These are quotes which stood out to me, possibly for use in a sermon someday. Their presence here does not mean I agree with them, it merely shows that I might want to reference them later. The default view is five random selections. Use the tag list on the right to view all quotes relevant to that theme.
There can be no doubt that every man is exactly as close to God as he wants to be.
I do not believe in God, but I want my banker, my lawyer and my doctor to do so.
What do you get when you have 32 rednecks in the same room? A full set of teeth.
In the 2001 Tour de France, Lance Armstrong was hotly pursued by the 1997 German winner, Jan Ullrich. In the 13th stage of the race, Ullrich had a bad crash, running off the road and vaulting over his handlebars. Armstrong stopped, halting the race while Ullrich got up and recovered. In that race, Armstrong ultimately was victorious, and Ullrich took the runner-up trophy. Two years later in the 2003 Tour de France, as Armstrong sought a fifth consecutive victory, Ullrich trailed him by a razor-thin 15 seconds when Armstrong's handlebars hooked in the bag of a fan leaning across the barrier to see, and Armstrong tumbled to the street. This time, Ullrich stopped and halted the competition while Armstrong picked himself up and remounted. At the end of that 15th stage, Lance Armstrong had extended his lead to 67 seconds. Waiting for a fallen competitor is part of bicycle road-racing etiquette. However, etiquette is a code and not a rule; Ullrich would have been within competitive bounds to sprint ahead and take advantage of Lance's fall. Armstrong went on to win the 2003 Tour de France.
Monkeys Pay to See Female Monkey Bottoms By Robert Roy Britt LiveScience Senior Writer posted: 28 January 2005 04:27 pm ET Would you pay to see a monkey's backside? I hope not. Monkeys will, and I guess that's okay, though it sounds awfully close to the sort of thing that lands guys in jail here in the human realm. A new study found that male monkeys will give up their juice rewards in order to ogle pictures of female monkey's bottoms. The way the experiment was set up, the act is akin to paying for the images, the researchers say. The rhesus macaque monkeys also splurged on photos of top-dog counterparts, the high-ranking primates. Maybe that's like you or me buying People magazine. The research, which will be detailed in the March issue of Current Biology, gets more interesting. The scientists actually had to pay these guys, in the form of extra juice, to get them to look at images of lower-ranking monkeys. Curiously, the monkeys in the test hadn't had any direct physical contact with the monkeys in the photos, so they didn't have personal experience with who was hot and who was not. "So, somehow, they are getting this information by observation -- by seeing other individuals interact," said Michael Platt of the Duke University Medical Center. Next, Platt and his colleagues want to see how people will perform in a similar experiment. "At the moment, it's only a tantalizing possibility, but we believe that similar processes are at work in these monkeys and in people," Platt said. "After all, the same kinds of social conditions have been important in primate evolution for both nonhuman primates and humans. So, in further experiments, we also want to try to establish in the same way how people attribute value to acquiring visual information about other individuals." The study, announced Friday, is far from monkey business. It was sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health and the Cure Autism Now Foundation. The goal is to learn more about the social machinery of the brain with an eye toward helping autism patients. "One of the main problems in people with autism is that they don't find it very motivating to look at other individuals," Platt said. "And even when they do, they can't seem to assess information about that individual's importance, intentions or expressions." The monkeys provide "an excellent model for how social motivation for looking is processed in normal individuals," Platt said. "And, it's a model that we can use to explore the neurophysiological mechanisms of those motivations in a way we can't do in humans. For example, we can use drugs that affect specific neural processes to explore whether we can mimic some of the deficits found in autism in these animals."