#amen

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#ancient-greeks #atheism #boredom #brotherhood #cana

It is idle to say that nations can struggle to outdo each other in building armaments and never use them. History demonstrates the contrary, and we have but to go back to the last war to see the appalling effect of nations competing in great armaments. ↗

— Frank B. Kellogg

#armaments #back #building #competing #contrary

I loved history, particularly of the British, American and Old Testament kind. ↗

— Luke Ford

#british #history #i #kind #loved

Generally the younger generation are not hard working. They will have to put in more effort to achieve results in tournaments. most of them can perform well but they cannot deliver when they play abroad. ↗

— Jahangir Khan

#achieve #cannot #deliver #effort #generally

It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools. ↗

— E. M. Forster

#fate #fools #perhaps #sign #temperament

Abortion and racism are both symptoms of a fundamental human error. The error is thinking that when someone stands in the way of our wants, we can justify getting that person out of our lives. Abortion and racism stem from the same poisonous root, selfishness. ↗

— Alveda King

#both #error #fundamental #getting #human

Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian. Food is still treated with reverence...To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that 'something more' is, but they nonetheless desire to celebrate it. They are still hungry and thirsty for sacramental life. ↗

— Alexander Schmemann

#food #sacrament #food

We went around and looked and talked to a lot of foundations with those charities and decided upon the Children's Hospital. They had a golf tournament at the time, but it was a small event that didn't raise a significant amount of money. ↗

— Tom Kite

#around #charities #children #decided #event

After a week of back and forth, and forth and back over firearms, it's good to see a consensus developing on this common-sense amendment to keep handguns away from children. ↗

— Herb Kohl

#amendment #away #back #children #common-sense

All that's left now is purely poetic work, putting more life into individual places, as I've made so sure of the fundamental mood and dimension of expression that it won't leave me groping around in uncertainty any more. ↗

— Oskar Kokoschka

#around #dimension #expression #fundamental #groping