In the contemporary world, we think of politeness as surface behavior, like frosting - it's sweet and attractive and finishes off the cake. But 19th century nobility and the enlightened thinkers and stoics before them viewed manners in a very different way. To them, manners are an outward expression of an inward struggle.
Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee, for heaven's sake. They think Reagan is too naive, too innocent, to grasp the intellectual complexities of cold war strategy.
We need more people speaking out. This country is not overrun with rebels and free thinkers. It's overrun with sheep and conformists.
Our economy is built upon convergent thinkers, people that execute things, get them done. But artists and designers are divergent thinkers: they expand the horizon of possibilities.
From 1961 to 1964, I was fortunate enough to work at a think tank in the Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago. As a writer and editor, I reported in a publication about the thinkers. Our offices were in a former mansion; I worked in what had been the ballroom. As I sat typing my copy, I imagined the dancers waltzing.
The thinkers of the world should by rights be guardians of the world's mirth.
At the end of the day, every member of the conservative movement, from our political commentators and thinkers to our elected officials, share an important and common purpose in advancing the cause of liberty, reigning in a bloated federal government, and defending our traditional family values.
Hip-hop artists, especially the older ones, are the ones who knew hip-hop was a worldwide phenomenon before the mainstream caught on, so hip-hop artists are forward thinkers. We want to stay with the new.
Certainly the research shows that grateful people are more innovative thinkers.
All of the people in my life whom I consider to be close friends or colleagues are good thinkers.
From earliest times, humans - explorers and thinkers - have wanted to figure out the shape of their world. Forever, the way we've done that is through storytelling. It is difficult to let the truth get in the way of a good story.
It has been wisely observed by the greatest of modern thinkers that mankind has progressed more rapidly in every other respect than in morality.
What inspires me? I am so inspired every day. I am inspired by thinkers. I am inspired by rebellion. I am inspired by children. I have been inspired by love.
When I was a baby feminist, leading feminist thinkers were insisting that if women ran the world, there would be no sadism or war.
Secular thinkers have a separation between thinking and doing. They don't have a grasp of the balance sheet. The doers are selling us potted plants and pizzas while the thinkers are a little bit unworldly. Religions both think and do.
Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.
The IP system is an artificial construct that excessively rewards owners of intellectual property, granting them monopolies over inventions and ideas that, in many cases, are the product of generations of thinkers and/or publicly funded research.
If you're looking at my other major science fiction roles - the Doctor on 'Star Trek' and certainly Woolsey on 'Stargate' - I often play characters that might be good theorists and good thinkers, but you wouldn't call either of them very macho characters.
Contemporary thinkers would say that man is continuously transcending himself.
I'll co-host 'TODAY' from Los Angeles Saturday morning and then make my way up to Merced for that evening's graduation ceremony. I'm still touching up my remarks, but my challenge to the Class of 2010 will be to break through the deafening and too often negative echo chamber of the digital era and become critical and independent thinkers.
Secular thinkers have no more been able to work free of the centuries-old Judeo-Christian culture than Christian theologians were able to work free of their inheritance of classical and pagan thought. The process... has not been the deletion and replacement of religious ideas but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation of religious ideas.
Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.
Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
Illogical thinkers throw names and slurs around because they have no arguments with which to rebut their opponents. Rational people have to keep hammering their points home.
My literary heroes were mostly women writers and thinkers - Joy Williams, Joan Didion, Anne Sexton, June Jordan, Sarah Schulman, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Christa Wolf - and much of this writing was political as well as literary.
