Buffett was a billionaire who drove his own car, did his own taxes, and still lived in a home he had bought in 1958 for $31,500. He seemed to answer to a deeply rooted, distinctly American mythology, in which decency and common sense triumphed over cosmopolitan guile, and in which an idealized past held firm against a rootless and too hurriedly changing present.
And what a congress of stinks!- Roots ripe as old bait, Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich, Leaf mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks, Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.
I do not like [in the new Federal Constitution] the omission of a Bill of Rights providing clearly and without the aid of sophisms for. . . protection against standing armies
I always have to dream up there against the stars. If I don't dream I will make it, I won't even get close.
Music is a weapon in the war against unhappiness.
I'm against cronyism, and I had to learn that early on. Like, I don't have an entourage, because I saw the negative effects of those things.
God doesn't like lesbians," Grandma Huberman hised, throwing the magazine in the trash. Jennifer knew what lesbian meant, and she knew she probably was one. But she couldn't understand why God would hold that against her or against Monica Mathers, who'd never started a war or killed anybody, and whose deadeye three-pointers were straight-up amazing. After all, hadn't God made both of them? But people were like that, she'd noticed. They'd invoke Godly privilege at the weirdest of times and for the most stupid reasons.
Nothing great has been and nothing great can be accomplished without passion. It is only a dead, too often, indeed, a hypocriticalmoralizing which inveighs against the form of passion as such.
Anything can happen; this is the very rule of this universe! The best defence against this rule is this: Don't panic!
You have to admit he's good looking," Bree pressed, leaning against my kitchen counter. "Of course I admit it. I'm not blind," I said, busily opening cans.
Everyone has the right to practice their religion, to worship as they choose. My war is against Islamic fundamentalism.
I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendency of one sect over another.
Turning a human being into a thing, an object, is almost always the first step towards justifying violence against that person. It is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to be violent to someone we think of as an equal, someone we have empathy with, but it is very easy to abuse a thing
How great an evil do you see that may have been announced by you against the Republic? - Videtis quantum scelus contra rem publicam vobis nuntiatum sit?
One thing I hold against Americans is that they have no flair for the rain. They seem unsettled by it; it's against them: they take it as an assault, an inconvenience! But rain is so wonderfully cleansing, so refreshing, so calming. . .
One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?
People say, how can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight evil? You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in's house and say I love you.
The best player I've ever played against is Kobe Bryant. I have seen him do some stuff that is just unbelievable.
That strain of anti-monopoly crusading egalitarianism really runs throughout American history from [Tomas] Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson, that finds its apotheosis in [Louis] Brandeis, continues through the New Deal, but then it sort of peters out in the '60s because progressives in particular become more interested in extending equality to minorities, and women, and other excluded groups, and little more suspicious of these old white guys, often from the south, who were crusaders against monopolies.
Gays should be fought against.