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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 57f9647 | After he finishes his song, I ask him, "Sir, were you just playing 'Lean on Me'?" "That's right!" he answers, thrilled. Now, whenever I think of Mudd and his house I hear that song, hear Mudd serenading the limping Booth, taking his arm and helping him up the stairs, singing, "Lean on me, when you're not strong, and I'll be your friend." -- | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 83aadd9 | Of course Americans celebrate Independence Day as opposed to Yorktown Day. Who wants to barbecue a hot dog and ponder how we owe our independence to the French navy? Who wants to twirl sparklers and dwell on how the French government's expenditures in America contributed to the bankruptcy that sparked the French Revolution that would send Rochambeau to prison, Lafayette into exile (then prison), and our benefactor His Most Christian Majesty.. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 6c4c8ee | Mutual Criticism required a member of the group to stand up in front of everybody and listen to the enumeration of his or her faults. The bright side of being that night's subject for criticism was the rare treat at Oneida of being the center of attention. The downside was that everyone you knew and loved was allowed, even encouraged, to look into your eyes and ask, "You know what your problem is?" | Sarah Vowell | ||
| cdc7718 | The irony of informing nearly naked people in a wilderness setting about the story of naked Adam and Eve eating the fruit of knowledge and inventing the fashion industry due to a sudden need for clothing to hide their shame is not lost on Williams. | hubris irony | Sarah Vowell | |
| 1f68d6a | Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of litera.. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| e42b7c2 | As the starstruck Lafayette later described his first glimpse of Washington, "It was impossible to mistake for a moment his majestic figure and deportment; nor was he less distinguished by the noble affability of his manner." What a sweet memory. Still, it does get on my nerves how easy it is for tall people to make a good first impression." | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 9d4d58e | I soon figured out that I should keep my qualms to myself. Christianity is no different from any other cult---it isn't about faith. It's about agreement, about like-minded people sitting together in the same room at the same time believing the same thing. That unity is its appeal. Once someone, even a little six-year-old someone wearing patent leather Mary Janes, starts asking questions that can't be answered, the whole congregation's fun i.. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| ea35b8c | There are people in this country who will argue that because of the demise of morals in general, and Sunday school in particular, kids today are losing their innocence before they should, that because of cartoons and Ken Starr and curricula about their classmates who have two mommies, youth learn too soon about sex and death. Well, like practically everyone else in the Western world who came of age since Gutenberg, I lost my innocence the o.. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| fef5c47 | mania for exact change can be off-putting for a traveler, what with getting yelled at by cashiers and cab drivers all day long for the crime of paying a sixteen-euro fare with a twenty-euro note. She said that it was nothing personal, that the French are naturally aggressive, especially with one another. Which I suppose is a form of equality, but not the sweet kind experienced by Lafayette. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| c05c573 | there is anything to be learned from the conspiracy--other than when in doubt, bet on George Washington--it is to beware the pitfalls of certainty. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 62018df | The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave," he wrote. "It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest." | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 88a551a | Chevalier d'Eon de Beaumont, had previously served France as both a male soldier in the Seven Years' War and a female secret agent who infiltrated the Russian monarchy, successfully befriending and convincing a Russian czarina not to become an ally of France's enemy Great Britain. No one was entirely sure of his/her gender, and he/she kept them guessing. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| abc0557 | Experience is terribly important. You'll notice that the congressmen who want to hold up the government are all junior people and new to the game. And of course they will say, 'Oh, it's Washington cynicism, where they all compromise and work out backroom deals.' But that's actually how democracy works." Which" | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 54d729a | Intellectual activity in a culture is not a one-way flow between the great minds and passive recipients; it is a discourse, a complex marketplace-like conglomeration of intellectual exchanges involving many participants all trying to manipulate the ideas available to them in order to explain, justify, lay blame for, or otherwise make sense of what is happening around them. Everyone, not just the great minds, participates in this complicated.. | history-of-thought philosophy | Gordon S. Wood | |
| 7219975 | Life was theater, and impressions one made on spectators were what counted. Public leaders had to become actors or characters, masters of masquerade. | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| 5f9fd2e | You didn't argue with Griffin when there was a plan involved. In this town, Griffin Bing was The Man With The Plan. | Gordon Korman | ||
| 345962e | I'm supposed to talk some sense into you," she told me. "But what I really want to say is congratulations. You did the right thing." "The police don't think so." "Typical," she clucked. "Getting hung up on the numbers on your birth certificate when you probably saved a life." "They made" | Gordon Korman | ||
| 27b3c0b | That Mesozoic mama's boy wouldn't have lasted five seconds in the Cretaceous period. | Gordon Korman | ||
| e3f3d49 | Mrs. Donnelly lived here with her daughter, Sophie. And, of course, me, now. Sophie | Gordon Korman | ||
| 534f589 | There was no logical explanation for what I did. It had to come from my DNA. That's | Gordon Korman | ||
| 359c3c1 | Noah stepped forward for a closer look. "If it's a girl," he said finally, "then what's that?" And we could all see exactly what he was pointing at." | Gordon Korman | ||
| f74369c | What's a starbuck? | Gordon Korman | ||
| d7ace74 | We're gifted," I explained." | Gordon Korman | ||
| 7cec636 | anger is the emotion of a lesser person. | Gordon Korman | ||
| 5e5a5b5 | That was when I started to worry about what was going to happen to me. | Gordon Korman | ||
| d586f5c | Believing in the divinity of Jesus is the heart of Christian orthodoxy. But believing in the viability of Jesus's ideas makes Christianity truly radical. | Brian Zahnd | ||
| 9406559 | War, as a legitimate means of shaping the world, died with Christ on Good Friday. Jesus refuted the war option when he told Peter to put up his sword. Killing in order to liberate Jesus and his followers from the violent injustice of Caiaphas, Herod, and Pilate would have been a just war--but Jesus refused to engage in a just war. He chose instead to bear witness to the truth, forgive, and die. Jesus took the death of a world framed by war .. | Brian Zahnd | ||
| a61a913 | Jesus didn't seem very interested in exposing symptomatic sinners--tax collectors, drunkards, prostitutes, etc. Instead Jesus challenged the guardians of systemic sin--the power brokers of religion and politics. | Brian Zahnd | ||
| 084ef9b | It's not the task of the church to change the world by legislative force. It's the task of the church to be the world changed by Christ. This is revolutionary in a way that conventional politics never can be. | Brian Zahnd | ||
| 0766744 | Jesus overturned money-changing tables in the temple, but set up banqueting tables in his Father's house. | Brian Zahnd | ||
| b9b58ed | we eventually have to ask ourselves what did Jesus intend and when do we need to turn the other cheek? If our default response to this portion of the Sermon on the Mount is to craft exemptions, we might give the impression that we really don't believe in Jesus's ideas of nonviolent resistance and enemy love at all. | Brian Zahnd | ||
| ad2e8ec | I know what the cynics will say. I know how the scoffers will sneer. I know the non-dreamers believing only in the brutal ways of force will laugh me off as impossibly naive. But I don't care. I've grown immune to their strain of unbelief. I've turned a corner. I believe that what Isaiah dreamed of, Jesus died for. I believe that what Isaiah said would come to pass in the last days, Jesus inaugurated in his resurrection. I've caught a glimp.. | Brian Zahnd | ||
| 85af2fa | What sinners need (shall we say deserve?) is love and healing, not torture and death. We are worthy of God's love and healing not on the basis of personal merit but because of the image we bear: the very image of God. Original blessing is more original than original sin! | Brian Zahnd | ||
| 2a86499 | this--when we feel hurt, threatened, or angered by a person, people-group, opinion, or situation, we instinctively look through the lens of self-defense. It's like looking at something through the sights of a gun--it's a narrow perspective framed in fear and held in hostility. Such a perspective is certainly not the full or true perspective. But if we are dualistic, non-contemplative people, we will think of our highly limited perspective a.. | Brian Zahnd | ||
| 921c9ff | The resurrection is not only God's vindication of his Son; it is the vindication of all Jesus taught. Easter Sunday is nothing less than the triumph of the peaceable kingdom of Christ. Easter changes everything. Easter is the hope of the world, the dawn of a new age, the rising of the New Jerusalem on the horizon of humanity's burned-out landscape. Easter is God saying once again, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. Listen.. | Brian Zahnd | ||
| 36e22bf | For people who are poor at being spiritual (which is most people), this announcement really is good news. But do you see how counterintuitive this is? The kingdom of God is coming on earth, and who would we think would be the first ones invited in? The religious. The devout. The observant. The ones rich in spirituality. The ones good at being spiritual. But that's not how Jesus issued the invitation, and it's not what happened. It was the s.. | Brian Zahnd | ||
| 3895205 | Christianity is a confession, not an explanation. We will attempt to explain what we legitimately can, but we will always confess more than we can explain. | Brian Zahnd | ||
| a6f10a0 | If we console ourselves with the promise of heaven in the afterlife while creating hell in this present life, we have embraced the tawdry religion of the crusader and forsaken the true faith of our Savior. | Brian Zahnd | ||
| 5de15c8 | Jesus does not lead his people as an angry crowd. Jesus does not lead his people to join an angry crowd. Jesus never leads anything other than a gentle and peaceable minority. | Brian Zahnd | ||
| 4d84c07 | The tragedy of growing up is not that we put aside childishness, but that we lose the capacity for childlike wonder. | Brian Zahnd | ||
| 1f8d34b | The problem is this: when we separate Jesus from his ideas for an alternative social structure, we inevitably succumb to the temptation to harness Jesus to our ideas--thus conferring upon our human political ideas an assumed divine endorsement. With little awareness of what we are doing, we find ourselves in collusion with the principalities and powers to keep the world in lockstep with the ancient choreography of violence, war, and death. .. | Brian Zahnd | ||
| 90ddbf5 | It was Jesus's ideas about truth and freedom that made him dangerous to the principalities and powers. But today our gospel isn't very dangerous. It's been tamed and domesticated. If Jesus of Nazareth had preached the paper-thin version of what passes for the "gospel" today--a shrunken, postmortem promise of going to heaven when you die--Pilate would have shrugged his shoulders and released the Nazarene, warning him not to get mixed up in t.. | Brian Zahnd | ||
| 6f8a81a | Violence is the enslavement of a pervasive lie; it imposes upon men a falsified vision not only of God but also of everything else. And that is indeed why it is a closed kingdom. Escaping from violence is escaping from this kingdom into another kingdom, whose existence the majority of people do not even suspect. This is the Kingdom of love, which is also the domain of the true God, the Father of Jesus, of whom the prisoners of violence cann.. | Brian Zahnd | ||
| be6ce01 | It is through the Incarnation that glory and beauty save the world. | Brian Zahnd |