Recent Quotes & Sayings

To date, no convincing evidence for AGW (anthropogenic global warming) has been discovered. And recent global climate behavior is not consistent with AGW model predictions. — Richard Courtney

The results of recent research on the impacts of climate change dramatically weaken the case for expensive, near-term abatement programs. — Robert O. Mendelsohn

But looking under the covers of Indian democracy one sees a more complex and troubling reality. In recent decades, India has become something quite different from the picture in the hearts of its admirers. Not that it is less democratic: in important ways it has become more democratic. But it has become less tolerant, less secular, less law-abiding, less liberal. And these two trends - democratization and illiberalism - are directly related. — Fareed Zakaria

For reasons that are both obvious and highly functional, science textbooks (and too many of the older histories of science) refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solution of the texts' paradigm problems. Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of early ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution in scientific theory and method has made seem scientific. — Thomas S. Kuhn

Share and Enjoy' is the company motto of the hugely successful Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints Division, which now covers the major land masses of three medium-sized planets and is the only part of the Corporation to have shown a consistent profit in recent years.
The motto stands
or rather stood
in three mile high illuminated letters near the Complaints Department spaceport on Eadrax. Unfortunately its weight was such that shortly after it was erected, the ground beneath the letters caved in and they dropped for nearly half their length through the offices of many talented young Complaints executives
now deceased.
The protruding upper halves of the letters now appear, in the local language, to read "Go stick your head in a pig," and are no longer illuminated, except at times of special celebration. — Douglas Adams

I am asking the state of Israel to revoke my citizenship. This wish for revocation of citizenship is neither new nor recent. Now, however, it is supported by the new Revocation of Citizenship Law. — Mordechai Vanunu

He shook his head and went on to his favourite book website at the moment: GoodReads, intending to check the entrants for his latest giveaway. His Recent Updates page — Anonymous

If you're Natalie Dormer, you can take big fashion risks and shave half your head, and it looks good. If you're a normal person and you try that, you just look like you had recent brain surgery. — Mindy Kaling

Museum architectural search committees have invariably included the Kimbell in their international scouting tours of exemplary art galleries (a practice pioneered by Velma Kimbell, the founder's widow, in 1964). Those groups no doubt respond to the Kimbell with suitable reverence, but given the buildings they later commissioned, many post-Bilbao museum patrons obviously wanted something quite different. The disparity between Kahn's museums and recent examples of that genre parallels the discrepancy he saw between postwar Modernism and ancient Classicism: "Our stuff looks tinny compared to it." At a time when commercial values are systematically corrupting the museum - one of civilized society's most elevating experiences - the example of Kahn, among the most courageous and successful architectural reformers of all time, seems more relevant and cautionary than ever. — Martin Filler

If you want to master the art of the sentence, you must first accept a somewhat unpleasant truth--something a lot of writers would rather deny: The Reader is king. You are his servant. You serve the Reader information. You serve the Reader entertainment. You serve the Reader details of your company's recent merger or details of your experiences in drug rehab. In each case, as a writer you're working for the man (or the woman). Only by knowing your place can you do your job well. — June Casagrande

Recent history is the record of one vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind. — Allen Ginsberg

The idea that one will die is more painful than dying, but less painful than the idea that another person is dead, that, becoming once more a still, plane surface after having engulfed a person, a reality extends, without even a ripple at the point of disappearance from which that person is excluded, in which there no longer exists any will, any knowledge, and from which it is as difficult to reascend to the idea that that person has lived as, from the still recent memory of his life, it is to think that he is comparable with the insubstantial images, the memories, left us by the characters in a novel we have been reading. — Marcel Proust

Superstring theories provide a framework in which the force of gravity may be united with the other three forces in nature: the weak, electromagnetic and strong forces. Recent progress has shown that the most promising superstring theories follow from a single theory. For the last generation, physicists have studied five string theories and one close cousin. Recently it has become clear that these five or six theories are different limiting cases of one theory which, though still scarcely understood, is the candidate for superunification of the forces of nature. — Edward Witten

Within this work are places where you will see I have done some unforgivably stupid things; here I can say only that I am not perfect. Throw stones if you must, but have a care for your own house! I also offer a part-excuse, part-explanation: I am subject to influences from my most recent meals. I have not edited those parts to make myself seem better than I am; they stand as they were written. — Garon Whited

She had realized something over the recent months: it didn't matter who you were or what you'd accomplished in life; none of that mattered when tragedy struck. You had no pull; no power. You had no choice. There was nothing to gamble with; nothing to do to put the odds in your favor. You were there and then you were gone, leaving those around you to realize how insignificant they all really were; leaving them to try to pick up the destroyed pieces. — Lindy Zart

The recent controversy over the portrayal of Ken Taylor and his embassy staff in the movie 'Argo' brought home to me the great responsibility we writers have when telling stories that involve real people. — Susanna Kearsley

With the recent addition of a full soundtrack and the players map, millions of Poptropicans around the globe are now fully immersed in a multimedia gaming experience when they embark on our high quality adventures. — Jeff Kinney

The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition - thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not. — Michael Shermer

I strongly believe that at this point in America's history, we need a president that will not just continue basically the policies we have been following in recent years. I think we need a transformational figure. I think we need a president who is a generational change. — Colin Powell

I collect church collapses, recreationally. Did you see the recent one in Sicily? Marvelous! The facade fell on sixty-five grandmothers at a special mass. Was that evil? If so, who did it? If he's up there, he just loves it, Officer Starling. Typhoid and swans - it all comes from the same place. — Thomas Harris

To those who charge that liberalism has been tried and found wanting, I answer that the failure is not in the idea, but in the course of recent history. The New Deal was ended by World War II. The New Frontier was closed by Berlin and Cuba almost before it was opened. And the Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina. — George McGovern

I have a professional acquaintance whose recent eyelid job has left her with a permanent expression of such poleaxed astonishment that she looks at all times as if she had just read one of my books. — Florence King

In most recent times, as the West started being hostile to us, we deliberately declared a Look East policy. — Robert Mugabe

And as Sumi flipped through more, she couldn't help smiling at the pictures of Hauk holding the human babies and children. They were so tiny in comparison to him. He looked awkward and scared in some, and in others - later ones - he was much more confident. One of the most adorable was a more recent image of him with a girl around a year old. She was dressed in a frilly tulle gown that filled Hauk's muscular arms with pink fluff. Laughing, the girl had her hands tangled in his braids while she laid her little head against his massive shoulder. Tears — Sherrilyn Kenyon

The issue of homosexuality in the church is complex, highly charged, and defined by misrecognized fears related to rapid social change and the perceived threat to familiar social institutions and the sense of security they represent. Underlying this conflict are the church's historic discomfort with issues of sexuality, and dualistic constructions that codify that unease into categories of sexual insiders (monogamous heterosexuals and celibates) and outsiders (everybody else). These have been magnified in recent years by cultural differences between different generations and African countries where the church has grown. — Jane Ellen Nickell

Then Childermass related to Mr Norrell what he had discovered about Drawlight: how he belonged to a certain breed of gentlemen, only to be met with in London, whose main occupation is the wearing of expensive and fashionable clothes; how they pass their lives in ostentatious idleness, gambling and drinking to excess and spending months at a time in Brighton and other fashionable watering places; how in recent years this breed seemed to have reached a sort of perfection in Christopher Drawlight. Even his dearest friends would have admitted that he possessed not a single good quality. — Susanna Clarke

We need to reflect with great seriousness about why many young people don't feel like getting married ... For fear of failure, many do not want to even think about it ... Many people believe the change that has taken place in recent decades was set in motion by the emancipation of women. But this argument is not valid, it is an insult, a form of misogyny. — Pope Francis

It's difficult to root for America when the villains of the story live in a ditch and are armed with jagged rocks. At some point in recent years they looked up from their international heroism to realize they'd alienated the entire world. — Yahtzee Croshaw

Only in relatively recent times have people decided that "because I want to" is sufficient reason for annoying others. — Bill McKibben

The acting director of the Secret Service, Joseph Clancy, said they may make the fence around the White House taller because of the recent security failures. When asked if he had any other ideas, he said, 'Uh, make the sidewalk lower?' — Jimmy Fallon

Inevitably I draw on my own relationships when I write, so if I'm writing about a fight between a husband and his wife, of course I'm going to think about a recent fight with my husband. Or if I'm writing about sisters, of course I'm going to think about my sister. — Emily Giffin

I did not think I could stand a Christmas at my parents' house, with a plastic tree and no snow and the TV going constantly. It was not as if my parent were so anxious to have me, either. In recent years they had fallen in with a gabby, childless couple, older than they were, called the MacNatts. Mr MacNatt was an auto-parts salesman; Mrs MacNat was shaped like a pigeon and sold Avon. — Donna Tartt

Acceptance is a far better word and denotes a more positive attitude than resignation; I've always known that, but in recent days I've found one which is better still; it is consent. — Faith Baldwin

The question then was not what other countries were doing, but why. Why did these countries have this consensus around rigor? In the education superpowers, every child knew the importance of an education. These countries had experienced national failure in recent memory; they knew what an existential crisis felt like. In many U.S. schools, however, the priorities were muddled beyond recognition. Sports were central to American students' lives and school cultures in a way in which they were not in most education superpowers. Exchange students agreed almost universally on this point. Nine out of ten international students I surveyed said that U.S. kids placed a higher priority on sports, and six out of ten American exchange students agreed with them. Even in middle school, other researchers had found, American students spent double the amount of time playing sports as Koreans. — Amanda Ripley

As shown in the splendid recent biography by Harry Stout, Whitefield's style - popular preaching aimed at emotional response - has continued to shape American evangelicalism long after Whitefield's specific theology (he was a Calvinist), his denominational origins (he was an Anglican), and his rank (he was a clergyman) are long since forgotten.65 — Mark A. Noll

On one wall there was a recent watercolour - Saint E.O. Wilson of Hymenoptera — Margaret Atwood

Today we hear a great deal about Organizational Men, Mass Culture, Conformity, the Lonely Crowd, the Power Elite and its Conspiracy of Mediocrity. We forget that the very volume of this criticism is an indication that our society is still radically pluralistic. Not only are there plenty of exceptionalists who take exception to the stereotyping of the mass culture but that very string of epithets comes from a series of books that have been recent best-sellers, symptoms of a popular, living tradition of dissent from things as they are. — Kenneth Rexroth

Some of the worst abuses of government force in recent years were precipitated by technical and victimless gun-law violations. For example, the BATF claimed that the Branch Davidians possessed machine guns without paying the required federal tax and filling in the proper registration forms. So a tax case worth less than $10,000 led to a 76-man helicopter, machine gun, and grenade assault on a home in which 2/3 of the occupants were women and children. — Dave Kopel

Everything has changed in recent decades - the economy, technology, cultural attitudes, the demographics of the workforce, the role of women in society and the structure of the American family. It's about time our laws caught up. We watch 'Modern Family' on television, but we're still living by 'Leave It To Beaver' rules. — Thomas Perez

We girls are supposed to at least have these amazing sexual powers, but in my recent experience this is just a lie told by men to make them feel better about having ALL the power. — Jonathan Franzen

Recent estimates suggest there are at least two million tropical insect species and perhaps as many as seven million. — Elizabeth Kolbert

One reason for the spiritual sickness of our society is that so many do not know or care about what is morally right and wrong. So many things are justified on the basis of expediency and the acquiring of money and goods. In recent times, those few individuals and institutions that have been courageous enough to stand up and speak out against adultery, dishonesty, violence, and other forms of evil are often held up to ridicule. Many things are just plain and simply wrong, whether they are illegal or not. Those who persist in following after the evil things of the world cannot know 'the peace of God, which passeth all understanding. — James E. Faust

There has been so much recent talk of progress in the areas of curriculum innovation and textbook revision that few people outside the field of teaching understand how bad most of our elementary school materials still are. — Jonathan Kozol

When you opened the door a bell tinkled, but just once, high and clear and small in the neat obscurity above the door, as though it were gauged and tempered to make that single clear small sound so as not to wear the bell out nor to require the expenditure of too much silence in restoring it when the door opened upon the recent warm scent of baking; a little dirty child with eyes like a toy bear's and two patent-leather pigtails. — William Faulkner

One thing that's really interesting is not only the magnitude of the recent immigration into this country, but also its distribution and its investment in the country. About 9.3 percent of the population is now foreign-born [announced by the Census Bureau at over 10 percent a few days later]. What's really surprising is how well distributed those population groups are. Historically, we see new immigrants primarily on the coast and in a few big cities. I think the data are going to show a much wider distribution of the new population groups than we've experienced historically. — Kenneth Prewitt

The more formidable the contradiction between inexhaustible life-joy and inevitable fate, the greater the longing which reveals itself in the kingdom of poetry and in the self-created world of dreams hopes to banish the dark power of reality. The gods enjoy eternal youth, and the search for the means of securing it was one of the occupations of the heroes of mythology and the sages, as it was of real adventurers in the middle ages and more recent times ... But the fountain of youth has not been found, and can not be found if it is sought in any particular spot on the earth. Yet it is no fable, no dream-picture; it requires no adept to find it: it streams forth inexhaustible in all living nature. — Ferdinand Cohn

While approximately one in every 400 children and adolescents have Type I diabetes; recent Government reports indicate that one in every three children born in 2000 will suffer from obesity, which as noted is a predominant Type II precursor. — Tim Holden

Most institutions of higher learning in the West were founded by and for religious denominations. The supposed alienation of education and faith is a recent phenomenon. At the same time, neither education nor the lack of it predisposes one to faith. — Marilynne Robinson

We can be creative and generate new breakthroughs, if we're willing to work with ideas from the pool of history - both distant and more recent - despite the potential for our experiments to fail. — Doug Dawson

Adolescence is a relatively recent thing in human history
a period of years between the constraints of childhood and the responsibilities of adulthood. This irresponsible period of adolescence is artificially extended by long years of education, much of it wasted on frivolities. Tenure extends adolescence even further for teachers and professors. — Thomas Sowell

The recent spate of magazines for "parents" (i.e., mothers) bombard the anxiety-induced mothers of America with reassurances that they can (after a $100,000 raise and a personality transplant) produce bright, motivated, focused, fun-loving, sensitive, cooperative, confident, contented kids just like the clean, obedient ones on the cover. — Susan Douglas

There are a lot of people who had past lives where they were monks and nuns and all their needs were provided for them. I feel like most people in the new age had this as their most recent lifetime experience, that kind of communal living. — Doreen Virtue

Despite its reputation, Appalachia - especially northern Alabama and Georgia to southern Ohio - has far lower church attendance than the Midwest, parts of the Mountain West, and much of the space between Michigan and Montana. Oddly enough, we think we attend church more than we actually do. In a recent Gallup poll, Southerners and Midwesterners reported the highest rates of church attendance in the country. Yet actual church attendance is much lower in the South. — J.D. Vance

I am willing for the participant to commit or not commit himself to the group. If a person wishes to remain psychologically on the sidelines, he has my implicit permission to do so. The group itself may or may not be willing for him to remain in this stance but personally I am willing. One skeptical college administrator said that the main things he had learned was that he could withdraw from personal participation, be comfortable about it, and realize that he would not be coerced. To me, this seemed a valuable learning and one that would make it much more possible for him actually to participate at the next opportunity. Recent reports on his behavior, a full year later, suggest that he gained and changed from his seeming nonparticipation. — Carl R. Rogers

Questions that pertain to the foundations of mathematics, although treated by many in recent times, still lack a satisfactory solution. Ambiguity of language is philosophy's main source of problems. That is why it is of the utmost importance to examine attentively the very words we use. — Giuseppe Peano

Monsanto actually emerged as a war chemicals industry. It is known for Agent Orange, and for toxics. It wasn't ever in seed and agriculture. This is a recent entry, because they realized controlling the seed means controlling the entire food chain and the profits they can make from that are so much more than they can make at any other level. So in a way they brought war to our farmlands. They brought war against our farmers. The economics of it are first and foremost the economics of a monopoly, created by a highly undemocratic, international trade treaty, which brought clauses on control over the seed. — John Robbins

I wish that one would be persuaded that psychological experiments, especially those on the complex functions, are not improved [by large studies]; the statistical method gives only mediocre results; some recent examples demonstrate that. The American authors, who love to do things big, often publish experiments that have been conducted on hundreds and thousands of people; they instinctively obey the prejudice that the persuasiveness of a work is proportional to the number of observations. This is only an illusion. — Alfred Binet

Derek Bok's most recent book, Our Underachieving Colleges, is worth scrutinizing ... Bok is ... on solid ground in pointing out that our colleges underachieve in preparing students for citizenship. — George Leef

Look," she sighed. "You might be a lovely lad, in fairness you look like a lovely lad, but I can't take the chance. My kids wouldn't even be able to remember what I was wearing to tell the police. And all the recent photographs of me are bad, very jowly. I couldn't have them stuck to the lamp posts around the city. On your way, son." (Woman to Matt, when he tried to give her a lift.) — Marian Keyes

I've never found kicks to the groin particularly funny, although recent work in the genre of the buddy movie suggests audience research must prove me wrong. — Roger Ebert

Human spoken language seems to be
adventitious. The exploitation of organ systems with other functions for communication in humans is also indicative of the comparatively recent evolution of our linguistic abilities. — Carl Sagan

With Alzheimer's, recent memory is affected first. At the start, you count the memory loss in days, then hours - then in minutes. But there's also an insidious backward creep of deterioration. — Laurie Graham

All I want is a modest place in Mr X's Good Reading, Miss Y's Good Writing, and that new edition of One Thousand Best Bits of Recent Prose. — James Agate

One recent menu for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo consisted of orange glazed chicken, fresh fruit crepe, steamed peas and mushrooms, and rice pilaf. Sounds like the sort of thing you'd get at Windows on the World - if it still existed. — Ann Coulter

I wasn't into fairytales when I was little. I was of the generation of the earlier Disney films where many of the female characters, with the exception of the Maleficent's, were not little girls that I admired ... the little princesses. They weren't characters that I identified with. I think that's very different now for my girls and more recent films. — Angelina Jolie

A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death. Overcoming our fears and wild misconceptions about death will be no small task, but we shouldn't forget how quickly other cultural prejudices--racism, sexism, homophobia--have begun to topple in the recent past. It is high time death had its own moment of truth. — Caitlin Doughty

Recent surveys show 3 out of 10 men have a problem with premature ejaculation. The rest just didn't really think it was a problem! — Frankie Boyle

Ignorance, far more than idleness, is the mother of all the vices; and how recent has been the admission, that knowledge should be the portion of all? The destinies of the future lie in judicious education; an education that must be universal, to be beneficial. — Letitia Elizabeth Landon

In a recent experiment, men were asked to rank how attractive they found photographs of different women's faces. The photos were eight by ten inches, and showed women facing the camera or turned in three-quarter profile. Unbeknownst to the men, in half the photos the eyes of the women were dilated, and in the other half they were not. The men were consistently more attracted to the women with dilated eyes. Remarkably, the men had no insight into their decision making. None of them said, "I noticed her pupils were two millimeters larger in this photo than in this other one." Instead, they simply felt more drawn toward some women than others, for reasons they couldn't quite put a finger on. — David Eagleman

The democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history. It is human history. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

I wrote for television some, animation. Batman the Animated Series, Superman the Animated Series, Son of Batman, things of that nature were made and I'm happy about that, but now the recent film and TV stuff have validated me, as if that makes any sense. — Joe R. Lansdale

Traffic is one of the most powerful films to come out in recent years. It blew me away. — Mary Hart

Gay culture is surviving and thriving. Some activists believe the recent rise in homophobic violence might be a gauge of the success of positive gay images. — Lance Loud

The extraordinary power of influence is now within everyone's reach. Recent graduates, executive assistants, project managers, and business leaders can all benefit from Monarth's simple steps for 'getting everyone to follow your lead.' — Marshall Goldsmith

So it is always preferable to discuss the matter of veganism in a non-judgemental way. Remember that to most people, eating flesh or dairy and using animal products such as leather, wool, and silk, is as normal as breathing air or drinking water. A person who consumes dairy or uses animal products is not necessarily or usually what a recent and unpopular American president labelled an evil doer. — Gary L. Francione

We base our ideas about the world on our personal experience, and that experience has ingrained the rate of growth of the recent past in our heads as "the way things happen." We're also limited by our imagination, which takes our experience and uses it to conjure future predictions - but often, what we know simply doesn't give us the tools to think accurately about the future. When we hear a prediction about the future that contradicts our experience-based notion of how things work, our instinct is that the prediction must be naive. If I tell you [...] that you may live to be 150, or 250, or not die at all, your instinct will be, "That's stupid - if there's one thing I know from history, it's that everybody dies." And yes, no one in the past has not died. But no one flew airplanes before airplanes were invented either. — Tim Urban

In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace as recommended by the commission headed by former congresswoman Barbara Jordan. We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it. — William J. Clinton

When religion does not move people to the mystical or non-dual level of consciousness9 it is more a part of the problem than any solution whatsoever. It solidifies angers, creates enemies, and is almost always exclusionary of the most recent definition of "sinner." At this level, it is largely incapable of its supreme task of healing, reconciling, forgiving, and peacemaking. When religion does not give people an inner life or a real prayer life, it is missing its primary vocation. Let me sum up, then, the foundational ways that I believe Jesus and the Twelve Steps of A.A. are saying the same thing but with different vocabulary: We suffer to get well. We surrender to win. We die to live. We give it away to keep it. This counterintuitive wisdom will forever be resisted as true, denied, and avoided, until it is forced upon us - by some reality over which we are powerless - and if we are honest, we are all powerless in the presence of full Reality. — Richard Rohr

In one of my recent books, 'The Success Principles,' I taught 64 lessons that help people achieve what they want out of life. From taking nothing less than 100 percent responsibility for your life to empowering others, these are the fundamentals to success - and to great leadership. — Jack Canfield

I do sometimes strongly hope that in a past life, my most recent life before this, I was absolutely horrible, evil, hideous. Because otherwise - well, hell, to even things up next time around, I'm going to have to pay for this one, am I not? — Vanessa Paradis

Once again, my colleague Stephen Hawking has upset the apple cart. The event horizon surrounding a black hole was once though to be an imaginary sphere. But recent theories indicate that it may actually be physical, maybe even a sphere of fire. But I don't trust any of these calculations until we have a full-blown string theory calculation, since Einstein's theory by itself is incomplete. — Michio Kaku

Recent events in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have reaffirmed for me, however, the complete folly of any Republican strategy to increase black representation in the Republican Party by appeals based on race. Whatever the name- 'African American Outreach' or 'Black Republicans for Bush'- any effort to attract blacks or any other ethnic group to the Republican party, based on explicit or implicit appeals to race or ethnic identity, are not only a waste of time and resources, but are also misguided and potentially quite damaging to the nation. — Ward Connerly

Globalization has considerably accelerated in recent years following the dizzying expansion of communications and transport and the equally stupefying transnational mergers of capital. We must not confuse globalization with "internationalism" though. We know that the human condition is universal, that we share similar passions, fears, needs and dreams, but this has nothing to do with the "rubbing out" of national borders as a result of unrestricted capital movements. One thing is the free movement of peoples, the other of money. — Eduardo Galeano

There is nothing wrong with loving musical theatre, but I think that it's naive to hold it superior any other musical classification, especially since these other genres have been influencing Broadway more and more in recent decades. — Stephanie D'Abruzzo

I don't have a reason to lie to you. Not now.' Jace's gaze remained steady. 'And quit baring your fangs at me. It's making me nervous.'
'Good,' Simon said. 'If you want to know why it's because you smell like blood.'
'It's my cologne. Eau de Recent Injury.' Jace raised his left hand. It was a glove of white bandages, stained across the knucles where blood had seeped through. — Cassandra Clare

If the prime minister really believes it, he must be the only person left who thinks that the recent bombs in London had no connection at all with his policy in Iraq. — Kenneth Clarke

I start with a comprehensive list of all the recent songs that have been big hits - and then I go down that list and see if I can come up with funny ideas for them. I can always come up with ideas, but not necessarily good ones! — Al Yankovic

Recent school shootings have lured ill-informed Americans into a war on our Second Amendment guarantees, led by the nation's tyrants and their useful idiots ... The Second Amendment was given to us as protection against tyranny by the federal government and the Congress of the United States. — Walter E. Williams

In Madison's formulation, the right to bear arms was not inherent but derivative, depending on service in the militia. The recent Supreme Court decision (Heller v. District of Columbia, 2008) that found the right to bear arms an inherent and nearly unlimited right is clearly at odds with Madison's original intentions.37 — Joseph J. Ellis

History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them. More evidence is preserved, often, one is tempted to say, too much. Decay and destruction have hardly begun their beneficent work. — A.J.P. Taylor

In recent years, even as the court has become an increasingly political body, the Senate is not focused on preserving any perceived ideological balance when Democrat presidents have appointed people to the court. — Sam Brownback

During a recent life development forum we offered a session on Christian practices. In one of the four weeks we introduced the practice of making the sign of the cross on ourselves. This gesture has become a very powerful experience for me. It is rich with meaning and history and is such a simple way to proclaim and pray my faith with my body. — Doug Pagitt

I feel that the recent ruling of the United States Army and Navy regarding the refusal of colored blood donors is an indefensible one from any point of view. As you know, there is no scientific basis for the separation of the bloods of different races except on the basis of the individual blood types or groups. — Charles R. Drew

The direct and indirect medical costs of low-back pain (LBP) are staggering. In 1991 it was reported that these costs equaled somewhere between $50 and $100 billion per year in the United States, with more recent studies showing these costs increasing. — Whitney W. Lowe

The Muslims of recent times had fallen very short indeed of the ideals of their faith, ... nothing could be more erroneous than to measure the potentialities of Muhammad's message by the yardstick of present-day Muslim life and thought - just as he [Shaykh Mustafa al-Maraghi] said, 'it would be erroneous to see in the Christians' unloving behavior toward one another a refutation of Christ's message of love ... ' — Muhammad Asad

I'm noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum's 'Younger Than Jesus' last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial, and I'm seeing it blossom and bear fruit at 'Greater New York,' MoMA P.S. 1's twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent. — Jerry Saltz

To have been described long ago to a recent acquaintance by nameless people is irresistible. — Jane Austen

Robots can now milk cows. Oil prices have fallen globally, meaning both the petro-states and those indirectly propped up by them are weakened. At the same time, slower growth in China has lately shrunk its voracious appetite for African, Australian, and Latin American commodities. China accounted for more than a third of global growth in recent years, and its growth engine multiplied the growth of many of the countries that exported raw materials to Beijing. That has slowed. China's total debt has grown from roughly 150 percent of its GDP in 2007 to around 240 percent today - a massive increase in one decade that is dampening its growth and its imports and shrinking China's wallet for foreign aid and investment in African and Latin American commodity-exporting countries. In — Thomas L. Friedman

The two lads were told to wash their hands. The recent thrill of adventure had been superseded by another sort of excitement. They locked themselves up. The tap ran unheeded. Both were in a manly state and moaning like doves. — Vladimir Nabokov

Beauvoir lent Maheu a recent English novel she had enjoyed, The Green Hat, by Michael Arlen. She admired its independent heroine, Iris Storm. Maheu did not. 'I have no liking for women of easy virtue,' he told her. 'Much as I like a woman to please me, I find it impossible to respect any woman I've had.' Beauvoir was indignant. 'One does not HAVE an Iris Storm! — Hazel Rowley