All of Robert Caro's biographies are exceptional, in part because of Caro's fundamental ambivalence about power. He sees its necessity and use for getting things done, even as he is often repelled by watching power at close range. His masterpiece on Robert Moses, The Power Broker, describes the evolution of Moses from idealist to pragmatist as he became one of the most powerful figures in the 20th century.
Though the details differ across the world, no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth consuming, hostility provoking rituals, the anti-factual, counter-productive fantasies of religion.
Our day-to-day lives are pretty chaotic. So in terms of the writing part, you have to get pretty disciplined about finding quiet moments and making sure you're making time for the art side, on top of all the time-consuming business side.
Here in the United States we're now consuming about three gallons of petroleum per person per day. That's twenty pounds of oil per person per day. We only consume about four pounds of oxygen per person per day. We're consuming five times more oil each day, here in the United States than we are oxygen. We've become the oil tribe.
In ancient times, we were users; we used the commodities in accordance to our needs. Using is not sufficient for the modern market; it needs consumers. Consuming means consuming things much more than the natural need of humanity or of any living being.
A modern vegetarian is also a teetotaler, yet there is no obvious connection between consuming vegetables and not consuming fermented vegetables. A drunkard, when lifted laboriously out of the gutter, might well be heard huskily to plead that he had fallen there through excessive devotion to a vegetable diet.
I had a baby and that is pretty time consuming.
In short, it is about the multiple health benefits of consuming plant-based foods, and the largely unappreciated health dangers of consuming animal-based foods, including all types of meat, dairy and eggs.
Young people, particularly in their teens and 20s, are not consuming sports the way my generation did. They are doing lots of things; they are multitasking. They are getting downloads; they are getting alerts on their computers or on their cellphones, and they are consuming sports in a more real-time but less full-time basis.
This fundraising is consuming us. It's impossible to overstate, I think, what it's doing to members and their ability to just focus on the job that they were elected to do. The collective concentration of the institution is being undermined every day by the need to fund-raise.
What worries some people about consumption (and I confess at the outset to be one of these ambivalent creatures, fat but troubled in paradise) is that the affluent, technologically advanced West seems more and more focused not on consuming to live but living to consume. The problem with consumption, and the consumer capitalism that has pushed it to feverish historical extremes, is that it has become so all-consuming.
You are thinking about the music, about the mathematics of it. It's time-consuming and energy-consuming at the same time. That's why I take my time off, my family time, as inspirational. I cool off.
Working in Hollywood for the orchestra world is a very time consuming and laborious job.
As a professional athlete, part of my job is to make sure I'm consuming high quality nutrients.
As soon as I got my business going, after a couple of years it was pretty much consuming my whole life.
I love fashion, I'm actually a pretty talented seamstress, so I can make stuff for myself, but that's really time-consuming.