Thoughts for June 2014

______

back      Index      next

______

  1.  "The hallmark of bullying isn't just being mean. It also involves a power differential: The bully is the one who's punching down." ~ Laura Hudson

  2.  "A panicked crowd is not going to listen to what you have to say no matter how well reasoned it is argued. Opposing it is like opposing a cattle stampede. If you stand in its path, you will surely be trampled to death." ~ John Myers

  3.  "A man cannot have character unless he lives within a fundamental system of morals that creates character." ~ Harry S. Truman

  4.  "The problem with crowds is they have no ear for reason. Once a contagious fear grabs hold, a crowd loses all sense of objectivity, all reason. Truth is meaningless. There is no way on Earth that you are going to reverse it until the hysteria has run its course." ~ John Myers

  5.  "Let us not be deceived by phrases about 'Man taking charge of his own destiny'. All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of the others. They will be simply men; none perfect; some greedy, cruel and dishonest. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be. Have we discovered some new reason why, this time, power should not corrupt as it has done before?" ~ C. S. Lewis

  6.  "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles." ~ Sun Tzu

  7.  "Any idiot can face a crisis. It's the day-to-day living that wears you out." - Anton Chekhov

  8.  "The new source of power is not money in the hands of a few, but information in the hands of many." - John Naisbitt

  9.  "If you have to tell people you are strong, you aren't. If you have to show you are not weak, you are!" ~ Mitt Romney

10.  "Nature goes on her way, and all that to us seems an exception is really according to order." ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

11.  "All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience." - Goethe

12.  "Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what’s really there." ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson

13. "The notion that democracy would be advanced – saved, ‘restored’ – by limiting speech is nothing but a perversion of the English language. ~ Floyd Abrams

14.  "Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself." - Robert Frost

15.  "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards." ~ Soren Kierkegaard

16.  "And don't forget: keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars." ~ Casey Kasem

17.  "The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather in a lack of will." ~ Vince Lombardi

18.  "A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself." - Joseph Campbell

19.  "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." - Anne Frank

20.  "Power and influence in the world come from having capability plus the will to use it." ~ Rep. Mac Thornberry

21.  "You cannot expect to live a positive life if you hang with negative people." — Joel Osteen

22.  "Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less." ~ C.S. Lewis

23.  (Two with which I do NOT agree. These guys hate us.):

"Saying Death to America is easy. We need to express Death to America with Action" ~ Hassan Rouhani, President of Iran

Gender equality was "one of the biggest mistakes of Western thought." ~ Ayatollah Khomeini, Former Supreme Leader of Iran

24.  "Islam has different interpretations, like any other religion. We must promote an interpretation of Islam that is in harmony with human rights and democracy. The undemocratic regimes take advantage of religion to promote their own undemocratic ideologies." Dr. Shirin Ebadi, Iranian Judge/Feminist in Exile, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

25.  "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." ~ William Shakespeare

26.  "A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear." ~ Cicero

27.  "Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century: Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others; Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected; Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it; Refusing to set aside trivial preferences; Neglecting development and refinement of the mind; Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do." ~ Cicero

28.  "Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum. (To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.)" ~ Cicero

29.  "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." - Leo Tolstoy

30.  "The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit." ~ Nelson Henderson