David Bentley Quotes
Does religious conviction provide a powerful reason for killing? Undeniably it often does. It also often provides the sole compelling reason for refusing to kill, or for being merciful, or for seeking peace; only the profoundest ignorance of history could prevent one from recognizing this. For the truth is that religion and irreligion are cultural variables, but killing is a human constant.
Quotes to Explore
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Gossip is when you hear something you like about someone you don't.
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I always start the day by washing my face and moisturizing.
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If people think they've found my biggest weakness, let them try to take advantage of it.
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If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.
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On banks, I make no apology for attacking spivs and gamblers who did more harm to the British economy than Bob Crow could achieve in his wildest Trotskyite fantasies, while paying themselves outrageous bonuses underwritten by the taxpayer. There is much public anger about banks and it is well deserved.
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I don't think I've ever met any single person who has been vulgar. But you know, you learn along the way that some people are going to be very generous, and other people... It's just not innate within them. Sometimes I think you just have to decide if you're going to stand up and get on with it or if you're going to be crushed and threatened.
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Romy and I, we're learning how to share the xx with people who aren't in the xx.
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I have had the good fortune to be able to climb the highest mountain on each of the seven continents. I have enjoyed the freedom I had gained from building a successful business from scratch, making some money, and creating the lifestyle I wanted.
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I force myself to outline, but not too closely, so I guess I plot by the seat of my pants? My natural instinct is to dive right in, but I know I'll get stuck. I like to stick with the architect vs. gardener metaphor. I guess I'm a gardener who plants tomatoes. I have the sticks in the ground and let the vines grow along those parameters.
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By the end of the 1950s, American cars were so reliable that their reliability went without saying even in car ads. Thousands of them bear testimony to this today, still running on the roads of Cuba though fueled with nationalized Venezuelan gasoline and maintained with spit and haywire.
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It's all for a reason and all happened the way it was supposed to happen.
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This is why fiction is an art, and life is not - how much more affecting is the lie than the truth.
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I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking.
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It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.
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If we men married the women we deserved, we should have a very bad time of it.
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To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment.
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… the ego's need to be periodically in conflict with something or someone in order to strengthen its sense of separation between me and the other, without which it cannot survive.
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Here lies David Garrick, describe me, who can,An abridgment of all that was pleasant in man.
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I don't desire happiness. I think it's a myth, and I don't think it's... and it makes you complacent. I feel very satisfyingly uncomfortable. I have the freedom to feel uncomfortable in the way I want to, is maybe a way to put it.
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We were film geeks. We devoured everything: really obscure art films, foreign films. We were the kind of guys that lived at the Cinematheque. But at the end of the day, your favorite movies are like everybody else's favorite movies. Because those are the movies that become a touch point where you can connect to other people.
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I do strongly identify with being Jewish. I was raised Orthodox and had a childhood complicated by the fact that my father was deeply religious and my mother was not.
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The historian ought to be the humblest of men; he is faced a dozen times a day with the evidence of his own ignorance; he is perpetually confronted with his own humiliating inability to interpret his material correctly; he is, in a sense that no other writer is, in bondage to that material.
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Does religious conviction provide a powerful reason for killing? Undeniably it often does. It also often provides the sole compelling reason for refusing to kill, or for being merciful, or for seeking peace; only the profoundest ignorance of history could prevent one from recognizing this. For the truth is that religion and irreligion are cultural variables, but killing is a human constant.
