Jonas Jonasson
- The 100-Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
Allan Karlsson hesitated as he stood there in the flower bed that ran along one side of the Old Folks' Home. He was wearing a brown jacket with brown trousers and on his feet he had a pair of brown indoor slippers. He was not a fashion plate; people rarely are at that age. He was on the run from his own birthday party, another unusual thing for a 100-year-old, not least because even being 100 is pretty rare.
Jules Verne
- Around the World in 80 Days
While the struggle continued and the balls whizzed across each other over his head, he made use of his old acrobatic experience, and with amazing agility worked his way under the cars, holding onto the chain, aiding himself by the brakes and edges of the sashes, creeping from one car to another with marvelous skill, and thus gaining the forward end of the train.
Jules Verne
- Around the World in 80 Days
He was, in short, the least communicative of men. He talked very little, and seemed all the more mysterious for his taciturn manner. His daily habits were quite open to observation; but whatever he did was so exactly the same thing that he had always done before, that the wits of the curious were fairly puzzled.
Buddha (c. 563–c. 483 B.C.)
Believe nothing, O monks, merely because you have been told it, or because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings — that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.
Henry David Thoreau
- Walden
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work.
Henry David Thoreau
- Walden
Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields.
John F. Kennedy
- Inaugural Address, 1961
Few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility -- I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it -- and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
John F. Kennedy
- Inaugural Address, 1961
Now the trumpet summons us again - not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are - but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation" - a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.
Tam Frager
- Just Five Minutes
I'd like to be able to tell you that that moment turned my life around. I'd like to tell you that because of Mr. Counselor, I got off books. I'd like to tell you that, but I can't. ... In class, our book reading became furtive, hidden behind text books or three-ring binders. Lunch hours we hid in the library, not wanting to get caught with literary contraband, knowing that the librarians weren't going to narc.
Cory Doctorow
- Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
What did he have to be nervous about? I was the one who'd been murdered - maybe he was nervous because he was supposed to finish the job. I cast my own sidelong looks at him, trying to see suspicious bulges in his tight clothes, but the Doom Buggy's pebbled black plastic interior was too dim. Dan was in the Buggy behind us, with one of the Mansion's regular castmembers. I rang his cochlea and subvocalized: "Get ready to jump out on my signal."
Cory Doctorow
- Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
This is how you hit bottom. You wake up in your friend's hotel room and you power up your handheld and it won't log on. You press the callbutton for the elevator and it gives you an angry buzz in return. You take the stairs to the lobby and no one looks at you as they jostle past you. You become a non-person.
Alexandre Dumas
- The Three Musketeers
Excitement was at its height among the Musketeers and their allies, and they even began to deliberate whether they should not set fire to the hotel to punish the insolence of M. de la Tremouille's domestics, in daring to make a sortie upon the king's Musketeers.
Alexandre Dumas
- Count of Monte Cristo
Dantes went and cut the strongest olive-tree he could find, stripped off its branches, inserted it in the hole, and used it as a lever. But the rock was too heavy, and too firmly wedged, to be moved by any one man, were he Hercules himself. Dantes saw that he must attack the wedge. But how? He cast his eyes around, and saw the horn full of powder which his friend Jacopo had left him.
U.S. gov't
- National Environmental Protction Act, 1969
The purposes of this Act are: To declare a national policy which will encourage productive and enjoyable harmony between man and his environment; to promote efforts which will prevent or eliminate damage to the environment and biosphere and stimulate the health and welfare of man; to enrich the understanding of the ecological systems and natural resources important to the Nation; and to establish a Council on Environmental Quality.
