Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.
The more ambivalent you are and the more uncertain you are, then you can get something that you cannot anticipate.
If you want to go the scorched-earth, Obamacare-is-like-slavery route and choose to stay uninsured, you will have the Palinesque guts, the Cruzian fortitude to wave off the ambulance that will appear to scoop you up should something bad happen to you, right?
Parties are only bad when a fight breaks out, when men fight over women or vice versa. Someone takes a fall, an ambulance comes, and the police arrive. If you can avoid those things, pretty much all behaviour is acceptable.
Snakes are sometimes perceived as evil, but they are also perceived as medicine. If you look at an ambulance, there's the two snakes on the side of the ambulance. The caduceus, or the staff of Hermes, there's the two snakes going up it, which means that the venom can also be healing.
We say here that if you fall down in the United States, the ambulance man must feel for your wallet before he feels for your pulse.
During every race, an ambulance trails the riders around the course. You know that sometimes you are going to end up in the back of that ambulance.
Imagine someone who has had a heart attack on the street, and they are picked up by an ambulance with 5G connectivity, hi-definition scanners, and cameras... You start taking a scan in the ambulance so all of that data is transferred to the surgery before the patient arrives, and a diagnosis is already underway.
I was with my mum in the shops, a ladies boutique or something, and I was asked what I wanted to be when I grow up. I think you're supposed to say an ambulance man or a footballer or a soldier or something like that, and I told all my mother's friends that I wanted to be Minister for Health. She was mortified, needless to say.
Now the ambulance is always ready; the paramedics are always ready. People in the crowd can get help without risk. If you look at the Fabrice Muamba case, this is what helped save his life - the paramedics are there.
Even in the ambulance ride I was trying to say something, trying to say, like, 'I knew who did it, I knew what went on.' And then I think they were kind of thrown back by that. They were like, 'What? You know what went on? You know what happened?' And I was like, 'Yeah, I saw the guy.'
To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.
I'm a pastor. I say, 'Let the church say amen,' and that settles it. Everything has been said, you know; it's like we have to agree with God.
I believe I have a calling. Do you know what that calling is? To stand up in a new and hard core, radical way for the Lord. In the process, if I insult a couple of people, if I offend a couple of people, and if I got to shake it up a little bit, as long as it is led by the Holy Spirit, amen.
My point is simply this: I believe I have a calling. Do you know what that calling is? To stand up in a new and hard core, radical way for the Lord. In the process, if I insult a couple of people, if I offend a couple of people, and if I got to shake it up a little bit, as long as it is led by the Holy Spirit, amen.
There are, in human affairs, two kinds of problems: those which are amenable to a technical solution and those which are not. Universal health-care coverage belongs to the first category: you can pick one of several possible solutions, pass a bill, and (allowing for some tinkering around the edges) it will happen.
Well, the fact is that one imagination is critically important, and if you have had your imagination stimulated by what is basically a variety of subjects, you are much more amenable to accepting, to understanding and interacting with the realities of the world.
A lot of what a military officer does is not just leading troops in combat. It's also doing budgets. It's solving complex problems. If you can sit down with warlords, you can certainly sit down with different parties and folks with different interests and come out with an amenable solution.
When you do something a little bit extreme or weird, it helps make it more interesting and more amenable to being written about.
You can always amend a big plan, but you can never expand a little one. I don't believe in little plans. I believe in plans big enough to meet a situation which we can't possibly foresee now.
