Generational Contract Quotes

A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the dawn."

À qui la faute? (1872) ~ Victor Hugo

If you're going to vote on a television contract, there is a certain rationality to saying that the same structures that are applied to Health Plan participation should be placed on the right to vote on a strike. ~ Dick Wolf

Sarah Aisling: I can't defend against these charges because I can't afford a litigator. But I can't afford a litigator because I've been charged.

Judge: You should have had insurance against contract suits.

Sarah Aisling: I did.

Judge: So what's the problem?

Sarah Aisling: They canceled my insurance when I filed the claim.

Judge: So sue them!

Sarah Aisling: I can't, I don't have a litigator.

Judge: That's very cute, Mrs. Aisling. ~ Nicholas Lamar Soutter

Life hasn't signed a contract with you promising to give you everything you want. It just unfolds in its own mysterious and uncontrollable way. The more you stop resisting the way things are, the happier and more peaceful you'll be. ~ Jonathan Landaw

Those who pass their lives in foreign travel find they contract many ties of hospitality, but form no friendships. ~ Seneca The Younger

But if the individual is to sacrifice a measure of personal liberty within the social contract, then individual rights must be guaranteed by law. Thus, it has been said that, in law, rights are the fence an individual erects around himself for protection against his neighbors.
How absurd such a posture must seem from a worldview in which the individual emerges out of the society, rather than the other way around. ~ F. David Peat

When I began experimenting, people weren't ready for it. Once it's in its second and third generational stages, people can accept it. ~ Joni Mitchell

It's very sad. There are no bike-riding federal contract attorneys in my apartment." If my phone had a cord, I would be twirling it around my finger right now.
"That is sad. Did you look everywhere? Sometimes they hide. ~ Mary Ann Rivers

My contract with my teachers is fair, and is two pages. The union contract is 200 pages. You cannot manage your business when you cannot make any decision without going back to 200 pages worth of stuff. ~ Geoffrey Canada

Dear Valued Customer: Your cable bill is now increasing 5% per month. You cannot cancel your cable. Ever. You cannot reduce your bill in any way. If you turn off your cable, your bill will remain exactly the same. If you rip your cable out of the wall, your bill will remain exactly the same, with the exception that we will charge you for the damage. Your children will be unable to cancel your cable contract. Also, please note that we will be reducing our delivery of channels by approximately 1 every month. As we deliver fewer channels, you can anticipate that your bill will sharply increase. If you do not pay your bill on time, the ownership of your house will revert to us, and we will lock you in an undisclosed location, where you will be forced to do tech support, and where we will be unable to protect you from assault and rape. If you attempt to defend yourself when we come to take your house, we are fully authorized to gun you down. Sincerely, The Statist Cable Company ~ Stefan Molyneux

Sometimes to take two steps in a row, one after the other, I need to make a contract with myself. ~ Erri De Luca

The only institution in the Sicilian conscience that really counts is the family; counts, that is to say, more as a dramatic juridical contract or bond than as a natural association based on affection. The family is the Sicilians' State. The State, as it is for us, is extraneous to them, merely a de facto entity based on force; an entity imposing taxes, military service, war, police. Within the family institution the Sicilian can cross the frontier of his own natural tragic solitude and fit into a communal life where relationships are governed by hair-splitting contractual ties. To ask him to cross the frontier between family and State would be too much. In imagination he may be carried away by the idea of the State and may even rise to being Prime Minister; but the precise and definite code of his rights and duties will remain within the family, whence the step towards victorious solitude is shorter. ~ Leonardo Sciascia

We have seen dog-tired Members of Congress marching lockstep ahead with their eyes fixed only on the end of the 100 Days of the 1995 Republican 'Contract with America' reform efforts. Many of the changes wrought by the House were passed without the benefit of a single hearing, or at best with a minimal legislative record. Is this what Jefferson and Madison had in mind? ~ John Gibbons

Before signing any contract, you have to assume that the guy on the other side of the desk is handing you a shifty piece of paper that works to his advantage. I know that sounds cynical, but it's really that simple. ~ Bun E. Carlos

Locke had illegitimately selected those parts of man he needed for his social contract and suppressed all the rest, a theoretically unsatisfactory procedure and a practically costly one. The bourgeois is the measure of the price paid, he who most of all cannot afford to look to his real self, who denies the existence of the thinly boarded-over basement in him, who is most made over for the purposes of a society that does not even promise him perfection or salvation but merely buys him off. ~ Allan Bloom

Our very contract with nature has a deep restorative power; contemplation of its magnificence imparts peace and serenity. ~ Pope John Paul II

He was also terrified that he hadn't properly read the small print of their relationship. He forgot that true friendship is a contract in which there can be no small print. ~ Gilbert Adair

To contract new debts is not the way to pay old ones. ~ George Washington

What pleased the land-owner's husband most was the insertion of a clause which stated that, if in any way our work of excavation was interfered with, or the contract was voided, he would have to pay £1000 down. He immediately went away and boasted of this to all his friends. 'It is a matter of such importance,' he said proudly, 'that unless I give all the assistance in my power, and keep all the promises I have made on my wife's behalf, I shall lose £1000.' Everybody was enormously impressed. '£1000,' they said. 'It is possible he will lose £1000! have you heard that? They can extract from him £1000 if anything goes wrong!' I ~ Agatha Christie

In fact, some leaders come right out and say it. Mario Draghi the president of the European Central Bank had an interview with the Wall St Journal in which he said the social contract's dead; we finally got rid of it. ~ Noam Chomsky

I keep expectations so embarrassingly low that I broke my contract and went and got a hair-cut. ~ Cristin Milioti

Three things make people want to change. One is that they hurt sufficiently. They have beat their heads against the same wall so long that they decide they have had enough. They have invested in the same slot machines without a pay-off for so long that they finally are willing either to stop playing, or to move on to others. Their migraines hurt, their ulcers bleed. They are alcoholic. They have hit the bottom. They beg for relief. They want to change.

Another thing that makes people want to change is a slow type of despair called ennui, or boredom. This is what the person has who goes through life saying, "So what?" until he finally asks the ultimate big "So What?" He is ready to change.

A third thing that makes people want to change is the sudden discovery that they can. This has been an observable effect of Transactional Analysis. Many people who have shown no particular desire to change have been exposed to Transactional Analysis through lectures or by hearing about it from someone else. This knowledge has produced an excitement about new possibilities, which has led to their further inquiry and a growing desire to change. There is also the type of patient who, although suffering from disabling symptoms, still does not really want to change. His treatment contract reads, "I'll promise to let you help me if I don't have to get well." This negative attitude changes, however, as the patient begins to see that there is indeed another way to live. A worki ~ Thomas A. Harris

Remember how, back in 1990, if you used a cellphone in public you looked like a total asshole? We're all assholes now. ~ Douglas Coupland

The rolling contract was designed to specifically take away some of that retirement talk and retirement issue. ~ David Gill

Although the body is very intelligent, it cannot tell the difference between an actual situation and a thought. It reacts to every thought as if it were a reality. It doesn't know it is just a thought. To the body, a worrisome, fearful thought means "I am in danger," and it responds accordingly, even though you may be lying in a warm and comfortable bed at night. The heart beats faster, muscles contract, breathing becomes rapid. There is a buildup of energy, but since the danger is only a mental fiction, the energy has no outlet. Part of it is fed back to the mind and generates even more anxious thought. The rest of the energy turns toxic and interferes with the harmonious functioning of the body. ~ Eckhart Tolle

If the derived class isn't going to adhere completely to the same interface contract defined by the base class, inheritance is not the right implementation technique. Consider containment or making a change further up the inheritance hierarchy. ~ Steve McConnell

Can human nature be so entirely transformed inside and out? Can man, created by God, be made wicked by man? Can a soul be so completely changed by its destiny, and turn evil when its fate is evil? Can the heart become distorted, contract incurable deformities and incurable infirmities, under the pressure of disproportionate grief, like the spinal column under a low ceiling? Is there not in every human soul a primitive spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world and immortal in the next, which can be developed by goodness, kindled, lit up, and made to radiate, and which evil can never entirely extinguish. ~ Victor Hugo

I signed a $150,000 contract with TNA Wrestling for a year. I ended up 8 appearances for 40 minutes. Then I signed a second contract and they didn't use me. So, I'd like to thank them for $300,000 for 40 minutes' worth of work. ~ Jonny Fairplay

Obviously, the closer you get to that moment, the more you start to realize 'this is the last year of my contract.' ~ Johnathan Joseph

I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor. Quite often during the past several years I have felt myself a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious of the moment's high issues, oblivious to its data, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams, the children burning in the locked car in the supermarket parking lot, the bike boys stripping down stolen cars on the captive cripple's ranch, the freeway sniper who feels "real bad" about picking off the family of five, the hustlers, the insane, the cunning Okie faces that turn up in military investigations, the sullen lurkers in doorways, the lost children, all the ignorant armies jostling in the night. Acquaintances read The New York Times, and try to tell me the news of the world. I listen to call-in shows. ~ Joan Didion

In our social contract, we have provisions that see to it that you take care of people who need some help. ~ Arlen Specter

Justice is a contract of expediency, entered upon to prevent men harming or being harmed. ~ Epicurus