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1 " Although I am still far from this kind of interior understanding of myself, with profound respect for its significance I have sought to preserve my individuality―worshipped the unknown God. With a premature anxiety I have tried to avoid coming in close contact with those things whose force of attraction might be too powerful for me. I have sought to appropriate much from them, studied their distinctive characteristics and meaning in human life, but at the same time guarded against coming, like the moth, too close to the flame. I have had little to win or to lose in association with the ordinary run of men, partly because what they do―so-called practical life―does not interest me much, partly because their coldness and indifference to the spiritual and deeper currents in man alienate me even more from them. With few exceptions my companions have had no special influence upon me. A life that has not arrived at clarity about itself must necessarily exhibit an uneven side-surface; confronted by certain facts [*Facta*] and their apparent disharmony, they simply halted there, for, as I see it, they did not have sufficient interest to seek a resolution in a higher harmony or to recognize the necessity of it. Their opinion of me was always one-sided, and I have vacillated between putting too much or too little weight on what they said. I have now withdrawn from their influence and the potential variations of my life's compass resulting from it. Thus I am again standing at the point where I must begin again in another way. I shall now calmly attempt to look at myself and begin to initiate inner action; for only thus will I be able, like a child calling itself " I" in its first consciously undertaken act, be able to call myself " I" in a profounder sense.But that takes stamina, and it is not possible to harvest immediately what one has sown. I will remember that philosopher's method of having his disciples keep silent for three years; then I dare say it will come. Just as one does not begin a feast at sunrise but at sundown, just so in the spiritual world one must first work forward for some time before the sun really shines for us and rises in all its glory; for although it is true as it says that God lets his sun shine upon the good and the evil and lets the rain fall on the just and the unjust, it is not so in the spiritual world. So let the die be cast―I am crossing the Rubicon! No doubt this road takes me into battle, but I will not renounce it. I will not lament the past―why lament? I will work energetically and not waste time in regrets, like the person stuck in a bog and first calculating how far he has sunk without recognizing that during the time he spends on that he is sinking still deeper. I will hurry along the path I have found and shout to everyone I meet: Do not look back as Lot's wife did, but remember that we are struggling up a hill." ―from_Journals_, (The Search for Personal Meaning) "
2 " Ah, adventure! Ah, romance! Ah, courtly graces and the noble gestures! Don't you wish you knew people like that? Don't you wish we could still walk around in cloaks and boots and breeches, with leather doublets and flowing white dueling shirts and swords strapped around our waists? Of course, if we did, given the way things are today, there'd be people out there lobbying for sword control, and we'd need a National Sword Association and bumper stickers that would read " Swords don't kill people, knights kill people," and there would be a five-day waiting period and background check before you could buy a rapier. We'd have drive-by lungings and people would be afraid of children carrying broadswords to school. " Milady" would be regard as a sexist term and feminists would go absolutely berserk if any woman called a man " Milord." Ralph Nader would probably get quarter horses banned because they are too small and unsafe in a collision and someone would figure out a way to put seat belts and air bags on our saddles. That's why people join the SCA and read fantasy novels, because the real world sucks. "
3 " In the Judeo-Christian tradition, we carry forward the basic insight our fundamental relationship to the world is one of love. Christians say that “God is Love,” that God created the universe out of love. The source of God’s Creation is love, and our relationship to the possibility of meaning within this created world is in and through love. The Christian community is a reciprocal relationship among subjects who love and are loved. The subject maintains the meaning of God’s Creation by taking up a Christ-like love toward others. The appearance of meaning in the world—love’s product—is always a manifestation of the divine. Liberalism turns away from this entire tradition of thought, in party because of its association with religion, and in part because this tradition resists the analytic form of reason. For liberalism, religion is individualized and privatized, and thus it cannot be used in the explanation or justification of a public space. If it does invade the public, it threatens irrationality. But religion is no less an effort to understand the character of our experience, and even a secular philosophy must not ignore that experience. We cannot simply deny what we cannot place within our categories of analysis. (221) "
― Paul W. Kahn , Putting Liberalism in Its Place
4 " ...the priests of all these cults, the singers, shouters, prayers and exhorters of Bootstrap-lifting have as their distinguishing characteristic that they do very little lifting at their own bootstraps, and less at any other man's. Now and then you may see one bend and give a delicate tug, of a purely symbolical character: as when the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Bootstrap-lifters comes once a year to wash the feet of the poor; or when the Sunday-school Superintendent of the Baptist Bootstrap-lifters shakes the hand of one of his Colorado mine-slaves. But for the most part the priests and preachers of Bootstrap-lifting walk haughtily erect, many of them being so swollen with prosperity that they could not reach their bootstraps if they wanted to. Their role in life is to exhort other men to more vigorous efforts at self-elevation, that the agents of the Wholesale Pickpockets' Association may ply their immemorial role with less chance of interference. "
― Upton Sinclair , The Profits of Religion
5 " The rise or fall, success or failure of your dreams is largely dependent on the association you build yourself around. "
― Israelmore Ayivor , Leaders' Frontpage: Leadership Insights from 21 Martin Luther King Jr. Thoughts
6 " frustration has flared up over the Common Core initiative, involving the implementation of national reading and maths standards for primary and secondary school children. The Gates Foundation played a central role in bringing the standards to fruition. Spending over $233 million to back the standards, the foundation dispersed money liberally to both conservative and progressive interest groups. The two major teachers' unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, each received large donations, as did the US Chamber of Commerce. Gates himself suggested that a benefit of the standards is that they open avenues towards increasing digital learning. In 2014, Microsoft announced it was partnering with Pearson to load Pearson's Common Core classroom material onto Microsoft's Surface tablet. Previously, the iPad was the classroom frontrunner; the Pearson partnership helps to make Microsoft more competitive. "
― Linsey McGoey
7 " At a cellular level of the human mind, Islamophobia is not really a matter of social stigma, rather it is a natural biological fear response of the general human mind, conditioned through countless pairings between terrorist attacks (unconditioned stimulus) and their apparent association with Islam (conditioned stimulus). Hence, Islamophobia cannot be eradicated completely, unless that pairing is severed and thereafter the conditioned stimulus of Islam is paired with something optimistic such as the heartwarming works of the 13th century Persian Muslim poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi. "
― Abhijit Naskar , What is Mind?
8 " Well written and easy to enjoy." executive director of Association of Science and Technology Museums "
9 " You cannot mend the chromosome, quell the earthquake, or stanch the flood. You cannot atone for the dead tyrants’ murders and you alone cannot stop living tyrants. As Martin Buber saw it, the world of ordinary days “affords” us that precise association with god that redeems both us and our speck of world. God entrusts and allots to everyone an area to redeem: this creased and feeble life, “the world in which you live, just as it is, and not otherwise.” “Insofar as he cultivates and enjoys them in holiness, he frees their souls…he who prays and sings in holiness, eats and speaks in holiness…through him the sparks which have fallen will be uplifted, and the worlds which have fallen will be delivered and renewed. "
― Annie Dillard , For the Time Being
10 " After this manner conceive that a flatterer differs from a friend: for it often happens to both that they engage in the same employments and the same associations; but the one differs from the other in use, in the end, and in the disposition of the soul: for the friend considers that which appears to him to be good to belong also in common to his friend; and, whether this proves to be painful or pleasant, he partakes equally of it with him; but the flatterer, following his own desires, conducts the association to his own advantage. The friend desires an equality of good, the flatterer his own private good. The one aspires after equal honour in virtue, the other after superiority in pleasure. The one in conversation desires an equal freedom of speech, the other servile submission. The one loves truth in association, the other deception; and the one looks to future emolument, but the other to present delight. The one requires to be reminded of his good actions, the other wishes them to be involved in oblivion. The one takes care of the possessions of his friend, as of things common, the other destroys them, as being the property of another. The company of a friend in prosperity is most opportune, and in calamity is most equal; but a flatterer can never be satiated with prosperity, and in adversity he is never to be seen. Friendship is laudable, flattery detestable; for friendship attends to equality of retribution, but this flattery mutilates: for he who pays servile attention to another through indigence, that his wants may be supplied, so far as he does not receive an equal submission in return, will reprobate the inequality. A friend, when his friendship is concealed, is unhappy; on the contrary, a flatterer is miserable when is flattery is not concealed. Friendship when tried is strengthened, flattery is confuted, by time. Friendship requires not to be corroborated by advantage, but flattery cannot subsist without profit; and if men have any communion with the divinities, the pious man is a friend to divinity, but the superstitious is a flatterer of divinity; and the pious man is blessed, but the superstitious is miserable. "
11 " During an hour-long conversation mid-flight, he laid out his theory of the war. First, Jones said, the United States could not lose the war or be seen as losing the war.'If we're not successful here,' Jones said, 'you'll have a staging base for global terrorism all over the world. People will say the terrorists won. And you'll see expressions of these kinds of things in Africa, South America, you name it. Any developing country is going to say, this is the way we beat [the United States], and we're going to have a bigger problem.' A setback or loss for the United States would be 'a tremendous boost for jihadist extremists, fundamentalists all over the world' and provide 'a global infusion of morale and energy, and these people don't need much.'Jones went on, using the kind of rhetoric that Obama had shied away from, 'It's certainly a clash of civilizations. It's a clash of religions. It's a clash of almost concepts of how to live.' The conflict is that deep, he said. 'So I think if you don't succeed in Afghanistan, you will be fighting in more places.'Second, if we don't succeed here, organizations like NATO, by association the European Union, and the United Nations might be relegated to the dustbin of history.'Third, 'I say, be careful you don't over-Americanize the war. I know that we're going to do a large part of it,' but it was essential to get active, increased participation by the other 41 nations, get their buy-in and make them feel they have ownership in the outcome.Fourth, he said that there had been way too much emphasis on the military, almost an overmilitarization of the war. The key to leaving a somewhat stable Afghanistan in a reasonable time frame was improving governance and the rule of law, in order to reduce corruption. There also needed to be economic development and more participation by the Afghan security forces.It sounded like a good case, but I wondered if everyone on the American side had the same understanding of our goals. What was meant by victory? For that matter, what constituted not losing? And when might that happen? Could there be a deadline? "
― Bob Woodward , Obama's Wars
12 " What separates Rand from Marx is that the latter saw the true flourishing of individual creativity as best accomplished through collaboration and association with others in a collective drive to abolish the barriers of scarcity and material necessity beyond which, Marx held, the true realm of individual freedom could begin. "
― David Harvey , Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
13 " We have rule of lawyers, not rule of law. The legal profession has a monopoly over one branch of government as it was never intended to. The American Bar Association owns an entire branch of our government. We should not be surprised that we are the most litigious society in the world. It is big business with a stranglehold on one of the three branches of government. "
― A.E. Samaan
14 " Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which is a pity because this week the National Association of Beholders wrote to tell me that I've got a face like a rucksack full of dented bells. "
― Charlie Brooker
15 " I have come to call this shadow government the Deep State...a hybrid association of key elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States with only limited reference to the consent of the governed as normally expressed through elections "
16 " Their characteristics are well-known. They're beautiful -- when they're not astoundingly ugly. They're both goddesses for men to worship, and demons for them to flee. They adore children, sometimes to the point of unhealthy obsession. They have a strong association with nature, from which they're often assumed to draw magical power. Their anger is a terrible thing to behold, and all the more fearsome because anything can spark it; the rules by which these creatures operate are not those of rational men. They are creatures of fanciful whim, and they never, ever, can be understood.I'm talking, of course, about women. "
― Marie Brennan
17 " This not to say that the men and women associated with the Rat Bastard Protective Association had freed themselves from the powerful hold of established gender roles on their lives. Shirley Burman, Joan Brown, Jean Conner, Jay DeFeo, and Joanna McClure most frequently provided the practical component of the vision they shared with their spouses; that is, the women all worked for a living... As Càndida Smith observed, the 'contradictions of this imaginary society fell most acutely upon the women, for... they carried the burden of 'holding things together'. "
― , Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association
18 " What, in nature," Kit asked, " is the most beautiful thing you've seen? Or the most terrible?" " The Dismals," Giles answered promptly. " A beautiful aberration in the lay of the land--North Alabama. A section mysteriously lowered, strewn with boulders, ferny, mossy, cooler--the vegetation, they say, typical of Canada. There the creek runs clear, but all other Alabama rivers and waterways are muddy with sediment. I even like the name--the Dismals. An eternal place, disjunct with the climate, the time, and its location." " You think being dismal is an attractive association with eternity?" I asked." It is a cool Eden in the Southern summer heat. What's yours, Una?" " The Kentucky hills in spring. Layers of pink and white--redbud and dogwood." " And you?" Giles asked Kit." Stars," he said. That was all. "
19 " Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is took weak and fuddled to shake off. "
20 " Happiness lies with us only. Desire for experiencing interactive pleasure is because of the association with the ignorance (of the Self). The one who does not have such association, he will ‘realize’ true happiness. "
― Dada Bhagwan
