No subscription or hidden extras
Read through the most famous quotes by topic #rug
I’M LOSING FAITH IN MY FAVORITE COUNTRY Throughout my life, the United States has been my favorite country, save and except for Canada, where I was born, raised, educated, and still live for six months each year. As a child growing up in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, I aggressively bought and saved baseball cards of American and National League players, spent hours watching snowy images of American baseball and football games on black and white television and longed for the day when I could travel to that great country. Every Saturday afternoon, me and the boys would pay twelve cents to go the show and watch U.S. made movies, and particularly, the Superman serial. Then I got my chance. My father, who worked for B.F. Goodrich, took my brother and me to watch the Cleveland Indians play baseball in the Mistake on the Lake in Cleveland. At last I had made it to the big time. I thought it was an amazing stadium and it was certainly not a mistake. Amazingly, the Americans thought we were Americans. I loved the United States, and everything about the country: its people, its movies, its comic books, its sports, and a great deal more. The country was alive and growing. No, exploding. It was the golden age of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The American dream was alive and well, but demanded hard work, honesty, and frugality. Everyone understood that. Even the politicians. Then everything changed. Partly because of its proximity to the United States and a shared heritage, Canadians also aspired to what was commonly referred to as the American dream. I fall neatly into that category. For as long as I can remember I wanted a better life, but because I was born with a cardboard spoon in my mouth, and wasn’t a member of the golden gene club, I knew I would have to make it the old fashioned way: work hard and save. After university graduation I spent the first half of my career working for the two largest oil companies in the world: Exxon and Royal Dutch Shell. The second half was spent with one of the smallest oil companies in the world: my own. Then I sold my company and retired into obscurity. In my case obscurity was spending summers in our cottage on Lake Rosseau in Muskoka, Ontario, and winters in our home in Port St. Lucie, Florida. My wife, Ann, and I, (and our three sons when they can find the time), have been enjoying that “obscurity” for a long time. During that long time we have been fortunate to meet and befriend a large number of Americans, many from Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation.” One was a military policeman in Tokyo in 1945. After a very successful business carer in the U.S. he’s retired and living the dream. Another American friend, also a member of the “Greatest Generation”, survived The Battle of the Bulge and lived to drink Hitler’s booze at Berchtesgaden in 1945. He too is happily retired and living the dream. Both of these individuals got to where they are by working hard, saving, and living within their means. Both also remember when their Federal Government did the same thing. One of my younger American friends recently sent me a You Tube video, featuring an impassioned speech by Marco Rubio, Republican senator from Florida. In the speech, Rubio blasts the spending habits of his Federal Government and deeply laments his country’s future. He is outraged that the U.S. Government spends three hundred billion dollars, each and every month. He is even more outraged that one hundred and twenty billion of that three hundred billion dollars is borrowed. In other words, Rubio states that for every dollar the U.S. Government spends, forty cents is borrowed. I don’t blame him for being upset. If I had run my business using that arithmetic, I would be in the soup kitchens. If individual American families had applied that arithmetic to their finances, none of them would be in a position to pay a thin dime of taxes. In this connection I witnessed what I consider to be t ↗
Jesus Christ, it's like living with Stevie bloody Nicks,' I said, 'only without the cocaine, which would be more fun. ↗
Danes bi dejal, da me je srednji vek privlačil zaradi dveh razlogov. Najprej zaradi poklicnih razlogov. Odločil sem postati zgodovinar po poklicu. Prakticiranje večine znanosti je brez dvoma stvar profesionalcev, strokovnjakov. Zgodovinska znanost ni tako ekskluzivna. Četudi gre po mojem mnenju za razpravo, ki je pomembna za naš čas, ko mediji omogočajo malone vsakomur pripovedovati ali pisati zgodovino v podobah ali v besedah, se ne bom lotil vprašanja kakovosti zgodovinske produkcije. Nikakršnega monopola ne zahteva za znanstvene zgodovinarje. Diletanti in vulganizatorji zgodovine so po svoje dopadljivi in koristni; njihova uspešnost pa kaže, kako močno potrebo občutijo današnji ljudje, da bi se udeleževali kolektivnega spomina. Želim si, da bi zgodovina ob tem, ko bo postala bolj znanstvena, lahko še zmeraj ostala umetnost. Če hočemo hraniti spomin ljudi, potrebujemo prav toliko okusa, stila in strasti kakor strogosti in metode. Zgodovino delamo z dokumenti in idejami, z viri in z domišljijo. ↗
#history #medieval-history #srednji-vek #umetnost #za-drugačen-srednji-vek
I ended up going into this big art historical argument.' [Barry Blinderman] invoked, for example, Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece, painted in the sixteenth century for a monastery where monks cared for people with skin diseases—so the suffering Christ in that painting shows symptoms of skin disease. 'It’s because he’s the man of sorrows,' Blinderman argued. 'He takes on the suffering of the world. So if Christ were to appear physically today, one of the sicknesses he would have to take on would be drug addiction. ↗
Had you but seen it, I promise you, your high-minded principles would have melted like candle wax. Never would you have wished such beauty away. ↗
#class-struggle #excess #french-revolution #grandeur #louis-xiv
I told her I loved the howling sound of her harmonica. That seemed to be the limit of my courage that night, and even those spoken words had to struggle their way out of my mouth. It's all very well for words to build bridges, but sometimes I think it's a matter of knowing when to do it. Knowing when the time's right. ↗
#courage #knowing-when-the-time-is-right #limit #mouth #spoken-words
