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"You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act-that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?"
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"Nothing will shake a man-or at any rate a man like me-out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself."
Truth

"Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue, but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse."
Morality

"Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years."
Knowledge

"God's presence is not the same as the feeling of God's presence and He may be doing most for us when we think He is doing least."
Faith

"It's not a question of God `sending' us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud."
Spiritual

"The Divine "goodness" differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different; it differs from ours not as white from black, but as a perfect circle from a child's first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning."
Spiritual

"We...advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche."
Society

"You are never to old to set another goal or to dream a new dream."
Inspirational

"What may be myth in one world may always be fact in some other."
Creativity

"Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead."
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"Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, they're experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesitation. I call this the "Wait-a-Minute Moment" - that pivotal instant when girls from traditional cultures start pondering what's in it for them, exactly, to be getting married at the age of thirteen and starting to have babies not long after. They start wondering if they might prefer to make different choices for themselves, or any choices, for that matter. Once girls from closed societies start thinking such thoughts, all hell breaks loose."
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Personal Development

"Pagans earn their reputations for relaxed sexual mores, often in rebellion from the repression of their religions during adolescence. At a Pagan festival, one need only lower one's guard to be offered sex under the cloaking of the sacred."
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Personal Development

"It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends."
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Personal Development

"I'm the idiot box. I'm the TV. I'm the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray. I'm the boob tube. I'm the little shrine the family gathers to adore.' 'You're the television? Or someone in the television?' 'The TV's the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to.' 'What do they sacrifice?' asked Shadow.'Their time, mostly,' said Lucy. 'Sometimes each other.' She raised two fingers, blew imaginary gunsmoke from the tips. Then she winked, a big old I Love Lucy wink.'You're a God?' said Shadow.Lucy smirked, and took a ladylike puff of her cigarette. 'You could say that,' she said."
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Personal Development

"Sociologically speaking, as Americans we often lack social, cultural, and mindful awareness. We hear the stories of how our arrogance has been known to offend, confuse, and alienate people from other cultures. Arrogance is the thief of mindfulness and it happens from both directions."
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Personal Development

"The part of the tradition that I knew best was mostly written (or rewritten for children) in England and northern Europe. The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the hero was a white man; most dark-skinned people were inferior or evil. If there was a woman in the story, she was a passive object of desire and rescue (a beautiful blond princess); active women (dark, witches) usually caused destruction or tragedy. Anyway, the stories weren't about the women. They were about men, what men did, and what was important to men."
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Personal Development

"The gypsies believe the bear to be a brother to man because he has the same body beneath his hide, because he drinks beer, because he enjoys music and because he likes to dance."
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Personal Development

"A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man, is all the simpler and the less obtrusive for her knowledge; it has made her see herself and her opinions in something like just proportions; she does not make it a pedestal from which she flatters herself that she commands a complete view of men and things, but makes it a point of observation from which to form a right estimate of herself. She neither spouts poetry nor quotes Cicero on slight provocation; not because she thinks that a sacrifice must be made to the prejudices of men, but because that mode of exhibiting her memory and Latinity does not present itself to her as edifying or graceful."
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Personal Development

"In Shinear, a woman [is] safe anywhere, any time-except from Trollocs and Myrddraal, of course-and any man [will] die to see it so."
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Personal Development

"Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born."
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Personal Development
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