Top Down Quotes

To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese. ~ Tom Robbins

Culture in any place always goes top down, never bottom up. We need to step back and look at what kind of environment we have created for ourselves and those around us. It is tough to expect positive behavior in a negative environment. Where lawlessness becomes the law, honest citizens become cheats, crooks and thieves. ~ Shiv Khera

I paint from the top down. From the sky, then the mountains, then the hills, then the houses, then the cattle, and then the people. ~ Grandma Moses

Top-down approaches do not work. The bottleneck is at the top of the bottle. ~ Iqbal Quadir

Language as a Prison

The Philippines did have a written language before the Spanish colonists arrived, contrary to what many of those colonists subsequently claimed. However, it was a language that some theorists believe was mainly used as a mnemonic device for epic poems. There was simply no need for a European-style written language in a decentralized land of small seaside fishing villages that were largely self-sufficient.

One theory regarding language is that it is primarily a useful tool born out of a need for control. In this theory written language was needed once top-down administration of small towns and villages came into being. Once there were bosses there arose a need for written language. The rise of the great metropolises of Ur and Babylon made a common written language an absolute necessity - but it was only a tool for the administrators. Administrators and rulers needed to keep records and know names - who had rented which plot of land, how many crops did they sell, how many fish did they catch, how many children do they have, how many water buffalo? More important, how much then do they owe me? In this account of the rise of written language, naming and accounting seem to be language's primary "civilizing" function. Language and number are also handy for keeping track of the movement of heavenly bodies, crop yields, and flood cycles. Naturally, a version of local oral languages was eventually translated into symbols as well, and nonadmi ~ David Byrne

Unlike solidarity, which is horizontal and takes place between equals, charity is top-down, humiliating those who receive it and never challenging the implicit power relations. ~ Eduardo Galeano

Authoritarian managers use power, often in the form of fear, to get people to do something their way. Leaders depend for the most part on influence rather than power, and influence derives from respect rather than fear. Respect, in turn, is based on qualities such as integrity, ability, fairness, truthfulness - in short, on character. Leaders are part of the team, and although they are given organizational authority, their real authority isn't delegated top-down but earned bottom-up. From the outside, a managed team and a led team can look the same, but from the inside they feel very different. ~ Jim Highsmith

Collective management will build companies - not top-down decision-making. ~ Peter Diamandis

Nicotinic receptors are so named because they respond to nicotine, whether smoked or chewed, and they're spread throughout the brain. For all the problems it causes to our overall health, it's well established that nicotine can improve the rate of signal detection when a person has been misdirected - that is, nicotine creates a state of vigilance that allows one to become more detail oriented and less dependent on top-down expectations. ~ Daniel J. Levitin

Altogether, these observations suggest that several processes contribute to psychotic experience: the loss of familiarity with the world, hypothetically associated with noisy information processing; increased novelty detection mediated by the hippocampus; associated alterations of prefrontal cortical processing, which have reliably been associated with impairments in working memory and other executive functions; increased top-down effects of prior beliefs mediated by the frontal cortex that may reflect compensatory efforts to cope with an increasingly complex and unfamiliar world; and finally disinhibition of subcortical dopaminergic neurotransmission, which increases salience attribution to otherwise irrelevant stimuli. Furthermore, increased noise of chaotic or stress-dependent dopamine firing can reduce the encoding of errors of reward prediction elicited by primary and secondary reinforcers, thus contributing to a subjective focusing of attention on apparently novel and mysterious environmental cues while reducing attention and motivation elicited by common and natural and social stimuli. ~ Andreas Heinz

Rather than double-down on the top-down economics that let a fortunate few play by their own rules, let's embrace an economic patriotism that says we rise or fall together, as one nation, and as one people. ~ Barack Obama

The revolution here is from hierarchical to lateral power. That's the power shift. So increasingly a younger generation that's grown up on the internet and now increasingly distributing renewable energies, they're measuring politics in terms of a struggle between centralized, hierarchical, top-down and closed and proprietary, versus distributed, open, collaborative, transparent. This shift, from hierarchical to lateral power, is going to change the way we live, the way we educate our children, and the way we govern the world. ~ Jeremy Rifkin

Common sense tells us that the government's attempts to solve large problems more often create new ones. Common sense also tells us that a top-down, one-size-fits-all plan will not improve the workings of a nationwide health-care system that accounts for one-sixth of our economy. ~ Sarah Palin

Technos and clerics have much in common. Both take a world that can't be fully understood and try to explain its fundamental properties.
Clerics postulate beliefs that can never be proven; they demand you accept these postulates as your Faith, which will guide your actions and thoughts. It's a top down way of thinking; start with the big picture and derive rules for living. Fundamental knowledge is static. Even the derived rules rarely change.
Technos work from the bottom up. They build a baseline of observations and formulate theories to explain these phenomena. Nothing is sacred; with new observations, theories are discarded or modified to fit the facts.
Technos and clerics; how could they not be in conflict?
Dan Ronco's Diary, 2016
~ Dan Ronco

There are more effective ways of tackling environmental problems including global warming, proliferation of plastics, urban sprawl, and the loss of biodiversity than by treaties, top-down regulations, and other approaches offered by big governments and their dependents. ~ Preston Manning

If I put the top down, I start to burn in about five minutes. ~ Kathleen Robertson

The inherent non-linearity of the digital allows for more input from others, including the subject and reader as collaborators. The top-down, bedtime-style story is of limited use. A non-linear narrative that allows for increased complexity and depth, and encourages both subject and reader to have greater involvement, will eventually emerge more fully from the digital environment. This, in a sense, is the more profound democratization of media. ~ Fred Ritchin

Top-down management is plan-based, hierarchical, and totalitarian. Bottom-up management is humane, consensual, and egalitarian. Effective ~ Philip Wik

There's a great deal of talk about loyalty from the bottom to the top. Loyalty from the top down is even more necessary and is much less prevalent. ~ Eric Blehm

Imagine a country where the majority of the population reaps the majority of the benefits for their hard work, creative ingenuity, and collaborative efforts. Imagine a country where corporate losses arent socialized, while gains are captured by an exclusive minority. Imagine a country run as a democracy, from the bottom up, not a plutocracy from the top down. Richard Wolff not only imagines it, but in his compelling, captivating and stunningly reasoned new book, Democracy at Work, he details how we get there from here - and why we absolutely must. ~ Nomi Prins

Read any of the top-selling business books, all of them talk about moving away from a top down manner of leading to a more inclusive one. It's not happening over night, but if you read the winds of change in most of the democracies in the world we are moving toward shared levels of power. ~ Elizabeth Lesser

In general we should be aware of, and protective towards, those precious legal instruments that we already possess, and which often depend on principles of equity and natural law and not on top-down legislation. ~ Roger Scruton

As if the weather knew the calendar the last day of August broke with a hard killing frost. Where the sun fell the world spangled, autumn arriving in glacial brilliance, almost suggesting snow over the grass and low shrubbery. Where the sun has not yet struck it was ghostly, a pewter finish over the sagging grass and wilted goldenrod stems. The pods of milkweed were brittle and broke open to release their slight spherical webs of seed onto any straggle of breeze. Smoke streamed white straight up from chimney tops and mist obscured the lake, hanging in sheets of cold vapor that disintegrated slowly from the top down as the sun came over the hills. A third-quarter moon hung against the endless fathoms of a colbalt heaven, the moon a quartzite river stone. ~ Jeffrey Lent

I've studied the disease, I've lived in the swamp. It is my informed conclusion that we are suffering, as an ex-great nation, from top-down corporate rot. And that's not just the judgement of an ailing old fart. A lot of people in my Service make a profession of not seeing things in black and white. Do not confuse me with them. I'm a late-onset, red-toothed radical with balls. Still with me? ~ John Le Carre

I'm OK with procedural code, and the web is a top-down type of problem. It makes sense to me that you have HTML, you spit out a bunch of HTML, then you call a function to do something and then call another function. ~ Rasmus Lerdorf

Kindliness seems to exist primarily as an animal instinct, so deeply rooted that mental degeneracy, which works from the top down,does not destroy it until the mind sinks to the lower grades of idiocy. ~ Charles Horton Cooley

Their eyes met.
For a split second she caught a glimpse of heat in his eyes. Then Jake banked the flame and broke out of her embrace.
Marnie felt a hot blush rise from her toes to her nose.
It took a moment for her eyes to focus and her brain to function. Bewildered, she looked up to find him watching her. His heavy-lidded eyes held a strange desperation as he reached back and unhooked the vice of her ankles from around his wiast.
Her legs dropped. Her heels thumped against the cabinet.
Beneath his hawklike gaze she felt stripped bare and vulnerable. He studied her face, seeming to see more than her features. He seemed to delve into her mind, to touch things deep and frightening - parts of herself Marnie was still exploring.
The muscles in his jaw knotted and unknotted. After a moment he stepped back and casually, but with difficulty, adjusted his jeans
Heat flooded her cheeks. Legs splayed, nipples peaked to his clinical gaze, she'd never experienced such acute embarrassment in her life. Her breath hitched as she jumped off the counter, tugging her top down and her pants up.
At a loss for hers, she half laughed. "I have absolutely no idea what to say." Which was a reasonable start, she guessed. It was rare for her to be speechless. But then, this was a day of firsts.
"I told you you weren't my type." The brass button on his jeans closed like the clasp of a miser's purse. Other than a faint flush on the ridge of his cheekbones and ~ Cherry Adair

Since we're each unique, if we've shared many experiences, then it probably has something to do with power or politics, and if we unify and act together, then we can make a change. Revolutions that last don't happen from the top down. They happen from the bottom up. ~ Gloria Steinem

The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You can't build a pyramid from the top down ~ Dan Bell

People have a hard time accepting free-market economics for the same reason they have a hard time accepting evolution: it is counterintuitive. Life looks intelligently designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that there must be an intelligent designer
a God. Similarly, the economy looks designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that we need a designer
a government. In fact, emergence and complexity theory explains how the principles of self-organization and emergence cause complex systems to arise from simple systems without a top-down designer. ~ Michael Shermer

Speaking generally, people who are drawn to journalism are interested in what happens from the ground up less than they are from the top down. ~ Tom Brokaw

I've seen, all too often in my career, people coming in to lead agencies and organizations and trying to impose change from the top down. Never works. You never have enough time. ~ Robert M. Gates

The Health Care Compact is a way for states to protect their residents from the top-down, one-size-fits-all health care 'solutions' that have been imposed from Washington D.C., including Obamacare. ~ James Lankford

He could be wearing a red letterman's jacket, driving around in a Corvette with the top down, one arm on the steering wheel, on his way to pick up his girl for the sock hop. ~ Jenny Han

Sad songs are not my strong suit. All the songs that have saved my life make you feel like driving with the top down or dancing in your room with your best friend. ~ J.C. Lillis

Goodness cannot be imposed externally, from the top down; it must grow internally, from the bottom up. ~ Philip Yancey

I can't have you," she said, trying to convince them both.
His fingertips slid over her silky skin as he pulled the strap on her tank top down her arm. ~ Jennifer Kacey

She gave his fake boob a poke. "What the hell is in here?"
He laughed and pulled the top down part of the way to reveal a grapefruit. She groaned onto her hands.
"Hey, I know it's been a while since I've seen a real tit up close, but I think I remember the basic shape. What would you have used?"
"Oh, hell, Michael,I have no idea what a man uses to stuff a maid's uniform. Where did you get it anyways?"
Another of his shit-eating grins lit his face. "From the plus sized section of the lingerie store in Sweedesboro. I'm a woman's extra large." He was so proud of the fact that she laughed until her side ached. ~ R.E. Butler

The multiple failures of top-down design, and the omnipresence of unintended consequences, can be attributed in large part, to the absence of relevant information. ~ Cass R. Sunstein

They'll [China] probably be a fully developed nation. The road there just is not going to be that easy. You're going from a macromanaged, top-down economy to a market-managed, micromanaged type of economy, with all the potential corruption issues, SOE [state-owned enterprise] reform, and market reform that come with it. ~ Jamie Dimon

What about the entrance to the cave?" she asked. He snapped his fingers as if he'd forgotten all about it.
"Excellent point."
Myrnin dragged the largest, heaviest table over, top down, and covered up with it the hole he'd made in the floor. Then he took handfuls of broken glass and mounded it up on all sides.
Myrnin artistically sprinkled some more broken glass. "There," Myrnin said, and backed off to the stairs again. "What do you think?"
"Fabulous." She sighed. "Brilliant job of camouflage."
"Normally, I'd add a corpse," he said, "just to keep people at bay. But that might be good enough. ~ Rachel Caine

After years of operating in a top-down manner that emphasizes control and conformance, organizations are rife with obstacles to bottom-up ideas that front-line staff are forced to overcome. ~ Alan G. Robinson

I was deeply disturbed by the meeting. If I couldn't do what I thought was necessary to take care of the troops, I didn't see how I could remain as secretary. I was in a quandary. I shared Obama's concerns about an open-ended conflict, and while I wanted to fulfill the troop requests of the commanders, I knew they always would want more - just like all their predecessors throughout history. How did you scale the size of the commitment to the goal? How did you measure risk? But I was deeply uneasy with the Obama White House's lack of appreciation - from the top down - of the uncertainties and inherent unpredictability of war. "They all seem to think it's a science," I wrote in a note to myself. I came closer to resigning that day than at any other time in my tenure, though no one knew it. During ~ Robert M. Gates

Top-down tends to be good practice when three preconditions are true: (a) you can specify in advance precisely what the program is to do, (b) the specification is unlikely to change significantly during implementation, and (c) you have a lot of freedom in choosing, at a low level, how the program is to get that job done. ~ Eric S. Raymond

[Ella Baker]'s second defining characteristic was her dislike of top-down leadership ... 'She felt leaders were not appointed but the rose up. Someone will rise. Someone will emerge'. It was an attitude Baker shared with some of the older women in the movement. ~ Gail Collins

Schools in which students and teachers relate as partners-where Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication is part of every interaction are communities of learning, rather than top-down, impersonal factories. Young people begin to see school as a safe and exciting place of exploration where they can share feelings and ideas, and where each child is recognized, valued and nurtured. ~ Riane Eisler

The vagrant, the squatter, had been redrawn, yet qualitatively he/she remained the same: a piece of white trash on the margins of rural society. Observers recognized how the moving mass of undesirables in the constantly expanding West challenged democracy's central principle. California was a wake-up call. Anxious southerners focused attention not only on their slave society and slave economy, but on the ever-growing numbers of poor whites who made the permanently unequal top-down social order perfectly obvious. Who really spoke of equality among whites anymore? No one of any note. Let us put it plainly: on the path to disunion, the roadside was strewn with white trash. ~ Nancy Isenberg

I've always believed that culture is defined and created from the top down, but it comes to life from the bottom up. This meant that I had to build our culture by working with the leadership group (i.e., the owner, general manager, and executives), the coaching staff, and the football team. To strengthen the culture among the leadership group, it was important to reiterate to the owner, team president, and general manager the shared beliefs, values, and expectations that we had discussed in depth when I was interviewing for the head coaching position. It was important to have collaborative conversations on a regular basis to discuss the changes we were making and why we were making them. ~ Jon Gordon

For so long, companies were run using a command-and-control, 'top down' hierarchical method that involved dictating down the command chain and maintaining order. What I've witnessed in our time is evolving democratization, a shift to a demand economy accelerated by technological advancements like social media. ~ Kevin Allen

Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism. ~ Nicholas Negroponte

There are many challenges in the global education ecosystem: from top-down systemic issues in how educational services are organized and delivered, to bottom-up issues of curriculum effectiveness, accountability, and human resource allocation. ~ Adam Braun

The best thing that I can offer to people is just to be honest, and that's a rare quality. In doing so, I think there's always a top down feeling that permeates a working environment. If the boss is cool and he's a certain way that's not bullshitting, then everyone around is going to feel that comfort and try to be that way, as well. That's just who I strive to be, as a person. ~ Joe Hahn

As an HR Manager, you don't have to build a top-down perks program. You decide how much you want to invest in your employees, and then you give your employees the control to build a custom perk package for themselves. ~ Paige Craig

top-down chains of command are not particularly efficient: they tend to promote stupidity among those on top and resentful foot-dragging among those on the bottom. The greater the need to improvise, the more democratic the cooperation tends to become. ~ David Graeber

The traditional view of purpose says it comes from on high, from God, from the Creator. Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition. Whereas people used to think of meaning coming from on high and being ordained from the top down, now we have Darwin saying, "No, all of this design can happen, all of this purpose can emerge from the bottom up without any direction at all." ~ Daniel Dennett

This is absolutely correct and forms part of the larger concept that top-down causation is a key factor not just in the way the brain works but in broader contexts in biology and even physics. ~ George F. R. Ellis

[P]rogressivism is a top-down, continent-wide tissue of taxes, mandates, and other coercions. ~ George Will

Turmoil is everywhere, and the whole world is waiting for solutions to come from the top down. That's not how it works - community change from the bottom up makes a real difference. ~ Betty Williams

Got my tank top top down, it probably ain't summer but I ride like that cause I'm hotter than the others. ~ Lil' Wayne

You can only succeed when people are communicating, not just from the top down, but in complete interchange. Communication comes from fighting off my ego and listening. ~ Bill Walsh

There are cases where government-to-government aid actually has worked. Look at the eradication of smallpox and the near eradication of polio. But these are really top down solutions that require government-to-government support and aid. ~ Jacqueline Novogratz

Top-down leaders, by withholding power from those in the ranks, deprive them of the ability to use the expertise and information vested in them to respond directly and with speed to customer concerns. ~ Sally Helgesen

Lord, how excellent are Thy ways, and how devious and dark are the ways of man. Show us how to die, that we may rise again to newness of life. Rend the veil of our self-life from the top down as Thou didst rend the veil of the Temple. We would draw near in full assurance of faith. We would dwell with Thee in daily experience here on this earth so that we may be accustomed to the glory when we enter Thy heaven to dwell with Thee there. In Jesus' name, Amen. ~ A.W. Tozer

This one is for the boys with the boomin system
Top down AC with the coolin system ~ Nicki Minaj

Women leading means that Congress is working to create jobs, make quality child care more affordable and strengthen the middle class because we understand that America grows the economy and opportunity from the middle out, not the top down. ~ Barbara Mikulski

We need better options for securing the Internet. Instead of looking primarily for top-down government intervention, we can enlist the operators and users themselves. ~ Jonathan Zittrain

The traditional paradigm of parenting has been very hierarchical, the parent knows best and very top down. Conscious parenting topples [this paradigm] on its head and creates this mutuality, this circularity where both parent and child serve each other and where in fact, perhaps, the child could be even more of a guru for the parent ... teaching the parent how the parent needs to grow, teaching the parent how to enter the present moment like only children know how to do. ~ Shefali Tsabary

In the first speech I delivered as health secretary, I made one thing perfectly clear: we need a cultural shift in the NHS: from a culture responsive mainly to orders from the top down to one responsive to patients, in which patient safety is put first. ~ Andrew Lansley

AUDIENCE ORIENTATION: Social marketers view their audience as decision-makers with choices, rather than students to be educated, or incorrigibles to be regulated. Social Marketing begins with a bottom-up versus a top-down perspective, and therefore rejects the paternalist notion that "experts know what is best and will tell people how to behave for their own good" in favor of an audience-centered approach which seeks to understand what people want and provide them support in acquiring it. ~ Nancy R. Lee

It's very difficult to solve a lot of problems from the top down. ~ Megan Smith

If I'm serious about patients and their GPs being able to have more control of their health care, I can't have a top-down system that imposes restrictions on the services they need. ~ Andrew Lansley

Each system will depend on resources available, not from the bottom up or top down. In other words, if you put 500 passengers in an airplane that's designed to carry 100, it won't get off the ground. So all decisions are made based upon the physical equipment you're working with, or the environmental resources available. They're not made by Fresco or any other person. They're arrived at by studies and research. ~ Jacque Fresco

Our economy grows from the middle out, not the top down. ~ Michael Nutter

In the Ferrari or Jaguar, switchin' four lanes
Wit' the top down screaming out money ain't a thang ~ Jermaine Dupri

Communication can't always follow the top-down model. With the fluidity of information in business today, leaders need to be masterful listeners; they need to be able to receive as well as send. ~ Joseph Badaracco

I think we did a pretty good role, linking, being a sounding board really and a driving force, especially from the bottom up. I think that part of this is bottom up as well as top down. ~ Richard Rogers

But in a turbulent environment the change is so widespread that it just routes around any kind of central authority. So it is best to manage the bottom-up change rather than try to institute it from the top down. ~ Kevin Kelly

Coz it's big business, baby,
and its smile is hideous.
Top-down violence.
Structural viciousness.

Your kids are doped up
on prescriptions and sedatives.
But don't worry 'bout that, man,
Worry 'bout
terrorists.

The water level's rising!
The water level's rising!
The animals -
the polar bears
the elephants are dying.
STOP CRYING START BUYING!!

But what about the oil spill?

Shh.
No one likes a party-pooping spoilsport.

Massacres massacres massacres/new shoes
ghettoised children murdered in daylight
by those employed to protect them.
Porn live-streamed to your pre-teens bedrooms.
Glass ceiling. No headroom.
Half a generation live beneath the breadline -
oh but it's Happy Hour on
the high street!

- Europe is Lost ~ Kae Tempest

Typically a command and control organization uses a top-down approach in allocating work: it defines a title for an individual, like Sales Manager, and then based on that tries to figure out what kind of tasks the person ~ Sebastian Klein

For wellbeing to take hold, it's got to be something that individual team members are getting excited about in their own lives. It can't be something that a company is forcing top-down through hierarchical structures. ~ Tom Rath

If our starting point is a respect for nature and people, diversity is an inevitable consequence. If technology and the needs of the economy are our starting point, then we have what we are faced with today - a model of development that is dangerously distanced from the needs of particular peoples and places and rigidly imposed from the top down. ~ Helena Norberg-Hodge

Smaller government, more individual responsibility, more individual control creates more Republicans. More state power and ownership and control and top-down decision-making creates more Democrats. ~ Grover Norquist

I am a taxonomist, I work in the descriptive, narrative sciences of natural history. Unfortunately there is this status ordering from physics, the queen of the sciences up on top, down through a bunch of squishy subjects, ending up with sociology and psychology on the bottom. Palaeontologists are not much above that in their conventional ordering. ~ Richard Lewontin

In India, all along, development as a process was always affected from the top down style of functioning. Naturally, because along with our freedom we had inherited a bureaucracy, which was designed by the British to rule, not to serve. The British way of doing things had always been to get things done through a government department and after independence we Indians merely continued this system. ~ Verghese Kurien

Neoconservatism had the philosophy that you go in with a supply-led approach to impose democratic values from the top down. Whereas Islamists and far-right organizations, for decades, have been building demand for their ideology on the grassroots. ~ Maajid Nawaz

It doesn't matter who came to talk to me,' he said (Barack Obama). He went on to say that I needed to realize the power of my words. I could not send emails like that because they - I am paraphrasing - freak everyone out.

Developing self-awareness is a lifelong process; you don't just wake up one day and have all you need. So even though I'd spend the last few months demonstrating that I was cable and knew what I was doing, this was something of a revelation. When the president of the United States tells you your words are powerful, it can be pretty shocking. I honestly didn't think anyone would give a shit if I sent a snippy email.

It was good advice, specifically to me at the time but generally as it relates to any kind of replying-all in life: Think about how what you say could affect people, from the top down. It was also a wake-up call for me about my state of mind: I didn't know why (yet) - though I'm sure I did, deep down - but my temper was getting worse, and my fuse shorter and shorter. ~ Alyssa Mastromonaco

From such experiments Christians have learned that the gospel grows best from the bottom up rather than being imposed from the top down. ~ Philip Yancey

Our top-down pyramid style of management is a very old concept borrowed from centuries of war and monarchies. ~ James Hunter

Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite social-psychological hypothesis: that forceful, graceful and intelligent behaviour occurs only when there is an uncoerced and direct response to the physical and social environment; that in most human affairs, more harm than good results from compulsion, top-down direction, bureaucratic planning, pre-ordained curricula, jails, conscription, states. ~ Paul Goodman

At that moment, the Stanford Prison Experiment was changed into the Stanford Prison, not by any top-down formal declarations by the staff but by this bottom-up declaration from one of the prisoners themselves. ~ Philip G. Zimbardo

Most of the approaches to peace between Israel and the Palestinians, have been directed at trying to resolve the most complex problems, like refugees and Jerusalem, which is akin to building the pyramid from the top down. ~ Benjamin Netanyahu

His body was tubby but his arms apparently couldn't understand that, for they were long and scrawny. From his brow to an inch below his eyes, his nose turned up; from there on, down. His short upper lip slanted sharply toward his tonsils, which had the effect of making his chinlessness positively jut.
( ... )
The bartender was fascinated by the way the teardrops proceeded down Biddiver's amazing nose. One drop would dash almost halfway, and then hesitate, daunted by the hump. Then it would be joined by another teardrop, and the two, merging, would surmount the obstacle and slip down to hang glittering over the disappearing lip until a sob came along to shake them off. ~ Theodore Sturgeon

Speaking of the devil, what is Alma doing right now?"

"Well..." Sitting in her favorite armchair, Isabel craned her neck around to peer down the hallway to where she saw Alma squealing and clapping hands at their pet beagle Petey Sampson. With his tail wagging, he woof-woofed at her, and she woof-woofed right back at him. ~ Ed Lynskey

Deep down, my mom had long suspected I was gay ... Much of her anger and hurt came from her sense of betrayal that she was the last to be told. ~ Chaz Bono

For my own part, I liked Lady Warminster, although at the same time never wholly at ease in her presence. She was immaculately free from any of the traditional blemishes of a mother-in-law; agreeable always; entertaining; even, in her own way, affectionate; but always a little alarming: an elegant, deeply experienced bird – perhaps a bird of prey – ready to sweep down and attack from the frozen mountain peaks upon which she preferred herself to live apart. ~ Anthony Powell

A bridge. A big bridge with lots of traffic. You can't be serious. I've almost killed us at least twice going up and down these crazy hilly roads!" I yelped with true fear in my quivering voice. ~ Elle Klass

I call the high and light aspects of my being SPIRIT and the dark and heavy aspects SOUL.
Soul is at home in the deep shaded valleys.
Heavy torpid flowes saturated with black grow there.
The rivers flow like arm syrup. They empty into huge oceans of soul.
Spirit is a land of high,white peaks and glittering jewel-like lakes and flowers.
Life is sparse and sound travels great distances.
There is soul music, soul food, and soul love.
People need to climb the mountain not because it is there
But because the soulful divinity need to be mated with the Spirit.
Deep down we must have a rel affection for each other, a clear recognition of our shared human status. At the same time we must openly accept all ideologies and systems as means of solving humanity's problems. No matter how strong the wind of evil may blow, the flame of truth cannot be extinguished. ~ Dalai Lama XIV

The people were divided into the persecuted and those who persecuted them. That wild beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free. The signal was given, the barriers were down. As has so often happened in the history of man, permission was tacitly granted for acts of violence and plunder, even for murder, if they were carried out in the name of higher interests, according to established rules, and against a limited number of men of a particular type and belief....In a few minutes the business quarter, based on centuries of tradition, was wiped out. It is true that there had always been concealed enmities and jealousies and religious intolerance, coarseness and cruelty, but there had also been courage and fellowship and a feeling for measure and order, which restrained all these instincts within the limits of the supportable and, in the end, calmed them down and submitted them to the general interest of life in common. Men who had been leaders in the commercial quarter for forty years vanished overnight as if they had all died suddenly, together with the habits, customs and institutions which they represented.

p. 11 ~ Peter Maass

The great oak tree had stood on a hill over the Hudson, in a lonely spot on the Taggart estate. Eddie Willers, aged seven, liked to come and look at that tree. It had stood there for hundreds of years, and he thought it would always stand there. Its roots clutched the hill like a fist with fingers sunk into the soil, and he thought that if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole of the earth with it, like a ball at the end of a string. He felt safe in the oak tree's presence; it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten; it was his greatest symbol of strength.

One night, lightning struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside-just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape it left had not been able to stand without it. ~ Ayn Rand