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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 43cc32f | We need sweeping, systemic changes, carried out by a real supporter of the free market who sees the whole picture, not trivial tinkering by some empty suit. | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | ||
| 10653b8 | state says it is. It will provide services you do not want, will never use, and may even find morally repugnant, and then tell you what you must pay for them. | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | ||
| a84aef3 | The dot-com and housing bubbles can both be explained by artificial credit expansion, say such economists. | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | ||
| a1c4db8 | In the nineteenth century there was no such thing as "retirement," -- | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | ||
| 667b928 | Government departments are arranged hierarchically; those at the top are used to issuing orders and expect them to be carried out by their subordinates right down the line. Minow assumed that a cultural institution like television has a similar hierarchical structure, as if television executives could requisition more creative programming the way a bureaucrat orders new pencils or department stationery. | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | ||
| 94141ac | Communism brought out the worst in human nature, and crippled people's ability or ambition to participate in a market economy. | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | ||
| 2a3493e | As Ludwig von Mises puts it in this seminal book, modern man "must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police." | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | ||
| 7dbfd68 | Reagan has become the Right's Obama: a man whose every action is to be treated as ipso facto brilliant, perhaps even divinely inspired. | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | ||
| dcaebdc | No oppressive government can survive if it has to use force to get people to obey its commands. What government must do is get the people to buy in, to voluntarily support their own oppressors, or the system will collapse. | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | ||
| 3256b06 | The issue is whether the orders are morally acceptable or not, and that question is not answered by anti-intellectual demands of obedience. | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | ||
| 368e755 | Is it any surprise that the current center of coffee culture, the city of Seattle, home to the Starbucks coffeehouse chain, is also where some of the world's largest software and Internet firms are based? Coffee's association with innovation, reason, and networking--plus a dash of revolutionary fervor--has a long pedigree. | Tom Standage | ||
| 868f0a3 | During the first millennium BCE, even the beer-loving Mesopotamians turned their backs on beer, which was dethroned as the most cultured and civilized of drinks, and the age of wine began. | civilization culture mesopotamia wine | Tom Standage | |
| 7e1ffce | Illness and death are not the only consequences of the lack of access to water; it also hinders education and economic development. Widespread illness makes countries less productive, more dependent on outside aid, and less able to lift themselves out of poverty. According to the United Nations, one of the main reasons girls do not go to school in sub-Saharan Africa is that they have to spend so much time fetching water from distant wells a.. | third-world water | Tom Standage | |
| 5b9cd90 | But [Coca-Cola] was also genuinely welcomed by the servicemen in far-flung military bases: Coca-Cola reminded them of home and helped to maintain morale. | home military morale | Tom Standage | |
| 8e88c7c | such a social-media environment; it is merely the most recent and most efficient way that humans have found to scratch a prehistoric itch. The compelling nature of social media, then, can be traced back in part to the evolution of the social brain, as | Tom Standage | ||
| ed2a450 | Coffeehouses were centers of self-education, literary and philosophical speculation, commercial innovation, and, in some cases, political fermentation. But above all they were clearinghouses for news and gossip, linked by the circulation of customers, publications, and information from one establishment to the next. Collectively, Europe's coffeehouses functioned as the Internet of the Age of Reason. | coffee coffee-house | Tom Standage | |
| 42e8b7d | By tracing the careers of the four members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club, Laura Snyder has found a wonderful way not just to tell the great stories of 19th-century science, but to bring them vividly to life. | Tom Standage | ||
| 1bb34d4 | Later American support for the unpopular Muhammad Reza Shah, who not only closed down the Majlis to effect his modernization programme, but systematically denied Iranians fundamental human rights that democracy was supposed to guarantee, made it seem that there was a double standard. The West proudly proclaimed democracy for its own people, but Muslims were expected to submit to cruel dictatorships. In Egypt there were seventeen general ele.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| e9adeca | Paul had been doing his best to hasten the coming of the Messiah; that was the "good" that he was trying to do. But in an overwhelming moment of truth, he realized that Jesus's followers were absolutely right and that his persecution of their community had actually impeded the arrival of the Messianic Age. As if this were not enough, his violence had broken the fundamental principles of the Torah: love of God and love of neighbor. In his ex.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 57e08b9 | As we develop our compassionate mind, we should feel an increasing sense of responsibility for the suffering of others and form a resolve to do everything we can to free them from their pain. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 483af44 | Anybody who imagines that revealed religion requires a craven clinging to a fixed, unalterable, and self-evident truth should read the rabbis. Midrash required them to "investigate" and "go in search" of fresh insight. The rabbis used the old scriptures not to retreat into the past but to propel them into the uncertainties of the post-temple world." | Karen Armstrong | ||
| d71116d | The new Sufi tariqahs founded at this time stressed the unlimited potential of human life. Sufis could experience on the spiritual plane what the Mongols had so nearly achieved in terrestrial politics | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 244f971 | The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my earlier misgivings appeared justified. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed over a long period. Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God, and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 27f637b | My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines. I | Karen Armstrong | ||
| a2c4f93 | Compassion dervies from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning "to suffer, undergo or experience." So "compassion" means "to endure [something] with another person," to put ourselves in somebody else's shoes, to feel her pain as though it were our own, and to enter generously into his point of view. That is why our hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybo.. | compassion inspirational | Karen Armstrong | |
| 0a91b7a | Yet it is perhaps worth mentioning that the masculine tenor of God-talk is particularly problematic in English. In Hebrew, Arabic and French, however, grammatical gender gives theological discourse a sort of sexual counterpoint and dialectic, which provides a balance that is often lacking in English. Thus in Arabic al-Lah (the supreme name for God) is grammatically masculine, but the word for the divine and inscrutable essence of God--al-Dh.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| ecbcd88 | In each of the early surahs, God spoke intimately to the individual, often preferring to pose many of his teachings in the form of a question - 'Have you not heard?' 'Do you consider?' 'Have you not seen?'. Each listener was thus invited to interrogate him or herself. Any response to these queries was usually grammatically ambiguous or indefinite, leaving the audience with an image on which to meditate but with no decisive answer. This new .. | meditation quran reflection | Karen Armstrong | |
| ffc9358 | Every year there was an important poetry contest at the fair of 'Ukaz, just outside Mecca, and the winning poems were embroidered in gold on fine black cloth and hung on the walls of the Kabah. Muhammad's followers would, therefore, have been able to pick up verbal signals in the text that are lost in translation. They found that themes, words, phrases, and sound patterns recurred again and again--like the variations in a piece of music, wh.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| cb35b1a | people derived their faith in Jesus from the experience of living together in a close-knit, minority community that challenged the unequal distribution of wealth and power | Karen Armstrong | ||
| bbbdf8a | 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 realise the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| de163c6 | the Taliban travesty, a noxious combination of Deobandi rigidity, tribal chauvinism, and the aggression of the traumatized war orphan. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 967bf4f | Muhammad preached his farewell sermon to the Muslim community. He reminded them to deal justly with one another, to treat women kindly, and to abandon the blood feuds and vendettas inspired by the spirit of jahiliyyah. Muslim must never fight against Muslim. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 6cdbdab | even the presidents of Harvard and Yale saw the War of Independence as part of God's design for the overthrow of Catholicism. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 564696b | The Meccan merchants had met Christian monks and hermits during their travels, and were familiar with the stories of Jesus and the concepts of Paradise and the Last Judgment. They called Jews and Christians the ahl al-kitab ("the People of the Book"). They admired the notion of a revealed text and wished they had sacred scripture in their own language." | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 8d753e9 | Fighting and obtaining wealth were inseparable and interconnected: freed from the need to engage in productive work, the nobility had the leisure to cultivate their martial skills.84 They certainly fought for honor, glory, and the sheer pleasure of battle, but warfare was, "perhaps above all, a source of profit, the nobleman's chief industry."85 It needed no justification, because its necessity seemed self-evident." | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 636f060 | Am I my brother's guardian?" Cain asked after he had killed his brother, Abel. We are now living in such an interconnected world that we are all implicated in one another's history and one another's tragedies. As we--quite rightly--condemn those terrorists who kill innocent people, we also have to find a way to acknowledge our relationship with and responsibility for Mamana Bibi, her family, and the hundreds of thousands of civilians who ha.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| b289651 | The Oxford Classical Dictionary firmly states: "No word in either Greek or Latin corresponds to the English 'religion' or 'religious.' "6 The idea of religion as an essentially personal and systematic pursuit was entirely absent from classical Greece, Japan, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, China, and India.7 Nor does the Hebrew Bible have any abstract concept of religion; and the Talmudic rabbis would have found it impossible to express what they.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 862de8c | After Iyman Faris's foiled plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, however, most of the al-Qaeda central command had either been killed or captured, and there were no more major incidents.85 But just as the situation seemed to be improving, in March 2003, the United States, Britain, and their allies invaded Iraq, despite considerable opposition from the international community and strong protests throughout the Muslim world. The reasons for th.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| a9ec643 | The Deuteronomists had made violence an option in the Judeo-Christian religion. It would always be possible to make these scriptures endorse intolerant policies. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 54f2361 | Since all premodern state ideology was inseparable from religion, warfare inevitably acquired a sacral element. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| f21a035 | In the inscriptions of Darius I, who came to the Persian throne after the death of Cyrus's son Cambyses in 522 BCE, we find a combination of three themes that would recur in the ideology of all successful empires: a dualistic worldview that pits the good of empire against evildoers who oppose it; a doctrine of election that sees the ruler as a divine agent; and a mission to save the world. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 2df6fb8 | Ashoka's dilemma is the dilemma of civilization itself. As society developed and weaponry became more deadly, the empire, founded on and maintained by violence, would paradoxically become the most effective means of keeping the peace. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 00b9ff3 | But the state had no jurisdiction over the conscience of the individual and no right, therefore, to fight heresy or lead a holy war. While it could have nothing to do with the spiritual realm, the state must have unqualified and absolute authority in temporal affairs. Even if the state were cruel, tyrannical, and forbade the teaching of God's word, Christians must not resist its power.37 For its part, the true church, the Kingdom of God, mu.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| dbfd1eb | Dropping cluster bombs from the air is not only less repugnant: it is somehow deemed, by Western people at least, to be morally superior,' says British psychologist Jacqueline Rose. 'Why dying with your victim* should be seen as a greater sin than saving yourself is unclear.'The colonial West had created a two-tier hierarchy that privileged itself at the expense of 'The Rest'. The Enlightenment had preached the equality of all human beings,.. | neo-colonialism religion | Karen Armstrong |