Quotes by Commentators - Page 4

... just one more reminder that the rules are always different for girls, no matter who they are and no matter what they do.
Roxane Gay
This tension-the idea that there is a right way to be a woman, a right way to be the most essential woman- is ongoing and pervasive.
Roxane Gay
I was too smart and that made people uncomfortable--most folks where we've lived our whole lives don't trust too much intelligence in a woman. There is also the problem of my eyes--they don't hide anything. If I don't care for a person, my eyes make it plain. I don't care for most. Folks are generally comfortable with the small lies they tell each other. They don't know what to do with someone like me, who mostly doesn't bother with small lies.
Roxane Gay
I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.
Roxane Gay
Many comedians are very proud of themselves for saying the things others are supposedly afraid to say. They are at the forefront of this culture of entitlement where we get to do anything, think anything, and say anything.
Roxane Gay
The [women's] march was pointless, classless, and brainless, but not harmless. One common theme was anger at certain crass comments Trump made in the past. To combat this, the march’s leaders and their lemmings decided to be crude, lewd, and even more crass in the present. It’s much like trying to correct your child’s cursing by cursing him out.
Selwyn Duke
People like bipartisanship not because they like the substance of what bipartisanship produces, but because it reduces the cognitive stress that partisan disagreement creates. If two sides are bitterly arguing over some major piece of public policy, this forces us to choose sides, and for those with weak mastery of the issue or tenuous connections to a specific worldview, it is easy to be stalked by the worry that you’re choosing the wrong side: After all, there are a ton of people screaming in righteous indignation that the side you’re on is about to destroy the country.
Chris Hayes
A second marked characteristic of the Liberal in debate with the conservative is the tacit premise that debateis ridiculous....Many people shrink from arguments over facts because facts are tedious, because they require a formal familiarity with the subject under discussion, and because they can be ideologically dislocative. Many Liberals accept their opinions, ideas, and evaluations as others accept revealed truths.
William F. Buckley Jr.
It will be like having an extreme close-up in high definition to examine each freckle, while failing to notice whether the person is even wearing pants.
Mike Huckabee
Well, let's see. There's—of course in the great history of America there have been rulings that there's never going to be absolute consensus by every American, and there are those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So, you know, going through the history of America, there would be others. But, um.
Sarah Palin
The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
Sarah Palin
Decent people should ignore politics, if only they could be confident that politics would ignore them
William F. Buckley Jr.
Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown.And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities.
Sarah Palin
Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.
William F. Buckley Jr.
Islamic killers are over here because we are over there.
Patrick J. Buchanan
We hold all people to unspoken rules about who and how they should be, how they should think, and what the should say. We say we hate stereotypes but take issue when people deviate from those stereotypes.
Roxane Gay
We all have the capacity to do hurtful things, but we differ from one another in terms of scale-how much we can hurt others, how far we will go to make a statement about our beliefs, how remorseful we might feel in the aftermath of committing a terrible act.
Roxane Gay
Love your friends' kids even if you don't want or like children. Just do it.
Roxane Gay
The only difference between a good shot and a bad shot is if it goes in or not
Charles Barkley
Easter tells us of something children can't understand, because it addresses things they don't yet have to know: the weariness of life, the pain, the profound loneliness and hovering fear of meaninglessness.
Frederica Mathewes-Green
Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, of self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.
Karen Armstrong
The constant reprimands made me hyperconscious of my own performance, and so instead of getting rid of self, I had become embedded in the egoism I was supposed to transcend. Now I was beginning to understand that a silence that is not clamorous with vexation and worried self-regard can become part of the texture of your mind, can seep into you, moment by moment, and gradually change you.
Karen Armstrong
We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realize the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. We need myths that help us to create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a 'resource.' This is crucial, because unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that is able to keep abreast of our technological genius, we will not save our planet.
Karen Armstrong
I knew I was in love with The Hunger Games when I did not want to get off the treadmill
Roxane Gay
It's not called being gay, it's called being fabulous!
PewDiePie
I knew I was in love with The Hunger Games when I did not want to get off the treadmill
Roxane Gay
It's not called being gay, it's called being fabulous!
PewDiePie
Life, apparently, requires a trigger warning.This is the uncomfortable truth: everything is a trigger for someone. There are things you cannot tell just by looking at someone.We all have history. You can think you're over your history. You can think the past is the past. And then something happens, often innocuous, that shows you how far you are from over it. The past is always with you. Some people want to be protected from this truth.
Roxane Gay
A man has never told me he likes me. Like is more interesting than love.
Roxane Gay
Unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that can keep abreast of our technological genius, it is unlikely that we will save our planet. A purely rational education will not suffice.
Karen Armstrong
I had failed to make a gift of myself to God.
Karen Armstrong
In the tenth century BC, the priests of India devised the Brahmodya competition, which would become a model of authentic theological discourse. The object was to find a verbal formula to define the Brahman, the ultimate and inexpressible reality beyond human understanding. The idea was to push language as far as it would go, until participants became aware of the ineffable. The challenger, drawing on his immense erudition, began the process by asking an enigmatic question and his opponents had to reply in a way that was apt but equally inscrutable. The winner was the contestant who reduced the others to silence. In that moment of silence, the Brahman was present - not in the ingenious verbal declarations but in the stunning realisation of the impotence of speech. Nearly all religious traditions have devised their own versions of this exercise. It was not a frustrating experience; the finale can, perhaps, be compared to the moment at the end of the symphony, when there is a full and pregnant beat of silence in the concert hall before the applause begins. The aim of good theology is to help the audience to live for a while in that silence.
Karen Armstrong
If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology.
Karen Armstrong
Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they they conform to some metaphysical, scientific or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice.
Karen Armstrong
When the horror recedes and the world resumes its normal shape, you cannot forget it. You have seen what is "really" there, the empty horror that exists when the consoling illusion of our mundane experience is stripped away, so you can never respond to the world in quite the same way again."from Coleridge: Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread
Karen Armstrong
Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.
Rashi
I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I’m right. I am just trying—trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself.
Roxane Gay
I once heard a Chicago-area pastor put it this way: we don't need more Americans bowing down to the Democrat donkey or the Republican elephant. We need more Americans bowing down to the Lion of Judah.
Todd Starnes
As I ponder my pilgrim’s progress to Orthodoxy, however, I realize that I didn’t make the trip alone, but in a two-seater. And I wasn’t the one driving.
Frederica Mathewes-Green
Could a body broken and blood spilled two thousand years ago restore my own damaged life?
Frederica Mathewes-Green
Dusty, dark, cold, and hard, coal has no beauty of its own, but when it is consummated by fire it is beautiful and becomes what it was designed to be.
Frederica Mathewes-Green
Just because you support equal rights doesn't mean you are a feminist.
Hunter Avallone
Trump’s America is not America: not today’s or tomorrow’s, but yesterday’s.Trump’s America is brutal, perverse, regressive, insular and afraid. There is no hope in it; there is no light in it. It is a vast expanse of darkness and desolation.And that is a vision of America that most of the people in this country cannot and will not abide.
Charles M. Blow
Common sense tells us that the government's attempts to solve large problems more often create new ones. Common sense also tells us that a top-down, one-size-fits-all plan will not improve the workings of a nationwide health-care system that accounts for one-sixth of our economy.
Sarah Palin
Ibn al-Arabi gave this advice:Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not limited by any one creed, for he says, 'Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah' (Koran 2:109). Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently, he blames the disbelief of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance.
Karen Armstrong
Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs. fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them.
Karen Armstrong
God's will has to be done, in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that.
Sarah Palin
Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them. We all could.
Charles J. Sykes