#fairs

We must develop huge demonstrations, because the world is used to big dramatic affairs. They think in terms of hundreds of thousands and millions and billions... Billions of dollars are appropriated at the twinkling of an eye. Nothing little counts. ↗

— A. Philip Randolph

#appropriated #because #big #billions #counts

Secrecy is the first essential in affairs of state. ↗

— Cardinal Richelieu

#essential #first #secrecy #state

Watching foreign affairs is sometimes like watching a magician; the eye is drawn to the hand performing the dramatic flourishes, leaving the other hand - the one doing the important job - unnoticed. ↗

— David K. Shipler

#doing #dramatic #drawn #eye #flourishes

So the major obstacle to the development of new supplies is not geology but what happens above ground: international affairs, politics, investment and technology. ↗

— Daniel Yergin

#affairs #development #geology #ground #happens

Dating is probably the most fraught human interaction there is. You're sizing people up to see if they're worth your time and attention, and they're doing the same to you. It's meritocracy applied to personal life, but there's no accountability. We submit ourselves to these intimate inspections and simultaneously inflict them on others and try to keep our psyches intact - to keep from becoming cold and callous - and we hope that at the end of it we wind up happier than our grandparents, who didn't spend this vast period of their lives, these prime years, so thoroughly alone, coldly and explicitly anatomized again and again. ↗

— Adelle Waldman

#love #the-love-affairs-of-nathaniel-p #dating

In the morning, that moment, when I knew it was you. When I could feel you breathing and we opened our eyes at the exact same time. ↗

— Kate Chisman

#affairs #first-love #love #love-story #lovers

A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#sex #love

...foreign policy is a matter of costs and benefits, not theology. ↗

— Fareed Zakaria

#international-relations #national-policy #theology

The reason for my discomfort was simple. Our story - however romantic I could make it sound in my head - sometimes sounded a little tawdry in the re-telling. There was no escaping the fact that I'd been living with the father of my child when we met; that I'd cheated on him, then left; that what James and I now shared was born out of the ruins of another relationship. ↗

— Catherine Sanderson

#awkward-beginnings #relationship

...the qualifications that I have to speak on world affairs are exactly the same ones Henry Kissinger has, and Walt Rostow has, or anybody in the Political Science Department, professional historians—none, none that you don't have. The only difference is, I don't pretend to have qualifications, nor do I pretend that qualifications are needed. I mean, if somebody were to ask me to give a talk on quantum physics, I'd refuse—because I don't understand enough. But world affairs are trivial: there's nothing in the social sciences or history or whatever that is beyond the intellectual capacities of an ordinary fifteen-year-old. You have to do a little work, you have to do some reading, you have to be able to think but there's nothing deep—if there are any theories around that require some special kind of training to understand, then they've been kept a carefully guarded secret. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#qualifications #world-affairs #science