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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a259ae9 | My dad says you don't see tanks and guns on parade in America because democracy keeps the country together, not fear of the military. | Firoozeh Dumas | ||
| b8bdd7f | My parents do not limit themselves to worrying about things that have actually happened. Dreams are also fair game. I often get phone calls with detailed descriptions of a dream, followed by "So naturally, I had to call to make sure you were okay and there wasn't a reason why I dreamed of you trapped in a canoe with a blue turtle." | Firoozeh Dumas | ||
| 953f951 | And Iranians never forget. You can't say my Aunt Jila's name without someone saying, "You mean the one who burned her rice?" That happened before I was born and even I know about it." | Firoozeh Dumas | ||
| 23098fb | The Limoges set has brought us more joy in its absence than it ever did in our cupboards. Of course, we no longer own a set of china to pass down to our kids, but that's okay. Francois and I plan on giving our children something more valuable, the simple truth that the best way to go through life is to be a major donor of kindness. We'll tell them that it's possible to own a whole bunch of beautiful, valuable things and still be miserable. .. | kindness | Firoozeh Dumas | |
| f161285 | Despite a few exceptions, I have found that Americans are now far more willing to learn new names, just as they're far more willing to try new ethnic foods... It's like adding a few new spices to the kitchen pantry. | names kitchen spices food | Firoozeh Dumas | |
| 514f887 | During our stay in Newport Beach, the Iranian Revolution took place and a group of Americans were taken hostage in the American embassy in Tehran. Overnight, Iranians living in America became, to say the least, very unpopular. For some reason, many Americans began to think that all Iranians, despite outward appearances to the contrary, could at any given moment get angry and take prisoners. | Firoozeh Dumas | ||
| 3612cc4 | I realize that Original Cindy is a compass, but instead of pointing north, she points to "horse story." | Firoozeh Dumas | ||
| 5a58541 | byshtr mywhh gr rwy drkht bh Hl khwd gdhshth shwnd blkhrh myrsnd | Firoozeh Dumas | ||
| 6caa916 | It seemed to me that life in America was one long series of festivities, all of them celebrated with merriment and chocolate. The | Firoozeh Dumas | ||
| 7c75a06 | Theories in the natural sciences which have been replaced by others which do the same job better are of no interest to the current practice of science. This cannot be the case where those theories have helped to constitute what they interpret or explicate. The | Anthony Giddens | ||
| af56eaa | We are trespassing on your hospitality | Eric Ambler | ||
| 6ea26d4 | The formulation of critical theory is not an option; theories and findings in the social sciences are likely to have practical (and political) consequences regardless of whether or not the sociological observer or policy-maker decides that they can be 'applied' to a given practical issue. | Anthony Giddens | ||
| ad3394f | Suppose, by way of illustration, we isolate a relation between technological change and patterns of managerial organization in business firms. The expanding use of microchip technology, let us say, might be shown to be associated with a partial dissolution of more rigid forms of hierarchical authority. The 'social force' involved here is not like a force of nature. Causal generalizations in the social sciences always presume a typical 'mix'.. | Anthony Giddens | ||
| 836fc15 | but when you have been nourishing your soul on expectation, reality is apt to be disappointing. | Eric Ambler | ||
| 6efff85 | Governments had risen and fallen; men and women had worked, had starved, had made speeches, had fought, had been tortured, had died. Hope had come and gone, a fugitive in the scented bosom of illusion. Men had learned to sniff the heady dreamstuff of the soul and wait impassively while the lathes turned the guns for their destruction. And through those years, Dimitrios had lived and breathed and come to terms with his strange gods. | Eric Ambler | ||
| c03eae6 | Tweeds, he soon found, are not in warm weather the ideal clothes for mountain climbing, for that was what his progress soon became. The track grew almost precipitous and he was still further hindered by the loose surface and his package of food and wine. He had been climbing for half an hour when he stopped, ate his lunch, drank his wine and smoked a pipe. Some forty minutes later, much refreshed and free of encumbrance, he continued the as.. | Eric Ambler | ||
| a4de266 | For instance, Visser, the Dutchman, had sold German machine guns to the Chinese, spied for the Japanese and served a term of imprisonment for killing a coolie in Batavia. He was not an easy man to handle. | Eric Ambler | ||
| c1defd0 | Ballet is merely a new rationalization of society's instinctive movement towards self-destruction. A dance of death for the Gadarene swine. | eric ambler | ||
| 13108f6 | International big business has made revolutions before now to safeguard its interests. At one time it made them ... in the name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Now, with Socialism to fight, it makes them in the name of Law and Order and Sound Finance. Assassination? If an assassination is going to be good for business, then there will be an assassination. | capitalism revolution regime-change self-interest spy big-business betrayal | Eric Ambler | |
| de271d7 | All over Europe, all over the world, men were spying. While in government offices other men were tabulating the results of the spies' labours; thicknesses of armour-plating, elevation angles of guns, muzzles velocities, details of fire control mechanisms and range-finders, fuse efficiencies, details of fortifications, positions of ammunition stores, disposition of key factories, landmarks for bombers. The world was getting ready to go to wa.. | Eric Ambler | ||
| bcefdc6 | At this point doubts started to creep in. One was always reading of young men running away to sea, or people shipping as deck-hands and working their passages. There seemed to be no special qualifications needed. No ropes had to be spliced. No rigging had to be climbed. All you did was paint the anchor, chip rust off the deck plating and say 'aye, aye, sir', when addressed by an officer. It was a tough life and you met tough men. There were.. | Eric Ambler | ||
| 090ab4f | It would be good now, I thought, to be in Paris. The afternoon city heat would have gone. It would be good to sit under the trees near the marionette theatre. It would be quiet there now. There would be no one there but a student or two reading. There you could listen to the rustle of leaves unconscious of the pains of humanity in labour, of a civilisation hastening to its own destruction. There, away from this brassy sea and blood-red eart.. | Eric Ambler | ||
| 32d19dc | But it was useless to try to explain him in terms of Good and Evil. They were no more than baroque abstractions. Good Business and Bad Business were the elements of the new theology. Dimitrios was not evil. He was logical and consistent; as logical and consistent in the European jungle as the poison gas called Lewisite and the shattered bodies of children killed in the bombardment of an open town. | Eric Ambler | ||
| ed2336d | It was Napoleon who said that one spy in the right place was worth twenty thousand men in the field. He was speaking of his own spy, Schul-meister, a man of amazing courage, skill, and loyalty. But when the time came to reward Schulmeister for his services it was the same Napoleon who refused him the Legion of Honor for which he had been recommended, and the same Napoleon who commented that money was the only suitable reward for | Eric Ambler | ||
| 9b89963 | In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest politician, but of the man with the best bedside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance. | politics mediocrity decline decline-of-civilization fin-de-siècle populism | Eric Ambler | |
| 9c5c111 | If "bullshit," as opposed to "bull," is a distinctively modern linguistic innovation, that could have something to do with other distinctively modern things, like advertising, public relations, political propaganda, and schools of education. "One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit," Harry Frankfurt, a distinguished moral philosopher who is professor emeritus at Princeton, says. The ubiquity of bull.. | Jim Holt | ||
| 630089b | If such things were not so dangerous one would laugh. But one recognizes the technique. Such propaganda always begins with words, but soon it proceeds to deeds. When there are no facts to support lies, facts must be made. | propaganda warnings-about-society | Eric Ambler | |
| b337624 | As for the description, it might, like most other tabulated descriptions, have fitted tens of thousands of men. With most persons, recognition, even of an intimate, was based on the perception of vague, half-observed quantities which together formed a caricature significant more in its relation to the observer than to the observed. A short man, conscious of his lack of height, would describe a man of medium height as tall. For the ordinary .. | Eric Ambler | ||
| 970b774 | Always seeking to open channels to new dimensions of consciousness and reach new heights of enlightenment, he spent a lot of time and money endearing himself to and worming his way into the trust of secretive tribal healers and shamans. Under their guidance, he experimented with all kinds of psychoactive substances and entheogens--mostly plant-derived concoctions that played a pivotal role in the religious practices of the tribal cultures h.. | Raymond Khoury | ||
| 26ef8d0 | The Bible tells us the messiah will only return AFTER we've had the final battle between God's children and the army of the antichrist out there in Israel. It's only after that happens that we can be saved by the Rapture . . . we're still waiting for the Israelis to bomb the crap out of Iran and kick-start the whole thing. | Raymond Khoury | ||
| d9b6662 | religion has always been the fuel that keeps the furnaces of intolerance and hatred burning. | Raymond Khoury | ||
| f15438b | Lam cai ghe nhu toi thi kho co vo lam" "Cha, han roi, neu cai nghe do cho phep anh nhay len may bay voi cac co gai chi moi quen biet. Toi cung han chang muon chong minh lam dieu do hang ngay" | Raymond Khoury | ||
| 4a9b8fd | Be quan toa cang voi the gioi con lai | Raymond Khoury | ||
| f9237a7 | Ai trong chung ta thuc su biet dieu gi se xay ra voi minh? Anh chi can song cuoc song cua minh va hi vong vao nhung dieu tot dep nhat | Raymond Khoury | ||
| 009404f | most expeditions lacked something Vance had at his disposal: the astrolabe, | Raymond Khoury | ||
| 2975107 | The truth is that it is not the sins of the fathers that descend unto the third generation, but the sorrows of the mothers. --Marilyn French, HER MOTHER'S DAUGHTER | Katie Hafner | ||
| 1b41fa8 | I see us as all sitting around naked, shivering, in a huge circle, looking up as the sky turns black and the stars flare out and somebody starts to tell a story, claims to see a pattern in the stars. And then someone else tells a story about the eye of the hurricane, the eye of the tiger. And the stories , the images, become the truth and we will kill each other rather than change one word of the story. But every once in a while, someone se.. | Marilyn French | ||
| d42d701 | When a man loses superiority, he loses potency. That's what all this talk about castrating women is about. Castrating women are those who refuse to pretend men are better than they are and better than women are. The simple truth -- that men are only equal -- can undermine a culture more devastatingly than any bomb. Subversion is telling the truth. | men sexism | Marilyn French | |
| df28026 | Fear and desire for pleasure. Aggressiveness comes out of fear, predominantly, and sexuality predominantly out of the other. But they mix in the middle. Anyway, both of these impulses can destroy order, which comes out of both drives, and which is another human need I haven't yet fit into my scheme. So both have to be controlled. But in fact, despite religious commands to the contrary, aggressiveness has never really been condemned. It's be.. | Marilyn French | ||
| 42552dc | the words of Pyotr Stephanovich come into my mind: You must love God because He is the only one you can love for Eternity. That sounds very profound to me, and tears come into my eyes whenever I say it. I never heard anyone else say it. But I don't believe in God and if I did I couldn't love Him/Her/It. I couldn't love anyone I thought had created this world. | Marilyn French | ||
| 3a7a8b4 | That's sheer luck too: luck of the draw of birth: century, continent, nation, section, sex, color, socioeconomic sector. | Marilyn French | ||
| 6ea8457 | and I'd die of his emptiness even more than I'm dying of my own. | Marilyn French | ||
| 1f5ac58 | true love cannot extend its claims to spouses. | Marilyn Yalom | ||
| 000de9f | In Harlem the government pushes heroin to keep the blacks down and doctors by the thousands give barbiturates and tranquilizers to all the housewives: keep the natives quiet. when the drugs don't work anymore, they put the blacks in jail and us in here. Don't make noise. I read a poem once, it had a line, something like 'You keep stiller when every time you move something jangles'. | Marilyn French |