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W Quotes

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All W Quotes

“What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons - reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.”

“What plan for the regulation of the militia may be pursued by the national government is impossible to be foreseen...The project of disciplining all the militia of the United States is as futile as it would be injurious if it were capable of being carried into execution... Little more can reasonably be aimed at with the respect to the people at large than to have them properly armed and equipped ; and in order to see that this be not neglected, it will be necessary to assemble them once or twice in the course of a year.”

“What plan of action? What can be done? We can’t fight the whole society.” “I was thinking we could use you as bait and draw them into a trap,” Gregori said, straight-faced. Gary’s eyes widened in alarm. “I’m not sure I like that plan. Sounds a little risky to me.” He looked at Savannah for support. Gregori shrugged his broad shoulders in a casual shrug. “I do not see a risk.” Savannah’s small clenched fist thumped his stomach in retaliation. Gregori glanced down at her with surprise. “Is this when I am supposed to say ouch?” Savannah and Gary exchanged a long, mournful groan. “Why did I want him to have a sense of humor?” she wondered. Gary shook his head. “Don’t be asking me. You created the monster.”

“What plant?' 'Sorry?' "What plant did Mum leave, at the grave?' Sally went to the open window and reached through to pick a peach-colored flower from a blooming bush. She offered it to Alice. 'Beach hibiscus,' Alice cried softly, remembering the flower crown her mother made when she was a child. Remembering its meaning in the Thornfield Dictionary. Love binds us in eternity.”

“What pleasure can those over-happy persons know, who, from their affluence and luxury, always eat before they are hungry and drink before they are thirsty?”

“What poetry is asking us to accept can be difficult. Our proximity to our mortality, the fragility of our existence, how close we live in every moment to nameless abysses, and the way language itself is beautifully, tragically, thrillingly insufficient...these are some of the engines that drive the poem. It's natural to want to turn away from these things. But we have to face them, as best we can, at least sometimes. Poetry can help us in that nearly impossible work.”

“What politicians do not understand is that [Ian] Wilmut discovered not so much a technical trick as a new law of nature. We now know that an adult mammalian cell can fire up all the dormant genetic instructions that shut down as it divides and specializes and ages, and thus can become a source of new life. You can outlaw technique; you cannot repeal biology. Writing after Wilmut's successful cloning of the sheep, Dolly, that research on the cloning of human beings cannot be suppressed.”