Matias frowned. Damn, he’d had a vision of this gorgeous woman naked? He hadn’t thought he could despise his memory loss any more than he did, but the hits kept on coming. Wait. The blonde had said vision... as in the future? “We’re fated to have sex?” “No!” Quinn shook her head so quickly and vehemently that her teeth all but rattled.“You sure? You can’t seem to stay away from me.” He looked down at their close proximity. “I knew I should have left you to rot in the psych ward strapped to that bed.”Matias frowned. He was having a hard time keeping up with the conversation. “Kinky. Or is that another dream you had starring yours truly?
10 fundamental lessons of history:1. We do not learn from history.2. Science and technology do not make us immune to the laws of history.3. Freedom is not a universal value.4. Power is the universal value.5. The Middle East is the crucible of conflict and the graveyard of empires.6. The United States shares the destinies of the great democracies, the republics, and the superpowers of the past.7. Along with the lust for power, religion and spirituality are the most profound motivators in human history.8. Great nations rise and fall because of human decisions made by individual leaders.9. The statesman is distinguished from a mere politician by four qualities: a bedrock of principles, a moral compass, a vision, and the ability to create a consensus to achieve that vision.10. Throughout its history, the United States has charted a unique role in history.
You were gullible," he said. And then, "When you were really little, you hated carrots. You wouldn't eat them. But then I told you that if you ate carrots, you'd get X-ray vision. And you believed me. You believed everything I said." I did. I really did. I believed him when he said that carrots could give me X-ray vision. I believed him when he told me that he'd never cared about me. And then, later that night, when he tried to take it back, I guess I believed him again. Now I didn't know what to believe. I just knew I didn't believe in him anymore.
The choice between James’s vision of a Jewish religion anchored in the Law of Moses and derived from a Jewish nationalist who fought against Rome, and Paul’s vision of a Roman religion that divorced itself from Jewish provincialism and required nothing for salvation save belief in Christ, was not a difficult one for the second and third generations of Jesus’s followers to make.Two thousand years later, the Christ of Paul’s creation has utterly subsumed the Jesus of history. The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history.
Can we only speak when we are fully living what we are saying? If all our words had to cover all our actions, we would be doomed to permanent silence! Sometimes we are called to proclaim God’s love even when we are not yet fully able to live it. Does that mean we are hypocrites? Only when our own words no longer call us to conversion. Nobody completely lives up to his or her own ideals and visions. But by proclaiming our ideals and visions with great conviction and great humility, we may gradually grow into the truth we speak. As long as we know that our lives always will speak louder than our words, we can trust that our words will remain humble.
Now here comes in the whole collapse and huge blunder of our age. We have mixed up two different things, two opposite things. Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision. It should mean that we are slow but sure in bringing justice and mercy among men: it does mean that we are very swift in doubting the desirability of justice and mercy: a wild page from any Prussian sophist makes men doubt it. Progress should mean that we are always walking towards the New Jerusalem. It does mean that the New Jerusalem is always walking away from us. We are not altering the real to suit the ideal. We are altering the ideal: it is easier.
“After my mom died she ate my father up completely. She would have hated it. Every minute of his life since then has been marked by her absence, every action has lacked dimension because she is not there to measure against. And when I was young I didn't understand, but now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird. If I had to live on without you I know I could not do it. But I hope, I have this vision of you walking unencumbered, with your shining hair in the sun. I have not seen this with my eyes, but only with my imagination, that makes pictures, that always wanted to paint you, shining; but I hope that this vision will be true, anyway.”
“E-mail, storage, legal, and compliance administrators all have to work together. The bigger challenge comes in large organizations where you have a storage group that wants to define a long-term vision for data management that goes beyond e-mail, and you have an e-mail group trying to make decisions just about e-mail.”
“Today we can build rich interactive sites [with] ASP.Net and Community Server, but it's time-consuming with handoffs between creative and development. Our creative team uses Macs and Windows today but they would prefer to use only Windows. If Microsoft can execute on their vision of simplifying the process of building rich interactive applications, they'll get adoption.”
“In my opinion, the religious visions of Bush's circle are anachronistic. I can't believe that John Ashcroft has personal conversations with God every day, who tells him what to do. But if God told him that he should destroy Saddam, then this was the right advice, because a world without Saddam Hussein is better than a world with Saddam Hussein.”