#promises

Allowing our government to kill citizens compromises the deepest moral values upon which this country was conceived: the inviolable dignity of human persons. ↗

— Helen Prejean

#citizens #compromises #conceived #country #deepest

We’re always being made promises,’ she said. ‘You make them yourself and you listen to others giving theirs. Politicians are always going on about providing a better quality of life for people as they get older, and a health service in which nobody ever gets bedsores. Banks promise you high interest rates, some food promises to make you lose weight if you eat it, and body creams guarantee old age with fewer wrinkles. Life is quite simply a matter of cruising along in your own little boat through a constantly changing but never-ending stream of promises. And how many do we remember? We forget the ones we would like to remember, and we remember the ones we’d prefer to forget. ↗

— Henning Mankell

#age

But as the arms-control scholar Thomas Schelling once noted, two things are very expensive in international life: promises when they succeed and threats when they fail. ↗

— Fareed Zakaria

#fail #international #life #national life #noted

Is this what sadness is all about? Is it what comes over us when beautiful memories shatter in hindsight because the remembered happiness fed not just on actual circumstances but on a promise that was not kept? ↗

— Bernhard Schlink

#sadness #beauty

When you find nothing, Morris said, it means you're eliminating what surrounds the something. Is that a Zen thing? Eve questioned. If not, it should be. ↗

— J.D. Robb

#death

Promise me you'll never stop dreaming. ↗

— Melina Marchetta

#hoping #promises-in-death #wishing #death

Every politician has a promising career. Unfortunately, most of them do not keep those promises. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#politician #politics #promises #funny

But all fairytales have rules, and perhaps it’s their rules that actually distinguish one fairytale from the other. These rules never need to be understood. They only need to be followed. If not, what they promise won’t come true. ↗

— Jostein Gaarder

#life #love #promises #life

It was not despair, but it seemed to her as if life were passing by, leaving its promises broken and unfulfilled. Yet there were other days when she listened, was led on and deceived by fresh promises which her youth had held out to her. ↗

— Kate Chopin

#life

Promises were like laws; smart men knew when to break both. ↗

— C.J. Hill

#laws #promises #smart-people #men