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The classical theorists resemble Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world who, discovering that in experience straight lines apparently parallel often meet, rebuke the lines for not keeping straight as the only remedy for the unfortunate collisions which are occurring. Yet, in truth, there is no remedy except to throw over the axiom of parallels and to work out a non-Euclidean geometry.
We're bringing the corporate rate down to 20 percent from 35 percent. That's a massive - this will be the biggest tax cut in history. In the history of our country. And that's great. And we need it. Because right now, our country's about the highest taxed or certainly one of the highest taxed in the world. And we can't have that. So we're going to have a country that's toward the lower end.
Really, doesn´t everything make sense? There are, of course, things from which we more or less recover, although some of them are too harsh even for saints. But that is no reason to accuse God. Even if there are reasons to doubt him, the fact that he did not arrange the world like a well-ordered parlor is not one of them. It speaks rather in his favor. This used to be much better understood.
The left, led by the news media, has been telling us practically from the day that Donald Trump announced his candidacy that he would be a complete disaster, particularly in foreign affairs and foreign relations around the world, and even more particularly in the Middle East. And, instead, we see the rave reception that President Trump is getting everywhere he is going, the profound respect.
I certainly was surprised to be named Poet Laureate of this far-out city on the left side of the world, and I gratefully accept, for as I told the Mayor, "How could I refuse?" I'd rather be Poet Laureate of San Francisco than anywhere because this city has always been a poetic center, a frontier for free poetic life, with perhaps more poets and more poetry readers than any city in the world.
What is an optimist? The man who says, "It's worse everywhere else. We're better off than the rest of the world. We've been lucky." He is happy with things as they are and he doesn't torment himself. What is a pessimist? The man who says, "Things are fine everywhere but here. Everyone else is better off than we are. We're the only ones who've had a bad break." He torments himself continually.
Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the world. If I say that there cannot be more than one consciousness in the same mind, this seems a blunt tautology - we are quite unable to imagine the contrary...
Modern Christians, especially those in the Western world, have generally been found wanting in the area of holiness of body. Gluttony and laziness, for example, were regarded by earlier Christians as sin. Today we may look on these as weaknesses of the will but certainly not sin. We even joke about our overeating and other indulgences instead of crying out to God in confession and repentance.
Value God and his love more than all the world, though there were millions of them. He valued you before the world, and therefore is beforehand with you in his love. He not only loved you from everlasting, (whereas your love is but of yesterday,) but in the valuation of it, he loved you before all worlds, and preferred you to all worlds: though you loved the world first, before you loved him.
If you go from the USA - which, relative to the rest of the world, is in pretty good shape in terms of biodiversity and sustainability - to the tropics, everything gets worse. You have Indonesia, which is destroying its own forest. In West Africa there's no control whatsoever. It's a global situation. For that reason it ties in clearly with the needs and relationships of low-income countries.
Comedy is like fictional charm. It's the charm of fiction. Or the charisma of fiction. When you meet somebody who's immediately charismatic, you're attracted to that person. And in fiction it's got to come out in either one of two ways: in the prose itself, and you're hooked immediately because you never want to leave such a colorful and penetrating world. Or, it's simply being a funny writer.
With software products, it is usual to find that the software has major `bugs' and does not work reliably for some users... The lay public, familiar with only a few incidents of software failure, may regard them as exceptions caused by exceptionally inept programmers. Those of us who are software professionals know better; the most competent programmers in the world cannot avoid such problems.
When you are young, you always expect that the world is going to end. And then you get older and the world still chugs along and you are forced to re-evaluate your stance on the apocalypse as well as your own relationship to time and death. You realize that the world will indeed continue, with or without you, and the pictures you see in your head. So you try to understand the pictures instead.
To me, the best zombie movies aren’t the splatter fests of gore and violence with goofy characters and tongue in cheek antics. Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in society… and our society’s station in the world. They show us gore and violence and all that cool stuff too… but there’s always an undercurrent of social commentary and thoughtfulness.
I suppose I could claim that I had suspected that the world was a cheap and shoddy sham, a bad cover for something deeper and weirder and infinitely more strange, and that, in some way, I already know the truth. But I think that's just how the world has always been. And even now I know the truth, the world still seems cheap and shoddy. Different world, different shoddy, but that's how it feels.
And we could have all this,' she said. 'And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.' 'What did you say?' 'I said we could have everything.' 'We can have everything.' 'No, we can't.' 'We can have the whole world.' 'No, we can't.' 'We can go everywhere.' 'No, we can't. It isn't ours anymore.' 'It's ours.' 'No, it isn't. And once they take it away, you never get it back.
Traditional murder mysteries are interesting because they're ostensibly about a horrible thing - murder - but underneath that, they're about restoring order to a messed-up world. By the end of a whodunit, the detective has taken the reader through all the reasons why this terrible thing happened. Through that explanation, and by seeing the killer captured, the reader feels a sense of catharsis.
As a writer I feel more like a filter than a performer. I absorb and observe and then I name scatterings of stars into constellations. I don't usually spend time asking whether the stars are random or planned. I make a narrative in the darkness, the area subscribed by an outline of bright points. Sometimes they look like Ursa Minor, and sometimes they just looks like one day the world exploded.
What I tried to show is that this idea of this fundamental conflict between savagery and civilization goes back to the very beginnings of Western history. I go back to the Greeks, I go back to the Romans. You can read Homer. And of course Homer has his great heroes involved in this myth, this wonderful mythic contest with savage tribal peoples, half-human monsters on distant parts of the world.
From the moment we are born, the world tends to have a container already built for us to fit inside: A social security number, a gender, a race, a profession or an I.Q. I ponder if we are more defined by the container we are in, rather than what we are inside. Would we recognize ourselves if we could expand beyond our bodies? Would we still be able to exist if we were authentically un-contained?
I got into architecture because I was searching for a way to produce in the world. I went to art school and thought I would do it through art, but I realized very quickly that I was interested in the social ramifications of form making. So buildings became the vehicle and fulfilled that thing. That satisfied me when I produced them. I decided this is what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
Of the seven billion people who reside on planet Earth, only 25% could, in the broadest sense of the word, be classified as "Christian" (and the percentage who have personally trusted in Christ for salvation is much smaller), meaning that over five billion people in the world are destined to hell if indeed Christ offers the exclusive path for salvation. To many people, such a claim is offensive.
What's the best gamble in the world, right now? Its betting that Deutsche Bank stock is going to go down. Short sellers borrowed money from their banks to place bets that Deutsche Bank stock is going to go down. Now, it's wringing its hands and saying, "Oh the speculators are killing us." But it's Deutsche Bank and the other banks that are providing the money to the speculators to bet on credit.
In the Internet world, both ends essentially pay for access to the Internet system, and so the providers of access get compensated by the users at each end. My big concern is that suddenly access providers want to step in the middle and create a toll road to limit customers' ability to get access to services of their choice even though they have paid for access to the network in the first place.
The world around us is an increasingly hostile and sinful place. Occasionally that splashes onto us, and perhaps, in the case of a few of you, it may be nearly drowning you. To anyone struggling under the burden of sin, I say again with the Prophet Joseph that God has ‘a forgiving disposition’ (Lectures on Faith, 42). You can change. You can be helped. You can be made whole—whatever the problem.
If we look round the world, there seem to be not above six distinct varieties in the human species, each of which is strongly marked, and speaks the kind seldom to have mixed with any other. But there is nothing in the shape, nothing in the faculties, that shows their coming from different originals; and the varieties of climate, of nourishment, and custom, are sufficient to produce every change.
J.J. Abrams wanted me to do a part in Lost and we probably had three meetings, and I finally turned it down, but it wasn't because I didn't like television or Lost, although I think I said to J.J., "I don't want to be in Hawaii and have an insurance person tell me I'm not allowed to go free dive and spear fishing." That would be the worst kind of torture in the world. But I don't hate television.
The students of biodiversity, the ones we most need in science today, have an enormous task ahead of molecular biology and the medical scientists. Studying model species is a great idea, but we need to combine that with biodiversity studies and have those properly supported because of the contribution they can make to conservation biology, to agrobiology, to the attainment of a sustainable world.
We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities, and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
There God tells us exactly what is going to happen and scripture tells us that there is going to come a world leader who will initially bring overtures of peace. He will help the Jewish people rebuild their temple in Jerusalem. He will have a new economic system where you don't buy or sell without his mark. Initially, for some, it will look like a good deal because there will be peace, as I said.
Although he reputedly hated the label of 'guru', Peter Drucker was, by any standards, the greatest management guru the world has yet seen. In 1996, the McKinsey Quarterly journal described him as the 'the one guru to whom other gurus kowtow' and Robert Heller described him as 'the greatest man in the history of management', praise indeed for a man who described himself as 'just an old journalist'.
Of all the sights and sounds which attracted me on my first arrival to live in London in the mid-thirties, one combined operation left a lingering, individual spell. I naturally went to Hyde Park to hear the orators, the best of the many free entertainments on offer in the capital. I heard the purest milk of the world flowing, then as now, from the platform of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.
We use the Air Force analogy: there were expensive things they had to do to get a cockpit suitable for a lot of pilots, like wraparound windshields, but their initial solutions, when they realized average didn't work, were adjustable seats. How in the world did they not already have adjustable seats in their planes? We're looking for adjustable seats for education, for basic things that we can do.
For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on. In my own life I saw these strings whose origins were endless enact the deaths of great men in violence and madness. Enact the ruin of a nation.
I don't speak cockney and I don't pretend to come from that part of the world. For the longest time the English, like the Beatles and so on sounded American. "She loves you yeah yeah yeah!" All of the sudden you sound American. It doesn't work that way with Americans who try to sing English. It's not convincing. If I say "Footy" and "tele" and "Brissy" and "Sydney" and "Simmo" it's not convincing.
I like traveling and I like not being part of the film world. Especially when you're in the middle of a junket, you're thinking, "I'm not doing this again for four years!"That's about taking time and finding the right story and being in a happy place in life where you can joyfully tell a story. I'm not really into the fame side of things, so I'm very happy with making a film every four years or so.
Modern education is competitive, nationalistic and separative. It has trained the child to regard material values as of major importance, to believe that his nation is also of major importance and superior to other nations and peoples. The general level of world information is high but usually biased, influenced by national prejudices, serving to make us citizens of our nation but not of the world.
I take facts about reasons to be fundamental in two ways. First, I believe that facts about reasons are not reducible to or analyzable in terms of facts of other kind, such as facts about the natural world. Second, I believe that reasons are the fundamental elements of the normative domain, and other normative notions, such as goodness and moral right and wrong can be explained in terms of reasons.
If, however, you take a moment to observe how you actually feel immediately after you criticise someone, you'll notice that you will feel a little deflated and ashamed, almost like you're the one who has been attacked. The reason this is true is that when we criticise, it's a statement to the world and to ourselves, "I have a need to be critical." This isn't something we are usually proud to admit.
When we see the world through our thoughts, we stop experiencing life as it really is and others as they really are. When I have a thought about you, that’s something I’ve created. I’ve turned you into an idea. In a certain sense, if I have an idea about you that I believe, I’ve degraded you. I’ve made you into something very small. This is the way of human beings, this is what we do to each other.
Indeed, often because of the size and weight in the world of our neighbor, we in Canada often define ourselves in contrast to American positions on things like Cuba, the Vietnam War and nuclear disarmament. Historically, Canada has not always been aligned with the United States. It doesn't necessarily serve anyone's interests - Canadian or American - to be seen as an extension of the United States.
But, Lord Crist! whan that it remembreth me Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee, It tickleth me aboute myn herte roote. Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote That I have had my world as in my tyme. But age, alias! that al wole envenyme, Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith. Lat go, farewel! the devel go therwith! The flour is goon, ther is namoore to telle; The bren, as I best kan, now most I selle.
There are many things I don't know, but quite a few I do. I know you can't be lost if you know where you are. I know that life is full of precious and fragile things, and not all of them are pretty. I know that the sun follows the moon and makes days, one after another. Time passes. The world turns, and we turn with it, and though we can never go back to the beginning, sometimes, we can start again.
The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you're supposed to go up and down when you're supposed to go down. When you're supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you're supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there's no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness.
Whether we like it or not, we live in a post-ideological world. That's how a Donald Trump can get through. He has no ideology at all: in that sense, he's a bit like Mussolini. I think that ultimately Trump will lose the election and in the process destroy the Republican party - but then I'm an optimist, ha ha ha! So he might not lose. He might be in charge of the largest nuclear arsenal in the world!
Human beings everywhere in the world are affected by the global media now. Still, what I have noticed in the east Asia, in the indigenous world, Alaska in particular, and in back country farm and ranch country, is a higher sense of etiquette, and more respectful manners. Urban middle class cosmopolitan world peoples of all races have become speedy and rude. This is a pretty big generalization though.
Capital movements are no longer necessarily related to the production of goods and services. Through the financial markets of the world, capital movements today are overwhelmingly concerned with the capture of and trade in property rights, the ownership of assets that magnify a corporation's wealth, power, and control. It is what John Maynard Keynes described as "a casino world"-wealth without worth.
Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It's a problem we face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity - a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied - and the world will pass beyond our understanding.
My short stories are so character-based and they're also so private. They're like a private world in each story and I'm getting more and more interested in allowing myself to investigate the big picture about this country, and about human beings, and about the planet, and about the solar system, and about the nature of the material world in general. And I felt like I needed to move into a bigger form.
A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence. Whether the meaning of existence is only what we put into life by our own individual fortitude, as Sartre would hold, or whether there is a meaning we need to discover, as Kierkegaard would state, the result is the same: myths are our way of finding this meaning and significance.