“The majority of persons choose their wives with as little prudence as they eat. They see a troll with nothing else to recommend her but a pair of thighs and choice hunkers, and so smart to void their seed that they marry her at once. They imagine they can live in marvelous contentment with handsome feet and ambrosial buttocks. Most men are accredited fools shortly after they leave the womb.”
“I started off thinking that maybe the social sciences ought to have the kinds of mathematics that the natural sciences had. That works a little bit in economics because they talk about costs, prices and quantities of goods. But it doesn't work a darn for the other social sciences; you lose most of the content when you translate them to numbers.”
“Frustration is the first step towards improvement. I have no incentive to improve if Im content with what I can do and if Im completely satisfied with my pace, distance and form as a runner. Its only when I face frustration and use it to fuel my dedication that I feel myself moving forwards.”
“This notion of some grand battle between content owners and network owners, I think it's specious. Network owners can partition bandwidth in such a way that everyone can have access to the Internet in a way we have today and provide some value-added services. There should be plenty of room for everyone to do what they want.”
“We'll take the win, but we really need to get more focused, I think. These guys are not used to losing too many games and that makes them too content with their success. I'm trying to tell them that they can never sit back and take things easy. They need to play every game as if it were a playoff game.”
Single parents - both women and men - can play as critical a role as the traditional two-parent family, and gay and lesbian parents can, and do, raise happy, resilient children. When it comes to family life, form is not merely as important as content. Feeling loved and supported, nurtured and safe, is far more critical than the 'package' it comes in.
I think success might be one of the most overused words in the western world, and maybe if we changed success for happiness we would be better off, because when you get this ‘success’ will it make you happier? Are we chasing money, fame, power, ego, success, or are we chasing happiness, freedom and the feeling of being content?
Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing; she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder; she found the image of the intense and varied life she yearned for, and despaired of, becoming more and more importunate.
Colinialism hardly ever exploits the whole of a country. It contents itself with bringing to light the natrual resources, which it extracts, and exports to meet the needs of the mother country's industries, thereby allowing certain sectors of the colony to become relatively rich. But the rest of the colony follows its path of under-development and poverty, or at all events sinks into it more deeply.
As soon as I sat down across from her, she ordered me to put the entire contents of my pants pockets on the table. I did as I was told, saying nothing. My reality seemed to have left me and was now wandering around nearby. I hope it can find me, I thought.