George Williams Ymca Quotes

Williams, having awarded Orwell the title of exile, immediately replaces it with the description 'vagrant'. A vagrant will, for example, not be reassured or comforted by Williams's not-very-consoling insistence that '"totalitarian" describes a certain kind of repressive social control, but, also, any real society, any adequate community, is necessarily a totality. To belong to a community is to be a part of a whole, and, necessarily, to accept, while helping to define, its disciplines.' In other words, Williams is inviting Orwell and all of us to step back inside the whale! Remember your roots, observe the customs of the tribe, recognise your responsibilities. The life of the vagrant or exile is unwholesome, even dangerous or deluded. The warmth of the family and the people is there for you; so is the life of the 'movement.' If you must criticize, do so from within and make sure that your criticisms are constructive.

This rather peculiar attempt to bring Orwell back into the fold is reinforced by this extraordinary sentence: 'The principle he chose was socialism, and Homage to Catalonia is still a moving book (quite apart from the political controversy it involves) because it is a record of the most deliberate attempt he ever made to become part of a believing community.' I leave it to any reader of those pages to find evidence for such a proposition; it is true that Orwell was very moved by the Catalan struggle and by the friends he made in the course of it. But h ~ Christopher Hitchens

I am convinced that it is the light and the way. ~ George C. Williams

Today is a sad day in Country music. We have lost another piece of history. George Jones was not only a good singer, but was a good friend. He will be missed by many. ~ Hank Williams, Jr.

Everyone who moves to New York City has a book or movie or song that epitomizes the place for them. For me, it's 'The Cricket in Times Square', written by George Selden and illustrated by Garth Williams. ~ Cathleen Schine

Before the game, he [Vin Scully] waxed poetic about Wrigley Field:
She stands alone at the corner of Clark and Addison, this dowager queen, dressed in basic black and pearls, seventy-five years old, proud head held high and not a hair out of place, awaiting yet another date with destiny, another time for Mr. Right. She dreams as old ladies will of men gone long ago. Joe Tinker. Johnny Evers. Frank Chance. And of those of recent vintage like her man Ernie. And the Lion [Leo Durocher]. And Sweet Billy Williams. And she thinks wistfully of what might have been, and the pain is still fresh and new, and her eyes fill, her lips tremble, and she shakes her head ever so slightly. And then she sighs, pulls her shawl tightly around her frail shoulders, and thinks, This time, this time it will be better. ~ George F. Will

It is almost possible to measure a writer's skill by the dexterity with which he repeats, and yet avoids monotony. ~ George G. Williams

Many traditional religions foster attitudes that ought to have disappeared as biological understanding accumulated over the last century. ~ George C. Williams

Job's avoidance of rebellion against God has nothing to do with God being good or wise or anything like that; it's strictly because God is so powerful, and you don't fight something when you are so much weaker than that which you would fight. ~ George C. Williams

I got a phone call from George Miller [the director] asking me to play this role. We sat down and he showed me on his computer a documentary-type montage sequence of real penguins swimming, in an Esther Williams synchronized sort of way, and doing things I have never seen them do. Then he explained his vision of the film, asked me to read the script and to voice the character. I was cast a little bit later, and he let me do the singing as well! ~ Brittany Murphy

In the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore got more votes than George W. Bush, but still lost the election. The Supreme Court's ruling in Florida gave Bush that pivotal state, and doomed Gore to lose the Electoral College. That odd scenario - where the candidate with the most votes loses - has happened three times in U.S. history. ~ Juan Williams

You think about people like Hank Williams, who stood on that spot of wood, and Mr. Acuff, and, of course, George Jones. And just about anybody you can think of who has made country music has been on that stage. That's what makes you so nervous - to think about the historical part of the Opry and how it's played such a part in country music. ~ Alan Jackson

The total effect of Orwell's work is an effect of paradox. He was a humane man who communicated an extreme of inhuman terror; a man committed to decency who actualised a distinctive squalor. ~ Raymond Williams

Ever since then, all descendant vertebrates have had the forward end of the digestive system and the forward end of the respiratory system very much involved with each other. This manifests itself in the human body with a crossing of the two systems in the throat. ~ George C. Williams

Making another effort to be paradoxical, Williams decides to identify Orwell as an instance of 'the paradox of the exile'. This, which he also identified with D. H. Lawrence, constituted an actual 'tradition', which, in England:

attracts to itself many of the liberal virtues: empiricism, a certain integrity, frankness. It has also, as the normally contingent virtue of exile, certain qualities of perception: in particular, the ability to distinguish inadequacies in the groups which have been rejected. It gives, also, an appearance of strength, although this is largely illusory. The qualities, though salutary, are largely negative; there is an appearance of hardness (the austere criticism of hypocrisy, complacency, self-deceit), but this is usually brittle, and at times hysterical: the substance of community is lacking, and the tension, in men of high quality, is very great.

This is quite a fine passage, even when Williams is engaged in giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Orwell's working title for Nineteen Eighty-Four was 'The Last Man in Europe,' and there are traces of a kind of solipsistic nobility elsewhere in his work, the attitude of the flinty and solitary loner. May he not be valued, however, as the outstanding English example of the dissident intellectual who preferred above all other allegiances the loyalty to truth? Self-evidently, Williams does not believe this and the clue is in the one word, so seemingly innocuous in itself, ~ Christopher Hitchens

George Piro, had gathered evidence that al-Qaeda had a network of adherents at American flight schools. Williams urged a nationwide investigation. He was unsurprised when headquarters took no action; thirteen years of experience had taught him that counterintelligence and counterterrorism were "bastard stepchildren" at the FBI. ~ Tim Weiner

George Clooney is a wonderful philanthropist. But I've heard regular people say, "Would he just shut up and be hot?" ~ Wendy Williams

Most evolving lineages, human or otherwise, when threatened with extinction, don't do anything special to avoid it. ~ George C. Williams

Having George W. Bush giving a lecture on business ethics is like having a leper give you a facial, it just doesn't work! ~ Robin Williams

The first twenty-four hours of a young man's life in London usually settled his eternity in heaven or hell. ~ George Williams

I've been lucky enough to kiss three James Bonds on screen: Pierce Brosnan, George Lazenby and Daniel Craig. ~ Olivia Williams

I think that my main criticism in that book was directed at the general assumption that adaptation characterizes populations and species, rather than simply the individuals in the populations and species. ~ George C. Williams

The general rule is that anything that is passed on in reproduction does not undergo senescence. ~ George C. Williams

I'd make a better U.S. president than George W. Bush. Bush is an idiot. I'm a better public speaker than him. It makes you wonder about the voters. ~ Robbie Williams

I can see it now: Osama bin Laden goes up to the pearly gates where George Washington comes out, starts beating him and is then joined by 70 other members of the Continental Congress. Osama will say, Hey, wait! Where are my 71 virgins? And George will reply It's 71 Virginians, you asshole! ~ Robin Williams

When the media ask George W. Bush a question, he answers, 'Can I use a lifeline?' ~ Robin Williams

It is calculated that George III had an astonishing fifty-six grandchildren. He did not have one legitimate heir. The vision of Charlotte had sustained the people through the direst years of the regency. Without her, all hope seemed gone.

From "Becoming Queen Victoria ~ Kate Williams

Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances. ~ George C. Williams

It doesn't take a literary detective, scanning the passage above, to notice that he is partly saying of Orwell what Orwell actually says about Gissing. This half-buried resentment can be further noticed when Williams turns to paradox. I have already insisted that Orwell contains opposites and even contradictions, but where is the paradox in a 'humane man who communicated an extreme of inhuman terror'? Where is the paradox in 'a man committed to decency who actualized a distinctive squalor'? The choice of verbs is downright odd, if not a little shady. 'Communicated'? 'Actualised'? Assuming that Williams means to refer to Nineteen Eighty-Four in the first case, which he certainly does, would it not be more precise to say that Orwell 'evoked' or even 'prefigured' or perhaps simply 'described' an extreme of inhuman terror? Yet that choice of verb, because more accurate, would be less 'paradoxical.' Because what Williams means to imply, but is not brave enough to say, is that Orwell 'invented' the picture of totalitarian collectivism.

As for 'actualising' a distinctive squalor, the author of that useful book Keywords has here chosen a deliberately inexact term. He may mean Nineteen Eighty-Four again - he is obsessed with the 'gritty dust' that infests Orwell's opening passage - or he may mean the depictions of the mean and cramped (and malodorous) existence imposed on the denizens of Wigan Pier. But to 'actualise' such squalor is either to make it real - no contradictio ~ Christopher Hitchens

Having been aware of the Red Sox since the 1946 World Series, having been growled at by Ted Williams as a young reporter in 1960, having been present at the horror of 1986 and the comeback of 2004, I have seen the highs and lows of some other people's favorite team. ~ George Vecsey

If Gissing is less compassionately observant than Mrs Gaskell, less overtly polemical than Kingsley, still The Nether World and Demos would be sympathetically endorsed by either of them, or by their typical readers. Yet Gissing does introduce an important new element, and one that remains significant. He has often been called 'the spokesman of despair,' and this is true in both meanings of the phrase. Like Kingsley and Mrs Gaskell, he writes to describe the true conditions of the poor, and to protest against those brute forces of society which fill with wreck the abysses of the nether world. Yet he is also the spokesman of another kind of despair: the despair born of social and political disillusion. In this he is a figure exactly like Orwell in our own day, and for much the same reason. Whether one calls this honesty or not will depend on experience. ~ Raymond Williams

The movie I've seen a million times - wait, that's not possible - my favorite movie of all times is 'The Empire Strikes Back,' directed by Irvin Kershner, executive-produced by the great George Lucas and stars Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams, James Earl Jones. ~ Donald Faison

[W]e are changed by what we read. Close that book, and you are not the same person anymore. Because of what you just read, your worldview--your understanding, your compassion for others, your ability to engage intelligently with others--has expanded a little. Books help us grow…. ~ Pat Williams