When considering a candidate for office, almost right up until they enter the polling booth and sometimes even in the booth itself, most voters rely more on what they see and hear themselves in real time than on facts, history, logic, or learned experience.

Sometimes you have to censor books. When I read 'Peter Rabbit,' I skip the part about Peter's father ending up in one of Mrs. McGregor's pies. I also hid the book of 'Grimm Fairy Tales.' They're just too grim for my grandkids. Reality will come soon enough.

I'd hope that the story A Dog's Purpose helps everyone reflect on how many different "lives" we all live - from children to teenager to adults to seniors - and how each phase of life presents new situations along the way to discovering our ultimate purpose.

People tend to overlook the fact that North Korea's economy collapsed at about the same time as South Koreans lost faith in their own state. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a time when South Koreans were questioning the very legitimacy of their republic.

A 'sign of weakness' for a male celebrity is being found to be unfaithful, or unkind to an employee, or having crashed their car while stoned out of their tiny minds. A 'sign of weakness' for a woman, on the other hand, can be a single, unflattering picture.

I can't live in a world where there are only, like, four kinds of women. Or where every woman is obsessed with cake. The very least I ask is that we have one female character in the world who likes savory things! I don't have any role models who like cheese!

Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is a symbolic - purely symbolic - move in that direction. Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation.

I wish all high schools could offer students the outside activities that were available at the old Harrison High on Chicago's West Side in the late '20s. They enabled me to become part of a school newspaper, drama group, football team and student government.

The stock market goes nuts over any company that so much as mentions the word Internet. All this proves to me is that the boneheads on Wall Street are as dumb as they were in college when they had to switch their majors to business to keep from flunking out.

People have one year after the wedding to send a gift. Thank-you notes must be written immediately. If you don't receive an acknowledgment within three months, phone and ask if it was received. If the bride and groom are embarrassed, fine. They deserve to be.

It was the Spice Girls who messed it all up. And obviously, the appropriating of the phrase "girl power", which at that point overrode any notion of feminism, and which was a phrase that meant absolutely nothing apart from being friends with your girlfriends.

For as long as I can remember the slogan has been ... the federal government ought to behave more like families, because families balance their budgets. It turns out that families looked around and said, "You know what? Let's behave more like the government!"

Steve Bannon went to the Conservative Political Action Conference and he said that there was a very important historical turning point, getting rid of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And the Republican Party has stood for that for as long as I have been alive.

The Republicans, with their crazed Reagan fixation, are a last-gasp party, living posthumously, fighting battles on sex, race, immigration and public education long ago won by the other side. They're trying to roll back the clock, but time is passing them by.

This willful deafness to religious argument, so new in our history, has had various effects. A principal one is encouragement of the already widespread view that religion doesn't have a lot to do with modern concerns - the way people live, the way they think.

All married couples should learn the art of battle as they should learn the art of making love. Good battle is objective and honest - never vicious or cruel. Good battle is healthy and constructive, and brings to a marriage the principles of equal partnership.

That one who does not get fun and enjoyment out of every day in which he lives, needs to reorganize his life. And the sooner the better, for pure enjoyment throughout life has more to do with one's happiness and efficiency than almost any other single element.

It is said that God gave us memory so we could have roses in winter. But it is also true that without memory we could not have self in any season. The more memories you have, the more you have. That is why, as Swift said, No wise man ever wished to be younger.

On March 8 a poll showed Hart 9 points ahead of Reagan. So perhaps 60 million Americans, 55 million of whom had not heard of Hart a month ago, have suddenly decided thay want him to be leader of the free world. The public mind is not just soft wax, it's runny.

Anyone who knows anything about journalism knows that reporters are rarely in a position to investigate anything. They lack the authority to subpoena witnesses, to cross-examine, to scrutinize official records. They are lucky to get their phone calls returned.

There are some dark days when I do receive some racist mail or emails. But overall the response to me has been very positive. Readers relate to me not just as an African-American, but as an American trying to make sense of her personal finance, just like them.

In the 1980s, in the communist Eastern Germany, if you owned a typewriter, you had to register it with the government. You had to register a sample sheet of text out of the typewriter. And this was done so the government could track where text was coming from.

Laws and regulations are supposed to restrict the kind of surveillance governments do. In fact, the U.S. government is quite restricted in what kind of surveillance they can do on U.S. citizens. The problem is that 96 percent of the planet is not U.S. citizens.

Though President Obama was at his smooth and polished best the other night, two aspects of his worldview came into sharper relief - his reflexive hostility toward and misunderstanding of business and his reliable resort to left-wing fables about race relations.

Few would deny the importance of tackling online hatred or child abuse content. The internet, after all, has become a key weapon for those who disseminate and incite hatred and violence against minorities, and for those who pose a horrifying threat to children.

Men's magazines often feature pictures of naked ladies. Women's magazines also often feature pictures of naked ladies. This is because the female body is a beautiful work of art, while the male body is hairy and lumpy and should not be seen by the light of day.

I have learned that part of the formula for success is to keep quiet about your objective until you get it. Just as the universe is filled with positive energy waiting to join your own, there is also destructive energy emanating from people who do not like you.

Baseball is not necessarily an obsessive-compulsive disorder, like washing your hands 100 times a day, but it's beginning to seem that way. We're reaching the point where you can be a truly dedicated, state-of-the-art fan or you can have a life. Take your pick.

To empty the heart does not mean to not love. On the contrary, true love, as God intented it, is purest when it is not based on a false attachment. The process of first emptying the heart can be found in the beginning half of the shahada (declaration of faith).

Dan Coats, retiring senator from Indiana, a mild-mannered man, a former United States ambassador to Germany, former congressman, said of Ted Cruz he's the most self-centered, narcissistic, pathological liar I have ever seen.And he said, you can quote me on that.

I am often invited to speak at colleges, and whenever I do Q and A's, a question that inevitably comes up is, 'How do you put up with the blogosphere?' It's a valid question, and I don't really know what answer to give. The truth is that I don't know what to do.

nothing like a few restful weeks contemplating the decline of civilization to restore the humors. What I did on my summer vacation was listen to a lot of people talk about the decline of practically everything - you could call it the leisure of the theory class.

My friend Mercedes Pena made me get in touch with my emotions just before I had a breast cut off. Just as I suspected, they were awful. "How do you Latinas do this all the time in touch with your emotions?" I asked her. "That's why we take siestas," she replied.

The Emancipation Proclamation...can remind us in 2013 of all the mistakes we never want to commit again but it can also motivate us to fulfill to an ever greater degree the definitive freedom-sustaining and life-enhancing principles of democracy in living action.

When you've got a mother who's given birth to eight children, you know, often without any kind of medical intervention - just she gave birth to one of my brothers sort of on the bedroom floor in front of all of us -you know, you see that women are fairly capable.

I think it's the next thing, getting out of the comfort-zone readership, that at some point you have to try and break out of that and see if you can go in new directions. I wanted to do something that felt a lot bigger than a book that's going to sit on a toilet.

I believe devoutly that the national election is the closest thing we have to a civic sacrament of democracy. And I really do think that heed must be paid, and when people make a decision, those who are on the other side, including me, accept it, for that reason.

Yes, there is some evidence that migration can slightly depress wages at the bottom end of the labour market, but that's an argument for a genuine living wage, for ensuring all workers are employed on the same terms and conditions, and for extending unionisation.

If you've never lived outside London, and if you've always had a car, it's difficult to understand how dire bus services undermine your standard of living: from being able to get to work, meet friends in the pub, get the weekly shop or take the kids on a day out.

Mentoring is all about people - it's about caring, about relationships and sensitivity. As it becomes increasingly in vogue it is becoming too formulated - concerned with performance metrics, critical success factors, investment and spending. It'll be a disaster.

You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, and wipe it clean of life - but if you desire to defend it, protect it,and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman Legions did - by putting your soldiers in the mud.

When you fall in love with a work of art, you’d die to meet the artist. I am a student of the galleries of Pacific sunsets, full moon rises on the ocean, the clouds from an airplane, autumn forests in Raleigh, first fallen snows. And I’m dying to meet the artist.

Before the thunderous clamor of political debate or war set loose in the world, love insisted on its promise for the possibility of human unity: between men and women, between blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, haves and have-have-nots, self and self.

There is no such thing as a "self-made" man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and of our thoughts, as well as our success.

I hear Democrats say, 'The Affordable Care Act is the law,' as though we're supposed to genuflect at that sunburst of insight and move on. Well, the Fugitive Slave Act was the law, separate but equal was the law, lots of things are the law and then we change them.

As society becomes more complex and opaque, as social processes seem more impersonal and autonomous, and as elites of 'experts' become more annoying, more people are tempted to think that some 'they' is manipulating 'us', using, among other dark arts, advertising.

All my stories were usually titled, 'White House Says,' 'President Bush Wants,' and I relied on transcripts from the briefings. I relied on press releases that were sent to the press for the purpose of accurately portraying what the White House believed or wanted.

Donald Trump is writing a different theme, which is it's midnight in America and that things are bad, and they're bleak, and they're gloomy and they're doomy, and the only thing that is going to save you is someone with the authority and power of somebody like me.

I think one can easily make a case for taking out Saddam Hussein. In fact, one could probably be made on humanitarian grounds alone. But just as there's a downside risk to doing nothing about this man, there is a very serious downside risk to invading the country.

When someone shows you their heart, their past, their wounds, they have entrusted you with the deepest part of themselves. It is the part of themselves that makes them uniquely beautiful. To be trusted in this way is a great honor. Guard that trust with your life.

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