No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.
We do not have time for this kind of silliness. ... We're not going to be able to do it if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts. We're not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers.
Your emotions get wrapped up in it. It reflected a particular moment in time in our lives.
Water is a very good servant, but it is a cruel master.
I begin by taking. I shall find scholars later to demonstrate my perfect right.
We see the path to agreement as challenging because the gap between the parties remains wide.
Yesterday was a very bad day. I had hoped today would be different. Today is a very bad day, too.
Is it perfect? No. I'd be the first to admit it's flawed. But welcome to divided government.
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: "Whose?"
Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth. Let us reflect that it is inhabited by a thousand millions of people. That these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion. That ours is but one of that thousand. That if there be but one right, and ours that one, we should wish to see the 999 wandering sects gathered into the fold of truth. But against such a majority we cannot effect this by force. Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves?
They know of no solutions to the paradoxes of the Middle East and Europe, the Far East and Africa except the landing of Marines. Being baffled, and also being very tired of being baffled, they have come to believe that there is no way out -- except war -- which would remove all the bewildering paradoxes of their tedious and now misguided attempts to construct peace. In place of these paradoxes they prefer the bright, clear problems of war -- as they used to be. For they still believe that "winning" means something, although they never tell us what.
In the United States a handful of corporations centralize decisions and responsibilities that are relevant for military and political as well as economic developments of global significance. For nowadays the military and the political cannot be separated from economic considerations of power. We now live not in an economic order or a political order, but in a political economy that is closely linked with military institutions and decisions. This is obvious in the repeated "oil crisis" in the Middle East, or in the relevance of Southeast Asia and African resources for the Western powers.
My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income.
Had this case proceeded in Manhattan or in an alternative venue in the United States, as I seriously explored in the last year, I am confident that our justice system could have performed with the same distinction that has been its hallmark for over 200 years. Now, unfortunately, since I made that decision, members of Congress have intervened and imposed restrictions blocking the administration from bringing any Guantanamo detainees to trial in the United States, regardless of the venue. As the President has said, those unwise and unwarranted restrictions undermine our counter-terrorism efforts and could harm our national security.
An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know; and it's knowing how to use the information you get.
I call it the table of gore. There's plenty of protein up in that nest.
[T]he general root of superstition [is] namely, that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.
What the opposition needs as much as anything right now is some training, some command and control, and some organization. It's pretty much a pickup ballgame at this point.
