When our heroes turn out to be sleazebags, self-deception is easier than facing the facts.
In Missoula, Grizzly football exists in a realm apart, where there is a pervasive sense of entitlement. University of Montana fans, coaches, players, and their lawyers expect, and often receive, special dispensation.
The LDS Church has annual revenues estimated at more than $6 billion, and it is currently the largest employer in the state of Utah.
The courtroom oath – “to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” – is applicable only to witnesses. Defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges don’t take this oath – they couldn’t! Indeed, it is fair to say the American justice system is built on the foundation of not telling the whole truth. It is the job of the defense attorney – especially when representing the guilty – to prevent, by all lawful means, the “whole truth” from coming out.
Mortenson was merely selling what the public was eager to buy.
When McCandless came into his world, however, the boy undermined the old man’s meticulously constructed defenses. Franz relished being with McCandless, but their burgeoning friendship also reminded him how lonely he’d been. The boy unmasked the gaping void in Franz’s life even as he helped fill it. When McCandless departed as suddenly as he’d arrived, Franz found himself deeply and unexpectedly hurt.
In trying to understand McCandless, I inevitably came to reflect on other, larger subjects as well: the grip wilderness has on the American imagination, the allure high-risk activities hold for young men of a certain mind, the complicated, highly charged bond that exists between fathers and sons. The result of this meandering inquiry is the book now before you.
In the adversarial system, it’s more important to follow legal procedure than to speak the truth.
Huguet, on the other hand, insisted that prosecutors settle for nothing less than a lengthy sentence at the state penitentiary in Deer Lodge.
On the morning of the July 24, Pioneer Day, Dan got up, prayed, and felt prompted by the Lord to saw the barrel and stock off a 12-gauge, pump-action shotgun that he had been storing at his mother’s house.
Devout Buddhists believe in sonam – an accounting of righteous deeds that, when large enough, enables one to escape the cycle of birth and rebirth and transcend forever this world of pain and suffering.
For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy. G. K. CHESTERTON.
I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities.
There are no true answers, just shades of grey, coincidence, and circumstance.
And he never quit in the middle of something. If he started a job, he’d finish it. It was almost like a moral thing for him. He was what you’d call extremely ethical. He set pretty high standards for himself.
He drifted past saguaros and alkali flats, camped beneath escarpments of naked Precambrian stone. In the distance spiky, chocolate-brown mountains floated on eerie pools of mirage.
The urge to catalog the myriad blunders in order to “learn from the mistakes” is for the most part an exercise in denial and self-deception.
The LDS Church has annual revenues estimated at more than $6 billion, and.
For a few minutes the roof of the bus remains visible among the stunted trees, a tiny white gleam in a wild green sea, growing smaller and smaller, and then it’s gone.
There is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.