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O Quotes

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All O Quotes

“One story clearly illustrates Anne Bonny's particular mix of comedy and ingenuity. She'd heard of a French Merchantman, loaded down with silks and satins, and decided to attack it. Her plan was quite nuts. She got the crew to smear the sails and the deck of the ship with turtle blood, covered most of the crew with the same blood, dressed one of Bouspeut’s dressmaker dummies in women’s clothing and stood it in the bow of the ship, likewise splashed with blood, and positioned the crew around it like corpses. She then lobbed her tits out and, brandishing a blood-soaked boarding axe, stood quite still over this horrific scene as they sailed out to meet the Merchantman. Sailors are profoundly superstitious and once the Frenchmen caught sight of this demonic ship with the bare-breasted maniac lit by a raging moon, the Frenchmen were so repelled that they gave up without a fight. What theatre!”

“One story that circulated about (U.S. Minister to Russia Charles S.) Todd concerned his conversation with a lady-in-waiting at an Imperial reception in the Winter Palace. In his bad French with a Kentucky accent, he mispronounced the word for year, so that an explanation of his travels came out: "I was an ass in Paris, part of an ass in London, almost an ass in Germany, and I am two asses here." To which the lady reportedly responded, "And you will be an ass wherever you go.”

“One strain of African American thought holds that it is a violent black recklessness—the black gangster, the black rioter—that strikes the ultimate terror in white America. Perhaps it does, in the most individual sense. But in the collective sense, what this country really fears is black respectability, Good Negro Government. It applauds, even celebrates, Good Negro Government in the unthreatening abstract—The Cosby Show, for instance. But when it becomes clear that Good Negro Government might, in any way, empower actual Negroes over actual whites, then the fear sets in, the affirmative-action charges begin, and birtherism emerges.”

“One strand of psychotherapy is certainly to help relieve suffering, which is a genuine medical concern. If someone is bleeding, you want to stop the bleeding. Another medical aspect is the treatment of chronic complaints that are disabling in some way. And many of our troubles are chronic. Life is chronic. So there is a reasonable, sensible, medical side to psychotherapy.”

“One strategy that the tea party smartly embraced was one of being almost entirely defensive. They consciously decided not to figure out which of their really abominable conservative policy priorities to prioritize. Instead, anything that came out of the Obama White House they were against. What they recognized is that when you've lost the White House and the House of Representatives and the Senate, you're not setting the agenda anymore. We progressives find ourselves in a similar situation now.”

“One strong idea being put forth these days (...) is that women should above all be given choice. (...) But this "right to choose" whether or not we provide for ourselves has contributed mightily to the female achievement gap. Because they have the social option to stay home, women can - and often do - back off from assuming responsibility for themselves. (...) There is something wrong with this. (...) We want so desperately to believe that we do not have to be responsible for our own welfare.”

“One student laid it wide open when she said with complete candor, “Of course you can’t eliminate the degree and grading system. After all, that’s what we’re here for.” She spoke the complete truth. The idea that the majority of students attend a university for an education independent of the degree and grades is a little hypocrisy everyone is happier not to expose.”

“One study concluded that there were 1.7 errors per patient per day in America's ICUs. Of these errors, 29 percent could have caused clinically significant harm or death. Given that the average ICU length of stay is three days, this research suggests that nearly all patients hospitalized in the ICU sustain a potentially life-threatening mistake at some point during their stay.”

“One study found interesting gender differences regarding how pain and synchrony affect social bonding. For women, greater social bonding was reported for painful ritual without synchronized movements. For men, however, synchrony and pain created a greater sense of social bonding. One possible reason for this is that males, more than females, over our evolutionary history were responsible for coordinated violent action against perceived threats, which may have selected them for greater sensitivity to synchrony as a bonding mechanism.”

“One study found that women with blond hair earn 7 percent more than brunettes. Women who wear makeup get better jobs and quicker promotions. Thin women outearn heavier women; white women who are overweight pay a financial penalty of a 12 percent drop in their wealth....... The average woman spends $15,000 on cosmetics alone during her lifetime.”

“One study on the treatment of asthma patients conducted by researchers John Goyeche, Dr. Ago, and Dr. Ikemi, suggests that any effective treatment should address suppressed emotions-such as anxiety and self-image-as well as the physical dimension. To achieve this, they encourage correction of poor posture, and helping the person relax the irrelevant respiratory muscles while restoring full diaphragmatic breathing. They also recommended finding ways for getting rid of excess mucus. The good news is that a well rounded breath practice will do all these things.”

“One substitute for the disappearing Evil Empire (The Soviet Union) has been the threat of drug traffickers from Latin America. In early September 1989, a major government-media blitz was launched by the President. That month the AP wires carried more stories about drugs than about Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa combined. If you looked at television, every news program had a big section on how drugs were destroying our society, becoming the greatest threat to our existence, etc.”

“One such troubling provision is a tax increase to pay for the $635 billion included in the budget for health care 'reserve funds.' Health care reform is desperately needed in America, but I'm concerned that $635 billion will be a down payment on socialized medicine, causing the impersonal rationing of health care and destroying the doctor-patient relationship.”

“One suggestion is to regard your personality as a pet. It follows you around anyway, so give it a name and make friends with it. Keep it on a leash when you need to, and let it run free when you feel that is appropriate. Train it as well as you can, and then accept its idiosyncrasies, but always remember that your pet is not you. Your pet has its own life, and just happens to be in an intimate relationship with you, whoever you may be, hiding there behind your personality.”

“One suggestion my wife and I have used in our personal finance courses we teach at college is simply writing down all expenditures and seeing where the money goes. That alone will cause heads of households to think twice about x, y or z expenditure, and to consider carefully whether they really need something or not.”

“One summer day, while I was walking along the country road on the farm where I was born, a section of the stone wall opposite me, and not more than three or four yards distant, suddenly fell down. Amid the general stillness and immobility about me the effect was quite startling. ... It was the sudden summing up of half a century or more of atomic changes in the material of the wall. A grain or two of sand yielded to the pressure of long years, and gravity did the rest.”

“One summer I was homeless in L.A., when I was about fifteen, and I used to go to the library to get books. I would have books in abandoned cars, in the seats, cubby holes on the L.A. River, just to have books wherever I could keep them, I just loved to have books. And that really helped me. I didn't realize it was going to be my destiny; I didn't know I was going to be a writer.”

“One summer when Carol was attending day camp, Greta had an affair with a man named Mel Carter. He was an Eastern publicity representative for a film studio, and often instructed dinner parties to which we went in those days with accounts of the movies' coming of age. 'We have a picture coming up,' he said once, 'in which a character says "son of a bitch." Lots of exciting things are happening. Still, it's only a beginning. Much remains to be done.”