I wouldn't wish any specific thing for any specific person - it's none of my business. But the idea that a four-year degree is the only path to worthwhile knowledge is insane. It's insane.
If a manager asks an academic consultant what to do and that consultant answers, then the consultant should be fired. No academic has the experience to know the context of a managerial problem well enough to give specific advice about a specific situation.
What great executives do is not magic. Their performance is made possible by specific, identifiable skills.
In the Small group the individual can know the effects of his actions on his several fellows, and the rules may effectively forbid him to harm them in any manner and even require him to assist them in specific ways. In the Great Society many of the effects of a person's actions on various fellows must be unknown to him. It can, therefore, not be the specific effects in the particular case, but only rules which define kinds of actions prohibited or required, which must serve as guides to the individual.
If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: 'The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,' I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.
You write people as human beings first and then the gender specific stuff second.
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts.
I state for the record that I have never sought funds from any POW family, nor led them to believe in any way that we were going on a mission to rescue their specific missing loved one.
Ask your child for information in a gentle, nonjudgmental way, with specific, clear questions. Instead of “How was your day?” try “What did you do in math class today?” Instead of “Do you like your teacher?” ask “What do you like about your teacher?” Or “What do you not like so much?” Let her take her time to answer. Try to avoid asking, in the overly bright voice of parents everywhere, “Did you have fun in school today?!” She’ll sense how important it is that the answer be yes.
We don't want to limit ourselves to any specific sound like that was before when we were brought up in classical music.
I think all of the best nonfiction that has ever been made comes from the result of someone who can't stop thinking about a certain topic - a very specific aspect of a certain topic in some cases. And second, they got really good at figuring out what they had to say about it.
In my opinion, what makes a great book is something that is universally specific.
Behind every specific call, whether it is to teach or preach or write or encourage or comfort, there is a deeper call that gives shape to the first: the call to give ourselves away - the call to die.
I don't claim to know a lot about Mexico, but I did talk to quite a number of left Mexican intelectuals, and they all said the same thing. That there's a lot of popular, kind of, concern and activism, but it is very fragmented. That the groups have very specific, narrow agendas and they don't interact and cooperate with one another. Ok, that's something you have to overcome to build a mass popular movement. And that's, media can help, but they also benefit from it.
It's just funny that Americans have to contend with 2000 channels, and 60 different specific news sources, and the confusion that it creates, and the junk that we get to see is hilarious.
For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.
When you are too specific on a target, it can drain you. Ask me where I will be when I am 60, and I will have no answer to give.
Frequent comparative ranking can only reinforce a short-term investment perspective. It is understandably difficult to maintain a long-term view when, faced with the penalties for poor short-term performance, the long-term view may well be from the unemployment line. . . Relative-performance-oriented investors really act as speculators. Rather than making sensible judgments about the attractiveness of specific stocks and bonds, they try to guess what others are going to do and then do it first.
I usually try not to think about actors while writing, because the odds of those stars aligning and you getting those specific people are so rare.
What le Carré is so good at is unpicking something very specific about Englishness. That is almost part of why I think he wrote the novel. You can feel le Carré's anger that someone who has had the benefits of an English education and an English upbringing is using that privilege to basically do the worst things imaginable. There is an anger in the book about that.