Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth unseen, both when we sleep and when we awake.
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Fishing gives you a sense of where you fit in the sceme of things - Your place in the universe...I, mean, here I am, one small guy with a fishing pole on this vast beach and out there in the blue expanse of ocean are these hundreds of millions of fish...laughing at me.
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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo's Women's War, the marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.
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One summer night, out on a flat headland, all but surrounded by the waters of the bay, the horizons were remote and distant rims on the edge of space. Millions of stars blazed in darkness, and on the far shore a few lights burned in cottages. Otherwise there was no reminder of human life. My companion and I were alone with the stars: the misty river of the Milky Way flowing across the sky, the patterns of the constellations standing out bright and clear, a blazing planet low on the horizon. It occurred to me that if this were a sight that could be seen only once in a century, this little headland would be thronged with spectators. But it can be seen many scores of nights in any year, and so the lights burned in the cottages and the inhabitants probably gave not a thought to the beauty overhead; and because they could see it almost any night, perhaps they never will.
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After the planet becomes theirs, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly loved by God, at the end of its calculations will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. The new kings of the world will live tranquilly for a long time, confining themselves to devouring each other and being parasites among each other on a cottage industry scale.
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In Paris today, millions of pounds of bread are sold daily, made during the previous night by those strange, half-naked beings one glimpses through cellar windows, whose wild-seeming cries floating out of those depths always makes a painful impression. In the morning, one sees these pale men, still white with flour, carrying a loaf under one arm, going off to rest and gather new strength to renew their hard and useful labor when night comes again. I have always highly esteemed the brave and humble workers who labor all night to produce those soft but crusty loaves that look more like cake than bread.
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Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome
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The poor and the affluent are not communicating because they do not have the same words. When we talk of the millions who are culturally deprived, we refer not to those who do not have access to good libraries and bookstores, or to museums and centers for the performing arts, but those deprived of the words with which everything else is built, the words that opens doors. Children without words are licked before they start. The legion of the young wordless in urban and rural slums, eight to ten years old, do not know the meaning of hundreds of words which most middle-class people assume to be familiar to much younger children. Most of them have never seen their parents read a book or a magazine, or heard words used in other than rudimentary ways related to physical needs and functions. Thus is cultural fallout caused, the vicious circle of ignorance and poverty reinforced and perpetuated. Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble.
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There is a tower in the Emperor's palace called the Tower of Heroes: a black tower which rises high into the sky like a spike. At the summit of that tower hangs the Bell of Lost Souls. It is an ancient thing, massive as a building and adorned with dark runes, its peal like the scream of an anguished god. It is tolled but once when a great hero of the Imperium dies. Its wailing moan of grief lasts long and reaches the ears of millions, and its tones penetrate the unifying ether of humanity turning the thought of countless billions towards mankind's loss.
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Although every organized patriarchal religion works overtime to contribute its own brand of misogyny to the myth of woman-hate, woman-fear, and woman-evil, the Roman Catholic Church also carries the immense power of very directly affecting women's lives everywhere by its stand against birth control and abortion, and by its use of skillful and wealthy lobbies to prevent legislative change. It is an obscenity -- an all-male hierarchy, celibate or not, that presumes to rule on the lives and bodies of millions of women.
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The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior. However, as we shall see, there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals. 'Special' and 'limited' are important words in the last sentence. Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.
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Spiritual superiority only sees the individual. But alas, ordinarily we human beings are sensual and, therefore, as soon as it is a gathering, the impression changes -- we see something abstract, the crowd, and we become different. But in the eyes of God, the infinite spirit, all the millions that have lived and now live do not make a crowd, He only sees each individual.
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From this day forward, the millions of our schoolchildren will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural schoolhouse, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty. (On signing law for inclusion of the words 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance, 14 Jun 54)
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'Recorded history shows the relationship between human and animal has been very one-sided! Man's exploitation/treatment of animals stands out as one of the darkest stains on his reputation. Is the purpose of life for the indulgence of selfish desires? Or a medium for soul growth? If we behave brutally or selfishly, then we are brutes and selfish. No religious label or outward facade alters this truth. Can we believe in and preach life after death, and yet be party to murdering millions of innocent animals via the blood-drenched abattoir, vivisection, fur trade, 'games', entertainment, 'sports'???'
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It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.
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The economic impact is in the millions of dollars, ... And those are dollars you can't recoup. For every day a facility is closed, the golf pro can't make up those rounds. We won't know the full effect for two to three years. My sense is that some courses won't survive down the road.
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The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.
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I want to offer congratulations to Pope Benedict XVI, a man of great wisdom, and knowledge. He's a man who serves the Lord. And we remember well a sermon at the pope's funeral in Rome -- how his words touched our hearts and the hearts of millions. We join our fellow citizens and millions around the world who pray for continued strength and wisdom as His Holiness leads the Catholic Church.
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Americans consume, on average, 51 pounds of chicken every year, 15 pounds of turkey, 63 pounds of beef, 45 pounds of pork, 1 pound of veal, and 1 pound of lamb. 'More than ever,' reports our U.S. Department of Agriculture, 'we are a nation of meat eaters.' And now, with help from Dr. Atkins and his wonder diet, we have millions of consumers gorging themselves on nothing but flesh, one excess to correct their other excesses -- no thought whatever of taking their portion of meat even if we grant that meat production and the sufferings involved are necessary.
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The man who has no money is poor, but one who has nothing but money is poorer. He only is rich who can enjoy without owning; he is poor who though he has millions is covetous.
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A man comes into a bar, obviously nervous and obviously in a hurry, walks over to the counter, picks up an empty glass and starts eating it. When he is finished he goes over to the wall, walks up the wall, walks along the ceiling, walks down the other wall and disappears out the door. The barkeeper can't believe his eyes. What the hell, he says, is going on here? A man who has been sitting on a bar stool and seen the whole thing, says with a shrug of his shoulders, Don't worry, I know that guy. It's always the same thing with him -- comes and goes without even saying hello. There are millions of people who are living like this. Miracles are happening all around but they can't see anything, they are blind with their knowledge. Drop your knowledge. Knowledge is worthless; wonder is precious. Regain the wonder that you had when you were a child -- and the kingdom of God belongs only to those who are able to become children again.
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My own medical perspective is that animal cancer research should be regarded as the scientific equivalent of gossip – with about the same chance of turning out to be true, i.e. truly effective in humans. Some gossip turns out to be true, but most of it does not…and gossip can cause great anguish for those affected, in this case millions of desperate cancer patients worldwide.
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The slanders poured down like Niagara. If you take into consideration the setting -- the war and the revolution -- and the character of the accused -- revolutionary leaders of millions who were conducting their party to the sovereign power -- you can say without exaggeration that July 1917 was the month of the most gigantic slander in world history.
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We need to reach the millions who live in cities, the hundreds of thousands in industrial centers, the tens of thousands in medium-sized towns, the thousands in small towns, and the hundreds in villages -- all these at once. Like a volcanic eruption, a spiritual revolution needs to spread through the country, to spur people to crucial decisions. People have to recognize the futility of splitting life up into politics, economics, the humanities, and religion. We must be awakened to a life in which all of these things are completely integrated.
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And it's true we are immune When fact is fiction and TV reality And the today the millions cry We eat and drink when tomorrow they die
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At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non-humans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change of perception akin to a religious conversion. Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that support our society.
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In fact, it seems that present-day science, with one sweeping step back across millions of centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to that primordial ' Fiat lux ' Let there be light uttered at the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, while the particles of the chemical elements split and formed into millions of galaxies ... Hence, creation took place in time, therefore, there is a Creator, God exists!
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For every living creature that succeeds in getting a footing in life there are thousands or millions that perish. There is an enormous random scattering for every seed that comes to life. This does not remind us of intelligent human design. 'If a man in order to shoot a hare, were to discharge thousands of guns on a great moor in all possible directions; if in order to get into a locked room, he were to buy ten thousand casual keys, and try them all; if, in order to have a house, he were to build a town, and leave all the other houses to wind and weather - assuredly no one would call such proceedings purposeful and still less would anyone conjecture behind these proceedings a higher wisdom, unrevealed reasons, and superior prudence.'
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To support federal funding for embryonic stem cell research is to come down on the side of hope for the millions of Americans suffering from diseases ranging from Alzheimer's to cancer to Parkinson's to diabetes,
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In order for life to have appeared spontaneously on Earth, there first had to be hundreds of millions of protein molecules of the Ninth Configuration. But, given the size of the planet Earth, do you know how long it would take for just one of these protein molecules to appear by chance? Roughly 10 to the 243rd power, billions of years; and I find that far, far more fantastic than simply believing in a god.
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