They said that man proposes, God disposes;.
Some of that wind had begun to sweep the streets of Black River, just enough of it to turn the leaves on the trees – a sign, according to folklore, of oncoming rain.
As a man who felt that he had been born too late, Jeffy was often amazed at what passed for high art in this low age.
His heart knocked as if on Heaven’s door.
On a mutual dare, they killed for the first time when they were fifteen. They enjoyed it. And satanism justified it. Gosset called it “just another way of believing.
It seemed that the political elites were striving, with admiration for George Orwell and rare unanimity, to ensure that the totalitarian state in the novel 1984 would be realized no later than fifty years after the author predicted.
When you’re on the run from the law, you need beans in your belly, tough-guy food.
The wood of the porch is the weathered gray that high-end designers strive to achieve for wealthy clients and that the poor endure because they lack money for paint.
When we hope, we usually hope for the wrong thing. We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it represents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was the progress in it? Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances.
The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy.
Certain events are lightly sketched on the future and can be erased. Others are woven into the fabric of all that is to come and resist being unraveled.
What he has seen is a nation gone insane. History attests that whole societies can turn away from truth and descend into a madness of lies in as little as a year. That was all it took in Germany in the late 1930s.
Artificial intelligences, if they became self-aware, would in every case be deeply evil because they had no soul. Machine thinking was not like human thinking and never could be. Life in the flesh, with five senses and an awareness that one day you would die, gave birth to emotions that no machine could ever know, and emotions like sympathy and pity and love were essential for the existence of mercy.
It was human nature to obsess on negatives, to worry the smallest of sparks into infernos.
Can a nation surrender its freedom and a civil society to a rabid ideology in just two short years?
They sat side by side, their legs drawn up, arms around their knees, facing west toward the Far East, where Japan lay thousands of miles away in tomorrow afternoon.
Dorian Purcell, working with a federal agency, funded a reckless research project into the engineering of the human genome and sited the work in rural Utah – but now people were dying here. Progress was real progress only when it evolved naturally and thoughtfully from the history of human experience and accumulated wisdom. When it was imposed in contempt for that experience and wisdom, then progress was in fact radical destruction.
The free kitchen, after-school programs, keeping porn out of libraries – all that needs done, but it’s dealing with the aftermath, not with the causes. I’m in the mood to deal with a cause.
Stormy believed that we are in this boot camp to learn, that if we don’t persevere through all this world’s obstacles and all its wounds, we won’t earn our next life of great adventure. To be with her again, I will have the perseverance of a bulldog, but it seems to me that the training is unnecessarily hard.
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