Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
By denying its musical and artistic merit, hip hop's critics get to have it both ways: they can deny the legitimate artistic standing of rap while seizing on its pervasive influence as an art form to prove what a terrible effect it has on youth.
Everybody wants to be good, but not many are prepared to make the sacrifices it takes to be great. To many people, being nice in order to be liked is more important. There's equal merit in that, but you must not confuse being good with being liked.
It is important that the Church of London, which has now lost its ruler, should receive for its new bishop a man whose personal merit, attainments in learning, and prudence in managing public business shall not be unworthy of the dignity of that see.
A genial and cultured Arab, Ameen Rihani, whose English is perfect and whose eloquence is astounding. He will discuss with equal eagerness and knowledge the merits of Picasso or Van Gogh, or the Zionist question, or the British achievements in Arabia.
I always love to look at something that I couldn't make, because I feel it's enlightening. It means you are not invincible: you can respect something and look up to it and go, 'Wow!' It's a skill that I don't have, but I can understand the merit of it.
If progressives were interested in mitigating inequality, they would support the dynamism of free markets to allow the merit of ideas, products and services to win the day rather than stifle companies and pick winners in the name of imagined 'progress.'
The scientist-community guy may get a $500,000 grant, and if his equipment works or doesn't work, he still gets a gold star for doing the science experiment. For me, there is no merit in anything for doing an experiment; I have to go home with pictures.
The merit of the cross does not consist in its heaviness, but in the manner in which we carry it. I would even say that it is sometimes more virtuous to carry a cross of straw than a heavy cross because we have to be more attentive for fear of losing it.
First loves are not necessarily more foolish than others; but the chances are certainly against them. Proximity of time or place, a variety of accidental circumstances more than the essential merits of the object, often produce what is called first love.
Trust and confidence in Christ and a ready reliance on His merits, mercy, and grace lead to hope, through His Atonement, in the Resurrection and eternal life. Such faith and hope invite into our lives the sweet peace of conscience for which we all yearn.
The realization that my daily relationship with God is based on the infinite merit of Christ instead of on my own performance is a very freeing and joyous experience. But it is not meant to be a one-time experience; the truth needs to be reaffirmed daily.
We all want merit to mean something, and we all may be tempted to reduce that meaning to something measurable and concrete like an SAT score. The reality, though, is that who deserves entry into an institution depends on what the institution exists to do.
But the stupidity which is common to all such "explanations" is, of course, simply that of proceeding as though the merits of a theory - such things as truth, or probability, or explanatory power - could not possibly be among the reasons for its currency.
The characteristic merit of the English constitutions is, that its dignified parts are very complicated and somewhat imposing, very old and rather venerable, while its efficient part, at least when in great and critical action, is decidedly simple and modern.
'You, too, can be the President,' every American kid is told. But one unintended consequence of this belief, it is that, as a result of our being a meritocracy, if you have not succeeded, you are of lesser merit. It is shameful to be a failure in this country.
My first encounters with faith came about the time I was a Boy Scout, at about 14 or 15. I made the logical deduction that they operate the same way; I treated my faith like earning a merit badge, and everything about Christianity was about earning merit badges.
Western society is a society of ever richer, more varied, more productive, more self-defined, and more satisfying lives; it is a society of boundless private charity; it is a society that broke, on behalf of merit, the seemingly eternal chains of station by birth.
A continual feast of commendation is only to be obtained by merit or by wealth: many are therefore obliged to content themselves with single morsels, and recompense the infrequency of their enjoyment by excess and riot, whenever fortune sets the banquet before them.
I once looked over the shoulder of a friend on Facebook and it looked like hieroglyphs to me. There's merit online, of course, but social media gets super freaky. Imagine if three generations from now, people online have forgotten what date or day of the week it is.
I was induced to establish several orders of merit, from conviction that emulation, well directed, becomes a useful servant; and, that the latent genius of some youth is more easily brought into action this way, than by the more sordid gratification of self-interest.
Not only were the Jewish people beloved, but God himself had taken pains to let them know it. Could there be any clearer sign that he continued to believe in their potential, even without the Temple, to achieve forgiveness and ultimately merit the Temple's rebuilding?
Nevertheless, the central affirmation of the Reformation stands: through no merit of ours, but by his mercy, WE HAVE BEEN RESTORED to a right relationship with God through the life, death, and resurrection of his beloved Son. This is the Good News, the gospel of Grace
People now have been conditioned to believe they should only buy one song at a time, that nobody can make an entire record that would merit you paying, you know, $7, $8, $10 when CDs in the '90s were $18, $19 and people bought millions and millions and millions of them.
Assuredly men of merit are never lacking at any time, for those are the men who manage affairs, and it is affairs that produce the men. I have never searched, and I have always found under my hand the men who have served me, and for the most part I have been well served.
Merit pay has failed repeatedly, and it's no surprise. When you base teacher pay on standardized test scores, you won't improve education; you just promote the high-stakes testing craze that's led parents, students and educators to shout 'Enough!' all across the country.
In K-12, almost everybody goes to local schools. Universities are a bit different because kids actually do pick the university. The bizarre thing, though, is that the merit of university is actually how good the students going in are: the SAT scores of the kids going in.
I will say that rowing in the first Olympics was probably one of the most proud moments in my life. What I enjoy about the sport is that it's definitive. Nobody can take away from the fact that you're an Olympian. It's indisputable. You get there on merit and merit alone.
An education system where student selection is based on credit capacity and not merit capacity and where graduating students are no longer indebted to the nation, but increasingly indebted to the Australian Taxation Office - that's no way to improve the quality of education.
When you are proud of something you have done, and you have made a film you feel has merit, and it's found an audience and is critically well received, that's a pretty pleasurable place to be. I mean, you don't want it gathering dust at the bottom of someone's DVD collection.
When I was a kid, what captivated me about detective fiction were the puzzles more than the detectives or their enemies. And as I've gotten older, I see a lot of merit in setting your investigative sights higher than figuring out how someone stole Encyclopedia Brown's bicycle.
I see the merit in religion, and I see the need for faith and hope and sometimes people who are more snide look at people who are religious, particularly people in rock bands, and they'll say, 'Oh that's dumb, you believe in whatever,' but I think everybody believes in something.
Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. But a capitalist society does not satisfy the principle of distribution 'to each according to his merit or value.'
I think Republicans need to take income inequality more seriously. Not because I favor equality of outcomes. I do not. I think the Right is correct to stress merit and earned rewards, not handouts and forced equality. But I think what Republicans are blind to is that power corrupts.
It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.
In honor of Surgeon General Koop's legacy, we should ensure that the position of surgeon general is protected from political interference, funded appropriately and nominated from the ranks of career public health professionals who merit consideration, as is done in the other uniformed services.
Do they merit vitriol, even a drop of it? Yes, because they corrupt the young, persuading them that the mature world, which produced Beethoven and Schweitzer, sets an even higher value on the transient anodynes of youth than does youth itself.... They are the Hollow Men. They are electronic lice.
The case of Andrews is really a very bad one, as appears by the record already before me. Yet before receiving this I had orderedhis punishment commuted to imprisonmentand had so telegraphed. I did this, not on any merit in the case, but because I am trying to evade the butchering business lately.
You must begin to trust yourself sometime. I suggest you do it now. If you do not then you will forever be looking to others to prove your own merit to you, and you will never be satisfied. You will always be asking others what to do, and at the same time, resenting those from whom you seek such aid.
Hereditary property sophisticates the mind, and the unfortunate victims to it ... swathed from their birth, seldom exert the locomotive faculty of body or mind; and, thus viewing every thing through one medium, and that a false one, they are unable to discern in what true merit and happiness consist.
'Upstream Color' in particular, it's got to infect culture at some level in order to have a life of its own. Then it'll be judged, and it'll either live or it won't by its own merit, and history will decide whether it's relevant however long into the future. I think that's more than enough to hope for.
It is easier to silence scientific dissent by utilizing the politics of personal destruction, than to actually debate them on the merits of their arguments. That should tell you something about the global warming debate...there is none right now....it's either you believe, or you are to be discredited.
While Labour Party orators readily remember the 1980s for Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's free-booting variety of entrepreneurial meritocracy, what gets forgotten is that Thatcher also gave the heave-ho to the old establishment's notion of merit - good breeding, a posh school, and so on.
We can speculate on what's likely, but what's needed is an investigation. And speculation is no substitute for facts. As a former prosecutor, I prosecuted antitrust cases civilly. And I can say that antitrust investigations merit searching, penetrating scrutiny and investigation. That's what we need here.
To those critics who see capitalism as a system of inegalitarian, oppressive structures, its defenders have vaunted its ability to recognize and encourage what they call individual merit and asserted not only the desirability but also the inevitability of differential reward, of earned privilege, so to speak.
Television is a business and, financially speaking, they have decisions and considerations that go far beyond the creative merit of the show. But at the same time, you'd like to believe in a man's word. When he shakes your hand and says he's going to stay with it, and doesn't, it's really frustrating in a way.
There's some way in which we would prefer not to see very clearly the immense gifts and intelligence of some of the people who live in our most abject conditions. Maybe there are some things at work in deciding who gets to be society's winners and who gets to be society's losers that don't have to do with merit.
Familiarity with holy things can often engender blindness, and churches are, for all their merits, institutions that embody, perhaps more than most, the will to perpetuate themselves. In this process, they can easily lose sight of the purpose for which they came into being and, in so doing, frustrate the Spirit.
If literary terms were about artistic merit and not the rules of convenience, about achievement and not safety, the term 'realism' would be an honorary one, conferred only on work that actually builds unsentimental reality on the page, that matches the complexity of life with an equally rich arrangement in language.
Thus much indeed he was obliged to acknowledge - that he had been constant unconsciously, nay unintentionally; that he had meant to forget her, and believed it to be done. He had imagined himself indifferent, when he had only been angry; and he had been unjust to her merits, because he had been a sufferer from them.
Immediately after 11 September, the U.S. closed down the Somali charitable network Al-Barakaat on grounds that it was financing terror. This achievement was hailed one of the great successes of the 'war on terror.' In contrast, Washington's withdrawal of its charges as without merit a year later aroused little notice.