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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #cal
What were you thinking when Trevor had that gun to your head?” “That I was going to die.” I said sounding too sarcastic to actually cover up that I was thinking something much different. “Well, I know that…but when you heard him start to pull the trigger your face changed. I watched it as I pulled the trigger on him.” He said his body still tense against mine. “I was thinking why the hell you hadn’t saved me yet.” “Sure you were. That’s not what I saw in your face.” He noted as his body relaxed. I turned to look at him again and our faces were barely an inch apart. “Then you know what I was thinking, so why are you asking? ↗
#in-between-seasons #post-apocalyptic #ya-dystopian #ya-romance #change
There is no such thing as political science, but there are tenancies so strong that they might as well be called laws of nature. ↗
Yet in another way, calculus is fundamentally naive, almost childish in its optimism. Experience teaches us that change can be sudden, discontinuous, and wrenching. Calculus draws its power by refusing to see that. It insists on a world without accidents, where one thing leads logically to another. Give me the initial conditions and the law of motion, and with calculus I can predict the future -- or better yet, reconstruct the past. I wish I could do that now. ↗
The men and women of England who abolished slavery, created the educational system, or gave women the vote were not acting on the hypotheses of what the voters wanted. They were afire with faith in what people ought to want and in the end they persuaded their lethargic compatriots to give them enough support to warrant a change. ↗
None of us asked for this life. I, of all people should know that our paths were chosen for us and we were just along for the ride, doing what was necessary and expected. There were far greater forces at work here. He was playing my heartstrings, which sang a sad melody I felt deep in my soul. For the first time, I could see him for who and what he was now. Even the worst incarnations of evil could change, and from this point forward, I would try to honor that. He was willing to put his life back in the line of fire to help me, and at the very least, he deserved my respect for that. Maybe even a second chance. ↗
Do women always take this long?” Darién sprang forward to find out what was keeping his bride, but Maxim, Shara and Serone stepped in front of him, blocking his path. “She’s late!” the prince fumed, his heart pounding, and his breathing ragged. “Maybe she changed her mind,” he said before Maxim snapped a picture of him with a digital camera, blinding him. “What the hell?” Darién shook his head to clear the momentary stun from the flash. Maxim shrugged nonchalantly, his wicked dark eyes glittering with humor, “Aleta put me in charge of photography--something about making a scrapbook…or whatever. Anyway…nothing says good times like a stressed-out groom on the verge of nuclear.” He smiled, wagging his dark brows up and down. “Priceless. ↗
The advantages of a hereditary Monarchy are self-evident. Without some such method of prescriptive, immediate and automatic succession, an interregnum intervenes, rival claimants arise, continuity is interrupted and the magic lost. Even when Parliament had secured control of taxation and therefore of government; even when the menace of dynastic conflicts had receded in to the coloured past; even when kingship had ceased to be transcendental and had become one of many alternative institutional forms; the principle of hereditary Monarchy continued to furnish the State with certain specific and inimitable advantages. Apart from the imponderable, but deeply important, sentiments and affections which congregate around an ancient and legitimate Royal Family, a hereditary Monarch acquires sovereignty by processes which are wholly different from those by which a dictator seizes, or a President is granted, the headship of the State. The King personifies both the past history and the present identity of the Nation as a whole. Consecrated as he is to the service of his peoples, he possesses a religious sanction and is regarded as someone set apart from ordinary mortals. In an epoch of change, he remains the symbol of continuity; in a phase of disintegration, the element of cohesion; in times of mutability, the emblem of permanence. Governments come and go, politicians rise and fall: the Crown is always there. A legitimate Monarch moreover has no need to justify his existence, since he is there by natural right. He is not impelled as usurpers and dictators are impelled, either to mesmerise his people by a succession of dramatic triumphs, or to secure their acquiescence by internal terrorism or by the invention of external dangers. The appeal of hereditary Monarchy is to stability rather than to change, to continuity rather than to experiment, to custom rather than to novelty, to safety rather than to adventure. The Monarch, above all, is neutral. Whatever may be his personal prejudices or affections, he is bound to remain detached from all political parties and to preserve in his own person the equilibrium of the realm. An elected President – whether, as under some constitutions, he be no more than a representative functionary, or whether, as under other constitutions, he be the chief executive – can never inspire the same sense of absolute neutrality. However impartial he may strive to become, he must always remain the prisoner of his own partisan past; he is accompanied by friends and supporters whom he may seek to reward, or faced by former antagonists who will regard him with distrust. He cannot, to an equal extent, serve as the fly-wheel of the State. ↗
Individuals are prey to institutions in modern mass societies... Individuals can struggle mightily against institutionalized conditions, but without changing the institutions themselves, those efforts will be largely for naught, since people tire, lose focus, forget, and, eventually, give up their ghosts, while institutions share no such limitations. ↗
