Quotes 13 Jan 18

If Islamic State support is a communicable disease, an infection of the mind, then (Ajem) Chowdary is its Typhoid Mary. - Graeme Wood, The Way of Strangers, p179

Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again. -Nelson Mandela

"The greatest mistake that we make with our own lives is to snatch at the particular objects we desire... If we realized the riches that lie within everyone of us we should know that we can all afford to be spendthrift of nine-tenths of the possessions we treasure; success, praise, and good opinion among men, achievements, and still more material well-being ... Never be afraid of throwing away what you have; if you can throw it away it is not really yours. if it is really your you cannot throw it away. And you may be certain that if you throw it away, whatever in you is greater than you will produce something in its place. never be afraid of pruning your branches. Trust the future and take risks. In moral, as in economic affairs, the rash man is he who does not speculate."
- R H Tawney

One of the oddest aspects of the sexual revolution is its tendency to present the problem as the solution. For instance, during the 1980s, the least acceptable response to the AIDS crisis was the promotion of abstinence. Promiscuity was held to be normative, opponents of it were decried as idiotic and prudish, and any acceptable solution had to be built on these foundational truths.
Thirty years on, the failed pattern continues. Britain's Daily Telegraph reports that researchers are calling for sex education to reflect the increasing range of sexual activity in which young people are engaged. The change in sexual habits is presented not as a problem, but as a reality to be accommodated. This makes perfect sense, given the divorce of sexual activity from any kind of moral framework or personal narrative. As sex is essentially amoral (except when consent is absent—and then it is only the violation of consent, not the sex, that is immoral), so the education that surrounds it is amoral, too.- Carl R. Trueman, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/11/scam-artists-and-sex-education

I had grown very fond of this dying woman [her
mother].  As we talked in the half-darkness I
assuaged an old unhappiness; I was renewing the
dialogue that had been broken off during my
adolescence and that our differences and our
likenesses had never allowed us to take up again.
And the early tenderness that I had thought
dead forever came to life again.
     --Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)
      _A Very Easy Death_ [1966]