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Pythagoras said, "The world is a series of changes, sometimes in your favor and sometimes against you: so when you are in charge, do good; and when you are overruled, bear it."

If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time.

The media, sensing that the "Edinburgh Strangler" was not about to vanish in the night, took the story by its horns and created a monster. TV crews moved into som of the better hotel rooms in the city, and the city was happy enough to have them, it being not quite the tourist season yet.

Then he felt himself grabbed by the feet and hands, lifted, and there they were, in the background of a long, hazy dream, those strange and remote faces, that feeling infinite and lucid peace. Would it be like that, Zavalita? Would it be that silence without any question, that serenity without any doubts or remorse?

"I don't know how I'm going to feel as Minister of Public Order," Major Paredes said. "It's too bad you won't stay on to give me some advice, with all the experience you've had." "I'm going to give you one good piece of advice," Cayo Bermudez smiled. "Don't even trust your mother!"

New Revelations in Dissipated Life of Nighttime Butterfly Murdered in Jesus maria. Was Muse a Woman with a Terrible past? La Cronica Reporters Uncover New facts in Crime That Has All Lima Shocked. From Show Business Start to Bloody End of One-Time Night-Life Queen. Stabbed Nighttime Butterfly had Fallen to lowest Level of Immorality Manager of Nightclub Declares.

"The cost of placating malcontents, jealous people, the ambitious people who rise up every day in the government itself," he recited. "Tranquillity isn't just a matter of billy clubs, doctor, it has to do with money, too. You're frowning and have every right to. I take care of all these dirty things, you don't even have to know about them."

"I'm notarguing about it, but I'm going to tell you one thing," Aida said laughing. "You're never going to join up [with the Communists], and when you finish at [the University of] San Marcos, you're going to forget all about the revolution, and you'll be a lawyer for International Petroleum and a member of the Club Nacional."

Forbidden books, forbidden magazines and Santiago could see shelves overflowing with pamphlets that weren't sold in bookstores, volumes that the police had taken out of libraries. In the shadow of walls gnawed by dampness, through cobwebs and mildew, they consulted the explosive books, argued and took notes, on nights that were as dark as the mouth of a wolf....

But I don't think of death as being terrifying. I was going over a sonnet with di Giovanni and the subject of that sonnet; I began by saying to the reader that he was invulnerable, that nothing could happen to him, that God had given him the certainty of dust, mortality, and that, after all, if one day he should die, he could always fall back on the fact that life was a mere dream

"Do you really mean," cried Jarvis, "that the strange woman who haunted him like a ghost was only the Mrs. Mandeville we know?" But he received no answer; for Father Brown was staring into vacancy with a blank expression almost like an idiot's. He always did look most idiotic at the instant when he was most intelligent.

Just as a moneychanger rings a coin to test if it i counterfeit ... the world tests the quality of man by making him experience loss, bereavement, and the lure of salvation. Coins that ring false are discarded as counterfeit; these sannyasis [holy men] are like those fake coins, useless in life's transactions.

When I say I am called Valmont, the name will convey no impression to the reader, one way or another. My occupation is that of private detective in London, but if you ask any policeman in Paris who Valmont was he will likely be able to tell you, unless he is a recent recruit. If you ask him where Valmont is now, he may not know, yet I have a good deal to do with the Parisian police.

Yes, ironically, that was exactly what my very life had come to represent. It was all about excess: about crossing over forbidden lines, about doing things you thought you'd never do and associating with people who were even wilder than yourself, so you'd feel that much more normal about your own loife.

It is in vain that we look for tranquillity in desert places, temptation will still be with us; our passions, symbolized by demons, will not leave us. These monsters in our hearts, these delusions of our minds, empty ghosts of error and mendacity, still appear before us in order to lead us astray, and attack us even amid fasting and penance....

It seems to me, Usbek, that all our judgements are made with reference covertly to ourselves. I do not find it surpriing that the negroes paint the devil sparkling white, and their gods black as coal.... It has been well said that if triangles had a god, they would give him three sides.

But what am I to think of these European women? Their skill in making up their faces, the jewels they bedeck themselves with, the trouble they take over their personal appearance, and the desire to be attractive that continually preoccupies them, simply detract from their virtue and are an affront to their husbands.

It was an element in this sublime and yet sinister simplicity of Islam that it knew no boundaries. Its very home was homeless. For it was born in a sandy waste among nomads, and it went everywhere because it came from nowhere. But in the Saracens of the early Middle Ages this nomadic quality in Islam was masked by a high civilization, more scientific if less creatively artistic than that of contemporary Christendom.

In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons, it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn't there. Or ignore what is. We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.

Your interest lies in not asking questions.... Think what you like. But bear in mind this: the moment you are told what the point of your work is, you're dead. This isn't a film, it's for real. The full story is what you get told only if and when your work, and with it your existence, are no longer required.

"How did he die?' Viktor asked. "Fell from a sixth-floor window—was cleaning it for some reason, apparently though it wasn't his. And at night."

And who knows what might happen to the girl among the yanquis? In her mind the U.S. was nothing more and nothing less than a pais overrun by gangsters, putas, and no-accounts.

What binds Europeans together, even when they are critical of some aspect or other of its practical workings, is what is conventional to call -- in disjunctive but revealing contrast with 'the American way of life' -- the 'European model of society.'

The disappearance of the Soviet Union was a remarkable affair, unparalleled in modern history. There was no foreign war, no bloody revolution, no natural catastrophe. A large industrial state—a military superpower—simply collapsed: its authority drained away, its institutions evaporated.

She is one of those village beauties of which the South is so prodigal. From the sleaziest house in the sleaziest town, from the loins of redneck pa and rockface ma spring these lovelies, these rosy-cheeked Anglo-Saxon lovlies, by the million.

And dawn, I think, is the hour when the pariah goes out. Not for him is the scornful morning with the crowds pointing the fingers of their minds at him, nor the evening when all but he may rest and be merry; but the peace before sunrise cannot be taken from him. It is the hour of the outlawed, the persecuted, the damned ....

No other territorial empire in recorded history ever abandoned its dominions so rapidly, with such good grace and so little bloodshed. Gorbachev cannot take direct credit for what happened in 1989—he did not plan it and only hazily grasped its long-term import. But he was the permissive and precipitating cause. It was Mr. Gorbachev's revolution.

As an economy, then, Thatcherite Britain was a more efficient place. But as a society, it suffered meltdown, with catastrophic long-term consequences. By disdaining and dismantling all collectively held resources, by vociferously insisting upon an individualistic ethic that discounted any unquantifiable assets, Margaret Thatcher did serious harm to the fabric of British public life.

In the life of the mind, the nineteen seventies were the most dispiriting decade of the twentieth century. In some measure this can be attributed to ... the sharp and sustained economic downturn, together with widespread political violence, encouraged the sentiment that Europe's 'good times' had gone, perhaps for many years to come.

It came to me that perhaps God had become senile, that He had lost His memory and no longer remembered the purpose of placing Man on Earth. He had become petulant. He had become whimsical. He retained His power over us, but could no longer be appealed to.