Obliterated Quotes

Hispanic gives us all one ultimate paternal cultural progenitor: Spain. The diverse cultures already on the American shores when the Europeans arrived, as well as those introduced because of the African slave trade, are completely obliterated by the term. Hispanic is nothing more than a concession made by the U. S. legislature when they saw they couldn't get rid of us. If we won't go away, why not at least Europeanize us, make us presentable guests at the dinner table, take away our feathers and rattles and civilize us once and for all. ~ Ana Castillo

The sciences were financially supported, honoured everywhere, universally pursued; they were like tall edifices supported by strong foundations. Then the Christian religion appeared in Byzantium and the centres of learning were eliminated, their vestiges effaced and the edifice of Greek learning was obliterated. Everything the ancient Greeks had brought to light vanished, and the discoveries of the ancients were altered out of recognition. ~ Mas'udi

It's hard to feel alive when you've been obliterated inside, hard to feel real when you no longer remember how to dream. ~ J.M. Darhower

States used to protect consumers from predatory lenders, but strong state usury laws were obliterated by a 1978 U.S. Supreme Court decision. ~ Bernie Sanders

Since Democrats vs. Republicans has been obliterated, no real difference between parties ... ~ Matt Drudge

Where do people get off telling people what to do? It's their bodies. If you legalized sex work and legally protected the sex workers, you wouldn't see anything like human trafficking. All of that would be obliterated. ~ Margaret Cho

Though no one notices at the time, in-loveness obliterates the humanity of the beloved. One does a curious kind of insult to another by falling in love with him, for we are really looking at our own projection of God, not at the other person. If two people are in love, they tread on star dust for a time and live happily ever after - that is so long as this experience of divinity has obliterated time for them. Only when they come down to earth do they have to look at each other realistically and only then does the possibility of mature love exist. If one person is in love and the other not, the cooler one is likely to say, "We would have something better between us if you would look at me rather than at your image of me. ~ Robert A. Johnson

My misery was too deep to speak any more. I scanned the page; I was having trouble breathing, as though the oxygen were leaving the room. Amid its devastation my mind flashed from thought to thought, despairingly in search of something left which it could rely on. Not rely on absolutely, that was obliterated as a possibility, just rely on a little,some solace, something surviving in the ruin. ~ John Knowles

Natural disasters are terrifying - that loss of control, this feeling that something is just going to randomly end your life for absolutely no reason is terrifying. But, what scares me is the human reaction to it and how people behave when the rules of civility and society are obliterated. ~ Eli Roth

When you say you experience my writing as sacred, what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place. ~ Cheryl Strayed

To understand anything is to find in it something which is our own, and it is the discovery of ourselves outside us which makes us glad. This relation of understanding is partial, but the relation of love is complete. In love the sense of difference is obliterated and the human soul fulfils its purpose in perfection, transcending the limits of itself and reaching across the threshold of the infinite. Therefore love is the highest bliss that man can attain to, for through it alone he truly knows that he is more than himself, and that he is at one with the All. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

I'm glad to see that the crusading spirit of your forebears hasn't been entirely obliterated by rock and roll. ~ Ken Follett

We thus have three levels of antagonism: the Two are never two, the One is never one, the Nothing is never nothing. Sinthome - the signifier of the barred Other - registers the antagonism of the Two, their non-relationship. The object a registers the antagonism of the One, its inability to be one. $ registers the antagonism of Nothing, its inability to be the Void at peace with itself, to annul all struggles. The position of Wisdom is that the Void brings ultimate peace, a state in which all differences are obliterated; the position of dialectical materialism is that there is no peace even in the Void. ~ Slavoj Zizek

wished she'd done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again. Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very height of my youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life both ended and begun in that premature place where we'd left off. She ~ Cheryl Strayed

The city of the First Empire, the one upon the old island ... " Icarium waited. "Destroyed ... by your hand, Icarium. Yours is a blind rage ... a rage unequaled. It burns fierce, so fierce all your memory of what you do is obliterated. I watch you - I have watched you stirring those cold ashes, ever seeking to discover who you are, yet there I stand, at your side, bound by a vow to prevent you ever committing such an act again. You have destroyed cities, entire peoples. Once you begin killing, you cannot stop, until all before you is ... lifeless. ~ Steven Erikson

Slavery and other forms of bondage, of course, have not been obliterated from the face of the earth. As a result of recent publicity about the trafficking of people for labor and prostitution, one sometimes hears the statistically illiterate and morally obtuse claim that nothing has changed since the 18th century, as if there were no difference between a clandestine practice in a few parts of the world and an authorized practice everywhere in the world. ~ Steven Pinker

If there's a cat, I obliterate it by putting polka dot stickers on it. I obliterate a horse by putting polka dot stickers on it. And I obliterated myself by putting the same polka dot stickers on myself. ~ Yayoi Kusama

Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head. they were his insomnia, his illness. And what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely, but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, over-poering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word! ~ Milan Kundera

I once heard the survivors of a colony of ants that had been partially obliterated by a cow's foot seriously debating the intention of the gods towards their civilization. ~ Don Marquis

I didn't get to grow up and pull away from her and bitch about her with my friends and confront her about the things I'd wished she'd done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again. Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very heigh of my youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life both ended and begun in that premature place where we'd left off. She was my mother, but I was motherless. I was trapped by her, but utterly alone. She would always be the empty bowl that no one could full. I'd have to fill it myself again and again and again. ~ Cheryl Strayed

An estimated two thirds of the women who got criminal abortions were married. This means that up to two thirds of the botched abortions were done on married women; up to two thirds of the dead were married women; perhaps two thirds of the survivors are married women. This means that most of the women who risked death or maiming so as not to bear a child were married - perhaps one million married women each year. They were not shameless sluts, unless all women by definition are. They were not immoral in traditional terms - though, even then, they were thought of as promiscuous and single. Nevertheless, they were not women from the streets, but women from homes; they were not daughters in the homes of fathers, but wives in the homes of husbands. They were, quite simply, the good and respectable women of Amerika. The absolute equation of abortion with sexual promiscuity is a bizarre distortion of the real history of women and abortion - too distorted to be acceptable even in the United States, where historical memory reaches back one decade. Abortion has been legalized just under one decade. The facts should not be obliterated yet. Millions of respectable, God-fearing, married women have had illegal abortions. They thank their God that they survived; and they keep quiet. ~ Andrea Dworkin

It occurred to him, for the first time, that it did unflattering things to a person when affection was taken away from them. For there had been a time when she had seemed gorgeous, and fun, and all of her naughtiness had had for him a kind of irresistible pull. It was only after he decided he didn't want her anymore that she became a shrew, and obliterated his memory of the girl she used to be. ~ Anna Godbersen

I kissed her and it was like my whole life became condensed to that little flashpoint. Every kiss that came before was obliterated and every kiss that comes after will never measure up, so long as it's with someone other than her.
That kiss undid me in ways I didn't see coming. ~ Karina Halle

a millisecond before fifty-two tonnes of intercontinental ballistic missile obliterated him completely. ~ Will Hill

I am a musician. My passion for music has obliterated everything in its path for my entire life. ~ Barry Manilow

A complying memory has obliterated many of them and edited my childhood down to a brief cinematic blur. ~ V.S. Naipaul

Within the universe of the extraordinary, those qualities we designate to human concepts of gender are often shared, exchanged, or even completely obliterated. Because of this mixture of traits, these twins called Genius and Madness often appear to be the same thing. They both have a tendency to blur the lines of what we call norms, or established reality. They both, when we study that grand tapestry known as history and modern-day society, tend to stand out in much bolder relief than other figures.
from Dancing with Madness, Dancing with Genius ~ Aberjhani

Father, brother, lover - he'd never really declared himself any of them. Certainly not the lover part, thought if Celaena had been another sort of girl, and if Arobynn had raised her differently , perhaps it might have come to that. He loved her like family, yet he put her in the most dangerous positions. He nurtured and educated her, yet he'd obliterated her innocence the first time he'd made her end a life. He'd given her everything, but he'd also taken everything away. She could no sooner sort out her feelings toward the King of the Assassins that she could count the stars in the sky. ~ Sarah J. Maas

Tancredi and Angelica were passing in front of them at that moment, his gloved right hand on her waist, their outspread arms interlaced, their eyes gazing into each other's. The black of his tail coat, the pink of her dress, combining formed a kind of strange jewel. They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other's defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowning actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither of them was good, each full of self-interest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die. . .

For them death was purely an intellectual concept, a fact of knowledge as it were and no more, not an experience which pierced the marrow of their bones. Death, oh yes, it existed of course, but it was something that happened to others. The thought occurred to Don Fabrizio that it was ignorance of this supreme consolation that made the young feel sorrows much more sharply than the old; the latter are nearer the safety exit. ~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

He looked like his brother, in a harder way, like Declan Lynch had been inserted into a pencil sharpener and Ronan Lynch had been taken out after Declan's teeth were even; Ronan's were bared. Declan's eyes were narrow; Ronan's were arrow slits. Declan's hair was curled; Ronan's was obliterated. Declan looked like the kind of person you forgot you'd ever seen. Ronan looked like the kind of person that made you cross to the other side of the street. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

For in the Market-place, one Dusk of Day, I watch'd the Potter thumping his wet Clay: And with its all obliterated Tongue It murmur'd - "Gently, Brother, gently, pray!" XXXVII. ~ Omar Khayyam

9:12 P.M. - GROUND ZERO, WASHINGTON, D.C. Without warning, the capital of the United States was obliterated. At precisely 9:12 p.m. Eastern, in a millisecond of time, in a blinding flash of light, the White House simply ceased to exist, as did everything and everyone else for miles in every direction. No sooner had the first missile detonated in Lafayette Park than temperatures soared into the millions of degrees. The firestorm and blast wave that followed consumed everything in its path. Gone was the Treasury building, and with it the headquarters of the United States Secret Service. Gone was the FBI building, and the National Archives, and the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Capitol and all of its surrounding buildings. Wiped away was every monument, every museum, every restaurant, every hotel, every hospital, every library and landmark of any kind, every sign of civilization. ~ Joel C. Rosenberg

his real point is that in the climate of fear that would follow the breakdown of authority, the kinder, more trusting, side of human nature would be obliterated. And from what we know of human behaviour when people are caught up in civil war and other situations in which their very survival is at stake, he seems to have been right. We ~ David Miller

We belong to that order of mammals, the primates, distinguished by its propensity for repeated single litters, intense parental care, long life-spans, late sexual maturity, and a complex and extensive social existence ... Our protracted biological and psychological helplessness, which extends well into the third year of life, intensifies the bond between infant and parents, making possible a sense of generational continuity. In contrast to other primates these bonds are not obliterated after sexual maturity. ~ Louise J. Kaplan

This part of Warsaw has always been an extension of home for her, part of her shape, a responsive intimate part of her identity. So much she was attached to, so much that lent her footholding weight is now obliterated. It's as if one of the mirrors by which she recognises herself has ceased to reflect her. The teetering balancing act of unsupported walls makes her feel unsteady on her own legs. Buildings taken for granted are no longer standing. There are voids where previously history stood. Feathers like snowflakes rise up into the smoke infested air as if she is inside a macabre snow globe. ~ Glenn Haybittle

My father's family was mostly obliterated in the Holocaust, and I grew up very much with the sense that the central moral and political question is how do we prevent these things from happening again. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

We are so stricken

We are so stricken
that we think we're dying
when the street casts an evil word at us.
The street does not know it,
but it cannot stand such a weight;
it is not used to seeing a Vesuvius of pain
break out.
Its memories of primeval times are obliterated,
since the light became artificial
and angels only play with birds and flowers
or smile in a child's dream ~ Nelly Sachs

The problem with music was always that the sound system often obliterated the words, and words, not music, have always been what I was about. ~ Lydia Lunch

Just as experience dictates to the ballet teacher the length of time necessary to train his students, so the horse, too, needs time to mature into a great four legged dancer. This fact cannot be obliterated by seeming successes that supposedly prove the opposite. For, even if someone should succeed in training a horse to high school level by the age of eight, this individual occurrence cannot shake the foundations of the classical art of riding, if this dressage horse is completely unsound and unusable by the age of ten. ~ Alois Podhajsky

Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear ~ Allen Ginsberg

Though the continued march of intellect and education have nearly obliterated from the mind of the Scots a belief in the marvelous, still a love of the supernatural lingers among the more mountainous districts of the northern kingdom; for 'the Schoolmaster' finds it no easy task, even when aided by all the light of science, to uproot the prejudices of more than two thousand years. ("The Phantom Regiment") ~ James Grant

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated. ~ Jean Baudrillard

I know my own reasons for keeping Peeta alive. He's my friend, and this is my way to defy the Capitol, to subvert its terrible Games. But if I had no real ties to him, what would make me want to save him, to choose him over myself? Certainly he is brave, but we have all been brave enough to survive a Games. There is that quality of goodness that's hard to overlook, but stil... and then I think of it, what Peeta can do so much better than the rest of us. He can use words. He obliterated the rest of the field at both interviews. And maybe it's because of that underlying goodness that he can move a crowd--no, a country--to his side with the turn of a simple sentence.

I remember thinking that was the gift the leader of our revolution should have. Has Haymitch convinced the others of this? That Peeta's tongue would have far greater power against the Capitol than any physical strength the rest of us could claim? I don't know. It still seems like a really long leap for some of the tributes. I mean, we're talking about Johanna Mason here. But what other explanation can there be for their decided efforts to keep him alive? ~ Suzanne Collins

Emma says her illness was a kind of self-hypnosis which obliterated the outside world, a way of escaping life and reducing its proportions to what she could manage. ~ Carol Lee

By and large, I think it should be a rule in the teacher employment manual that you can't go attend any event where if you took your classroom on a student field trip, they would summarily be obliterated. That should be rule No. 1. ~ Dennis Miller

As I looked down at him, as I saw his yellow hair pressed against my coat, I had a vision of him from long ago, that tall, stately gentleman in the swirling black cape, with his head thrown back, his rich, flawless voice singing the lilting air of the opera from which we'd only just come, his walking stick tapping the cobblestones in time with the music, his large, sparkling eye catching the young woman who stood by, enrapt, so that a smile spread over his face as the song died on his lips; and for one moment, that one moment when his eye met hers, all evil seemed obliterated in that flush of pleasure, that passion for merely being alive. ~ Anne Rice

Hospitals are a little like the beach. The next wave comes in, and the footprints of your pain and suffering, your delivery and recovery, are obliterated ... ~ Anna Quindlen

Painting bodies with the patterns of Kusama's hallucinations obliterated their individual selves and returned them to the infinite universe. ~ Yayoi Kusama

Each generation was a rehearsal of the one before, so that that family gradually formed the repetitive pattern of a Greek fret, interrupted only once in two centuries by a nine-year-old boy who had taken a look at his prospects, tied a string around his neck with a brick to the other end, and jumped from a footbridge into two feet of water. Courage aside, he had that family's tenacity of purpose, and drowned, a break in the pattern quickly obliterated by the calcimine of silence. ~ William Gaddis

I still preserve those relics of past sufferings and experience, like pillars of witness set up in travelling through the valve of life, to mark particular occurrences. The footsteps are obliterated now; the face of the country may be changed; but the pillar is still there, to remind me how all things were when it was reared. ~ Anne Bronte

The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever said to me is: Your mother would be proud of you ... The strange and painful truth is that I'm a better person because I lost my mom young. When you say you excperienced my writing as sacred, what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I build in my obliterated place. I'd give it all back in a snap, but the fact is, my grief taught me things ... It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Globalisation has obliterated distance, not just physically but also, most dangerously, mentally. It creates the illusion of intimacy when, in fact, the mental distances have changed little. It has concertinaed the world without engendering the necessary respect, recognition and tolerance that must accompany it. ~ Martin Jacques

The modern human has taken a pristine natural environment and has obliterated it with pollution, technology and overpopulation. ~ Steven Magee

The Indians had to be either killed, or herded into reservations, which were essentially concentration camps, and forgotten. Their history had to be absolutely obliterated so that we could believe that we were living on virgin soil. ~ Richard Rodriguez

She stood up and took the book from him, and as he smiled over his shoulder at some other kids, she threw it away and kicked him as hard as she could in the vicinity of the groin.
Well, as you might imagine, Ludwig Schmeikl certainly buckled, and on the way down, he was punched in the ear. When he landed, he was set upon. When he was set upon, he was slapped and clawed and obliterated by a girl who was utterly consumed with rage. His skin was so warm and soft. Her knuckles and fingernails were so frighteningly tough, despite their smallness.
You Saukerl." Her voice, too, was able to scratch him. "You Arschloch. Can you spell Arschloch for me? ~ Markus Zusak

It was wrong. It was so relentlessly awful that my mother had been taken from me. I couldn't even hate her properly. I didn't get to grow up and pull away from her and bitch about her with my friends and confront her about the things I wished she'd done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again. Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Everything is About To Change. ~ Chris Mentillo

For an immeasurable period of time, hours, days, weeks, it seemed, Celia had been struggling against tides of anguish, sinking deeper and deeper into a dreadful sea, whose waves broke at ever shorter intervals until at last there was no respite, but an endless torment that drowned and broke and shattered her to nothing. There was no longer any such person as Celia Bryant in the living world. All that remained was an anonymous hulk, a bleeding rag of flesh in a universe of pain. Her brain had long ago ceased to function. Only somewhere, at the centre of torture, an inexorable core of consciousness persisted.

Hours ago, years ago, she had thought: 'This is too much. No one could bear such agony and go on living.' It seemed that something in her must break; that she must either die or fall into oblivion. Yet somehow she had gone on bearing everything. She had not died. She had not lost consciousness. All that she had lost was the sense of her personal integrity. As a human being she was obliterated; her mind was dispersed. she could not any longer envisage an end of torment. 'Not only not to hope:not even to wait. Just to endure.'

At last, in some region utterly remote, a new thing came into being, words were spoken, and strangely, incredibly, the words had significance. That which had once been Celia could not grasp their meaning because somewhere else a woman's voice was crying out lamentably. Nevertheless, she heard a man speaking, and with a new sea ~ Anna Kavan

diversity. The imperial steamroller gradually obliterated the unique characteristics of numerous peoples (such as the Numantians), forging out of them new ~ Yuval Noah Harari

To my mind, there are no unattractive women; only those who haven't been awakened by love ... A woman is often like a strip of film-obliterated, insignificant-until a man puts the light behind her. ~ George Hamilton

For there was need once more of a Divine Revelation to the torpid frivolous children of men, if they were not to sink altogether into the ape condition. And in that whirlwind of the Universe, - lights obliterated, and the torn wrecks of Earth and Hell hurled aloft into the Empyrean; black whirlwind, which made even apes serious, and drove most of them mad, - there was, to men, a voice audible; voice from the heart of things once more, as if to say: "Lying is not permitted in this Universe. The wages of lying, you behold, are death. Lying means damnation in this Universe; and Beelzebub, never so elaborately decked in crowns and mitres, is NOT God!" This was a revelation truly to be named of the Eternal, in our poor Eighteenth Century; and has greatly altered the complexion of said Century to the Historian ever since. ~ Thomas Carlyle

He hated it when women cried. At the first sign of tears, he had always bolted like a hare at a coursing. But as soon as his arms had gone around Kathleen, in one ordinary instant, the world, the past, everything he'd always been certain of had all been obliterated. She had reached for him, not out of passion or fear, but the simple human need for closeness. It had electrified him. No one had ever sought comfort from him before, and the act of giving it had felt more unspeakably intimate than the most torrent sexual encounter. He'd felt the force of his entire being wrap around her in a moment of sweet, raw connection. ~ Lisa Kleypas

I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in Beginnings, and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of 'deconstruction' or 'postmodernism' was applied to my beloved canon of English writing, but when Edward talked about English literature and quoted from it, he passed the test that I always privately apply: Do you truly love this subject and could you bear to live for one moment if it was obliterated? ~ Christopher Hitchens

Lucian Blackstone was a hurricane, and I was the land he intended to destroy. He was a category five, creating and wreaking havoc, knocking down defenses as he obliterated me. He ripped me apart, tore me down to my basic animal instincts, and there was no knowing how much damage would be left when he was finished. The worst part was that I wasn't sure I wanted to survive this storm. Some storms were worth dying for just to be witness to them. ~ Amelia Hutchins

Internet trolling wasn't just a symptom, it was a canary. Trolls tested the boundaries of how far society would allow racism, misogyny, and transphobia to be normalized. Would anyone do anything? Would anyone take action? Would anyone powerful take this seriously? The answer turned out to be no. Those of us on the receiving end begged for help, and were told to grow a thicker skin, because the Internet "isn't real life." Until, surprise, the Internet became president, and we as a society were so inured to hate speech - our boundaries had been so thoroughly obliterated and "political correctness" so stigmatized - that we had no defense. There ~ Lindy West

Belief is about collecting ideas and investing in them. Faith is about having your ideas obliterated and having nothing to hang onto and trusting that it's going to be all right anyway. ~ Father Joe Pasquale To Dr. David Sutton

There's an idea out there that salespeople have actually been obliterated by the Internet, which is just not supported by the facts. ~ Daniel H. Pink

Stop, oh my friends, let us pause to weep over the remembrance of my beloved.
Here was her abode on the edge of the sandy desert between Dakhool and Howmal.


The traces of her encampment are not wholly obliterated even now.
For when the South wind blows the sand over them the North wind sweeps it away. ~ Imru Al-Qays

Edgar Allan Poe once called the death of a beautiful woman "the most poetical topic in the world" and I've often found myself wondering how many woman writers who have killed themselves or let themselves be otherwise obliterated were trying, somehow, to fulfill this most popular of narratives. We're most valuable when we're smiling, dead, posing, our words hanging on the page with no real body behind them. I'm ~ Jessica Valenti

Many years afterwards, we attempt to solve puzzles that were not mysteries at the time and we try to decipher half-obliterated letters from a language that is too old and whose alphabet we don't even know. ~ Patrick Modiano

Who has not raised a tombstone, here and there, over buried hopes and dead joys, on the road of life? Like the scars of the heart, they are not to be obliterated. ~ Ninon De L'Enclos

Cassie, stop. I can't do this.' He pulls back to meet my hurt gaze.
'I know why you're doing this.' I draw a breath, letting it out on a long exhale. 'You don't trust me with your heart. You're afraid if you give it to me there's a chance it could be broken, again.'
'It's been shattered once. I'm afraid next time it won't get broken. It'll be obliterated,' he says quietly.
I press a single kiss to his lip. 'You're my Superman. You're not supposed to be afraid of anything.'
'Even Superman had weaknesses. ~ Rhonda James

When we change the shape of the Land, we alter the contents and contexts of our collective, familial, and personal memories. Yet, stories can preserve both mythic and familiar elements of geography even when the physical features are forgotten, buried, or obliterated. And more than this: the stories can bring these elements back. If the Land can be preserved long enough for its stories to be told, and retold, perhaps we all - as custodians of both place and memory - stand a chance at real preservation. ~ Ari Berk

The Council on Foreign Relations is the American branch of a society which originated in England ... [and] ... believes national boundaries should be obliterated and one-world rule established. ~ Carroll Quigley

There is no always," I say. "Nothing persists forever."
"Nothingness persists," she says. She is testing me.
"No. So long as anything exists, nothingness is impossible. In fact, it's nothingness that cannot persist. Nothingness gives way to somethingness. The nothingness that preceded the Big Bang was obliterated. Nothing became something. ~ Michael Grant

When we think of the historic struggles and conflicts of the current and past century, we naturally think of famous leaders: men who governed nations, commanded armies, and inspired movements in the defense of liberty, or in the service of ideologies which have obliterated liberty.

Yet today, in this hour of human history, when the forces arrayed against the free spirit of man are more powerful, more brutal, and potentially more deadly than ever before, the single figure who has raised the highest flame of liberty heads no state, commands no army, and leads no movement that our eyes can see.

But there is a movement - a hidden movement of human beings who have no offices and no headquarters, who are not represented in the great halls where nations meet, who every day risk or suffer more for the right to speak, to think, and to be true to themselves than any of us here are likely to risk in our lifetime.

We heed this voice, not because it speaks for the left or the right or for any faction, but because it hurls truth and courage into the teeth of total power when it would be so much easier and more comfortable to submit to and embrace the lies by which that power lives.

What is the strength of this voice? How has it broken through to us when others have been silenced? Its strength is art.

Art illuminates the truth. It is, in a sense, subversive: subversive of hypocrisy, subversive of delusion, subversive of untruth.
George Meany

Presents Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn