- Dictatorships do cut down on rape, and pillage, not to mention sexual harassment, by the simple expedient of sending people to labor camps for life or cutting off their hands without a trial.
- The Chinese understand that slave labor, which they thrive on, is not productive or useful to the economy if it is only extracted by torture.
- There is nothing wrong with aging except what it does to you physically and mentally.
- There's a bit of a Mormon moment right now. Think me crazy, but I rather like the sound of a life in which men address each other as 'elder' and the womenfolk call each other 'sister' - or, when circumstances warrant, 'sister-wives'. There's a respect lost when complete strangers who obtain your credit card take to addressing you by your first name.
- Most great literature and low entertainment have one thing in common: violent death.
- Where would Freud have been without Oedipus?
- Avant-gardism is a staple of the arts festival.It's a handy term, avant-garde, because it puts audiences and critics on the defensive, fearing that they may not recognize the Nexr Big Thing.
- You can bitch all you want about gay marriages, but Mr.& Mr. Furnish-John do the work of saints.
- Heroines are women who naturally self-sacrifice their own needs for others: the mother who interposes her body between that of her children and danger, the wife who donates an organ, the daughter who gives up all to care for an aging parent. Those people who crossed Boylston Street to help the injured in Boston when, for all they knew, another bomb could go off. Just think of it. In that blood and dust and mayhem, they thought only of others.
- Were I to give a commencement address, I'd tell those upturned faces to empty their minds of every idea imbibed in the rotten world of academia. Re-examine every dearly held assumption. Be sure to take no further studies in journalism or business and do not let any prospective employer know you have ever studied such things...And one final thing. Take a leaf from a writer who did not go to college either, William Shakespeare, and 'first...kill all the lawyers'.
- What's happening to the universal maternal instinct? Babies are being born of course and Hollywood celebs wear baby bumps like a new It handbag, waiting for the scheduled C-section on a convenient day when motherly love kicks in. Still, most of women I know of child-bearing age aren't bearing much except a vague notion of harvesting their eggs. Was it only in nineteenth-century novels - written by men - that all women longed to be mothers, often risking their lives for newborns?
- In poetry, the lamb and lion lie down together but, practically speaking, any lamb trying that probably won't ever get up again.
- [in defence of a public criticism she had made] My response is mild compared to the [British] critic who, after listening to professor Steve Jones talking on the BBC about climate change, began his column characterizing a statement of the good prof as a ' cherishably stupid, rude, fatuous, crabby, bigoted , ignorant, petulant, feeble, fallacious, dishonest and misleading argument.
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