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"Nobody knows how many North Koreans have died or are dying in the famine-some estimates by foreign-aid groups run as high as three million in the period from 1995 to 1998 alone-but the rotund, jowly face of Kim Il Sung still beams down contentedly from every wall, and the 58-year-old son looks as chubby as ever, even as his slenderized subjects are mustered to applaud him."
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"The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party when the masks are dropped."
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Personal Development
"It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality."
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Personal Development
"It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces."
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Personal Development
"But alas, the world is not a wish-granting factory."
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Personal Development
"You cannot change reality by ignoring it."
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Personal Development
"The reality about life is that challenges are inevitable."
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Personal Development
"I don't know why everyoneis still trying to find out whether heaven and hell exist.Why do we need more evidence?They exist here on this very Earth.Heaven is standing atop Mount Qasiounoverlooking the Damascene sightswith the wind carrying Qabbani'sdulcet words all around you.And hell is only four hours away in Aleppo where children's cries drown out the explosions of mortar bombsuntil they lose their voice,their families, and their limbs.Yes, hell certainly does existright now, at this moment,as I pen this poem. And all we're doingto extinguish this hellfireis sighing, shrugging, liking, and sharing.Tell me: what exactly does that makeus? Are we any better than the gatekeepers of hell?"
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Personal Development
"Look at him now, poor fellow. That's what a dose of reality does for you...Never touch the stuff myself, you understand. Find it gets in the way of the hallucinations."
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Personal Development
"Everything that looks too perfect is too perfect to be perfect."
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Personal Development
"It now seemed to me that all my other guesses had been only self-pleasing dreams spun out of my wishes, but now I was awake."
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Personal Development
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"One of the juiciest pleasures of life is to be able to salute and embrace, as elected leaders and honored representatives, people whom you first met when they were on the run or in exile or (like Adam) in and out of jail. I was to have this experience again, and I hope to have it many more times in the future: it sometimes allows me to feel that life is full of point."
Inspirational
"I've always regarded it as a test of character to dislike the Kennedys. I don't really respect anyone who falls for Camelot."
Opinion
"I don't envy or much respect people who are completely politicised."
Politics
"The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks."
Philosophy
"Scientists have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless even for learning from mistakes. They refer to them as being "not even wrong." Most so-called spiritual discourse is of this type."
Science
"Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that."
Conflict
"A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends."
Friendship
"Those who say that I am being punished are saying that god can't think of anything more vengeful than cancer for a heavy smoker."
Critique
"Unless a reincarnationist is willing to say there was a 'first generation' of souls created with the first humans, he is exposed to absurdity by the recency of human life on the planet."
Philosophy
"This is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life."
Conflict
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