Familiarity breeds attempt.

Time wounds all heels.

I went down on the Lower East Side today and saw all those Old Testament houses.

We’re all cremated equal.

We’re insufferable friends.

I’ve been working my head to the bone.

Frankly, I’d like to see the government get ouf of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.

The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them in fact, is bad acting.

People do get hypnotized by the hard choices. And stop looking for alternatives. The will to be stupid if a very powerful force - but there are always alternatives.

I hope your heart is broken many times because it means you would have loved many times.

Any kiddie in school can love like a fool,
But hating, my boy, is an art.

This sad vicissitude of things.

Girl: But are you a man or a boy?

Jonathan Ames: Well….what’s the difference?

Girl: With a man, you feel like you’re being taken and you like it. And with a boy, you feel like they’re stealing something from you, and you don’t like it.

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

The real fault is to have faults and not try to mend them.

…in a very real sense the commercial not only controls television, it also is one of the more distorting factors. How do you put on a meaningful drama or documentary that is adult, incisive, probing, when every fifteen minutes the proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper?

Americans are suckers for empty gestures. Our doltish leadership is helpless to stop terrorism and the country is facing economic ruin from the corporate banditry of our neo-Robber Barons, so it’s time to distract us with one of those all-absorbing hokey crusades that we do so well. It won’t be long now before oil tankers start exploding, banks start failing, goldbugs start fleeing, and computer hackers figure out how to open the floodgates of Hoover Dam, but, as our grandstanding leaders well know, we will be too busy shouting “under God!” to notice.

With so much information available at a keystroke, it is now inescapable that there will be times when what is whispered in the closet will indeed be shouted from the housetops.

If you hear that something might be about to happen, call a press conference and demand it!

I think it’s better to feel too much than to feel too little.

Say you’re here [at a movie premeire] and you get word that your mother died, you know like hit by a bus or something…You go downstairs; you shed a tear, and say, “It’s a shame…she would have loved this movie.”

Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.

Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.

[Image by buschap licensed under Creative Commons.]

The admiration of his peers as a man rather than as a mere politician came easily to Bentsen as it had never come to men like Nixon or Clinton, who had to hold positions of power to gain respect.

The robot is going to lose. Not by much. But when the final score is tallied, flesh and blood is going to beat the damn monster.

She was extremely pretty, with that air of innocence that can be devastating to young men and provocative to older ones.

All of them bending themselves to listen though, ‘Pray heaven that the inside of my mind not be exposed,’ for each thought, ‘The others are feeling this. They are outraged and indignant with the government about the fishermen. Whereas, I feel nothing at all.’

In Qutb’s passionate analysis, there was little difference between the communist and capitalist systems; both, he believed, attended only to the material needs ot humanity, leaving the spirit unsatisfied. He predicted that once the average worker lost his dreamy expectations of becoming rich, America would inevitably turn toward communism. Christianity would be powerless to block this trend because it exists only in the realm of the spirit - “like a vision in a pure ideal world.” Islam, on the other hand, is “a complete system” with laws, social codes, economic rules, and its own method of government. Only Islam offered a formula for creating a just and godly society. Thus the real struggle would eventually show itself: It was not a battle between capitalism and communism; it was between Islam and materialism. And inevitably, Islam would prevail.

No doubt this clash between Islam and the West was remote in the minds of most New Yorkers during the holiday season of 1948. But, despite the new wealth that was flooding into the city, and the self-confidence that victory naturally brought, there was a generalized sense of anxiety about the future. “The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible,” the essayist E. B. White had observed that summer. “A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions.” White was writing about the dawn of the nuclear age, and the feeling of vulnerability was quite new. “In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning,” he observed, “New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.”

The question of suicide was even more problematic. There is no theological support for such an action in Islam; indeed, it is expressly prohibited. “Do not kill yourselves,” the Quran states. The hadith, or sayings of the Prophet, are replete with instances in which Mohammed condemns the action. The specific punishment for the suicide is to burn in hell and to be forever in act of dying by means of the same instrument that was used to take his life. Even was one of his bravest warriors was severely wounded in battle and hurled himself upon his own sword only to relieve his terrible suffering, Mohammed declared that he was damned. “A man may do the deeds of the people of the Fire while in fact he is one of the people of Paradise, and he may do the deeds of the people of Paradise when in fact he belongs to the people of Fire,” the Prophet observed. “Verify, (the rewards of) the deeds are decided by the last actions.”

In his defense of the bombing, Zawahiri had to overcome this profound taboo. The bombers who carried out the Islamabad operation, Zawahiri said, represent “a generation of mujahideen that has decided to sacrifice itself and its property in the cause of God. That is because the way of death and martyrdom is a weapon thaqt tyrants and their helpers, who worship their salaries instead of God, do not have.” He compared them to the martyrs of early Christianisty. The only example he could point to in Islamic tradition was that of a group of Muslims, early in the history of the faith, who were captured by “idolaters” and forced to choose between recanting their religion or being killed by their captors. They choose to become martrys to their beliefs.

It was, Zawahiri argued, a suicidal choice. Other Muslims did not condemn them at the time because they were acting for the glory of God and the greater good of Islam. Therefore, anyone who gives his life in pursuit of the true faith - such as the bombers in Islamabad - is to be regarded not as a suicide who will suffer the punishment in hell but as a heroic martyr whose selfless sacrifice will gain him an extraordinary reward in Paradise.

With such sophistry, Zawahiri reversed the language of the Prophet and opened the door to universal murder.

Judging how the world will judge what you do - how a position will “play” - is an essential political skill. If you can’t predict what will work, you can’t survive in office. If you don’t keep your job, you can’t achieve what you think is right. The danger is when you stop caring about the difference between being right and being employed, or fail to notice that you don’t know what the difference is any more.

…great men have an instinct for what the future will demand…It has always been the case that individuals must sacrifice to further the advance of civilization and their particular society. But there is another definition of a great man. Primarily that he does not accept that burden. In some way, criminal, immoral, or by sheer cunning, he will ride the crest of that wave of human progress without sacrifice.

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.

“Necessitas dat legem non ipsa accipit.”

Translated as “Necessity gives the law, but does not itself submit to it.”

But this love business – so far, it had been not very satisfying.  He had been involved with girls he liked; he had been involved with girls he didn’t like. In neither case had he ever really felt…whatever it was that he imagined he was supposed to feel.  He was shy, so that even though he showed determination at work, and playing hockey he positively enjoyed giving an opponent a hard check, he shrank before a girl who attracted him, and this made the search for someone who would make him feel whatever it was he was supposed to feel particularly difficult.  Moreover, he wasn’t cold-blooded, so he couldn’t pursue and abandon girls with the same relish as some of his friends, his best friend in particular, rather, he had a sympathetic streak that, in the matter of making conquests, seemed much more like a weakness than a strength.

But pressure, with [Tiger] Woods, is like an old, dear, embraceable friend.

Nationalism had made the weak better able to resist the strong. Big powers easily pushed around local tribal and traditional leaders, most of whom did not command much loyalty from their subjects or many resources. But in the mid-twentieth century, peoples around the world increasingly sought and won their independence and the right to establish their own states. Formerly submissive peoples were increasingly prepared to sacrifice countless lives and do whatever necessary, and for however long it took, to win and maintain their independence.

“But - and again, who am I to judge? - I don’t think that is the only way. I think you can also escape suffering through … love. When you really love someone and they really love you, you have desire, but not in the sense of wanting things that you can’t get or shouldn’t want in the first place. It’s not even that your desire has been satisfied. It’s not satiety. You lie in that person’s arms and you aren’t thinking about what’s next or what’s wrong or what you want.  You aren’t trying to get someplace. Rather than doing or proving or striving for something, you just sort of are, as a lyric poem or work of art is supposed to be, or like a big boulder that’s really just there. And again, it’s not that you’ve gotten what you desire and so are satisfied; it’s that there is no doingness or provingness or strivingness. To my mind, this sounds a little like nirvana and I’d say you are emptied of your self. The difference, maybe, is that in my scheme you aren’t just emptied, you are also filled - but filled with one big thing that replaces all the ten million nettlesome, egotistical things that are inside you as a rule. And with that on thing comes a feeling of joy - not no feeling. You’re like a big boulder that somehow has levitated six feet off the ground. Then there is one more thing, which is wanting to make the person you love happy, to give yourself to him or her, but this wanting is not a feeling external to love or the result of any incompleteness; it is one component of that big single thing. And serving the person you love isn’t something you ‘do.’ It is entirely natural. It’s guided by the same part of your brain, whatever it is, that controls your heartbeat and your - oh - kidney function or whatever.”

The illicit has an added charm.

A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things.

There is a final and essential battle to win in order to restore the power of American power: It is to defang those liberals and conservatives who repeatedly corner our leaders into making commitments they cannot fulfill. America has endured more than half a century’s worth of these unattainable goals. We live with them now: nation-building in places such as Afghanistan, where there is no coherent nation and certainly no outsider could do this for them anyway; spreading democracy to countries such as Iraq with no tradition of, or foundations for, democracy; and insisting on bringing such places as George or Ukraine under NATO’s wing with neither the intent nor the capability of actually sending troops to defend them. False promises and failures are the surest way to kill power.

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.

Andrew Sullivan is a self-made man who loves his creator.

A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance. Observe how the greatest minds yield in some degree to the superstitions of their age.

I believe more suffering has been caused by prophets than by statesmen.

In Washington politics, it is easy to confuse limits with impotence. Accepting limits is equated with weakness. It is considered virtually un-American to argue that the United States might be incapable of doing whatever it wants.

“Burząc pomniki, oszczędzajcie cokoły. Zawsze mogą się przydać.”

Translated as “When smashing monuments, save the pedestals - they always come in handy.”

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

Welcome anything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.

Bad habits are like a comfortable bed, easy to get into, but hard to get out of.

For if a man desires what has not been forbidden, he may be afraid of prohibition; but if he may with impunity do what has been prohibited, neither fear nor shame can restrain him longer.

In the name of the multitude he was here giving expression to the fact that Western man is in danger of losing his shadow altogether, of identifying himself with his fictive personality and of identifying the world with the abstract picture painted by scientific rationalism. His spiritual and moral opponent, who is just as real as he, no longer dwells in his own breast, but beyond the geographical line of division…Thinking and feeling lose their own inner polarity, and where religious orientation has grown ineffectual, not even a god is at hand to check the sovereign sway of unleashed psychic functions.

[T]he only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.

The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go, she went.

Freedom and responsibility are like Siamese twins, they die if they are parted.