The Czech Republic, severed from its old Slovak half, sits in apparent landlocked contentment, inside the European Union but outside the troubled Euro Zone, set into the new Continental mosaic like one of the small sturdy paving stones, just a few inches square, that form the sidewalks under the visitor's ambling feet.

For many people, and particularly in communities of color, the basic bargain of America - that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can share in the nation's prosperity - has become a raw deal. That's what President Obama's opportunity agenda is all about - making good on our country's half of the basic bargain.

Repentance is a sweet solace to conscience as well as the most complete atonement to the Supreme Judge of our offenses; notwithstanding, the tongue of malevolence and scurrility may be continually preparing its most poisonous ingredients for the punishment of a crime, which has already received more than half a pardon.

Here's the scientific community saying, fundamentally, "If we don't change our ways, we're screwed." And they got no attention at all. Even though the Union of Concerned Scientists put out this statement which was signed by more than half of all the Nobel laureates in science and another 1,500 distinguished scientists.

It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century.

We did wanna change the name. We were actually putting names in a hat. It was the people making an income off Motley Crue that talked us out of it. The booking agent was getting them between a half a million and a million dollars a show as Motley Crue. Then there was the manager who got 10 to 15 percent off Motley Crue.

Now, my mom did not read well and she read 'True Romance' magazines, but she read with me. And she would spend 30 minutes a day, her finger going along the page, and I learned to read. Eventually, by the time I was four and a half, she could iron and I could sit there and read the 'True Romance.' And that was wonderful.

The problem of dealing with the financial industry is being addressed today. You can measure it with interest rates coming down. You can measure it with the quantity of loans, and that sort of thing. The problem is, that nobody wants to take the loans. Once the banks are willing to give it, that's only half the problem.

Several times in Earth's history, rapid global warming occurred, apparently spurred by amplifying feedbacks. In each case, more than half of plant and animal species became extinct. New species came into being over tens and hundreds of thousands of years. But these are time scales and generations that we cannot imagine.

Anybody can see that the little money you get is half-wasted, because you cannot spend it to advantage. The worst food comes to the poor, which their poverty makes them buy and their necessity makes them eat. Their stomachs are the waste-basket of the State. It is their lot to swallow all the adulterations on the market.

And we have done more in the two and a half years that I've been in here than the previous 43 Presidents to uphold that principle, whether it's ending 'don't ask, don't tell,' making sure that gay and lesbian partners can visit each other in hospitals, making sure that federal benefits can be provided to same-sex couples.

The cabbage surpasses all other vegetables. If, at a banquet, you wish to dine a lot and enjoy your dinner, then eat as much cabbage as you wish, seasoned with vinegar, before dinner, and likewise after dinner eat some half-dozen leaves. It will make you feel as if you had not eaten, and you can drink as much as you like.

I usually tried to stay in the net for 45 minutes, half an hour longer than most batsmen would stick at the county nets. There was a reason for this so-called gluttony of practice: it was a conscious effort to make myself concentrate for long periods of time in circumstances as close to the real thing as I could make them.

Shamus ordered half a cup of house brew. Then he proceeded to fill the cup up the rest of the way with milk and sugar. Lots of sugar. “Sure you got enough milk in your sugar?” I asked as we strolled out of the shop and headed south. He flipped me off. “You drink your coffee your way, and I’ll drink my coffee the right way.

While we women dilly-dally, making decisions, leaving jobs half done, forgetting where we've put the house keys while we water the Hoover and leave the laundry in the dishwasher, men, like blinkered horses, look straight ahead, oblivious to peripheral vision, where a discarded pile of wet towels might have caught their eye.

If you have the 'Total Information Awareness' project working, it might be relatively easy to find everyone who had bought more than a ton of fertilizer and 500 gallons of diesel in the last year, which would be a great way of spotting potential Tim McVeighs - but it would also spot half the farmers and ranchers in America.

I'm magnetic," she whispered, half awed and half horrified. "I hope you don't start sticking to fridges and stuff," I said in disbelief. Fang dropped down next to me, and the Gasman joined us, squishing in next to Nudge. "What's going on?" Fang asked. "I'm Magnet Girl!" Nudge said, already coming to terms with her new skill.

My formative years were in Houston. I was in middle school, and everyone was dropping the last half of their names and adding an 'o' to the end. My little crew that I had, we were an all-female rap group, and everyone had an 'o' at the end of their name. I was Lisso. Then this dude started getting lazy with it, saying Lizzo.

A life is not meant to be half lived. It is meant to be fully, wholly embraced. If you want to make a change in the world you have to be strong. You have to take chances. You have to persevere. Sometimes you must blindly go in a direction that you may be unsure of, but one that you have faith will lead you to the right place.

I remember I took an editorial, and I was so excited. I got the pictures back, and I looked in the magazine, and I was like, 'Oh my gosh!' My arms were half their size, and I had a thigh gap magically, and all these crazy things. My family went out and tried to find my pictures in the magazines, but no one could recognize me.

From the time I was five years old, theater was all I knew. I did community theater; I went to theater school. It's like going to the gym as an actor: every single night, you have to recreate the illusion of the first time, so you really have to listen and connect and stay in the moment for an hour and a half - with no breaks.

That’s the thing you have to understand about the whole process of art (or the work that we do) – you’re only half of the equation. It’s an interaction between you and the person who’s going to experience the work. The person who’s going to experience the work is bringing just as much to it and is just as important as you are.

I was relatively buff (before 'Avatar'), because I was working in a tanktop half the time on stage, anyway, but I just went kind of into hyperdrive after that and really worked to beat that old body into shape, to get that carcass where...I didn't want to be looking at it and see anything hanging where it shouldn't be hanging.

I always wanted to be a zookeeper when I was growing up, and I've wound up a zookeeper! I've been working with the Los Angeles Zoo for 45 years! I'm the luckiest old broad on two feet because my life is divided absolutely in half - half animals and half show business. You can't ask for better than two things you love the most.

When I was three and a half years old, I heard my big sister tell my mum that at school that day all the kids sat on the floor and watched 'The Neverending Story.' Having never heard of the movie, I concluded that this was what school must be: sitting cross legged on the floor listening to a never-ending story. Page after page.

You don't need a digital David Petraeus or a President Bush avatar to distract you from the truth. You don't need to wait decades to have disinformation beamed into your head. You just need a constant stream of misleading information, half truths, and fictions to be promoted, pushed, and peddled until they are accepted as fact.

All indications are that three and a half billion years ago, Mars looked like Earth. It had lakes. It had rivers. It had river deltas. It had snow-capped peaks and puffy clouds and blue sky. Three and a half billion years ago, it was a happening place. The same time on Earth, that's when life started. So did life start on Mars?

I expected something a little more castle-shaped," said Jamie. Nothing lasts forever," Nick said. "Except demons, of course." Has anyone ever told you that you're a charming conversationalist?" Jamie asked. No," Nick replied honestly. I cannot tell you how much that surprises me," Jamie told him, and Nick gave him a half smile.

My senior leadership team is half people who have been at GM for a long period of time like me, and others who have joined the company within the last five years from different industries, experiences, and countries. You have a better picture of the world. The diversity of thought is where you can make better business decisions.

Getting to Valle Nevado is half the fun. A serpentine road from Santiago wriggles up the spine of Andean peak for an hour, then traverses a valley and finally up again. The hotel is perched on a rugged mountain crag at 3,000m: no other sign of human development is visible from this spot, which is close to the Argentinean border.

If you look at the beginning of this country, when the pilgrims came to this country, the first year they had a communistic experiment. They said, 'OK, we're going to take the land, we're going to work the land together and share in the fruits of our labor.' They almost starved to death. Almost half of them died that first year.

A couple of years ago, I went to dinner with a very high-profile source, and out of respect, I put my phone down for, say, an hour and a half. And during this dinner there was a major breaking story related to the Secret Service. When I picked my phone back up, I had missed about 50 emails and seven phone calls from the network.

Twisting through the thorn-thick underbrush, scratched and exhausted, one turns suddenly to find an unexpected waterfall, not half a mile from the nearest road, a spot so hard to reach that no one comes a hiding place, a shrine for dragonflies and nesting jays, a sign that there is still one piece of property that won't be owned.

I didn't understand key signatures or anything, you know. I'd say silly things at the top of a trumpet part like, 'Note, when you play B naturals, make the B naturals a half step lower because they sound funny if they're B naturals.' And some guy said: 'Idiot, just put a flat on the third line and it's a key signature, you know?'

There's a certain kind of dark-crusted sourdough bread I'm incapable of resisting. A sixth sense alerts me anytime I veer within a three-block radius of a bakery offering tangy country loaves with mahogany crusts. Without fail, I'll make my way inside and buy one, even if there's already half a loaf growing stale on my countertop.

During my first years in the Sierra, I was ever calling on everybody within reach to admire them, but I found no one half warm enough until Emerson came. I had read his essays, and felt sure that of all men he would best interpret the sayings of these noble mountains and trees. Nor was my faith weakened when I met him in Yosemite.

A parabatai. Like he was. And Jace knew, too, what that faded rune meant: a parabatai whose other half was dead. He felt his sympathy leap toward Brother Zachariah, as he imagined himself without Alec, with only that faded rune to remind him where once he had been bonded to someone who knew all the best and worst parts of his soul.

From Nato to the U.N. and the E.U., the generation that lived through the first half of the 20th century knew they needed to create a new world order. An order with rules and institutions which, however imperfect, could act both as constraints on individual countries going rogue and as catalysts for co-operation for mutual benefit.

Social Security is an insurance policy. It's a terrible investment vehicle. Social Security has some great benefits. But it was never meant to be a savings plan. So we need to have a national debate. Should this 12.5 percent that we're contributing all go into a Social Security pool, or should half go into a mandatory savings plan?

I had a general burnout: I got extremely tired; I couldn't do anything anymore. I canceled tours; I cancelled everything in my life. For a year and a half, I was completely sick; I couldn't do anything. So yeah, I wanted to write about it in my lyrics. 'Anatomy Of A Nervous Breakdown' is really about that, the inspiration behind it.

In the early '90s, I was hired to write educational dramas about HIV and AIDS in the shantytowns. I did that for two and a half years, and then I was hired on other films. When 'Tsotsi' presented itself, I thought, 'This is not a world I grew up in, but I've spent a great deal of time writing about it and researching it in my past.'

I was 3 and a half, and there was an open call for a Coca-Cola commercial. We were living around Dallas, and my mom took me. I think they were calling for 16-year-olds that could ride horses and swing a rope, and for whatever reason, my mom took me up there when I was 3. But I always had a rope, and I was a little cowboy at that age.

My parents made it clear that I should never display even the slightest disrespect to individuals who had the power to let me skip a half grade or move into more challenging classes. While it was all right for me to know more about a topic than my sixth-grade teacher had ever learned, questioning her facts could only lead to trouble.

I spent money, and I kept thinking, 'I get one more movie and I'll wipe these bills out,' but that movie never came. That black pride, I said, 'Man, I'm going to hang in there, I'm going to pay these bills.' So you owe a million dollars. 'I can pay that.' OK, fines, fees, now you owe two and a half million. 'But I didn't do nothin'!'

Trying to build a team over the course of the winter to put on the field is really just half the job. Because if your best players go down, it's not so much him going down as who you replace him with, which ultimately might have the biggest impact on how you end up finishing. So you want to have both a belt and suspenders for support.

From the day of its birth, the anomaly of slavery plagued a nation which asserted the equality of all men, and sought to derive powers of government from the consent of the governed. Within sound of the voices of those who said this lived more than half a million black slaves, forming nearly one-fifth of the population of a new nation.

I detest tradition for tradition's sake; the half-alive; that which is not real. I feel no hatred of individuals, but of customs, traditions; superstitions that go against life, against truth, against the reality of experience, against the spontaneous living out of the sense of wonder-of fresh experience, freshly seen and communicated.

There was kind of a no-nonsense parenting style that my parents had that was true of the time. Everything now... there are books, and there are websites, and there are blogs, and you're reading, and there's research. We're such an interconnected world now, and half the stuff they did was pretty terrible, but we somehow turned out fine.

Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother Teresa said that in India, a woman dying in the street will share her banana with anyone who needs it, whereas in America, people amass and hoard as many bananas as they can to sell for an exorbitant profit. So half of them go bad, anyway.

When I am at a dinner table, I love to ask everybody, 'How long do you think our species might last?' I've read that the average age of a species, of any species, is about two million years. Is it possible we can have an average life span as a species? And do you picture us two million years more or a million and a half years, or 5,000?

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