George Wills Column Quotes & Sayings

However objective one's analytical approach may seem, [Some dude] argues, we must recognize the myth of objectivity as another rhetoric, another metadiscourse fashioning our sense of 'reality.' Although avant-gardism has long been believed to be a metafictional rhetoric displacing reality, we must not forget that it is a framework of reality that has been constructed rhetorically--whether its rhetoric is ontological or consumerist or creative-masochistic. — Takayuki Tatsumi

Knowledge must be gained by ourselves. Mankind may supply us with facts; but the results, even if they agree with previous ones, must be the work of our own minds. — Benjamin Disraeli

I totally feel like an FBI agent right now, with my legs spread and my arms out straight, gripping the gun. I'll bet my butt looks awesome.
... I squint at the target, holding the gun like I've seen FBI guys do it in the movies. I am so badass. — Elle Casey

The years would pass like weeks, and loves would pass too, or else grow sour. — Larry McMurtry

... the high brutality of good intentions ... — Henry James

I used to go to church. I even went through a rather intense religious period when I was sixteen. But the idea of an everlasting life
a never-ending banquet, as a stupid visiting minister to our church once appallingly described it
filled me with a greater terror than the concept of extinction ... — Louis Auchincloss

You live, learn, and move on, and there are bumps in the road. Sometimes they seem like we're diving off cliffs without wings. But at least if we try to fly, we have a chance that maybe we can. — Melanie Nilles

As a consequence of the enormous social and technological changes of the last few centuries, the world is not working well. We do not live in traditional and static societies. But our government, in resisting change, act as if we did. Unless we destroy ourselves utterly, the future belongs to those societies that, while not ignoring the reptilian and mammalian parts of our being, enable the characteristically human components of our nature to flourish; to those societies that encourage diversity rather than conformity; to those societies willing to invest resources in a variety of social, political, economic and cultural experiments, and prepared to sacrifice short-term advantage for long-term benefit; to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future. — Carl Sagan

We should think about whether canonizations, which are an invention of the Middle Ages, still make sense today. — Hans Kung

Mum left school at 15, and after a few years of modelling and dating jazz musicians, was married by 21 to my father, Mike Taylor, a journalist on the 'Daily Mirror.' They had my brother and me pretty quickly and had split up by the time I was two. I don't really have any memories of them as a couple. — Natascha McElhone

What do they call it, Y.O.L.A., you only live once? I think people are sort of gravitating towards that. — Lorene Scafaria

Why is it that even the best of men always seem to hide something from other people and to keep something back? Why not say straight out what is in one's heart, when one knows that one is not speaking idly? As it is every one seems harsher than he really is, as though all were afraid of doing injustice to their feelings, by being too quick to express them. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

She has gathered that the man in the grey suit whom her father called Alexander also has a student, and there will be some sort of game.
"Like chess?" she asks once.
"No," her father says. "Not like chess. — Erin Morgenstern

Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes. — Terence McKenna