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I'd not go behind scripture but it may be that there has been sinners so notorious evil that the fires coughed em up again and I could well see in the long ago how it was little devils with their pitchforks had traversed that fiery vomit for to salvage back those souls that had by misadventure been spewed up from their damnation onto the outer shelves of the world. Aye. It's a notion, no more. ...

Statt zu antworten, rief Gandalf dem Pferd laut zu: "Voran, Schattenfell! Wir müssen eilen. Die Zeit ist knapp. Siehe! Die Leuchtfeuer von Gondor sind angezündet und rufen Hilfe herbei! Der Krieg ist entbrannt. Schau, da ist das Feuer auf Amon Dîn und die Flamme auf Eilenach; und dort ziehen sie sich eilends nach Westen: Nardol, Erelas, Min-Rimmon, Calenhad und Halifirien an den Grenzen von Rohan."

He was tapping the flat of the sword lightly against the horn of his saddle and he seemed to be forming words in his mind. He leaned slightly to them. When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.

The second corporal was from Texas and spoke a little Spanish and he meant to trade his mule. The other boy was from Missouri. They were in good spirits, scrubbed and combed, clean shirts and all. Each foreseeing a night of drink, perhaps of love. How many youths have come home cold and dead from just such nights and just such plans.

Die großen Türen schlugen zu. Bum. Die eisernen Riegel schnappten ein. Klong. Das Tor war geschlossen. Sam warf sich gegen die verriegelten ehernen Torflügel und fiel besinnungslos auf den Boden. Er war draußen in der Dunkelheit. Frodo war am Leben, aber vom Feind gefangen.

How people in the Assyrian Empire cursed and swore can be gauged from a small tablet from Nineveh inscribed with invectives against a certain Bel-etir. "Bel-etir, you fucked hostage, doubly so, with runny eyes, doubly so, with bulging eyes, doubly so, son of Ibâ, that missed period, that shit bucket of a fart factory, of a vile family, lackey of a dead god, of a house whose star has vanished from the heavens,...

The eldest daughter of King Esarhaddon and sister of his successor Ashurbanipal, Sherua-etirat never suffered from a lack of self-confidence. Druing the period when Ashurbanipal was still crown prince, she wrote a bullying letter to Ashurbanipal's wife Libbali-sharrat, making it quite clear that, as a blood relation of the Assyrian royal family, she - Sherua-etirat - held a far higher rank than her sister-in-law.

The history of religious thought is full of strange turns, but few new ideas in this sphere have been as serendipitous as the emergence of the devil from a dubious interpretation of a cosmological metaphor used in the Hebrew Bible to characterize an unlucky Near Eastern king killed on the battlefield - a king who, in all likelihood, was none other than Sargon II.

"Ach, Sam," sagte er, "dir zuzuhören macht mich irgendwie so fröhlich, als ob die Geschichte schon beschrieben sei. Aber du hast eine der wichtigsten handelnden Personen ausgelassen: Samweis der Beherzten. 'Ich will mehr von Sam hören, Papa. Warum hast du nicht mehr davon erzählt, wie er redet, Papa? Das mag ich gern, das bringt mich zum Lachen. Und Frodo wäre ohne Sam nicht weit gekommen, nicht wahr, Papa?'"

Und dann können wir uns ausruhen und etwas schlafen",sagte Sam. Er lachte bitter."Und genau das meine ich, Herr Frodo. Ich meine schlicht und einfach Ruhe und Schlaf, und am Morgen aufwachen, um im Garten zu arbeiten. Ich fürchte, das ist alles, worauf ich zurzeit hoffe. All die großen, wichtigen Pläne sind nicht für meinesgleichen. Immerhin wüsste ich gern, ob wir jemals in Liedern oder Geschichten vorkommen werden.

In a letter from Babylonia from the time of the Assyrian trade colonies, a young man berates his mother in a tone that many a modern parent of moody, brand-conscious teenagers will know only too well:
'From year to year, the clothes of the young gentlemen here become better, but you let my clothes get worse. . . . At a time when in our house wool is used up like bread, you have made me poor clothes. The son of ...

They even found the platform for the throne of the ninth-century BCE Assyrian king Shalmaneser III, with an image of that king and a Babylonian ruler shaking hands, the first known pictorial representation of this widely used gesture.

And so Assyria matters. "World history" does not begin with the Greeks or the Romans—it begins with Assyria.

'Tis not solely in poetry and music, we must follow our taste and sentiment, but likewise in philosophy. When I am convinc'd of any principle, 'tis only an idea, which strikes more strongly upon me. When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence.

This whole strange, now incomprehensible contradiction between facts and historical descriptions comes only from the fact that historians who wrote about this event wrote the history of the beautiful feelings and words of various generals, and not the history of the events themselves.
They find very interesting the words of Milodarovich, the decorations received by this or that general, or their own speculations;

When a man finds himself in motion, he always thinks up a goal for that motion. In order to walk a thousand miles, a man needs to think that there is something good at the end of those thousand miles. One needs a vision of the promised land in order to have the strength to move.

Coming out into the field under French fire, the agitated and brave Bagovut, without considering whether his going into action now, and with only one division, was useful or useless, marched straight ahead and led his troops under fire. Danger, cannonballs, bullets were what he needed in his wrathful state. One of the first bullets killed him, the bullets that followed killed many of his soldiers.

To every administrator, in peaceful, unstormy times, it seems that the entire population entrusted to him moves only by his efforts, and in this consciousness of his necessity every administrator finds the chief reward for his labors and efforts. It is understandable that, as long as the historical sea is calm, it must seem to the ruler-administrator in his frail little bark, resting his pole against the ship ...

The first method of history consists in taking an arbitrary series of continuous events and examining them separately from others, whereas there is not and cannot be a beginning to any event. The second method consists in examining the actions of one person, a king, a commander, as the sum of individual wills, whereas the sum of individual wills is never expressed in the activity of one historical person.

It was obvious to everyone, military and nonmilitary, that this part of the line ought to be attacked by the French. It seemed that for that there was no need for much reflection, no need for such consideration and botheration on the part of the emperor and his marshals, and no need at all for that especially superior quality known as genius, which people like so much to ascribe to Napoleon; but the historians ...

He looked at the line of birches with their motionless yellow and green leaves and white bark gleaming in the sun. "To die, to be killed tomorrow, to be no more...so that all this is here and I am not." He pictured vividly to himself his absence from this life. And the birches with their light and shade, and the fleecy clouds, and the smoke of the campfires - everything around was transfigured for him...

A good commander not only does not need genius or any special qualities, but, on the contrary, he needs the absence of the best and highest human qualities—love, poetry, tenderness, a searching philosophical doubt. ... God forbid he should be a human being and come to love or pity someone, or start thinking about what is just and what isn't.

On the twelfth of June, the forces of western Europe crossed the borders of Russia, and war began—that is, an event took place contrary to human reason and to the whole of human nature.

I answer this objection, by pleading guilty, and by confessing that my intention never was to penetrate into the nature of bodies, or explain the secret causes of their operations. ... I am afraid that such an enterprize is beyond the reach of human understanding, and that we can never pretend to know body otherwise than by those external properties, which discover themselves to the senses.

... the modern sciences might offer some cause for optimism, and they are often held up as exemplars of justified knowledge. This accounts for attempts on the part of some social scientists and philosophers to mould their endeavours on the model of science. But the reputation of the natural sciences rests partly upon latent theological assumptions and partly on a suspect conflation of instrumentality with truth.

James, aged six, invented the "most insulting insult" that made Vincent bend over with laughter: "Mommy, you're so dense that if we put you next to a black hole, you would not be sucked in by the black hole, but the black hole would be sucked into you."
Little did James know, and little did I know, that someday I would live with a black hole inside me, the precise shape of my two children.

It's been my experience, both as a child and as a parent, that adults - at least those specializing in arrogance and ignorance, and those who easily forget or else write off their own childhood memories - are extremely good at underestimating children. A ten-year-old already has the capacity to understand life's bleakness.

"Nun ja, Herr," sagte Sam. "Ihr habt gesagt, mein Herr habe etwas Elbenhaftes an sich, und das war gut und richtig. Aber ich kann dies sagen: Auch Ihr habt etwas an Euch, Herr, das mich - nun ja, an Gandalf, der Zauberer, erinnert."
"Vielleicht", sagte Faramir. "Vielleicht erkennst du von ferne etwas von Númenor. Gute Nacht!"

we are sadly aware that speech ... is the medium of lies as well as of truth, and more often the former than the latter in the public sphere - with a busily fostered growth between them of unmeaningness, not even fit for either, eating away into both; and the older suspicion whether we are not dealing with a tale told by an idiot is overshadowed by the worse that it might be a tale concocted by knaves.

Es war die erste Schlacht von Menschen gegen Menschen, die Sam miterlebte, und sie gefiel ihm nicht sehr. Er war froh, dass er das Gesicht des Toten nicht sehen konnte. Er fragte sich, wie der Mann wohl hieß und wo er herkam und ob er wirklich ein böses Herz gehabt hatte, oder welche Lügen oder Drohungen ihn zu dem langen Marsch von seiner Heimat veranlasst hatten