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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3e349ee | Slavery was, in fact, a social system designed to destroy social capital among slaves and between slaves and freemen. | social-capital | Robert D. Putnam | |
| 5c4004b | Automatic law corrodes our freedom | Philip K. Howard | ||
| d0d386f | In 2010, 70 percent of federal tax revenue was consumed by three entitlement programs (Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security) | Philip K. Howard | ||
| 5fab838 | America has succumbed to its own intermediate goal. Purging official discretion, not advancing the public good, has become the goal of the Rule of Law. Better to prevent a bad choice, even at the cost of banning all good choices. Unquestioned assumptions are the most powerful forces in human affairs. If people assume something is right or wrong, they'll act on it even to the point of self-destruction. Just as the inhabitants of Easter Islan.. | Philip K. Howard | ||
| dfeade2 | The top surface of the computer is smooth except for a fisheye lens, a polished glass dome with a purplish optical coating. Whenever Hiro is using the machine, this lens emerges and clicks into place, its base flush with the surface of the computer. The neighborhood loglo is curved and foreshortened on its surface. Hiro finds it erotic. This is partly because he hasn't been properly laid in several weeks. But there's more to it. Hiro's fath.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| e1a2548 | After September 1939, perhaps one billion of the world's roughly two billion population were soldiers, partisans, and producers engaged in trying to kill people. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 2557013 | Yet it is hard to find many wars that have resulted from miscommunications or misunderstandings. Far more often they break out because of malevolent intent and the absence of deterrence, or because a prior war ended without a clear resolution or without settling disagreements--in a manner of Rome's first two wars with Carthage. Again, Margaret Atwood was empirical when she wrote in her poem, "Wars happen because the ones who start them / th.. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 93cd6bf | Osama bin Laden did not attack on September 11 because there was a dearth of American diplomats willing to talk with him in the Hindu Kush. He did not think America denied its Muslim citizens the right to worship freely. He did not think his native Saudi Arabia was impoverished or short of lebensraum. Instead, he recognized that a series of Islamic terrorist assaults against U.S. interests over two decades had met with what he would judge a.. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 739c2ac | Over many years bin Laden cited dozens of concocted reasons about why he attacked the United States; the only valid one was that he attacked America because he thought--to paraphrase Margaret Atwood--with good reason, he could get away with it. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| ac083bd | To conclude wars decisively and achieve prewar aims, the victor must defeat, and often even humiliate militarily, an enemy and force the loser to abandon prewar behavior before offering a magnanimous peace. "Humiliate," here, does not mean to gratuitously insult or ridicule a prostrate enemy but rather to show him that the wages of his unprovoked aggression are the end of his ability to make war on others." | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 76644e9 | General George S. Patton may have been uncouth, but he wasn't wrong when he bellowed, "Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser." | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| b39214a | human character is unchanging and thus its conduct in calamitous times is always predictable. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 28e479d | After fighting for four long years, we were completely surprised by the Soviets' efforts to absorb Eastern Europe, and their rejection of almost all wartime assurances of elections to come. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| a847f01 | Harry Truman, after all, in conjunction with Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, radically cut back American arms following the end of the Second World War. Johnson himself wished to dismantle the Marine Corps and felt nuclear weapons had made all such conventional arms unnecessary. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| d2892c7 | Japan would live and die by the race card--defining (and demonizing) America as "white" and thus Japan as a kindred but clearly superior "yellow" people." | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 21b320f | Greeks and Romans were anti-Mediterranean cultures, in the sense of being at odds with much of the political heritages of Persia, Egypt, and Phoenicia. While Hellenism was influenced--and enriched--at times by Near Eastern, Egyptian, and Persian art, literature, religion, and architecture, its faith in consensual government and free markets was unique. Greek and Latin words for "democracy," "republic," "city-state," "constitution," "freedom.. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| c3f2068 | Few American commentators evaluated MacArthur's strategic sense at various stages in his generalship in Korea; it was instead the perception of whether he was winning or losing that mattered most to the public. | berserker declan-chase dreams-of-a-dark-warrior immortals-after-dark kresley-cole lore paranormal-romance regin-the-radiant valkyrie | Victor Davis Hanson | |
| a983213 | We should note that almost every technological transformation of consequence has taken place under Western auspices--if not Western in the strict geographical sense, then Western in the notion of a cultural landscape shaped by free thought and the chance for profit. Even non-Western innovations, like stirrups and gunpowder, have been quickly modified and improved by Western militaries. Jet fighters, GPS-guided bombs, and laser-guided muniti.. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 9001f0d | No society in the present age is so self-critical, so ready to embrace foreign ideas, or so transparent and merit-based as the United States. Far more lethal to the U.S. military than a new form of IED would be censorship of ideas back home in the United States, or religious restrictions on research, or politically guided rules of investigation and publication, or government-run monopolies on labor, management, and production. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| e7aefbc | The United States, being a strong and wealthy society, and with unrivaled global influence, invites envy. The success of its restless culture of freedom, constitutional democracy, self-critique, secular rationalism, and open markets provokes the resentment of both weaker and less-secure theocracy and autocracy alike. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| e4a13c7 | Who we are, how we think, and the manner in which we act, ipsis factis, are considered obnoxious, dangerous, and unpalatable to many fundamentalist Muslims around the globe, who endure manifestations of our power and influence daily, from DVDs in Kabul to text-messaging ads in Yemen. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 7d56d5d | Indeed, future historians may well attribute our recent successes--toppling the two worst regimes in the Middle East, presiding over the birth of consensual governments in their places, and losing fewer soldiers in the effort than during many individual campaigns of the Second World War or Korea--to an ever-innovative American military that learned quickly from mistakes of the kind described in Finding the Target and War Made New. The somet.. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| b5be57c | The great American contribution to the Red Army was not just food stocks and strategic materials but nearly four hundred thousand heavy transport trucks, which eventually allowed Stalin a mobility and rapidity lacking among his Nazi enemies on the eastern front. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 11503dc | Islamophobia" as a weapon of jihad The charge of "Islamophobia" is routinely used to shift attention away from jihad terrorists. After a rise in jihadist militancy and the arrest of eight people in Switzerland on suspicion of aiding suicide bombers in Saudi Arabia, some Muslims in Switzerland were in no mood to clean house: "As far as we're concerned," said Nadia Karmous, leader of a Muslim women's group in Switzerland, "there is no rise in.. | Robert Spencer | ||
| 25fed13 | Physical deprivation and hunger are one thing; the poverty of the mind and psyche is quite another. Crashing Costco to find bulk beans and rice is not the same as flash-mobbing for Air Jordans and iPhones. How odd that our cultural elite and our dependent poor are somewhat alike, in a symbiotic relationship in which the latter guilt-trip the former for entitlements, with the assurance that the top of the pyramid is safe and free to fritter .. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| a806f19 | You make people happy. When you're in front of a crowd, nobody can think about their problems or their worries or anything else. You have a gift, Kes, an amazing wonderful gift. It's special, just like you. | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| a0bf203 | Oh, son, hardly anybody wants to leave. These mountains are more than just a place for folks around here. | Sharyn McCrumb | ||
| 9696a25 | When you were dying, Edward quickly discovered, people would let you do pretty much whatever you wanted. So he made some new unofficial decrees: 1. The king was allowed to sleep in as long as he wished. 2. The king no longer had to wear seven layers of elaborate, jewel-encrusted clothing. Or silly hats with feathers. Or pants that resembled pumpkins. Or tights. From now on, unless it was a special occasion, he was fine in just a simple shir.. | Cynthia Hand | ||
| 6daf34c | Dear Lord...patch this work. Quilt us together, feather-stitching piece by piece our tag-ends of living, our individual scraps of love | Jane Wilson Joyce | ||
| 9bcee31 | And yet I felt a tickling cognizance, dewdrops beading in my mind. Perhaps I'd always known, always been aware that there is more to be seen than what is in front of me. Perhaps I'd deliberately chosen not to acknowledge the story a flower tells or the particular vibration of rocks. When the mole spoke of The Mother Trees, I didn't question him because somewhere deep down, below feather and skin and bleached bone, I knew. | nature trees | Kira Jane Buxton | |
| 69c0a27 | So now Nathan had a new partner, who, by all accounts, was a dour old drudge with nary a daughter to his name. She'd seen Nathan in town once since then. He had not looked happy. But she was insanely happy, especially after what the doctor had hold her yesterday. With only a few days left at home, she and Freddy had dragged Jane and Oliver on a romantic picnic. So far, it wasn't going all that well. Poor Jane darted up at every sound. Fredd.. | Sabrina Jeffries | ||
| 9a23ee8 | It was May of my senior year at Leighton Gage and on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons we sat in an air-conditioned hourglass and savored our own total incomprehension as an assistant professor charted the poems of Dryden, Lovelace, Fanshawe and Suckling. They were all so incomparably dead, the Penguin poets, and we loved them because their lines meant less to us than the dark side of the moon. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 8d6b38c | Rain turned to sleet, sleet to snow. | Don DeLillo | ||
| e011579 | I care about you !" he roared. "Christ!" He took a deep breath. "I'm trying here, Aimee. Maybe I don't say it pretty enough for you. But this is me, trying." | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| 8bc1dcc | I would never treat you like those other guys, Torrey, I promise. But yeah, okay, I get it. | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| 703a9a2 | I didn't leave because I didn't love you enough, Kes; I left because I loved you too much, and it was breaking my heart that you couldn't trust me. I'd done everything I could to fit into your world, and it still wasn't enough. There were things about your life that you didn't want to share with me--you must see that there's no future in a relationship like that? | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| 4fe7581 | It hurt so badly to be away from you. I suppose if my parents' marriage taught me anything, it was not to be the person who was left behind. So I ran, afraid that you would run first, sooner or later. | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| 613f74e | Let me make love to you, Torrey Delaney, | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| 775389f | I preferred my Papa's version: 'Rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men'. A | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| 9f0239b | Do you want kids?" I asked tentatively. "It's just you've never said anything before." Kes paused as he kicked off his pants. His eyes were guarded when he replied. "Don't you?" "I do. I think I do. Not yet, but one day." Kes stared at me steadily. "Do you want kids?" . My poor boy still didn't believe that I'd stay. Why should he? No one in his world ever had before." | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| 2c53311 | Our sex life seemed to be of great interest to everyone, and I hated that. Other women slyly commented that they'd heard us inside the RV. Well, they couldn't have heard Kes, because he was never loud, not even when he came. Embarrassingly, it must be my gasps and screams that they were hearing, unless it was the sound of me being thoroughly pounded. Yeah, not at all embarrassing. | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| af7d2a0 | I really want to kiss you right now. | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| 048209c | I think," I said, slowly, "that meeting you has been the best thing that's ever happened to me." | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| fbf0cd8 | Don't give up on me, Torrey," I said, not too proud to beg. "I've only got six-and-a-half weeks left. "God, don't leave me, sweetheart. Not now." | Jane Harvey-Berrick |