painful, exhausting, trying, scary, and intimidating. How did you learn to ride a bike? One pedal, one balance, one turn, and one step at a time.
Susan C.Young
Mankind's biggest blunder, ignorance. Mankind's second, infallible.
M.T. Dismuke
Sometimes in the quest for enlightenment the only thing that gets lighter is your wallet.
Steve Maraboli
Serenity of mind produces an expanding awareness that fosters creative selflessness, which in turn enables us to experience unabashed harmony communing in rhythmical bliss with nature.
Kilroy J. Oldster
A person only experiences the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars that constitute reality by giving up the distorting spectacles of our egotistical appetites and repulsive pretensions, shedding artificial attachments, living without grand illusions, and free of deceptive delusions.
Kilroy J. Oldster
The problem with car insurance is that you never know how bad your policy is until you are involved in a car crash. At that point enlightenment begins.
Steven Magee
In that nanosecond of enlightenment I knew that the human spirit survives the death of the physical body and I understood that my wandering soul needed to get back into its earthly habitat.
Janet Bettag
Sleep is a daily reminder from God that we are not God. Once a day God sends us to bed like patients with a sickness. The sickness is a chronic tendency to think we are in control and that our work is indispensable. To cure us of this disease God turns us into helpless sacks of sand once a day.
John Piper
A 2002 Oxford study showed counting sheep actually delays the onset of sleep. It's just too dull to stop us from worrying about jobs and spouses
A.J. Jacobs
There now remain only a few books, which they call books of the lesser prophets; and as I have already shown that the greater are impostors, it would be cowardice to disturb the repose of the little ones. Let them sleep, then, in the arms of their nurses, the priests, and both be forgotten together.
Thomas Paine
I am here to tell youWe are all of us just as mighty as planets—and you too,We'll let you in, we've got stalwart to spare—But you might have to sleep on the floor.
Catherynne M. Valente
Come on, baby. It’s time.”“You’re mean, Noah.”The blanket falls off her arm as I slide a finger down her shoulder. Goose bumps form along her skin at my touch. She may be cranky, but she’s responding.“A deal’s a deal,” I remind her.“I changed my mind. I’d rather sleep.” With her eyes still shut, she hunts for the cover, but I kick it off. She presses her lips together. “I’m serious. You’re the meanest person I know.”I kiss her neck then blow on the skin, pleased with the smile she’s fighting.“Does that feel mean?” I ask.“Horribly.” She giggles. “It’s torture.
Katie McGarry
I slept so long and hard that when my mother woke me the next morning I was a stranger to myself.
Lauren Wolk
Do you Believe? Do you Fade like a Dream?Let me hear you BREATHELet me watch as you sleepThe Sparrow's Eyes... Promises shift into judgmentsI cannot deny that you were designed for my punishments
Slipknot
Food," I suggested. "Sleep. That's what I need. To get the hell away from here."Cole frowned at me, as if I'd suggested "ducks" and "yoga".
Maggie Stiefvater
One Life is about realizing there's no second chances in this one life that we were given to live. So we need to be thankful for all we have. Work hard for what we want and love one another no matter the difference.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
We are never taught more deeply and more truthfully than by pain.
Bryant McGill
You are the grand estate and administrator of — now.
Bryant McGill