“How can love be worthy of its name if one selects solely the pretty things and leaves out the hardships? It is easy to enjoy the good and dislike the bad. Anybody can do that. The real challenge is to love the good and the bad together, not because you need to take the rough with the smooth but because you need to go beyond such descriptions and accept love in its entirety.”
Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes. Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali is the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammad. When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them--or worse, who credibly rebut them--they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.
I was thinking about honour. It's a thing that changes doesn't it? I mean, a hundred and fifty years ago we would have had to fight if challenged. Now we'd laugh. There must have been a time when it was rather an awkward question.""Yes. Moral theologians were never able to stop dueling -- it took democracy to do that.""And in the next war, when we are completely democratic, I expect that it will be quite honourable for officers to leave their men behind. It'll be laid down in King's Regulations as their duty-- to keep a cadre going to train new men to take the place of prisoners.""Perhaps men wouldn't take too kindly to being trained by deserters.""Don't you think that they'd respect them more for being fly? I reckon our trouble is that we're in the awkward stage -- like a man challenged to a duel a hundred years ago.
You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects—are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream. The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.
Together the five orbiters Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour have flown a total of 133 successful missions, an unequaled accomplishment of engineering, management, and political savvy. But it's the two disasters that people remember, that most shape the shuttle's story. The lovely dream of spaceflight I grew up with is marred by the images of Challenger and Columbia breaking apart in the sky, the lost astronauts smiling on hopefully in their portraits, oblivious. Some people took the disasters to mean the entire space program had been a lie, that the dream itself was tainted with our fallibility. But even as a child, I knew it was more complex than that. If we want to see people take risks, we have to be prepared to sometimes see them fail. The story of American spaceflight is a story with many endings, a story of how we have weighed our achievements against our failures.
“We are in the business of informing what is available in the world, and I believe we have a duty to be consistent in this task. The people of China should be able to read about Tiananmen Square or anything else found on Internet sites. We will provide comprehensive search results on http://www.dumbfind.cn. We challenge the Chinese authorities to block us, and are confident that Chinese users will find their way around the firewalls.”
“My lack of enthusiasm was due to my illness the night before. I was in the hospital until 3 a.m. and had to be up at 6 a.m.. Even though I was feeling just as sick as I was earlier, I decided to do the challenge with the rest of the girls. It probably hindered me from doing the best of my capabilities, but I wanted to show them that I could be strong.”
“CEOs and directors realize that board discussions are richer when individuals with diverse backgrounds and perspectives participate. The challenge is finding qualified women and minority candidates. Boards have a responsibility to shareholders to align the composition of the board with the business strategy by appointing directors who add value to the board and company. But, there is still only a small number of women and minorities among senior corporate executives, and they are in high demand.”
“Jewish feminists are passing away or clearing out their attics. A new scholarship of Jewish women is developing. We're at a turning point. A lot of people think the work is done making the world more egalitarian. But there's lots more work to do in terms of the glass ceiling, equitable policies and family leave. The challenge now is to move forward, to see how we can continue feminist change.”
“We didn't find out until December, and the students were preparing for the Christmas program then. When they came back from vacation, the kids really worked hard and focused. They did a nice job. They have a big performance contest in April, and not much time to prepare for it. This caused them to have to peak early, and they will have to peak again, but they were up to the challenge. They did very well.”