Civilwarland In Bad Decline Quotes

What I'm primarily saying,' he says, 'is that this is a time for knowledge assimilation, not backstabbing. We learned a lesson, you and I. We personally grew. Gratitude for this growth is an appropriate response. Gratitude, and being careful never to make the same mistake twice. ~ George Saunders

What other movement has ensured that young women have the rights that they have today? Feminism is responsable not only for the decline in violence against women over the last decade, but also for equal pay and rights legislation, reproductive justice, and the list goes on. So I'm more than a little suspicious of those who see women's advancement as a bad thing. ~ Jessica Valenti

Our Christian habit is to bewail the world's deteriorating standards with an air of rather self-righteous dismay. We criticize its violence, dishonesty, immorality, disregard for human life, and materialistic greed.

"The world is going down the drain," we say with a shrug. But whose fault is it? Who is to blame? Let me put it like this. If the house is dark when nightfall comes, there is no sense in blaming the house; that is what happens when the sun goes down. The question to ask is "Where is the light?"

Similarly, if the meat goes bad and becomes inedible, there is no sense in blaming the meat; that is what happens when bacteria are left alone to breed. The question to ask is "Where is the salt?"

Just so, if society deteriorates and its standards decline until it becomes like a dark night or a stinking fish, there is no sense in blaming society; that is what happens when fallen men and women are left to themselves, and human selfishness is unchecked.

The question to ask is "Where is the Church? Why are the salt and light of Jesus Christ not permeating and changing our society?" It is sheer hypocrisy on our part to raise our eyebrows, shrug our shoulders, or wring our hands. The Lord Jesus told us to be the world's salt and light. If therefore darkness and rottenness abound, it is largely our fault and we must accept the blame.--John Stott (Human Rights and Human Wrongs) ~ Richard Stearns

I have been investigating this modern problem of decline in readership and my conclusion is that it has little to do with bad readership and a whole lot with a difference in information speed. Frankly, the modern brain is much faster than the classical brain was in how it absorbs information and novels do not reflect this development. They are simply not dense enough. Too slow, not the right tempo - bores the shit out of a modern brain! There's the real problem: our brains have developed into different speed levels that authors cant adjust to. It has nothing whatsoever to do with quality: it has rather a whole lot to do with people claiming to be authors who are incapable of concentrating their ideas in the right sort of space, and rather smear out a few already halfbaked ideas over 30 plus pages. Hello! Do you think its weird a facebooktrained mind, capable of digesting enormous amounts of information at quick speeds, is bored shitless with that? The problem is not bad readership but rather bad authorship: authors that cannot adjust to the times. And since there are a zillion books published every day of authors that just cant keep up with the speed of the times, and criticism hardly exists anymore in modern society, it becomes simply very unattractive to read books, unless one keeps to the classics, which are books that are much more dense at essence. ~ Martijn Benders

I try as much as possible to keep pushing myself beyond my limits, those set by myself, and those by others, to see how much lies within. He said nothing is impossible and I truly believe Him.
Once in while I go beyond . . .
More often than not, I get pretty burned and decline to tend to my sores in solitude, whilst trying the best I can to find out why I burned so bad.
Other times, I surprise myself at the power within has been lying dormant probably out of ignorance or out of fear.
Either ways, I learn . . .
And probably that is the most significant thing to be gleaned out of every experience. ~ Ufuoma Apoki

Adeline had moved to San Francisco in 1996, which was a defining moment in the city's history. 1996 was not defined by Adeline's arrival.

1996 as defined by being the year during which the Internet economy exploded into the collective consciousness.

San Francisco had spent much of the Twentieth Century in decline, which meant that it was a bad place for people who liked doing business but a wonderful place for people who were terrible at making money.

San Francisco had been defined by the culture of people who were terrible at making money. It had become a haven for the misfits of America most of who were living in the city's fabulous old houses.

When the Internet economy exploded into the collective consciousness, these people proved that resisting social change was the only thing at which they were less adept than earning money. ~ Jarett Kobek

For the outsider
and everyone in this world is an outsider in relation to everyone else
something always seems worse or better than it does for the one directly concerned, whether that something is good luck or bad luck, an unhappy love affair or an 'artistic decline'. ~ Heinrich Boll

I've always said, the key organ here isn't the brain, it's the stomach. When things start to decline - there are bad headlines in the papers and on television - will you have the stomach for the market volatility and the broad-based pessimism that tends to come with it? ~ Peter Lynch

All those statistics - the ones about decline - point toward massive theological discontent. People still believe in God. They just do not believe in the God proclaimed and worshipped by conventional religious organizations. Some of the discontented - and there are many of them - do not know what to call themselves. So they check the "unaffiliated" box on religion surveys. They have become secular humanists, agnostics, posttheists, and atheists and have rejected the conventional God. Others say they are spiritual but not religious. They still believe in God but have abandoned conventional forms of congregating. Still others declare themselves "done" with religion. They slink away from religious communities, traditions that once gave them life, and go hiking on Sunday morning. Some still go to church, but are hanging on for dear life, hoping against hope that something in their churches will change. They pray prayers about heaven that no longer make sense and sing hymns about an eternal life they do not believe in. They want to be in the world, because they know they are made of the same stuff as the world and that the world is what really matters, but some nonsense someone taught them once about the world being bad or warning of hell still echoes in their heads. They are afraid to say what they really think or feel for fear that no one will listen or care or even understand. They think they might be crazy. All these people are turning toward the world because they intuit that ~ Diana Butler Bass

World War II was really unusual, because America was in the Great Depression before. So the war did help the US economy to get securely out of this decline. This time, the war [in Iraq] is bad for the economy in both the short and long run. We could have spent trillions in research or education instead. This would have led to future productivity increases. ~ Joseph Stiglitz

Do you ever wonder why a battered wife stays with her husband? Why people continue to spend money they don't have even though they know they are deeply in debt? Why some keep jamming food in their mouths when they're already overweight? Why do people stay in bad relationships? Why are some people still racist? Why do people still drink and drive? You'd think the response to all these things would be obvious and cause them to scream, "Duh, of course I need to change this." Why do we keep doing church the same way even when we know it's in critical decline? Why do paid church leaders spend so much time preparing for a 90-minute service for Christians who have heard it all before? Why do we still call our message the good news when it clearly seems to be bad news or no news to Sojourners? Why do we think Pharisees are only found in the Bible? Why is returning to a simpler form of ancient church so hard to grasp? ~ Hugh Halter

She felt bad for them, that nature had taken away their loving home and put her there in its place; that they'd been pulled from her uterus and placed in her arms, where she was the only thing standing between them and oblivion, them and failure, them and disappointment. ~ Melanie Golding

... He was a bad courtier and painted an ambiguous picture entitled La Menzogna or Falsehood, to show what he felt about the need for dissimulation to achieve success; a man holds up a mask to indicate to his companion that he must adopt it if he wants to make progress at court... ... The clear message was that Rosa was not prepared to demean himself in that way. ~ Jonathan Scott

He hated hospitals, hated them. The stench of Domestos and death seemed to linger in his nostrils and on his clothes for weeks, as if to remind him of something bad. It was even rare to find a tasty nurse these days. Most of the ones he'd seen this afternoon had been as ugly as sin. ~ Dougie Brimson

I'm probably the only guy in hockey who can win a scoring title and everybody is saying I had a bad year. I don't worry about it. ~ Wayne Gretzky

This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know
which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension! ~ Anton Chekhov

Marriage isn't a love affair. It isn't even a honeymoon. It's a job. A long hard job, at which both partners have to work, harder than they've worked at anything in their lives before. If it's a good marriage, it changes, it evolves, but it does on getting better. I've seen it with my own mother and father. But a bad marriage can dissolve in a welter of resentment and acrimony. I've seen that, too, in my own miserable and disastrous attempt at making another person happy. And it's never one person's fault. It's the sum total of a thousand little irritations, disagreements, idiotic details that in a sound alliance would simply be disregarded, or forgotten in the healing act of making love. Divorce isn't a cure, it's a surgical operation, even if there are no children to consider. ~ Rosamunde Pilcher

Not every girl has a bad-boy problem. Some of my friends get into relationships constantly. Others cheat all the time, or run away. Some get jealous. Some think they are too undateable to even try. Our dating pool is a circus of fuckups, misfits, and past mistakes that we keep on making. The brand of baggage you're carrying on your back is the issue. But most of all, I think we fear the same thing. I think that thing is love. Real love. Think of your first love. Think of how Bambi-like you were, prancing around all excited and in love with everything. Then think of how that happiness was beaten to death with a hatchet, spit on, shit on, leaving you cold. If you watch something you care about get destroyed, you're not going to want to go back to that place, no matter how pleasant it ever was. ~ Alida Nugent

Suicides pay the world a bad compliment. Indeed, it may so happen that the world has been beforehand with them in incivility. Granted. Even then the retaliation is at their own expense. ~ Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann

Christmas is God lighting a candle; and you don't light a candle in a room that's already full of sunlight. You light a candle in a room that's so murky that the candle, when lit, reveals just how bad things really are. ~ N. T. Wright

We all have struggle in our lives. We're all searching for personal freedom, whether we're in a bad place or trying to be true to ourselves. ~ Barbara Becker Holstein

Antoine was one hundred and ten percent certain that this was a very bad idea. Very very bad. Unfortunately, the raging hard-on in his boxers was telling him that he was in the mood for something very very bad ~ Jennifer Ashley

In Germany, no child finishes high school without learning about the Holocaust. Not just the facts of it but the how and the why and the gravity of it - what it means. As a result, Germans grow up appropriately aware and apologetic. British schools treat colonialism the same way, to an extent. Their children are taught the history of the Empire with a kind of disclaimer hanging over the whole thing. "Well, that was shameful, now wasn't it?"
In South Africa, the atrocities of apartheid have never been taught that way. We weren't taught judgment or shame. We were taught history the way it's taught in America. In America, the history of racism is taught like this: "There was slavery and then there was Jim Crow and then there was Martin Luther King Jr. and now it's done." It was the same for us. "Apartheid was bad. Nelson Mandela was freed. Let's move on." Facts, but not many, and never the emotional or moral dimension. It was as if the teachers, many of whom were white, had been given a mandate. "Whatever you do, don't make the kids angry. ~ Trevor Noah

Zachary Jernigan can't write a bad story. He couldn't even if he tried. Each and every time I start one of his inventive, carefully crafted, thoughtful and mind-bending tales I know I'm in for a treat. This collection is sci-fi at its intelligent best. ~ David Anthony Durham

Beauty like hers had no place in his life. ~ Kelly Moran

Not bad," he said. "Chewy and sweet, too. They sell these in New York?"
I nodded, washing it down with lemonade. That wasn't where Connor had bought it, but I was pretty sure they sold them in New York and pretty much anywhere else in the country, although definitely not in 1893. I wondered how much Kiernan knew about the CHRONOS key from his time on the Cyrist farm, and what his reaction would be if I told him he was eating something purchased by his great-grandson. ~ Rysa Walker

Most of us perceive Evil as an entity, a quality that is inherent in some people and not in others. Bad seeds ultimately produce bad fruits as their destinies unfold. . . Upholding a Good-Evil dichotomy also takes 'good people' off the responsibility hook. They are freed from even considering their possible role in creating, sustaining, perpetuating, or conceding to the conditions that contribute to delinquency, crime, vandalism, teasing, bullying, rape, torture, terror, and violence. ~ Philip G. Zimbardo

New Rule: If you're one of the one-in-three married women who say your pet is a better listener than your husband, you talk too much. And I have some bad news for you: Your dog's not listening, either; he's waiting for food to fall out of your mouth. ~ Bill Maher

[W]e are not morally bad people for taking carbon and turning it into the energy that offers life to humanity in a world that would otherwise be brutal (think of life before modernity). On the contrary, we are good people for doing so. ~ John Christy

A habit is a stable disposition to act in a certain way, good or evil. Virtues are good habits; vices are bad habits. ~ Peter Kreeft

My point is, it's not cut and dried, black and white, good and bad. It lives where everything lives: somewhere in the middle. Where everything lives, where all the rest of us live, everyone but you. ~ Tracy Letts

If we had allowed things to drift, everything would have gone from bad to worse. Nasser would have become a kind of Moslem Mussolini, and our friends in Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and even Iran would gradually have been brought down. His efforts would have spread westwards, and Libya and North Africa would have been brought under his control. ~ Anthony Eden

I hope you feel better about yourself. I hope you feel alive. I hope that good things happen to you, and I hope that when the inevitable bad things happen you can handle them and learn a lesson and move on. I hope you know you're not alone and I hope you spend plenty of time with your family and/or friends and I hope you write more and get a seven-figure book deal. I hope next year no more celebrities die and I hope you get an iPhone if you want one. Or maybe a pony. I hope someone writes a song for you on Valentines Day that's a bit like Hey There Delilah, and I hope they have a good singing voice, or at least one better than mine. I hope that you accept yourself the way you are, and figure out that losing 20 pounds isn't going to magically make you love yourself. I hope you read a lot. I hope you don't have to almost die to figure out how valuable life is. I hope you find the perfect nail polish/digital camera/home/life partner. I hope you stop being jealous of others. I hope you feel good, about yourself and the people around you and the world. I hope you eat heaps of salt and vinegar chips because they're the best kind. I hope you accomplish all your hopes & dreams & aspirations and are blissfully happy & get married to Edward Cullen/George Clooney/Megan Fox/Angelina Jolie (delete whichever are inappropriate) & ride a pretty white horse into the sunset & I hope it's all sweet and wonderful because you deserve it because you did well this year in the fa ~ Steph Bowe

I figure, sometimes, bad things happen to us so we can achieve a higher purpose and attain greater happiness and fulfillment in life. ~ Omoakhuana Anthonia

But there were other, vaguer, harder-to-pin-down feelings, like: a pit in the stomach that means something is either really good or really bad or both. A feeling of being old and young at once. A sense of beginnings and endings happening at the same time. A certainty that your life is changing, but an uncertainty about how it's changing and whether you want it to. ~ Pseudonymous Bosch

Now what do you get in the Army? Bad helmets and Basra. Your guns don't work and everyone hates you when you come back. ~ Rupert Everett

It is not the development of material need which sets the modern vocabulary of aspiration apart from anything which has gone before, but rather the transformation of our spiritual needs. It is our spirits, not our clothes and houses and cars, that set us so radically apart from our own past and form much of the rest of the world. Imagine what we must be like to the primitive peoples who receive our attentions as anthropologists. We come upon them armed with our mastery of nature, and yet they can disarm us with the simplest metaphysical inquiry: what happen when people die? where do they go? what are the duties of the living to the dead? Their cultures are as rich in answers to these questions as our culture is rich in answers to the technical and scientific problems which baffle them.

It has always been a truism of the Western bad conscience that we have purchased our mastery of nature at the price of our spirits. The conservative and romantic critique of Western progress has always used the example of the savage - rich in cosmology, poor in goods - to argue for an inverse historical relationship between the development of material and spiritual needs. Certainly this view could draw upon the dark side of the Christian theology of need. While secular optimists have trust in the permanence of spiritual need, Augustinian Christians have fixed their gaze on the nightmare of the happy slave: the being so absorbed by the material that all spiritual needs have perished.< ~ Michael Ignatieff

You have enough friends.

Do you really want to just be friends? There is nothing worse than just being friends with someone you're in love with who isn't in love with you. Actually, being friends with benefits with someone you're in love with who isn't in love with you is worse. But friendship with no benefits is bad too. ~ Melissa Broder

Ah! but a man cannot be held to write down in cold blood the wild and black thoughts that storm his brain when an uncontrolled passion has battered a breach for them. Yet, unless he sets up as a saint, he need not hate himself for them. He is better employed, as it humbly seems to me, in giving thanks that power to resist was given to him ... ~ Anthony Hope

This was something that happened in bad horror movies, and books written by people from Maine. ~ Chris Philbrook

It does not matter. You train your soldiers to kill using video games. They blow enough people up on their computer and it becomes easier for them to kill with a real weapon. Why do you think your government funds so many war and terrorism movies? Hollywood does your dirty work for you. Had 9/11 happened twenty years earlier, the country would have been in chaos, but people have seen enough bad things on their television screen to prepare them for just about anything. We do not really need to talk about government conspiracies. ~ Sylvain Neuvel