#venti

Last month, the House of Representatives passed the Veterans Opportunity to Work Act, which would provide training and assistance to unemployed veterans, and break down bureaucratic barriers preventing them from finding work. It's smart legislation that members of both parties support, and I'm pleased the Senate passed it. ↗

— Joe Heck

#assistance #barriers #both #break #bureaucratic

The public has lost faith in the ability of Social Security and Medicare to provide for old age. They've lost faith in the banking system and in conventional medical insurance. ↗

— Ron Chernow

#age #banking #banking system #conventional #faith

Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process. ↗

— Kenneth Clark

#architecture #been #could #foreseen #gothic

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing. ↗

— Jonathan Coe

#between #choose #conventional #down #i

As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies, as a form of abstract thought. I don't wish to deny the uses of the intellect, but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere. ↗

— J. M. Coetzee

#abstract thought #creation #deny #development #fantasies

Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#hugs #illusion #knows #loneliness #lonely

If adolescent pregnancy prevention is to become a priority, then our strategy, as advocates, must contain two key elements: civic engagement and education. ↗

— Jane Fonda

#become #civic #contain #education #elements

I expect the Republicans will enjoy a large bounce out of their convention. They're here wrapping themselves in the 9/11 flag, which I think is inappropriate in many ways, but it's their choice. ↗

— Harold Ford

#choice #convention #enjoy #expect #flag

When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate? ↗

— Harold Edmund Stearns

#civilization #conventions #distinction #equality #individualism

The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones. ↗

— Northrop Frye

#ancient #back #being #convention #due