Point Of No Return Quotes

I was terrified of what that meant
but as she took my hand in hers, kissing it softly before entwining our fingers, I realized it didn't matter. I'd passed the point of no return and whether she wanted me or not, I was hers.
"Je suis à toi. ~ Christina Lauren

For some people, "the point of no return" begins at the very moment their souls become aware of each others' existence. ~ C. JoyBell C.

So, what is the right way to look at death?
Do we see death as life's expiration date and the point of no return? Or is it simply a threshold to be crossed, on the way to another dimension, or another life?
Do you want to know what the right answer is?

Whatever makes you feel more comfortable about dying. ~ Merlyn Gabriel Miller

We have at most ten years - not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions ... We are near a tipping point, a point of no return, beyond which the built in momentum and feedbacks will carry us to levels of climate change with staggering consequences for humanity and all of the residents of this planet. ~ James Hansen

The edge of a black hole, the event horizon, is a boundary that marks the point of no return. Once an object crosses the event horizon, it cannot escape and will be ripped to pieces, atom by atom. ~ Kevin McCarthy

What is the Conscious leap?
Conscious leap is a term that refers to a process of change.
It specifies a particular point in the process where a change cannot be undone or reversed.
The leap is the singularity point ,the point of no return.
It will be a fundamental change in everybody's way of living.
Not everybody will remain alive during this turbulent phase.
Thought of the Day ~ Katerina Kostaki

Maybe the critics are right. Maybe there's no escaping our great political divide, an endless clash of armies, and any attempts to alter the rules of engagement are futile. Or maybe the trivialization of politics has reached a point of no return, so that most people see it as just one more diversion, a sport, with politicians our paunch-bellied gladiators and those who bother to pay attention just fans on the sidelines: We paint our faces red or blue and cheer our side and boo their side, and if it takes a late hit or cheap shot to beat the other team, so be it, for winning is all that matters.
But I don't think so. They are out there, I think to myself, those ordinary citizens who have grown up in the midst of all the political and cultural battles, but who have found a way-in their own lives, at least- to make peace with their neighbors, and themselves.
...I imagine they are waiting for a politics with the maturity to balance idealism and realism, to distinguish between what can and cannot be compromised, to admit the possibility that the other side might sometimes have a point. They don't always understand the arguments between right and left, conservative and liberal, but they recognize the difference between dogma and common sense, responsibility and irresponsibility, between those things that last and those that are fleeting. They are out there, waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them. ~ Barack Obama

In everybody's life there's a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can't go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That's how we survive. ~ Haruki Murakami

I reiterate that the rigor and credibility brought to the world by Monti's government are for us a point of no return. ~ Pier Luigi Bersani

An act of thinking without restriction- without boundaries or rules can lead to the point of no return. ~ Sean William Scott

In the white man's world, language, too
and the way which the white man thinks of it
has undergone a process of change. The white man takes such things as words and literatures for granted, as indeed he must, for nothing in his world is so commonplace. On every side of him there are words by the millions, an unending succession of pamphlets and papers, letters and books, bills and bulletins, commentaries and conversations. He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in on him. He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language
for the Word itself
as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. It may be that he will perish by the Word. ~ N. Scott Momaday

Enchanted by your beauty
Mesmerised by your words
I've travelled to a point of no return ~ Aditya Koppula

Dachau has been my own lifelong point of no return. Between the moment when I walked through the gate of that prison, with its infamous motto, 'Arbeit Macht Frei,' and when I walked out at the end of a day that had no ordinary scale of hours, I was changed, and how I looked at the human condition, the world we live in, changed ... Years of war had taught me a great deal, but war was nothing like Dachau. Compared to Dachau, war was clean. ~ Martha Gellhorn

The issue of climate change is one that we ignore at our own peril. There may still be disputes about exactly how much we're contributing to the warming of the earth's atmosphere and how much is naturally occurring, but what we can be scientifically certain of is that our continued use of fossil fuels is pushing us to a point of no return. And unless we free ourselves from a dependence on these fossil fuels and chart a new course on energy in this country, we are condemning future generations to global catastrophe. ~ Barack Obama

We are not far away from the point of no return when it comes to life on earth, and we have some radical choices to make. ~ Jeff Corwin

You get a wonderful view from the point of no return. ~ Terry Pratchett

This Is a Manifesto About Starting Starting a project, making a ruckus, taking what feels like a risk. Not just "I'm starting to think about it," or "We're going to meet on this," or even "I filed a patent application. . . ." No, starting. Going beyond the point of no return. Leaping. Committing. Making something happen. ~ Seth Godin

Christ came to save us. If we have taken a wrong course, the Atonement of Jesus Christ can give us the assurance that sin is not a point of no return. A safe return is possible if we will follow God's plan for our salvation ~ Dieter F. Uchtdorf

Let the chromosomes be represented by the keyboard of a grand piano-a very grand piano with thousands of keys. Then each key will be a gene. Every cell in the body carries a microscopic but complete keyboard in its nucleus. But each specialised cell is only permitted to sound one chord, according to its specialty-the rest of its genetic keyboard has been inactivated by scotch tape. The fertilised egg, and the first few generations of its daughter cells, had the complete keyboard at their disposal. But succesive generations have, at each 'point of no return', larger and larger areas of it covered by scotch tape. In the end, a muscle cell can only do one thing: contract-strike a single chord.

The scotch tape is known in the language of genetics as the 'repressor'. The agent which strikes the key and activates the gene is an 'inducer'. A mutated gene is a key which has gone out of tune. When quite a lot of key have gone quite a lot out of tune, the result, we were asked to believe, was a much improved, wonderful new melody- a reptile transformed into a bird, or a monkey into a man. It seems that at some point the theory must have gone wrong.

The point where it went wrong was the atomistic concept of the gene. ~ Arthur Koestler

Trotsky's assault on Kronstadt in March 1921 marked a point of no return. There was no longer even a whiff of pretense that the Communist government had the support of the people over whom it ruled. The Red Terror had been aimed at "class enemies"; the Civil War was a struggle against "imperialists and White Guards." Even the peasant wars had pitted, in theory at least, proletarians against "capitalist farmers." But now the world's first "proletarian" government had begun slaughtering urban proletarians, too. It is no wonder that "Kronstadt" became, in addition to a black mark on Trotsky's record, a byword of Bolshevik betrayal for European socialists who refused to bow to Moscow. ~ Sean McMeekin

Something escapes us, and we are escaping from ourselves, or losing ourselves, as part of an irreversible process; we have now passed some point of no return, the point where the contradictoriness of things ended, and we find ourselves, still alive, in a universe of non-contradiction, of enthusiasm, of ecstasy - of stupor in the face of a process which, for all its irreversibility, is bereft of meaning. ~ Jean Baudrillard

[On writing Jeeves and Wooster stories]:
You tell yourself that you can take Jeeves stories or leave them alone, that one more can't possibly hurt you, because you know you can pull up whenever you feel like it, but it is merely wish-full thinking. The craving has gripped you and there is no resisting it.
You have passed the point of no return. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

There is no doubt that human survival will continue to depend more and more on human intellect and technology. It is idle to argue whether this is good or bad. The point of no return was passed long ago, before anyone knew it was happening. ~ Theodosius Dobzhansky

To whoever will listen.

I've been thinking about black holes a lot. How their gravity is so strong it bends time and space. How you'd be stretched down to atoms passing the event horizon.

I kind of feel like I'm being stretched to atoms. Like I'm falling apart and becoming so metaphorically thin that I'm transparent. But, as nothing that happens past the event horizon affects the universe outside of it, nothing that I'm feeling is affecting anyone in the outside world, either.

The event horizon is a point of no return. Nothing, not even light, can escape it.

I wonder what will happen when I pass the event horizon and fully submerge myself into the black hole.

There are theories that if you enter a blackhole under a specific angle, you'll survive and hit the bottom of it. The chances are incredibily small.

I doubt I'll survive. ~ Emily Trunko

The men of the Ulysses had no need to stand in shame ... many had found, or were finding, that the point of no return was not necessarily the edge of the precipice: it could be the bottom of the valley, the beginning of the long climb up the far slope, and when a man had once begun that climb he never looked back to that other side. ~ Alistair MacLean

What we can be scientifically certain of is that our continued use of fossil fuels is pushing us to a point of no return ~ Barack Obama

Every second that goes by is a point of no return. ~ J.R. Rim

Seeing your friend's penis and riding it hard moved us beyond the point of no return. ~ Becca Lee

I've worn stilettos since I was 12, so I have abused my feet to the point of no return. ~ Cobie Smulders

Baby, when you feel that temper of yours crossing over to that point of no return, then you take that shit out on me. If you have to unleash whatever is going on in that pretty brain of yours, then you you unleash it on me. You give ME your anger and you don't leave me out again. You hear what I'm saying? Come at me, Rage. Give me all you fucking got, and I'll give it right back. Take it out on me. On my body. I promise, I can take it. I want to take it. ~ T.M. Frazier

Self-pity is not a pleasant emotion and is a fruitless one as well, for its point of no return is an onset of black despair in very short order. ~ Moss Hart

draw out the anticipation, until I was begging for him to fuck me. He would kiss and caress my body until I was forced to beg for it, until I reached the point of no return, where even the slightest touch would set off a chain reaction inside my body; a domino effect of nerve endings firing through ~ Cassia Leo

We cross the point of no return. . . . ~ Kresley Cole

So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they'll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.' Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. A rain dance even more so.
I thought I might finally have offended Loyd past the point of no return, like stealing the lobster from frozen foods that time, to get myself fired. But Loyd was just thinking. After a minute he said, 'No, it's not like that. It's not making a deal, bad things can still happen, but you want to try not to cause them to happen. It has to do with keeping things in balance.'
In balance.'
Really, it's like the spirits have made a deal with us.'
And what is the deal?' I asked.
We're on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying: We know how nice you're being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You've gone to a lot of trouble, and we'll try to be good guests.'
Like a note you'd send somebody after you stayed in their house?'
Exactly like that. 'Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn't your favorite one. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I could still turn back before I pass the last houses and really have to commit to this. ~ Claire Wong

When swimming into a dark tunnel,there arrives a point of no return when you no longer have enough breath to double back.your choice is to swim forward into the unknown ... and pray for an exit ~ Dan Brown

The ellipse is as aimless as that,
Stretching invisibly into the future so as to reappear
In our present. Its flexing is its account,
Return to the point of no return. ~ John Ashbery

There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives. ~ Graham Greene

Every major technological innovation propels humanity forward to the point of no return. ~ Newton Lee

He could guide anyone to the point of no return. He'd corral them with poetry, music, invoking the alcoholic gods that all died young. But we were so young, we didn't know we had anything we would miss. ~ Hannah Lillith Assadi

Love, like alcoholism, comes to a point of no return. ~ Jennifer Stone

If you want to take your mission in life to the next level, if you're stuck and you don't know how to rise, don't look outside yourself. Look inside. Don't let your fears keep you mired in the crowd. Abolish your fears and raise your commitment level to the point of no return, and I guarantee you that the Champion Within will burst forth to propel you toward victory. ~ Bruce Jenner

How one can never truly leave. And never quite return. Do you understand? ~ Emma Richler

An event horizon, or the point of no return, is only a byproduct of the bending of space. However, electricity and magnetism, by themselves, have no event horizon. It gets complicated, however, if a black hole has charge, and then this new solution does have an event horizon. ~ Michio Kaku

There is a point at which everything becomes simple and there is no longer any question of choice, because all you have staked will be lost if you look back. Life's point of no return. ~ Dag Hammarskjold

At the beginning of the semester, when you asked who I loved the most, an image of my mother popped in my head. When you asked me who I loved the most for the second time, it wasn't an image of my mother. Instead, it was replaced by an image of a strawberry blonde with big, blue eyes.
It took me a long time to figure out the exact moment I fell in love with her, partly because I denied that I did until it was too late.
I fucked up so badly and did so many things wrong, to the point of no return, so I let her go. The selfless part inside of me wants to say I did the right thing, and the selfish part of me thinks I made the biggest mistake of my life. I guess the selfless side won out because, every time I look at her and see what I did, I realize I don't deserve her.
I was never supposed to fall in love with her, but that was the best mistake of my life. I will always love her; I have ever since I purposely bumped into her in the hallway. ~ Sarah Brianne

While the Obama administration in Washington is not the root cause of the ominous dangers that face this country, at home and abroad, it is the embodiment, the personification and the culmination of dangerous trends that began decades ago. Moreover, it has escalated those dangers to what may be a point of no return. The specifics of the missteps and the misdeeds of this administration are among the things chronicled, here and there, in the essays that follow, which were first published as my syndicated newspaper columns. ~ Thomas Sowell

In the long evenings in west Beirut, there was time enough to consider where the core of the tragedy lay. In the age of Assyrians, the Empire of Rome, in the 1860s perhaps? In the french mandate? In Auschwitz? In Palestine? In the rusting front-door keys now buried deep in the rubble of Chatila? In the 1978 Israeli invasion? In the 1982 invasion? Was there a point where one could have said: Stop, beyond this point there is no future? Did I witness the point of no return in 1976? That 12 year-old on the broken office chair in the ruins of the Beirut front line. Now he was in his mid-twenties - if he was still alive - a gunboy, no more. A gunman, no doubt ... ~ Robert Fisk

One glance. Once stare.
Was all it took to take my lungs to long for air.
The moment I saw you, is the moment I found myself.
It was unreal; this love thrill,
My soul it manifest. I was obsessed.
Maybe that's where I went wrong, love possessed.
Forced to cross the Rubicon, no protest.
From your end 'cause we shared the same sentiment
Love we earned, time we burned, look at what we've done.
Now we at the point of no return, no taking it back.
Our world like centre CERN, particles go round and back.
All we do is speak out of turn,
Argue, push buttons;
I guess that's the straw hun,
That broke the camel's back. ~ Soroosh Shahrivar

I had a perfect confidence, still unshaken, in books. If you read enough you would reach the point of no return. You would cross over and arrive on the safe side. There you would drink the strong waters and become addicted, perhaps demented - but a Reader. ~ Helen Bevington

The point of no return in every relationship: When nothing you say or do can ever make things how they used to be. ~ Nitya Prakash

No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man's presumption made of man in Auschwitz. ~ Primo Levi

This is a key point which the secularists are missing: they think that stressing God's mercy means that sins are no longer sins. On the contrary, God's mercy is a great gift of grace precisely because sins are sins and they call for repentance and forgiveness. ~ Thomas J. Paprocki

I thought of Einstein, and his insistence that no particular point of view was more privileged than any other: in other words his 'general relativity', and its claim that the answer to the question 'What is real?" begins with the question 'Where are you standing? ~ Robert Charles Wilson

The whole point about vision is that it's very individual, it's very personal, and it has to be confessional. It has to be something which hurts - the pulling out of it and putting it on the page hurts. Art can be about the individual writer's response to his or her condition, and if that response comes out of a predigested belief about what the audience wants to hear about the writer's condition, then it has no truth, it has no validity. You either write with your own blood or nobody's. Otherwise it's just ink. ~ Clive Barker

I went on steadily trying to 'find out how to'; but I wrote two or three novels without feeling that I had made much progress. It was not until I wrote "Ethan Frome" that I suddenly felt the artisan's full control of his implements. When "Ethan Frome" first appeared I was severely criticized by the reviewers for what was considered the clumsy structure of the tale. I had pondered long on this structure, had felt its peculiar difficulties, and possible awkwardness, but could think of no alternative which would serve as well in the given case: and though I am far from thinking "Ethan Frome" my best novel, and am bored and even exasperated when I am told that it is, I am still sure that its structure is not its weak point. ~ Edith Wharton

Mrs. Breedlove considered herself an upright and Christian woman, burdened with a no-count man, whom God wanted her to punish. (Cholly was beyond redemption, of course, and redemption was hardly the point - Mrs. Breedlove was not interested in Christ the Redeemer, but rather Christ the Judge.) Often she could be heard discoursing with Jesus about Cholly, pleading with Him to help her "strike the bastard down from his pea-knuckle of pride." And once when a drunken gesture catapulted Cholly into the red-hot stove, she screamed, "Get him, Jesus! Get him!" If Cholly had stopped drinking, she would have never forgiven Jesus. ~ Toni Morrison

But he would understand," he said dazedly. "If we explained it to him. If we told him…he would understand."

She made her voice as cold as she could. As calm. "Told him what?"

Will only looked at her. There had been light in his eyes on the stairs… And it was going now, fading like the last breath of someone dying. She felt as if she were watching the life bleed out of Will Herondale.

"Jem would forgive me," Will said, but there was hopelessness in his face, his voice, already. He had given up, Tessa thought. "He would," she said, "He would never stay angry at you, Will; he loves you too well for that. I do not even think he would hold anger toward me. But this morning he told me he thought he would die without ever loving anyone as his father loved his mother, without ever being loved like that in return. Do you want me to go down the hallway and knock on his door and take that away from him? And would you love me still, if I did?"

"Then…please, Tessa, don't tell him what I just told you…"

"I will tell no one," she said. "I swear it… ~ Cassandra Clare

No matter who weaves in and out of your life, regardless of the quality of those deep friendships and familyships, I'm the only common denominator at this point who's been with me the whole time. And there's this sense of trying to make sense of that ultimate solitude. It's not a negative or even a positive. It's just a fact. ~ Feist

The most common criticism of the spread was that it detached policy debate from the real world, that nobody used language the way that these debaters did, save perhaps for auctioneers. But even adolescents knew this wasn't true, that corporate persons deployed a version of the spread all the time: for they heard the spoken warnings at the end of the increasingly common television commercials for prescription drugs, when risk information was disclosed at a speed designed to make it difficult to comprehend; they heard the list of rules and caveats read rapid-fire at the end of promotions on the radio; they were at least vaguely familiar with the 'fine print' one received from financial institutions and health-insurance companies; the last thing one was supposed to do with these thousands of words was comprehend them. These types of disclosure were designed to conceal; they exposed you to information that, should you challenge the institution in question, would be treated like a 'dropped argument' in a fast round of debate - you have already conceded the validity of the point by failing to address it when it was presented. It's no excuse that you didn't have the time. Even before the twenty-four hour news cycle, Twitter storms, algorithmic trading, spreadsheets, the DDoS attack, Americans were getting 'spread' in their daily lives; meanwhile, their politicians went on speaking slowly, slowly about values utterly disconnected from their policies. ~ Ben Lerner

A child isn't born bitter. I point no fingers as to who tainted the clean, pure pool of my childhood. Let's just say that when I realized that I didn't want to grow up, the damage was already done. Knowing that being grown up was no swell place to be means that you are grown up enough to notice. And you can't go back from there. You have to forge another route, draw your own map. ~ Hiromi Goto

To be rich is to give a smile with no expectation of return. ~ Sri Chinmoy

The Sravaka (literally 'hearer,' the name given by Mahayana Buddhists to contemplatives of the Hinayana school) fails to perceive that Mind, as it is in itself, has no stages, no causation. Disciplining himself in the cause, he has attained the result and abides in the samadhi (contemplation) of Emptiness for ever so many aeons. However enlightened in this way, the Sravaka is not at all on the right track. From the point of view of the Bodhisattva, this is like suffering the torture of hell. The Sravaka has buried himself in Emptiness and does not know how to get out of his quiet contemplation, for he has no insight into the Buddha-nature itself. Mo Tsu When Enlightenment is perfected, a Bodhisattva is free from the bondage of things, but does not seek to be delivered from things. Samsara (the world of becoming) is not hated by him, nor is Nirvana loved. When perfect Enlightenment shines, it is neither bondage nor deliverance. Prunabuddha-sutra ~ Aldous Huxley

I'm speechless. But my dick has plenty to say. I'm already hard at the idea of Wes being prepped and ready for me. I drop my mouth onto his and he moans again. My tongue glides across his piercing and we're off to the horny dog races. We kiss as if there's a meteor heading straight for the Toronto metropolitan area. Wes's eager hands roam my ass while I suck on his tongue. His eagerness is like a drug, and I want hit after hit. I can feel how hard he is, even through all of our clothes. He wants me to fuck him, and he's all primed and ready? "Mmm," I moan into his mouth. Sexiest fucking thing I ever heard. That's when the doorbell rings. "Hold that thought," I say, pushing up on one arm. "Nooooo!" Wes lifts both his legs to trap me in them. "No." Kiss. "No." Kiss. "Don't even think about it." Pinning his hands to the quilt is easy, because he's horny to the point of distraction. "Stop it, baby. It's the couch delivery. We're paying seventy-five bucks for them to show up on a Saturday. ~ Sarina Bowen

From Got Luck --
"Tell me why we're doing this again?" Erin asked.
"Remember what we learned from Return of the Jedi?"
"No. What?"
"We learned you can be the most powerful sorcerer in the galaxy but if someone grabs you and throws you down an energy shaft, you die like everybody else. ~ Michael Darling

RANSOM

When the freighters inch past in the distance
The men load their small boats. They motor out,
Buzzing like mosquitoes, aimed at the iron
Side of the blind ship as it creeps closer.

They have guns. They know the sea like it
Is their mother, and she is not well. Her fish
Are gone. She heaves barrels leaking disease
Onto the shores. When she goes into a fit,

She throws a curse upon the land, dragging
Houses, people to their deaths. She glows
In a way she should not. She tastes of industry.
No one is fighting for her, and so they fight.

By night, they load their boats and motor out,
And by day, they aim their guns at the ships,
Climbing aboard. It is clear what they want.
The white men scramble. Some fight back.

When one is taken, the whole world sits up
To watch. When the pirates fall, the world
Smiles to itself, thanking goodness. They
Show the black faces and the dead black bodies

On TV. When the pirates win, after the great
White ships return to their own shores,
There is a party that lasts for days. ~ Tracy K. Smith

Walking and overcoming by faith is not easy. For one thing, the dimension of time constantly constrains our perspective. Likewise, the world steadily tempts us. No wonder we are given instructive words from Jesus about the narrowness and the straightness of the only path available to return home: "I am the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6). And then he said, "No man cometh unto the Father, but by me." Jesus laid down strict conditions. ~ Neal A. Maxwell

The art of communicating is to speak with a non judging sensitivity and mean it rather than impulsively verbalizing whatever feelings arise; there's no better way to make a point. ~ Judith Orloff

What is your name?" he asked softly.
She winced, knowing what was to come, "Calpurnia." She closed her eyes again, embarrassed by the extravagant name- a name with which no one but a hopelessly romantic mother with an unhealthy obsession with Shakespeare would have considered saddling a child.
"Calpurnia." He tested the name on his tongue. "As in, Caesar's wife?"
The blush flared higher as she nodded.
He smiled. "I must make it a point to better acquaint myself with your parents. That is a bold name, to be sure."
"It's a horrible name."
"Nonsense. Calpurnia was Empress of Rome- strong and beautiful and smarter than the men who surrounded her. She saw the future, stood strong in the face of her husband's assassination. She is a marvelous namesake. ~ Sarah MacLean

The perfect being, huh? There is no such thing as perfect in this world. That may sound cliché, but it's the truth. The average person admires perfection and seeks to obtain it. But, what's the point of achieving perfection? There is none. Nothing. Not a single thing. I loathe perfection! If something is perfect, then there is nothing left. There is no room for imagination. No place left for a person to gain additional knowledge or abilities. Do you know what that means? For scientists such as ourselves, perfection only brings despair. It is our job to create things more wonderful than anything before them, but never to obtain perfection. A scientist must be a person who finds ecstasy while suffering from that antimony. In short, the moment that foolishness left your mouth and reached my ears, you had already lost. Of course, that's assuming you are a scientist ~ Tite Kubo

Gilbert would never have dreamed of writing a sonnet to her eyebrows. But then, Gilbert could see a joke. She had once told Roy a funny story - and he had not seen the point of it. She recalled the chummy laugh she and Gilbert had had together over it, and wondered uneasily if life with a man who had no sense of humor might not be somewhat uninteresting in the long run. But who could expect a melancholy, inscrutable hero to see the humorous side of things? It would be flatly unreasonable. ~ L.M. Montgomery

No other investment yields as great a return as the investment in education. An educated workforce is the foundation of every community and the future of every economy. ~ Brad Henry

Though the elite have been opened, and have opened themselves to the world, the world has not opened to all. Access is not the same as integration. But what is crucial is that no one is explicitly excluded. The effect is to blame non-elites for their lack of interest. As we have seen, the result of this logic is damning. The distinction between the elites and the rest of us appears to be a choice. It is cosmopolitanism that explains elite status to elites and closed-mindedness that explains those who choose not to participate. What matters are individual attributes and capacities, not durable inequalities. From this point of view, those who are not successful are not necessarily disadvantaged; they are simply those who have failed to seize the opportunities afforded by our new, open society. ~ Shamus Rahman Khan

It is, in short, the growing conviction that the Negroes cannot win - a conviction with much grounding in experience - which accounts for the new popularity of black power. So far as the ghetto Negro is concerned, this conviction expresses itself in hostility, first toward the people closest to him who have held out the most promise and failed to deliver (Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, etc.), then toward those who have proclaimed themselves his friends (the liberals and the labor movement), and finally toward the only oppressors he can see (the local storekeeper and the policeman on the corner). On the leadership level, the conviction that the Negroes cannot win takes other forms, principally the adoption of what I have called a "no-win" policy. Why bother with programs when their enactment results only in sham? Why concern ourselves with the image of the movement when nothing significant has been gained for all the sacrifices made by SNCC and CORE? Why compromise with reluctant white allies when nothing of consequence can be achieved anyway? Why indeed have anything to do with whites at all?

On this last point, it is extremely important for white liberals to understand what, one gathers from their references to "racism in reverse," the President and the Vice-President of the United States do not: that there is all the difference in the world between saying, "If you don't want me, I don't want you" (which is what some proponents of black power have in effect bee ~ Bayard Rustin

What was it then? What did it mean? Could things thrust their hands up and grip one; could the blade cut; the fist grasp? Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of the tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life? - startling, unexpected, unknown? For one moment she felt that if they both got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an explanation, why it was so short, why was it so inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped human beings from whom nothing should be hid might speak, then, beauty would roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return. "Mrs. Ramsay!" she said aloud, "Mrs. Ramsay!" The tears ran down her face. ~ Virginia Woolf

If someone tells you that you're too sensitive, grab a knife and point it at them with intention. As soon as they react with fear, tell them that there's no such thing as sensitive people. Only people that are more connected to their heart than others, that are so selfish that can only react when afraid of dying. It's never about being sensitive but spiritual evolution. Many humans are simply below what a common dog or pig would easily understand without the use of fear. ~ Robin Sacredfire

We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit, will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down. ~ Susan Sontag

You speak as if you envied him."
"And I do envy him, Emma. In one respect he is the object of my envy."
Emma could say no more. They seemed to be within half a sentence of Harriet, and her immediate feeling was to avert the subject, if possible. She made her plan; she would speak of something totally different - the children in Brunswick Square; and she only waited for breath to begin, when Mr. Knightley startled her, by saying,
"You will not ask me what is the point of envy. - You are determined, I see, to have no curiosity. - You are wise - but I cannot be wise. Emma, I must tell you what you will not ask, though I may wish it unsaid the next moment."
"Oh! then, don't speak it, don't speak it," she eagerly cried. "Take a little time, consider, do not commit yourself."
"Thank you," said he, in an accent of deep mortification, and not another syllable followed.
Emma could not bear to give him pain. He was wishing to confide in her - perhaps to consult her; - cost her what it would, she would listen. She might assist his resolution, or reconcile him to it; she might give just praise to Harriet, or, by representing to him his own independence, relieve him from that state of indecision, which must be more intolerable than any alternative to such a mind as his. - They had reached the house.
"You are going in, I suppose?" said he.
"No," - replied Emma - quite confirmed by the depressed manner in which he still spoke - "I should like to take ~ Jane Austen

But whence came this curious difference between them? He found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore. One could try - Ransom has tried a hundred times - to put it into words. He has said that Malacandra was like rhythm and Perelandra like melody. He has said that Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, metre. He thinks that the first held in his hand something like a spear, but the hands of the other were open, with the palms towards him. But I don't know that any of these attempts has helped me much. At all events what Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender. ~ C.S. Lewis

I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings for the job.
But here's an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. It's an unnerving thought that we may be living the universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
Because we are so remarkably careless about looking after things, both when alive and when not, we have no idea-- really none at all-- about how many things have died off permanently, or may soon, or may never, and what role we have played in any part of the process. In 1979, in the book The Sinking Ark, the author Norman Myers suggested that human activities were causing about two extinctions a week on the planet. By the early 1990s he had raised the figure to about some six hundred per week. (That's extinctions of all types-- plants, insects, and so on as well as animals.) Others have put the figure ever higher-- to well over a thousand a week. A United Nations report of 1995, on the other hand, put the total number of known extinctions in the last four hundred years at slightly under 500 for animals and slightly over 650 for plants-- while allowing that this was "almost certainly an underestimate," particularly with regard to tropical species. A few interpreters think most extinction figures are grossl ~ Bill Bryson

Wilson's weakness was to be over-literal, or to assume that his opponents were. One treatise, The Uttermost Pit, demonstrated with considerable geological learning that there could not be space within the mineral bowels of the Earth for any chambers big enough to contain all the damned souls of the ages. A third, Going to Gehenna, purported to show that the biblical references to the infernal domain were in point of fact to real places of sinister repute, and not to anywhere metaphysical. Wilson lost no opportunity to argue, with any evidence he found to hand, that there could not be any hell or Hades, and so none should fear them. ~ Mark Valentine