Individuals who succeed have a belief in the power of commitment. If there's a single belief that seems almost inseparable from success, it's that there's no great success without commitment. If you look at successful people in any field, you'll find they're not necessarily the best and the brightest, the fastest and the strongest. You'll find they're the ones with the most commitment.
Crime has always been a regrettably consistent element of the human experience.
When the government takes video of people in public places, the images should only be kept as long as they may reasonably be needed to investigate a crime. After a few days, if there has not been a report of a crime, they should be destroyed.
Why does anyone do anything? Belief. A belief that they are right and just in their actions. Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac, because he believed that God had commanded it. To kill your son is unthinkable. A crime. But if you are acting in the belief that your God, your supreme deity whom you must obey, has demanded it of you, is it still a crime?
The belief that women should control our own bodies may be a majority belief, but the minority that believes otherwise is against not only safe and legal abortions but contraception and even sex education.
When I was in college, we used to take a popcorn popper, because that was the only thing they would let us use in the dorm, and we would fry squirrels in a popcorn popper in the dorm room.
Law and order is a social service. Crime and the fear which the threat of crime induces can paralyse whole communities, keep lonely and vulnerable elderly people shut up in their homes, scar young lives and raise to cult status the swaggering violent bully who achieves predatory control over the streets. I suspect that there would be more support and less criticism than today's political leaders imagine for a large shift of resources from Social Security benefits to law and order - as long as rhetoric about getting tough on crime was matched by practice.
Criticism is beyond your control and is a collective group of people deciding things about you that may or may not be true. Some critics look for more when there's no need to. They have a dotto-dot picture of me they are intent on filling in.
No, we don't control who our parents are. We don't control what color we are. We don't control what home we are born into. But we control our attitude. We control our work ethic. We control our drive and our commitment.
If weakness may excuse, What murderer, what traitor, parricide, Incestuous, sacrilegious, but may plead it? All wickedness is weakness; that plea, therefore, With God or man will gain thee no remission.
Whenever the strength of a belief strongly steps into the foreground, we must infer a certain weakness of demonstrability and the improbability of that belief.
There have been so many stories out there about me, so many untruths. I've always believed you can only control what you can control. I can control my attitude, my effort, my commitment to West Virginia. I can't control lies.
The identification of the genes which determine biological phenomena and the study of the control they exert on these phenomena has proven to be the most successful approach to a detailed understanding of the mechanism of biological processes.
The success of the Inklings also helps us to see criticism in a positive light. There are, unfortunately, people who boost their own sense of importance by criticizing others as a matter of principle. Yet within this community, criticism was a mark of respect and commitment.
Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.
While the machinery of law enforcement and indeed the nature of crime itself have changed dramatically since the Fourth Amendment became part of the Nation's fundamental law in 1791, what the Framers understood then remains true today - that the task of combating crime and convicting the guilty will in every era seem of such critical and pressing concern that we may be lured by the temptations of expediency into forsaking our commitment to protecting individual liberty and privacy.