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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 33ca124 | Judge for yourself. I've hated him and tried to love him for so many years I can't see him clearly. | Laurell K. Hamilton | ||
| 83e6a45 | He walked away through the crowd before i could decide if i'd been insulted or not. Just as well. For the life of me, i couldn't think of a good comeback line. | Laurell K. Hamilton | ||
| fc43fe0 | I promise to shoot anything, human or monster, that threatens me while I'm gone'. He made the Boy Scout sign, three fingers to heaven. 'You can bail me out of jail and explain that i was just following orders'. | Laurell K. Hamilton | ||
| 0fe1970 | We can order him to make appointments and talk to someone, but we can't force him to actually do the work. You've got to be willing to work on your issues. You've got to be willing to face hard truths and fight to get better. that takes courage and force of will. (Anita) | therapy wisdom | Laurell K. Hamilton | |
| 92c7584 | If you love someone your freedom is curtailed, if you love someone you give up much of your privacy, if you love someone you are not merely one person but half of a couple, to think or behave any other way is to risk losing that love. | Laurell K. Hamilton | ||
| 0c808c4 | If you keep the gun in your purse, you get killed, because no woman can find anything in her purse in under twelve minutes. It is a rule. | Laurell K. Hamilton | ||
| 15b5be7 | If you are following Deity's plan for you, it isn't always the easy path; sometimes it's the hard one. So why follow? Because to do any less is to betray your own abilities and gifts, and the faith that Deity has in you. Who would do that willingly? | spirituality | Laurell K. Hamilton | |
| d6d643d | It's not about being able to do something, Rocco. It's not even about thinking about doing it. It's not even about being tempted to go too far. [...] It's about deciding not to do it. It's about being tempted but not giving in. It isn't our abilities that make us evil, Sergeant, it's giving in to them. | Laurell K. Hamilton | ||
| c09607d | Edward wonders why I'm so sympathetic to the monsters. The answer is simple. Because I am one. | Laurell K. Hamilton | ||
| 99b8a43 | Talking to children is like testifying in court, answer just what's asked, don't elaborate, and don't volunteer information. | Laurell K. Hamilton | ||
| ff0d367 | Always, everywhere, the world is filled with collisions. | Luke Davies | ||
| 20dc9aa | In the act itself there is a point at which a light that comes from nowhere starts flickering like a strobe. What happens is not exactly a hallucination. But it wells up from deep in the earth and pounds through my body and there is nowhere to escape from its intensity. | Luke Davies | ||
| e0c33c2 | All summer it feels as if it will rain soon. All summer the strange feeling, 'something will break. | Luke Davies | ||
| c4ef594 | His eyes are huge and black. I think about desire. There are flickerings that occur, and we know very little about them. Millimetres of dilation are words in a language. | Luke Davies | ||
| 7ca79c4 | What passes relentlessly through the years is blood, and time; all the bitterness or warmth along the way is almost incidental. Even blood gets forgotten eventually, bleached into myth which are bleached of all colour into ashes of myth. | Luke Davies | ||
| f73432f | For every gain there is a sacrifice, and the removal of the parasite sometimes entails removal of the host. | Luke Davies | ||
| 59ffc5d | People lie so that others will form beliefs that are not true. The more consequential the beliefs--that is, the more a person's well-being demands a correct understanding of the world or of other people's opinions--the more consequential the lie. | Sam Harris | ||
| ffcde91 | the four factors in radicalization: a grievance narrative, whether real or perceived; an identity crisis; charismatic recruiters; and ideological dogma. | Sam Harris | ||
| 7a86442 | The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not "cowards," as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith--perfect faith, as it turns out--and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be." | Sam Harris | ||
| a4aeb0b | To understand this is to realize that we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose. Of course, this insight does not make social and political freedom any less important. The freedom to do what one intends, and not to do otherwise, is no less valuable than it ever was. Having a gun to your head is still a problem worth rectifying, wherever intentions come from. But the idea that we, as consciou.. | Sam Harris | ||
| 3e48457 | Moderates in every faith are obliged to loosely interpret (or simply ignore) much of their canons in the interests of living in the modern world. [...] The first thing to observe about the moderate's retreat from scriptural literalism is that it draws its inspiration not from scripture but from cultural developments that have rendered many of God's utterances difficult to accept as written. | Sam Harris | ||
| 5799136 | While the stoning of children for heresy has fallen out of fashion in our country, you will not hear a moderate Christian or Jew arguing for a "symbolic" reading of passages of this sort. [...] it is only by ignoring such barbarisms that the Good Book can be reconciled with life in the modern world. This is a problem for "moderation" in religion: it has nothing underwriting it other than the unacknowledged neglect of the letter of the divin.. | Sam Harris | ||
| a7faf75 | When we consider that so few generations had passed since the church left off disemboweling innocent men before the eyes of their families, burning old women alive in public squares, and torturing scholars to the point of madness for merely speculating about the | catholic church excommunication ss | Sam Harris | |
| bc6529c | The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand--that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character in this moment--is a mystery, exceeded only by the mystery that there should be something rather than nothing in the first place. Although science may ultimately show us how to truly maximize human well-being, it may still fail to dispel the fundamental mystery of our being itself. | Sam Harris | ||
| e370c88 | Most moral relativists believe that tolerance of cultural diversity is better, in some important sense, than outright bigotry. This may be perfectly reasonable, of course, but it amounts to an overarching claim about how all human beings should live. Moral relativism, when used as a rationale for tolerance of diversity, is self-contradictory. | Sam Harris | ||
| 902bbd8 | As we have seen, there is something that most Americans share with Osama bin Laden, the nineteen hijackers, and much of the Muslim world. We, too, cherish the idea that certain fantastic propositions can be believed without evidence. Such heroic acts of credulity are thought not only acceptable but redeeming -- even necessary. | Sam Harris | ||
| 7c0a442 | Making distinctions of this kind, however, is deeply unfashionable in intellectual circles. In my experience, people do not want to hear that Islam supports violence in a way that Jainism doesn't, or that Buddhism offers a truly sophisticated, empirical approach to understanding the human mind, whereas Christianity presents an almost perfect impediment to such understanding. In many circles, to make invidious comparisons of this kind is to .. | Sam Harris | ||
| 0b5f375 | Our habitual identification with thought--that is, our failure to recognize thoughts *as thoughts,* as appearances in consciousness--is a primary source of human suffering. It also gives rise to the illusion that a separate self is living inside one's head. | Sam Harris | ||
| 8169577 | If being prepared for death entails knowing when and where it will happen, the odds are you will not be prepared. Not only are you bound to die and leave this world; you are bound to leave it in such a precipitate fashion that the present significance of anything -- your relationships, your plans for the future, your hobbies, your possessions -- will appear to have been totally illusory. | Sam Harris | ||
| 947cc2e | When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives--about how they appear, their reputations, or their prospects in the world. This is an extraordinary stance to adopt toward other human beings, and it requires justification. Unless someone is suicidal or otherwise on the brink, deciding how much he should know about himself seems the quintes.. | Sam Harris | ||
| 3c541c2 | The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness--rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it. | Sam Harris | ||
| 835c1a2 | But if they don't try a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in their adult lives, I will wonder whether they had missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience. | Sam Harris | ||
| 2e54902 | If my brain were surgically divided by callosotomy tomorrow, this would create at least two independent conscious minds, both of which would be psychologically continuous with the person who is now writing this paragraph. If my linguistic abilities happened to be distributed across both hemispheres, each of these minds might remember having written this sentence. The question of whether I would land in the left hemisphere or the right doesn.. | Sam Harris | ||
| 8769766 | I fear that my lesson in this lifetime is humility... and I think that lesson is beneath me. | Sam Harris | ||
| 45cfaa3 | Word was that God could heal anyone. The wounded, the infirm, even lepers. I figured I should be a breeze. | Sam Harris | ||
| 7264a3a | In a now famous thought experiment, the philosopher Derek Parfit asks us to imagine a teleportation device that can beam a person from Earth to Mars. Rather than travel for many months on a spaceship, you need only enter a small chamber close to home and push a green button, and all the information in your brain and body will be sent to a similar station on Mars, where you will be reassembled down to the last atom. Imagine that several of y.. | Sam Harris | ||
| 26d0a75 | Critiquing Islam, critiquing any idea, is not bigotry. "Islamophobia" is a troubled and inherently unhelpful term. Yes, hatred of Muslims by neo-Nazi-style groups does exist, and it is a form of cultural intolerance, but that must never be conflated with the free-speech right to critique Islam. Islam is, after all, an idea; we cannot expect its merits or demerits to be accepted if we cannot openly debate it." | Sam Harris | ||
| aaffa8d | Every lie is an assault on the autonomy of those we lie to. | Sam Harris | ||
| 72376e1 | What is the meaning of life? What is our purpose on earth? These are some of the great, false questions of religion. We need not answer them, for they are badly posed, but we can live our answers all the same. At a minimum, we can create the conditions for human flourishing in this life--the only life of which any of us can be certain. That means we should not terrify our children with thoughts of hell or poison them with hatred for infidel.. | philosophy religion | Sam Harris | |
| bf98a2b | A great liberal betrayal is afoot. Unfortunately, many "fellow-travelers" of Islamism are on the liberal side of this debate. I call them "regressive leftists"; they are in fact reverse racists. They have a poverty of expectation for minority groups, believing them to be homogenous and inherently opposed to human rights values. They are culturally reductive in how they see "Eastern"--and in my case, Islamic--culture, and they are culturally.. | Sam Harris | ||
| 3f92910 | I do not believe that I am made of the stuff which constitutes heroes, because, in all of the hundreds of instances that my voluntary acts have placed me face to face with death, I cannot recall a single one where any alternative step to that I took occurred to me until many hours later. My mind is evidently so constituted that I am subconsciously forced into the path of duty without recourse to tiresome mental processes. However that may b.. | Edgar Rice Burroughs | ||
| d230efb | But this I do know that since you have told me that ten years have elapsed since I departed from this earth I have lost all respect for time--I am commencing to doubt that such a thing exists other than in the weak, finite mind of man. | Edgar Rice Burroughs | ||
| 2f3e5b5 | With man it is different. When he comes many of the larger animals instinctively leave the district entirely, seldom if ever to return; and thus it has always been with the great anthropoids. They flee man as man flees a pestilence. | Edgar Rice Burroughs | ||
| 8e87098 | It is always a foolish thing to contemplate suicide; for no matter how dark the future may appear today, tomorrow may hold for us that which will alter our whole life in an instant, revealing to us nothing but sunshine and happiness. So, for my part, I shall always wait for tomorrow. | Edgar Rice Burroughs |