#sm

The travel and tourism industry is the lifeblood of many states around the country - including Florida, California, New York and Nevada, to name a few. ↗

— Mark Foley

#california #country #few #florida #including

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known. ↗

— Garrison Keillor

#getting #got #had #known #lies

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

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. ↗

— Helen Keller

#awkwardness #barrier #book #discourses #disenfranchised

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived. ↗

— Helen Keller

#lived #miles #potent #smell #thousands

Elsewhere the paper notes that vegetarians and vegans (including athletes) 'meet and exceed requirements' for protein. And, to render the whole we-should-worry-about-getting-enough-protein-and-therefore-eat-meat idea even more useless, other data suggests that excess animal protein intake is linked with osteoporosis, kidney disease, calcium stones in the urinary tract, and some cancers. Despite some persistent confusion, it is clear that vegetarians and vegans tend to have more optimal protein consumption than omnivores. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#health #meat #veganism #vegetarianism #food

With the end of the cold war, all the 'isms' of the 20th century - Fascism, Nazism, Communism and the evil of apartheid-ism - have failed. Except one. Only democracy has shown itself true the help of all mankind. ↗

— Jack Kemp

#century #cold #cold war #communism #democracy

Everybody's scared for their ass. There aren't too many people ready to die for racism. They'll kill for racism but they won't die for racism. ↗

— Florynce R. Kennedy

#die #everybody #kill #many #people

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. ↗

— Robert Kennedy

#bend #change #each #events #few

I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses. ↗

— Johannes Kepler

#criticism #i #intelligent #intelligent man #man