Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When's the last time CNN broke an important story or really made the government angry? I literally can't remember. That's because they're built to be inoffensive. They do the opposite of watchdog journalism. They simply pass on the government's message to their audience.
Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy.
The Church is composed of people, and people do terrible things and commit sin - it's what the Church has been telling us for two thousand years and continues to tell us, which is why the Church is here and essentially one of the major reasons why people hate it so much.
Who can begrudge the generosity of the wealthy, you might say. Wherever you stand on the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a tiny global elite, surely such charity should be applauded? But philanthropy is a dangerous substitution for progressive taxation.
Baseball has traditionally possessed a wonderful lack of seriousness. The game's best player, Babe Ruth, was a Rabelaisian fat man, and its most loved manager, Casey Stengel, spoke gibberish. In this lazy sport, only the pitcher pours sweat. Then he takes three days off.
In the end, no single group will mean defeat for the Democrat and victory for the Republican in 2016. But President Obama's troubling legacy - a weakened coalition and growing ranks of alienated white voters - could mean a serious post-presidential hangover for Democrats.
It is ridiculous to sue the president on a Wednesday because he oversteps the law, as he has done a dozen times illegally and unconstitutionally, and then on a Thursday say that he should overstep the law, contradict the law that passed in 2008 and deal with this himself.
For every moment of triumph, there is an unequal and opposite feeling of despair. Take that iconic photograph of Muhammad Ali standing triumphantly over the prostrate, semiconscious wreckage of Sonny Liston. Great photo. Now think of Liston. Do the pleasure/pain calculus.
The magnitude of an action may change not only the strength of its impact, but the direction. If you became a dentist, for example, you would certainly be an asset to our society. But what if everyone became a dentist? Who would bake the bread? Who would build the houses?
The Galapagos Islands are probably the most famous wildlife-watching destination in the world. And no wonder - it's almost impossible to exaggerate the sheer spectacle of the place that provided inspiration for Charles Darwin's ground-breaking theory of natural selection.
China is responsible for a lot of the major conservation issues we're facing. It's the main market for rhino horn. Tigers are being killed for tiger bone wine. They're driving the tropical timber trade and illegal logging in Indonesia, and the trade in tropical reef fish.
'Get along, go along' is not an inspirational philosophy, and only God knows how much moral cowardice it has covered up over the years. Serve your time, collect your chits, and cash 'em in for your home state? No, I'd say we could ask for more than that from our senators.
Feminists are forever discovering subtle new forms of sexism and then beating men around the head and shoulders with it. It is left to the rest of us to suffer the inevitable backlash this provokes among men. Besides, the feminists have the Federal Government behind them.
We need to be smarter than our smart phones and realize the people we are with are more important than the people we aren't with, and way more important than the strangers we hope will tweet and like and share and Instagram whatever we're sending out into the cybersphere.
As to which is cuter, a puppy or a baby, I'm going to say that probably depends less on the particular puppy and more on the baby. I've seen pictures of me as an infant and consider myself lucky that nobody ever offered my parents the opportunity to trade me for a beagle.
3D printers give us what we've all been craving: another reason to talk to technical support. When you finally get the thing working, though, you'll be able to print out your grocery list as a cube! When you look up directions online, you can print the map out on a globe!
If you think you're too far from Allah to return, and your 'past' continues to own you, just remember that Malik ibn Dinar (RA) was an alcoholic, and Omar (RA) was on his way to assassinate the Prophet (pbuh) before they became two of the greatest souls to walk the earth!
The Consumer Product Safety Commission has issued reams of playground regulations and actually gone so far as to recommend against "tripping hazards, like tree stumps and rocks." Maybe we should just bulldoze the local parks and put in a couple of blobs... made of plastic.
There is more hooey spread about the Second Amendment. It says quite clearly that guns are for those who form part of a well-regulated militia, i.e., the armed forces including the National Guard. The reasons for keeping them away from everyone else get clearer by the day.
Austerity and economic insecurity have collided with the scapegoating of migrants and refugees, at a time when global instability and warfare have driven millions to flee violence and persecution, a minority of whom have arrived on European shores to be met with hostility.
Whenever we show others the goodness of God, whenever we follow our Teacher by imitating His posture of humble and ready service, our actions are sacred and ministerial. To be called into the priesthood, as all of us are, is to be called to a life of presence, of kindness.
We have enforced a Darwinian process on wolves, turning them into the shy and elusive animals they've become. They didn't have that fear of us 30,000 years ago. We didn't have gunpowder; we had rocks. Wolves would have seen us as lunch, and we were weak and slow and tasty.
Ours is an age in which thousands are driven daily from their homelands by the unforgiving brutalities of war, terrorism, political oppression, starvation, disease, economic piracy, and the relentless suffocation of that singular breath which makes human beings individuals.
When a party is in opposition, it opposes. That's its job. But when it comes to power, it must govern. Easy rhetoric is over, the press of reality becomes irresistible. By necessity, it adopts some of the policies it had once denounced. And a new national consensus is born.
Guerrilla war is a test of wills. Obama's actual objectives - rollback in Iraq, containment in Syria - are not unreasonable. But they require commitment and determination. In other words, will. You can't just make one speech declaring war, then disappear and go fundraising.
None of the kids in the neighborhood had dogs. My dad walked in that Labrador, and we started running together and rolling around together like we found each other after years apart. And then, suddenly, some of the other people in the neighborhood started getting dogs, too.
Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country - and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.
Although the House Intelligence Committee report claims to be the definitive statement of the House of Representatives on matters of Benghazi and intelligence, interviews over the past week make clear that it's not even the consensus position of Republicans on the committee.
I was riding my mountain bike in Colorado, and I met a dog who reminded me so much of my very first dog in the way she interacted with me, looked at me, and wagged her tail that I rode away convinced I'd just very possibly met the reincarnated version of my long lost friend.
I'm quite British; I've got big, flat feet, and I can't wear heels. I've got very, very pale Celtic skin, so my legs are always a frightening blue color. So when you take out clothes that reveal your legs, shoes that have any kind of heel, no shop will actually take my money.
The 1935 Social Security Act established 65 as the age of eligibility for payouts. But welfare state politics quickly becomes a bidding war, enriching the menu of benefits, so in 1956 Congress entitled women to collect benefits at 62, extending the entitlement to men in 1961.
Jay Carney, whose unenviable job is not to explain but to explain away what his employers say, calls the IRS’s behavior “inappropriate. ” No, using the salad fork for the entree is inappropriate. Using the Internal Revenue Service for political purposes is a criminal offense.
Use familiar words-words that your readers will understand, and not words they will have to look up. No advice is more elementary, and no advice is more difficult to accept. When we feel an impulse to use a marvelously exotic word, let us lie down until the impulse goes away.
The good news, though, is that I find in my political travels that people, as regular citizens, are more interested than ever in getting together and having discussions. They want to hear about other viewpoints that differ entirely from what the administration is putting out.
Christine O'Donnell is making a mockery of running for public office. She has no real history, no real success in any kind of business. And what that sends to my generation is, one day, you can just wake up and run for Senate, no matter how [much] lack of experience you have.
One thing we should all understand is that we are brutally honest with search engines. You show me your search history, and I'll find something incriminating or something embarrassing there in five minutes. We are more honest with search engines than we are with our families.
For liberals, the observation that 'the peasants are revolting' is a pun. For conservatives, it is cause for uncharacteristic optimism. No matter how far the ideological pendulum swings in the short term, in the end the bedrock common sense of the American people will prevail.
Humour is a way of relating and connecting to people, especially when you're a minority or misunderstood. It has the power that other forms of conversations or writing don't have. With all the problems I had, sometimes the only way of coping with it is to make fun of yourself.
How do you know someone is a grandparent? They've got milk stains on every shirt from burping babies. Their pants are worn out at the knees from crawling around giving pony rides. They have 2,842 pictures of the grandkids on their smart phone and not one photo of their spouse.
Love is our most unifying and empowering common spiritual denominator. The more we ignore its potential to bring greater balance and deeper meaning to human existence, the more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man’s inhumanity to man.
Take all your dukes and marquesses and earls and viscounts, pack them into one chamber, call it the House of Lords to satisfy their pride and then strip it of all political power. It's a solution so perfectly elegant and preposterous that only the British could have managed it.
I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind, a sense of something lost. And it's the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state, with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom.
Arizonans should not be judged disdainfully and from a distance by people whose closest contacts with Hispanics are with fine men and women who trim their lawns and put plates in front of them at restaurants, not with illegal immigrants passing through their backyards at 3 A.M.
Everybody is continuously connected to everybody else on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Reddit, e-mailing, texting, faster and faster, with the flood of information jeopardizing meaning. Everybody's talking at once in a hypnotic, hyper din: the cocktail party from hell.
From a very young age, boys are taught that real men get into fights, say demeaning things about girls and women, show extraordinary athletic prowess, avoid looking studious, don't do anything to display supposed emotional 'weakness' and prioritise competition over cooperation.
Too many countries that do not play by the free trade rules of the World Trade Organization - including, notably mercantilist China and monopolist Saudi Arabia - have been allowed in, to the detriment of both the WTO and the liberal trading environment it is supposed to sponsor.
Machiavelli, however, took his bearings from people as they are. He defined the political project as making the best of this flawed material. He knew (in words Kant would write almost three centuries later) that nothing straight would be made from the crooked timber of humanity.
The trouble with blaming powerless people is that although it's not nearly as scary as blaming the powerful, it does miss the point. Poor people do not shut down factories... Poor people didn't decide to use 'contract employees' because they cost less and don't get any benefits.
In the end, Tuesday's vote represented a repudiation of virtually every notion Democrats embraced in recent weeks as they tried to disregard the growing evidence that they were headed for a historic defeat. Now, the vote is in, and the voters' message can no longer be discounted.
I don't know about you, but I lie awake nights worrying about Canadian uranium. I know these people. I grew up there. You have no idea what they're capable of doing. If Sidney Crosby hadn't scored that goal to win the Olympic gold medal, there's no telling what might have ensued.