Weekend Words: Evaporate

Concluding that he isn’t about to withdraw anytime soon, a letter signed by more than 120 current and former Republican elected officials urged the Republican National Committee to cut off funds to the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and concentrate on down-ballot candidates instead.

CBS News reported on Tuesday that the letter, delivered to RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, reads in part, “Given the catastrophic impact that Donald Trump’s losing presidential campaign will have on down-ballot Senate and House races, we urge you to immediately suspend all discretionary RNC support for Trump and focus the entirety of the RNC’s available resources on preserving the GOP’s congressional majorities,” adding that the chances of a Trump victory are “evaporating by the day.”

The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.

—John Keats

We have needed to define ourselves by reclaiming the words that define us. They have used language as weapons. When we open ourselves to what they say and how they say it, our narrow prejudices evaporate and we are nourished and armed.

—Selma James

Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.

—Albert Schweitzer

Every time a resolve or fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing fruit, it is worse than a chance lost; it works to hinder future emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.

—William James

I don’t know about you, but I find it exhilarating to see how vague psychological notions evaporate and give rise to a physical, mechanistic understanding of the mind, even if it’s the mind of the fly.

—Gero Miesenbock

If love means that one person absorbs the other, then no real relationship exists any more. Love evaporates; there is nothing left to love. The integrity of self is gone.

—Ann Rosamund Oakley

Those most moved to tears by every word of a preacher are generally weak and a rascal when the feelings evaporate.

—Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus)

It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption. This long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated.

—Edward Gibbon

If you slid Pluto to where Earth is right now, heat from the sun would evaporate that ice, and it would grow a tail. Now that’s no kind of behavior for a planet.

—Neil deGrasse Tyson

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

—Franz Kafka