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B Quotes

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All B Quotes

“By continuously adapting to change and seeking improvement, businesses can sustain their ability to provide value and maintain a competitive advantage.”

“By contrast, dozens of serious demographers and statisticians—not just the Jean-Paul Sanderson I mention—have concluded the overall population rose slightly or was unchanged at around 8 to 10 million from 1885 to 1908. Others include Bruce Fetter, Guy Vanthemsche, Jean-Luc Vellut, Pierre-Luc Plasman, Anatole Romaniuk, and, as mentioned, the later Jan Vansina. Taken on its own, the EIC was a positive influence on the black population in the Congo because of its campaigns against slavery, endemic tribal warfare, cannibalism, and polygamous rape and torture. Infrastructure and trade brought life-saving income. Population remained unchanged only because of the persistence of endemic disease and slavery. According to Romaniuk, venereal disease alone can explain the depression of population growth after 1900 when the EIC had finally brought a modicum of peace and prosperity to the region.”

“By contrast, if you stay in a negative environment for too long you’ll become a negative person. Fact. It will suck the life out of you. It’s the same with negative people. If you’re surrounded by people who think and act negatively, then it’s for fucking sure that you’ll start doing the same. It’s up to you, really.”

“By contrast, moderate identity alteration differs from its milder countepart in that the alterations are not always under the person's control. In addition, moderate identity alteration does not always manifest the presence of distinct alter personalities. Someone who experiences moderate identity alteration may present with mood changes and behaviors that they perceive as uncontrollable. Patients with nondissociative psychiatric disorders (e.g., manic depressive illness) may report moderate alterations in behavior/demeanor that they cannot control; for example, one patient diagnosed as manic depressive mentioned being bothered by his inability to "keep his mind from racing" (SCID-D interview, unpublished transcript). However, these alterations do not coalesce around distinct personalities. Similarly, individuals who have borderline personality disorder tend to fluctuate rapidly between radically different behaviors and moods; however, these changes do not involve different names, memories, preferences, distinct ages, or amnesia for past events.”

“By contrast, my wife at fifty-two yeas old seems to me just as attractive as the day I first met her. If I were to say this out loud, she would say, 'Douglas, that's just a line. No one prefers wrinkles, no one prefers grey.' To which I'd reply, 'But none of this is a surprise. I've been expecting to watch you grow older ever since we met. Why should it trouble me? It's the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or fourty-three. It's that face.' Perhaps she would have liked to hear this but I had never got around to saying it out loud. I had always presumed there would be time and now, sitting on the edge of the bed at four a.m., no longer listening out for burglars, it seemed that it might be too late.”

“By contrast, the constellations of unwillingness, of repulsion and disgust, are more solid than ever. It seems that this has generated a new energy, a counterenergy, a force that has taken the place of desire in us, a viral abreaction in response to whatever has replaced the world, the body and sex for us. Today only distaste is determined - tastes are determinate no longer. Only rejections are violent - projects are violent no longer. Our actions, our undertakings, our sicknesses have less and less in the way of 'objective' motives: they arise for the most part from a concealed self-disgust, an unacknowledged empty legacy which causes us to try to get rid of our energy by whatever means. A kind of exorcism, then, rather than a will to action. Could this be the principle of Evil in a new form, one not far removed from magic - whose epicentre, as we know, is, precisely, exorcism?”

“By contrast, the traditional revolutionary demand for council forms of organization (what Hannah Arendt describes as "the revolutionary heritage") does not break completely with the terrain of hierarchical society. Workers' councils originate as class councils. Unless one assumes that workers are driven by their interests as workers to revolutionary measures against hierarchical society (an assumption I flatly deny), then these councils can be used just as much to perpetuate class society as to destroy it. We shall see, in fact, that the council form contains many structural limitations which favor the development of hierarchy. For the present, it suffices to say that most advocates of workers' councils tend to conceive of people primarily as economic entities, either as workers or nonworkers. This conception leaves the onesidedness of the self completely intact. Man is viewed as a bifurcated being, the product of a social development that divides man from man and each man from himself. Nor is this one-sided view completely corrected by demands for workers' management of production and the shortening of the work week, for these demands leave the nature of the work process and the quality of the worker's free time completely untouched. If workers' councils and workers' management of production do not transform the work into a joyful activity, free time into a marvelous experience, and the workplace into a community, then they remain merely formal structures, in fact, class structures. They perpetuate the limitations of the proletariat as a product of bourgeois social conditions. Indeed, no movement that raises the demand for workers' councils can be regarded as revolutionary unless it tries to promote sweeping transformations in the environment of the work place.”

“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature--for instance in a biological survey of evolution--we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”

“By convention sweet is sweet, by convention bitter is bitter, by convention hot is hot, by convention cold is cold, by convention color is color. But in reality there are atoms and the void. That is, the objects of sense are supposed to be real and it is customary to regard them as such, but in truth they are not. Only the atoms and the void are real.”

“By conversing with the mighty dead, we imbibe sentiment with knowledge. We become strongly attached to those who can no longer either hurt or serve us, except through the influence which they exert over the mind. We feel the presence of that power which gives immortality to human thoughts and actions, and catch the flame of enthusiasm from all nations and ages.”

“By creating a false distinction between "good" and "bad" forms of animal exploitation and violence, the animal industry has convinced the public that there is nothing wrong with animal agriculture, per se, only with the way it is practiced. However, it isn't just the animal industry that has a stake in this. Capitalists and consumers, conservatives and liberals, small-scale farmers and corporate industrial farms alike all wish to re-"naturalize" animal husbandry as a permanent, benignant fixture of the human condition. The new hoax of "humane" meat is thus a convenience for all, a way to neutralize animal advocacy and to fend off the bad conscience of society." - The Humane Hoax”

“By creating a prosecutor who is overseen over by a court, they are melding executive and judicial power in a way that can lead to terrible abuses - as the founders of America understood full well. It's why they created a system of separated powers - to set up a constitutional mechanism that would enhance freedom, by making sure that no one's accumulation of power could predominate over [that of] others.”

“By creating a self-policing, self-reporting, sort of self-monitoring culture through law, through statute, and imposing that on the academic world, I think not only are we losing a significant measure of freedom in academic traditions and in our civil society, but we're actually making ourselves less competitive with every other country around the world that does not do that. Because that's where researchers are going to go and that's where academics are going to go. And ultimately, that's where breakthroughs are going to occur.”

“By creating a society in which all people, of all colors, were granted freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution forever transformed the world. It was a central part of the destruction of slavery in the Americas, and therefore a crucial moment in the history of democracy, one that laid the foundation for the continuing struggles for human rights everywhere. In this sense we are all descendents of the Haitain Revolution, and responsible to these ancestors.”

“By “crime” I do not mean mere illegality, but instead a category of socially proscribed acts that: (1) threaten or harm other people and (2) violate norms related to justice, personal safety, or human rights, (3) in such a manner or to such a degree as to warrant community intervention (and sometimes coercive intervention). That category would surely include a large number of things that are presently illegal (rape, murder, dropping bricks off an overpass), would certainly not include other things that are presently illegal (smoking pot, sleeping in public parks, nude sunbathing), and would likely also include some things that are not presently illegal (mass evictions, the invasion of Iraq). The point here is that the standards I want to appeal to in invoking the idea of crime are not the state’s standards, but the community’s — and, specifically, the community’s standards as they relate to justice, rights, personal safety, and perhaps especially the question of violence. (...) Because the state uses this protective function to justify its own violence, the replacement of the police institution is not only a goal of social change, but also a means of achieving it. The challenge is to create another system that can protect us from crime, and can do so better, more justly, with a respect for human rights, and with a minimum of bullying. What is needed, in short, is a shift in the responsibility for public safety—away from the state and toward the community.”

“By crying you get more attention with my Zulu language we use to say (ingane engakhali ifela embelekweni) means uncrying baby can die on his mom comfort,you need to express your feelings special to God . That what I does and still do more then that it work very well for me it will do the same for you too these stories sometimes may not make the sense to you or not understand it but it very true and it works for other people. If there's other option beside this I would tell you that love does and true friendship is and sharing is carring will make a better world.”

“By cultivating awareness while following our bliss and learning to work with and eventually see the energy of the Dark Sea of Awareness, and aligning our intentions with our most absurdly profound gnosis of how the universe actually works and where we fit into it, we become powerful change agents indeed.”

“By cultivating the values that matter most—and pursuing them unconditionally, undeterred by circumstance—we can live meaningful lives. The path isn’t easy. It leads away from the conventional ways of the world and our instincts. It requires controlling our thoughts, words, and actions. Gradually, we can close the gap between who we are and who we aspire to be. As we think, speak, and act with intention and build habits aligned with our values, we experience a transformation.”