I first read 'The Scarlet Letter' when I was fifteen. In it, I found a familiar vision of religious intolerance to the one around me. I grew up in the 1980s, when televangelists, with their fluffed up hair and their tears, self-righteously denounced all kinds of sinners, reserving a special, full-throated enthusiasm for gay people.

Francis seems familiar because Catholics have already known him in the Vatican II priests who have been their pastors and sacramental ministers over the years since that council brought new life to an old church. Catholics have known him in the bishops and priests who brought the spirit of the council to their dioceses and parishes.

We're more familiar with what economists call an English auction - prices start low and rise as people bid. However, there is also the Dutch auction, where prices start high and go lower until somebody bites. Movies are sold to the audience via a very slow Dutch auction, where each phase between price drops can last weeks or months.

I am involved with 'Write Girl,' which is such a great organization, because they go into inner city schools and work with underprivileged girls to pair them up with other writers. And it gets them learning to express themselves and become familiar with their own voice. They have a 100% success ratio getting those girls into college.

When you're in a movie with Will Ferrell, well, it's time to at least sometimes throw the script away. And that character in 'Talladega Nights' I found a lot easier to kind of riff with because I related to it more, those kind of Southern, almost rednecky guys. That's a culture that I'm familiar with, that makes sense for me to spew.

In period pieces or genre pieces, those have to be set in historical truths. But, science fiction has different game pieces. And with those game pieces come other stories we're not familiar with. So, science fiction teaches us how to relate to outsiders, to foreigners, and to not approach any of that with fear, but a genuine curiosity.

When you see the same familiar faces, it's nice when you get a chance to play with the same musicians. You start to develop this shorthand so everybody knows where you're at and where you're going, but then again, there are always surprises. But the more people are comfortable with the material, the more free you can be with the music.

With 'The Humans,' I've found that because it's related to very familiar forms - the family play and the thriller, almost a genre-collison play - some people want it to be one or the other. Either less dark and more of a family comedy or a full-fledged thriller with blood and ghosts jumping out of closets. Everyone's taste is different.

For members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the term 'testimony' is a warm and familiar word in our religious expressions. It is tender and sweet. It has always a certain sacredness about it. When we talk about testimony, we refer to feelings of our heart and mind rather than an accumulation of logical, sterile facts.

We'll continue to expand our footprint... Oracle's Fusion cloud applications for HCM, CRM and ERP all have a new simplified user interface and an integrated social network that makes our enterprise applications as easy-to-use and familiar as Facebook, while enabling better collaboration and teamwork among your employees and your customers.

My fans saw 'Roll Bounce,' but also that older crowd who might not have been familiar with me on the music tip saw 'Roll Bounce' and loved it. 'Roll Bounce' opened up that door for me to have older people love Bow Wow and opened up that door so all of the kids would love Bow Wow. My fan base is really diverse; it's all ages and all colors.

There is such a very large quantity of books clamouring for a buyer's attention that publishers have relied more and more on support such as blurbs as a way of getting an independent recommendation from a familiar name, much in the same way that Amazon.com will send an e-mail recommending Book A to a customer who's already purchased Book B.

Every one must understand that, whatever be the evil of slavery, it is not increased by its diffusion. Every one familiar with it knows that it is in proportion to its sparseness that it becomes less objectionable. Wherever there is an immediate connexion between the master and slave, whatever there is of harshness in the system is diminished.

There's a misconception that I can't relate to the quote-unquote 'Asian-American experience' because I didn't grow up with an Asian mom and dad. And that's just not true. I am Asian American, and so playing a girl who is half Korean, half white, but her white dad tried really hard to connect with her mom's heritage - that's very familiar to me.

I was familiar with Lovecraft, I also was familiar with his history as a person. So I had read his stories but I wasn't bananas like I think that a lot of people get bananas. I was like, they're good and I can definitely see the influences - but I can definitely read them and see the parts where you're being racist right there in your own stories.

Chess masters don't evaluate all the possible moves. They know how to discard 98 percent of the ones they could make and then focus on the best choice of the remaining lot. That's the way expertise works in other fields, too: Wise practitioners recognize familiar patterns and put their creativity, improvisation, and skill toward the marginal cases.

If any value is deeply evolutionarily familiar, it is reproductive success. If any value is truly unnatural, if there is one thing that humans (and all other species in nature) are decisively not designed for, it is voluntary childlessness. All living organisms in nature, including humans, are evolutionarily designed to reproduce. Reproductive success is the ultimate end of all biological existence.

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