Preferences Quotes

It's not always so easy, it turns out, to identify your core personal projects. And it can be especially tough for introverts, who have spent so much of their lives conforming to extroverted norms that by the time they choose a career, or a calling, it feels perfectly normal to ignore their own preferences. They may be uncomfortable in law school or nursing school or in the marketing department, but no more so than they were back in middle school or summer camp. ~ Susan Cain

According to The Echo Nest, a "music intelligence start-up," your music-based Code Halos can tell much more about you than just what kind of music you like to listen to.14 They can also reveal your tastes in food, movies, and literature as well as your product preferences, political leanings, and even measures of intelligence. ~ Malcolm Frank

But decades of research on public opinion have led to the conclusion that self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences. ~ Jonathan Haidt

The good news was that he wasn't sixteen anymore and he had this, his art. His food. And if this dinner continued to go the way it was going, if Mrs. Raje stood by her word and gave DJ the contract for her son's fund-raising dinner next month based on tonight's success... well, then they'd be fine.
Mrs. Raje had been more impressed thus far. Everything from the steamed momos to the dum biryani had turned out just so. The mayor of San Francisco had even asked to speak to DJ after tasting the California blue crab with bitter coconut cream and tucked DJ's card into his wallet.
Only dessert remained, and dessert was DJ's crowning glory, his true love. With sugar he could make love to taste buds, make adult humans sob.
The reason Mina Raje had given him, a foreigner and a newbie, a shot at tonight was his Arabica bean gelato with dark caramel. DJ had created the dessert for her after spending a week researching her. Not just her favorite restaurants, but where she shopped, how she wore her clothes, what made her laugh, even the perfume she wore and how much. The taste buds drew from who you were. How you reacted to taste as a sense was a culmination of how you processed the world, the most primal form of how you interacted with your environment.
It was DJ's greatest strength and weakness, needing to know what exact note of flavor unfurled a person. His need to find that chord and strum it was bone deep. ~ Sonali Dev

We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today. ~ Sandra Day O'Connor

Labels confine as much as they define. Remember that when you discuss people and preferences. Likes and dislikes speak of who you aren't, too. ~ Nick Shamhart

Whether you are new to the scene or a long-time grillmaster, everyone has unique preferences when it comes to their cooking method of choice. From propane to charcoal to wood, people take their method of grilling quite seriously, and some argue quite passionately about the pros and cons of each method. ~ Homaro Cantu

I've always believed that as an author, I do 50% of the work of storytelling, and the reader does the other 50%. There's no way I can control the story you tell yourself from my book. Your own experiences, preferences, prejudices, mood at the moment, current events in your life, needs and wants influence how you read my every word. ~ Shannon Hale

A critic can serve as guide. I think there's an understanding amongst the public that critics have their own preferences and dislikes. ~ Michael Hersch

Much of the Constitution is remarkably simple and straightforward - certainly as compared to the convoluted reasoning of judges and law professors discussing what is called 'Constitutional law,' much of which has no basis in that document ... The real question [for judicial nominees] is whether that nominee will follow the law or succumb to the lure of 'a living constitution,' 'evolving standards' and other lofty words meaning judicial power to reshape the law to suit their own personal preferences. ~ Thomas Sowell

Embrace Your Nature

As we discussed in the last chapter, how sensation seeking you are is biological and wired into your personality. If you have only a few goals, it could be that your preferences for novelty and intense experiences are on the lower end of the spectrum, not that you lack goals. If you're constantly thinking of new goals, there's nothing wrong with that either. It suggests you're hardwired with a high need for novelty and excitement. ~ Alice Boyes

Evidence that [feminine aesthetic preferences and ways of expressing oneself] may be hardwired comes from the fact that they typically appear early in childhood and often in contradiction to one's socialization. [ ... ] This indicates that some aspects of feminine verbal and aesthetic expression precede and/or supersede gender socialization. ~ Julia Serano

You may concentrate on appearances all through the rest of your house, but in the bedroom comfort should be supreme. I think that bedrooms should also be very intimate rooms-they should express your personal preferences in every way ... Of all the rooms in the house your bedroom is yours. ~ Dorothy Draper

Is the marketing effort designed to convey the candidate's convictions, or are the convictions expressed by the candidate the reflections of a "big data" research effort into individuals' likely preferences and prejudices? ~ Henry Kissinger

Once a new social stage appears in a culture, it will spread its instructional codes and life-priority messages throughout that culture's surface-level expressions: religion, economic and political arrangements, psychological and anthro-pological theories, and views of human nature, our future destiny, globalization, and even architectural patterns and sports preferences. We all live in flow states; there is always new wine, always old wineskins. We, indeed, find ourselves pursuing a neverending quest. ~ Don Edward Beck

No one, and the liberal cognoscenti least of all, wants to look at why, after decades of throwing money at a rotting educational establishment and years of racial preferences black students are worse off than ever. ~ Wesley Pruden

The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinion for or against. The struggle of what one likes and what one dislikes is the disease of the mind. ~ Sengcan

Some people do not like you; that's a given. So what? ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

We have to be careful not to elevate our preferences to moral standards and judge others by them. We only do so to feel superior. ~ Timothy Keller

The most powerful forces in economics are not numbers or facts. They are prejudices and preferences. No amount of evidence will ever change the degree to which many of the rich and powerful prefer themselves to be richer and more powerful and others poorer and weaker. ~ Nick Hanauer

Along with others, I have tried to pry economists away from narrow assumptions about self interest. Behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences. ~ Gary Becker

Awakening involves mind training. Step back and pay attention to the thoughts that come into awareness. Feel your desire for healing. Preferences are judgments, and as the mind yields to the nonjudgmental Perspective of the Holy Spirit, the Awakening is obvious. Observe that as long as appetites seem to exist there are the ego defenses of indulgence and repression. Neither is better or worse than the other, for they are the same illusion. The miracle offers a real alternative and when one is consistently miracle-minded, defenses are no longer needed. ~ David Hoffmeister

But somehow, with someone holding my hand right now, all those preferences disappeared. And the answer for that was simple: you just loved a person, that was it. ~ Freesia Lockheart

A true gentleman doesn't prefer blondes. A true gentleman doesn't have any preferences whatsoever. ~ Matt LeBlanc

We really become one - we might wear different clothes or have different sexual preferences or lifestyles than the person next to us, but really those are just details. The person inside is looking for the same thing as their neighbor - freedom, expression, acceptance, love. ~ Jewel

I most certainly am not harboring any sort of negative feeling toward the gay community. I don't have an opinion on people with different religious, sexual or political preferences. I'm one of the most liberal artists that I think you will ever meet, and I pride myself on that. ~ CeeLo Green

Every time that an animal eats a plant or another animal, the conversion of food biomass into the consumer's biomass involves an efficiency of much less than 100 percent: typically around 10 percent. That is, it takes around 10,000 pounds of corn to grow a 1,000-pound cow. If instead you want to grow 1,000 pounds of carnivore, you have to feed it 10,000 pounds of herbivore grown on 100,000 pounds of corn. Even among herbivores and omnivores, many species, like koalas, are too finicky in their plant preferences to recommend themselves as farm animals. As a result of this fundamental inefficiency, no mammalian carnivore has ever been domesticated for food. ~ Jared Diamond

A second, less well-known decision was based on his simple calculation "More people, more power." Copying a Soviet system of the same name, Mao created policy preferences for Hero Mothers, women who had many children. At a time when much of the rest of the world, including most of the developing world, saw reductions in population growth, China's average remained at around six children per woman. Over the next two decades, China added the population of South America, even as they'd hampered their agricultural system. ~ Clay Shirky

To have preferences, but not exclusions. ~ Voltaire

Human individuals and human organizations typically have preferences over resources that are not well represented by an "unbounded aggregative utility function". A human will typically not wager all her capital for a fifty-fifty chance of doubling it. A state will typically not risk losing all its territory for a ten percent chance of a tenfold expansion. [T]he same need not hold for AIs. An AI might therefore be more likely to pursue a risky course of action that has some chance of giving it control of the world. ~ Nick Bostrom

Like … most of the school has figured out you're gay." "Oh. Interesting. I haven't met most of the school, so don't know how they managed that." "Yeah, but…" I knew what he was getting at. It was fine. Whatever. It's not like it was a state secret or anything. And hey, if people guessed, it saved me having to have a discussion about my sexual preferences with people who didn't even know if I preferred ham or peanut butter on my sandwiches. For reference, the answer was, "both, simultaneously. ~ Sophie Gonzales

Joining the corporate worship of the body of Christ requires that we allow something else - the good of the body - to supercede our personal preferences. ~ Michael Walters

to second guess your preferences and tastes based upon how others may interpret them is to unduly deny yourself well-earned freedom. ~ Joseph R. Lallo

When you are inhabiting a self that is fixed and set in place, you may think that you have attained something positive. As people say, "Now I know who I am." What they really know is an imitation of a real self, a collection of habits, labels, and preferences that is entirely historical. ~ Deepak Chopra

In addition to billions in new 'stimulus' spending that our country can't afford, the Geithner plan also contains billions in tax increases on small and family-owned businesses while protecting the tax preferences of wealthy, multinational corporations. ~ Kevin McCarthy

Love means giving up - yielding my preferences, comfort, goals, security, money, energy, or time for the benefit of someone else. ~ Rick Warren

The reality is that beer still outsells wine and spirits combined, and makes up 60 of all alcoholic beverage occasions. It's important to keep beer fun, relevant and in step with the changing preferences of adults who enjoy beer. ~ Pat McGauley

Let us each grasp a new idea this year. Let us grasp the awareness of what it is that makes us truly happy. Let us consider our personal preferences and learn how to recognize, then embrace, moments of happiness that are uniquely our own. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

Being a man is a privilege, not an entitlement. It is a surrender of our priority. It is a laying down of our lives, not physically but inwardly - our preferences, our pleasures, sometimes even our dreams. Our version of Witold Pilecki's medals comes in the lives we offer to God, lives we have bled and sweated and prayed and given ourselves for. This is what it means to be a man. ~ Stephen Mansfield

Miss Wigglesworth gave him an assessing look out of her remarkable blue eyes.
"You're a libertine? How very unique."
She gave a small fake yawn. She was, in that heartbeat, so perfect and so pure and so very dangerous indeed that all he could do was frighten her away.
"Have you been listening at keyholes, Lazuli? I assure you, they have always been willing, even when I ask that they pretend otherwise."
She blushed deep pink at that – an appealing thing, the blood high under her cheeks, warm and subtle and alive. He wanted to delve into her, with teeth and body until she was ravaged and supine and wrecked and bleeding and his. She did not, as he had expected, break away from him mid-step. The blush was there, to be sure, but she was made of sterner stuff. Any true innocent would be repulsed by the intent in his tone. A woman without experience would fear the implication of his preferences – the certain acknowledgment that there was wolf, nothing but wolf, underneath all his icy indifference. Faith was intrigued. She tilted her head and looked hard at him, her lovely eyes flinty.
"So, you're just a beast who enjoys the chase, nothing else?"
"Exactly so."
She threw it all at him. Like a piece of warm fresh meat, cut and dripping temptation, enough to make him salivate, to bait her trap.
"You can't catch me."
The waltz ended. ~ Gail Carriger

The great way is not difficult if you don't cling to good or bad. Just let go of your preferences; and everything will become perfectly clear. ~ Sengcan

The assertion that 'culture' explains human variation will be taken seriously when there are reports of women war parties raiding villages to capture men as husbands, or of parent cloistering their sons but not their daughters to protect their sons' virtue, or when cultural distributions for preferences concerning physical attractiveness, earning power, relative age and so on show as many cultures with bias in one direction as in the other. ~ John Tooby

Upgrade your addictions to the status of preferences. Here's the distinction between an addiction and a preference: ~ Ken Keyes Jr.

At your next book club meeting, picture me sitting quietly in the corner, taking notes on your preferences. Imagine the next day you get an email from me trying to sell you a new grill - or a book - or accessories for your Glock. That's the Amazon/Goodreads deal. It's appalling. But everywhere in the press, you'll read about the genius of Amazon.
(Michael Herrmann and the booksellers of Gibson's) ~ G.R. Reader

The expression of preferences is the essence of love. ~ Stefan Molyneux

rather amazingly, an IAT developed for monkeys shows that they, too, exhibit implicit preferences for in-group members, associating good things like fruit with in-group members and bad things like spiders with out-group members. ~ Joshua Greene

It's important for a couple to talk about their sexual preferences. On the other hand, the aura of the mysterious should be preserved. ~ Volkmar Sigusch

I think that people's sexual preferences are a legitimate subject for humour, dirty humour if at all possible. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The mind was designed not to defend what we want, but to discover what is ultimately true, which should shape our wants and satisfy them more deeply with God. The purpose of the mind is not to rationalize subjective preferences, but to recognize objective reality and to help the heart revel in God. ~ John Piper

Our preferences for stability and security blind us to the opportunities for adventure when they present themselves. ~ Alan Hirsch

Fear resides in all things, and the heart of fear is the unexpected. Do not frighten your opponent with what is right before their eyes."
The Book of Five Rings, The Fire Chapter

The Way of Walking Alone

Do not turn your back on the various ways of this world.
Do not scheme for physical pleasure.
Consider yourself lightly; consider the world deeply.
Do not ever think in acquisitive terms.
Do not regret things about your personal life.
Do not envy another's good or evil.
Do not lament parting on any road whatsoever.
Do not complain or feel bitterly about yourself or others.
Have no heart for approaching the path of love.
Do not have preferences.
Do not harbor hopes for your own personal home.
Do not have a liking for delicious food for yourself.
Do not carry antiques handed down from generation to generation.
Do not fast so that it affects your physically.
While it's different with the military equipment, do not be fond of material things.
While on the Way, do not begrudge death.
Do not be intent on possessing valuables or a fief in old age.
Respect the gods and Buddhas, but do not depend on them.
Though you give up your life, do not give up your honor.
Never depart from the Way.

Shinmen Musashi
Twelfth day of the fifth month, Second Year of Shoho, 1645 ~ Shinmen Musashi

If we buy into categories of sexual orientation based solely on gender--heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual-- we're cheating ourselves of a searching examination of our real sexual preferences. ~ Kate Bornstein

We change our attitudes, our careers, our relationships. Even our age changes minute by minute. We change our politics, our moods, and our sexual preferences. We change our outlook, we change our minds, we change our sympathies. Yet when someone changes hir gender, we put hir on some television talk show. Well, here's what I think: I think we all of us do change our genders. All the time. Maybe it's not as dramatic as some tabloid headline screaming "She Was A He!" But we do, each of us, change our genders. In response to each interaction we have with a new or different person, we subtly shift the kind of man or woman, boy or girl, or whatever gender we're being at the moment. We're usually not the same kind of man or woman with our lover as we are with our boss or a parent. When we're introduced for the first time to someone we find attractive, we shift into being a different kind of man or woman than we are with our childhood friends. We all change our genders. ~ Kate Bornstein

Maybe lobsters, who are also without frontal lobes, are detached from the neurological-registration-of-injury-or-hazard we call pain in just the same way. There is, after all, a difference between (1) pain as a purely neurological event, and (2) actual suffering, which seems crucially to involved an emotional component, an awareness of pain as unpleasant, as something to fear/dislike/want to avoid. [ ... ] To my lay mind, the lobster's behavior in the kettle appears to be the expression of a preference; and it way well be that an ability to form preferences is the decisive criterion for real suffering. ~ David Foster Wallace

The merely conscious being does not have a preference for continued life. Perhaps while having a pleasurable experience it has a preference for that experience to continue, or while having a painful experience it has a preference for that experience to end, but it will not have any preferences for the long-term future, and the desires it has do not survive periods of sleep or temporary unconsciousness, because unlike a self-aware being, it has no conception of its own future existence after a period of sleep. Thus if we are concerned only about the thwarting of preferences, for a merely conscious being, painless killing and administering an anesthetic seem to be equivalent. Killing does not thwart any more desires than putting the being to sleep. The being will be able to continue to satisfy its preferences after it awakes, but from the being's subjective perspective it is as if a new being, with new preferences, came into existence. ~ Peter Singer

This is the great truth life has to teach us ... that gratification of our individual desires and expression of our personal preferences without consideration for their effect upon others brings in the end nothing but ruin and devastation. ~ Hortense Odlum

I need to put forward more encouraging terms for my students than the negative popular terminology struggling and reluctant. Where is the hope in these terms? I prefer to use positive language to identify the readers in my classes. Peeking into my classroom, I see sixty different readers with individual reading preferences and abilities, but I consistently recognize three trends: developing readers, dormant readers, and underground readers. ~ Donalyn Miller

If the gospel is reduced because of our preferences or misunderstandings, we leave ourselves open to heresies and to attacking our brothers-in-arms. ~ Matt Chandler

We all have our preferences - some people go for birds - but for me, there's just something about the wolf; the design of it is really aesthetically pleasing. ~ Sarah Hall

They entrenched themselves in their preferences, their beliefs, their prejudices, and closed ranks against everything that was different ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

When, for instance, we say that a literary work is good or bad, we are making a value judgment (...) Objective evidence for subjective preferences does not makes the value judgment itself objective, but merely objectifies the preference. ~ Wolfgang Iser

Good humor, Jefferson added, "is the practice of sacrificing to those whom we meet in society all the little conveniences and preferences which will gratify them, and deprive us of nothing worth a moment's consideration; ~ Jon Meacham

God has no forms, no limbs, no qualities, no preferences, no prejudices. ~ Sathya Sai Baba

There is a strong current in contemporary culture advocating ' holistic ' views as some sort of cure-all ... Reductionism implies attention to a lower level while holistic implies attention to higher level. These are intertwined in any satisfactory description: and each entails some loss relative to our cognitive preferences, as well as some gain ... there is no whole system without an interconnection of its parts and there is no whole system without an environment. ~ Francisco Varela

As any man, I, of course, have certain preferences. Being a Scot by birth, I'm inclined to favor those with a well-scrubbed look and a hint of color in their cheeks-put there by an early walk in the chill air rather than by rouge. The smell of soap on a woman's skin or the hint of shampoo in her hair is perfume enough for me ... Humor is important. The most beautiful woman in the world is a bore without that. ~ David Niven

Seemingly innocuous language like 'Oh, I'm flexible' or 'What do you want to do tonight?' has a dark computational underbelly that should make you think twice. It has the veneer of kindness about it, but it does two deeply alarming things. First, it passes the cognitive buck: 'Here's a problem, you handle it.' Second, by not stating your preferences, it invites the others to simulate or imagine them. And as we have seen, the simulation of the minds of others is one of the biggest computational challenges a mind (or machine) can ever face. ~ Brian Christian

When people get rich, they shed their skin-in-the-game-driven experiential mechanism. They lose control of their preferences, substituting constructed preferences for their own, complicating their lives unnecessarily, triggering their own misery. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There he got out the luncheon-basket and packed a simple meal, in which, remembering the stranger's origin and preferences, he took care to include a yard of long French bread, a sausage out of which the garlic sang, some cheese which lay down and cried, and a long-necked straw-covered flask wherein lay bottled sunshine shed and garnered on far Southern slopes. ~ Kenneth Grahame

Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny - and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do). ~ Stephen Jay Gould

My own personal preference is that the consumer, the individual person should be protected because individual people and the difference between individual people and the diversity we have between people on the planet is so important. ~ Tim Berners-Lee

The basic idea behind self-signaling is that despite what we tend to think, we don't have a very clear notion of who we are. We generally believe that we have a privileged view of our own preferences and character, but in reality we don't know ourselves that well (and definitely not as well as we think we do). Instead, we observe ourselves in the same way we observe and judge the actions of other people - inferring who we are and what we like from our actions. For ~ Dan Ariely

Our beliefs about how much personal control people have over their lives, which are shaped in part by the level of individualism to which we have been exposed, also play an important role in our preferences for allocating choice. ~ Sheena Iyengar

The idiosyncrasies of human preferences seem to reflect a competition between the impetuous limbic grasshopper and the provident prefrontal ant within each of us. ~ Walter Mischel

She had grown up knowing you cared for the one who had fallen and couldn't get up. She had also grown up knowing you ate no shit - not about your hosses, your size, your line of work, or your sexual preferences. Once you started eating shit, it had a way of becoming your regular diet. ~ Stephen King

We will never find joy in church membership when we are constantly seeking things our way. But paradoxically, we will find the greatest joy when we choose to be last. That's what Jesus meant when He said the last will be first. True joy means giving up our rights and preferences and serving everyone else. ~ Thom S. Rainer

Give ten children a toy box, and watch them select ten different toys, regardless of gender or religion or parental expectations. Children have preferences. The danger comes when they, as with any human, are denied those preferences for too long. ~ Seanan McGuire

They [human beings] are unwilling to gamble that God made those people who are skilled at rational argumentation uniquely virtuous. They protect themselves and others from cleverness by obscuring their preferences. ~ James G. March

Happiness happens when your consciousness is not dominated by addictions and demands - and you experience life as a parade of preferences. ~ Ken Keyes Jr.

Lenders make their choices with clear preferences: "Africans first, women first, and agriculture first" (Flannery, ~ Anke Schwittay

[P]arents need to step back from their own preferences and see what the world looks like to their quiet children. ~ Susan Cain

Are you ready to go home, Catherine?" he asked. "It's warm inside the house. I kept a fire going for you."

I continued looking at him, unsure how to respond. "Thanks," I managed to say and then glanced in the direction of his house - our house.

"Well, you are my wife. And I know you don't like the cold."

I'm his wife, I thought to myself. He had said the words as if that simple fact made it necessary to be both thoughtful and kind. As if having gained a wife or husband meant having also gained her or his concerns, and hence the need to consider the person's needs, wants, and preferences as strongly as one's own. It struck me as a perfect description of what marriage ought to be. An agreeable notion that had not entered into my petty way of viewing matrimony. I would have assumed it to be above Thaddeus' egotistical mindset as well.

"Catherine?" he said again, watching me regard him with a quizzical expression. "Are you ready to go home?"

I nodded, which made him smile. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Having a highly homogeneous background, education, values, preferences, etc, in the very early team is better than not - cuts down on time-wasting arguments. ~ Max Levchin

Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

We have made some collective mistakes as a species, it's true – invested too much power in things we can't see, let alone control. But look at the world we have, Chiku. For all its failings, things could be a great deal worse. No one's died in any wars lately, or been murdered, or left to rot in a prison, or been denied the basic allocation of fresh food and drinking water. No one's been tortured for their beliefs or made to feel like a pariah because of their sexual preferences. ~ Alastair Reynolds

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life--knowing that under certain conditions it is not worth while to live. He is of a disposition to do men service, though he is ashamed to have a service done to him. To confer a kindness is a mark of superiority; to receive one is a mark of subordination... He does not take part in public displays... He is open in his dislikes and preferences; he talks and acts frankly, because of his contempt for men and things... He is never fired with admiration, since there is nothing great in his eyes. He cannot live in complaisance with others, except it be a friend; complaisance is the characteristic of a slave... He never feels malice, and always forgets and passes over injuries... He is not fond of talking... It is no concern of his that he should be praised, or that others should be blamed. He does not speak evil of others, even of his enemies, unless it be to themselves. His carriage is sedate, his voice deep, his speech measured; he is not given to hurry, for he is concerned about only a few things; he is not prone to vehemence, for he thinks nothing very important. A shrill voice and hasty steps come to a man through care... He bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of his circumstances, like a skillful general who marshals his limited forces with the strategy of war... He is his ~ Aristotle

Women are beautiful because the world sees with the eyes of men and us men are still influencing the preferences of humanity. ~ Hockson Floin

When the pressure comes, preferences give way while convictions hold firm. ~ Edwin Louis Cole

Virtually any appliance is going to be online. Appliances will talk to each other and to the power-generation system. Our appliances will pay attention to our preferences. ~ Vint Cerf

[after guard dogs frozen mid-attack] 'How long are the dogs going to stay hanging there like that?' ask Yulia. 'I want to make friends with them. Otherwise, i'll be left with a latent psychological complex that's bound to affect my personality and sexual preferences. ~ Sergei Lukyanenko

When we turn the Bible into an adjective and stick it in front of another loaded word, we tend to ignore or downplay the parts of the Bible that don't quite fit our preferences and presuppositions. In an attempt to simplify, we force the Bible's cacophony of voices into a single tone and turn a complicated, beautiful, and diverse holy text into a list of bullet points we can put in a manifesto or creed. More often than not, we end up more committed to what we want the Bible to say than what it actually says. ~ Rachel Held Evans

The inspired principles in the Constitution are the principles of the rule of law which, if preserved, guarantee liberty to every man. These principles are assumed in the Constitution because they had come to be assumed by Americans generally, as they struggled through several generations to find institutional safeguards for the liberty that they prized so highly. Many theoreticians of law and politics have rejected such a tenuous and fragile basis for a nation's freedom. They dream of constitutional arrangements based on clear libertarian principles which would maximize individual liberty whether or not the people understood or supported the basic principles. Their objection does raise the important secondary problem of preserving the liberty we have obtained.

The early Americans themselves recognized the necessity of "public virtue" for the continuing security of their liberty. . . .

The radicals of the left today seek freedom from social and material deprivation through the application of government power. On the right, according to your preferences in political taxonomy, we have either those libertarians who would go far beyond the classically liberal views of the Founding Fathers in restricting the role of government, or those reactionaries who would be willing to invoke arbitrarily the power of government to reshape moral society in their own image. Modern prophets seem to reject both the reactionary and radical left views. And in clearly recognizi ~ Noel B. Reynolds

The less you get attached to your preferences, the less they will become your source of stress. ~ Jeffrey Bernstein

Those who don't love themselves as they are rarely love life as it is either. Most people have come to prefer certain of life's experiences and deny and reject others, unaware of the value of the hidden things that may come wrapped in plain or even ugly paper. In avoiding all pain and seeking comfort at all cost, we may be left without intimacy or compassion; in rejecting change and risk we often cheat ourselves of the quest; in denying our suffering we may never know our strength or our greatness. Or even that the love we have been given can be trusted. It is natural, even instinctive to prefer comfort to pain, the familiar to the unknown. But sometimes our instincts are not wise. Life usually offers us far more than our biases and preferences will allow us to have. Beyond comfort lie grace, mystery, and adventure. We may need to let go of our beliefs and ideas about life in order to have life. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen

The moment you realize that you aren't creating a cut-and-paste version of yourself, but rather nurturing a stunningly unique individual with thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears and opinions and preferences and plans and interests of their own is the moment parenting becomes an adventure instead of a challenge. It's a simple shift in perspective that creates a world of difference. ~ L.R. Knost

I have found that if I tend to a person's illness rather than to the
person, I am going to treat that person as if they are their illness. In doing so, I run the risk of limiting them greatly and helping them to focus in on their illness as if that is all they are. It is so important to see and help a person and not just a condition. Everyone is different, with unique twists and challenges, so the same herbs are not applied for the same 'condition.' The herbs chosen are connected to the whole personincluding their illness, their constitution, their diet, their psychology, their
history, their tastes, their lifestyle, and their joys and sorrows. I always
try to set a person up to succeed, and take their preferences, abilities, stamina, and financial resources into account when helping choose their plant medicines. ~ Robin Rose Bennett

The degree of customization possible through your Preferences screens is awesome. ~ Paul Simon

God is not calling us to win the world and, in the process, lose our families. But I have known those who so enshrined family life and were so protective of "quality time" that the children never saw in their parents the kind of consuming love that made their parent's faith attractive to them. Some have lost their children, note because they weren't at their soccer games or didn't take family vacations, but because they never transmitted a loyalty to Jesus that went deep enough to interrupt personal preferences. ~ David Shibley

Donkeys ... I've decided that donkeys are universally cute. Really cute. So cute that donkeys defy any arguments of preferences being relative. When you pet their noses, they blink their eyes and bashfully look away as if embarrassed. And when donkeys hee-haw, they have their mouths and lips curled up as if they are smiling. Boyfriend and girlfriend donkeys rest their heads on each other's rumpt and fan each other's faces with their tails. And kid donkeys, the size of an average dog, trot around with big smiles on their faces and floppy, dangly, long donkey ears. Too cute. ~ Johnny Rico

The way is light and fluid for the man with
no preferences. ~ Laozi

What women want is still what it's always been: either you or, more likely, not you. ~ David Mitchell