Thoughts for April 2015

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  1.  "In order to have a society in which public issues can be openly and vigorously debated, it is not necessary to allow the brutalization of innocent victims." ~ Samuel Alito, Dissenting, Snyder v. Phelps, 131 S. Ct. 1207, 1229 (2011)

  2.  "If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way." ~ Émile Zola

  3.  "Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old." ~ Washington Irving

  4.  "We must be something in order to do something, but we must also do something in order to be something. The best rule, I think, is this: If we find it hard to do good, then let us try to be good. If, on the other hand, we find it hard to be good, then let us try to do good. Being leads to doing, doing leads to being. Yet below both as their common root is faith, — faith in God, in man, in ourselves, in the eternal superiority of right over wrong, truth over error, good over evil, love over all selfishness and all sin." ~ James Freeman Clarke

  5.  "How could you not wish to see what tomorrow brings? How could you not want to feel the warmth of the sun on your skin, to eat ice cream in the Piazza Navona, to watch the children throwing coins into the fountain?" ~ Anthony Horowitz

  6.  "Nature didn't tell me 'Don't be poor;' and certainly didn't say: 'Get rich;' but she did shout: 'Always be independent!'" ~ Nicolas Chamfort

  7.  "I call that mind free, which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from heaven. I call that mind free, which sets no bounds to its love, which is not imprisoned in itself or in a sect, which recognises in all human beings the image of God and the rights of his children, which delights in virtue and sympathizes with suffering wherever they are seen, which conquers pride, anger, and sloth, and offers itself up a willing victim to the cause of mankind." ~ William Ellery Channing

  8.  "In our democratic society, the library stands for hope, for learning, for progress, for literacy, for self-improvement and for civic engagement. The library is a symbol of opportunity, citizenship, equality, freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and hence, is a symbol for democracy itself." ~ Vartan Gregorian

  9.  "Our sense of worth, of well-being, even our sanity depends upon our remembering. But, alas, our sense of worth, our well-being, our sanity also depend upon our forgetting." ~ Joyce Appleby

10.  "They to whom a boy comes asking, Who am I, and what am I to be? have need of ever so much care. Each word in answer may prove to the after-life what each finger-touch of the artist is to the clay he is modelling." ~ Lew Wallace

11.  "The most ominous spirit of our times, as it seems to me, is the indication of the growth of an intolerant spirit. It is the more dangerous when armed, as it usually is, with sincere conviction. It is a spirit whose wrath must be turned away by the soft answers of a sweet reasonableness. It can be exorcised only by invoking the Genius which watched over our infancy and has guided our development— a good Genius— still potent let us believe — the American spirit of civil and religious liberty. Our institutions were not devised to bring about uniformity of opinion; if they had we might well abandon hope. It is important to remember, as has well been said, 'the essential characteristic of true liberty is that under its shelter many different types of life and character and opinion and belief can develop unmolested and unobstructed.'" ~ Charles Evans Hughes: Speech to the American Bar Association (2 September 1925)

12.  "Historically, anything that gets information to people is good for the world. The most important human being who ever lived, if you want to leave out religious figures, would be Johannes Gutenberg... that's when the liberation of human thought happened, because people could read the thoughts of people across the world, and have thoughts of their own, and publish them and spread information around. Anything that gets information to people is good. America has prospered because we're the most information-friendly society in the world." ~ Tom Clancy

13.  "It is common talk that every individual is entitled to economic security. The only animals and birds I know that have economic security are those that have been domesticated--and the economic security they have is controlled by the barbed-wire fence, the butcher's knife and the desire of others. They are milked, skinned, egged or eaten up by their protectors." ~ Ray Lyman Wilbur

14.  "The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves." ~ Arnold J. Toynbee

15.  "Worrying is carrying tomorrow's load with today's strength- carrying two days at once. It is moving into tomorrow ahead of time. Worrying doesn't empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength." ~ Corrie ten Boom

16.  "I think we must reflect more on what democracy in the exercise of authority would mean. Is truth determined by a majority vote, only for a new 'truth' to be 'discovered' by a new majority tomorrow?" ~ Pope Benedict XVI

17.  "Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion." ~ Thornton Wilder, "The Matchmaker" (1954)

18.  "Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man. She will have nothing from him who will not give her all. She knows that his pretended love serves but to betray. But when once the fierce heat of her quenchless, lustrous eyes has burned into the victim's heart, he will know no other smile but hers." ~ Clarence Darrow

19.  "Wherever was found what was called a paternal government was found a state education. It had been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience was to commence tyranny in the nursery." ~ Benjamin Disraeli

20.  "There is no such word as 'too late,' in the wide world — nay, not in the universe. What! shall we, whose atom of time is but a fragment out of an ever-present eternity — shall we, so long as we live, or even at our life's ending, dare to cry out to the Eternal One, 'It is too late!'" ~ Dinah Maria Craik

21.  "I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior." ~ Hippolyte Taine

22.  "In the past few years, I have made a thrilling discovery ... that until one is over sixty, one can never really learn the secret of living. One can then begin to live, not simply with the intense part of oneself, but with one's entire being." ~ Ellen Glasgow

23.  "Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has to be paid at last." ~ James Anthony Froude

24.  "Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake." ~ Robert Penn Warren

25.  "American traditions and the American ethic require us to be truthful, but the most important reason is that truth is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that." ~ Edward R. Murrow, Speaking as the Director of USIA, in testimony before a Congressional Committee (May 1963)

26.  "If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done." ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

27.  "The free school is the promoter of that intelligence which is to preserve us as a nation. If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason’s and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on one sight, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other." ~ Ulysses S. Grant, Speech to the Society of the Army of Tennessee (1875)

28.  "Laughter is the jam on the toast of life. It adds flavor, keeps it from being too dry, and makes it easier to swallow." ~ Diane Johnson

29.  "The right of the legislature to ordain laws binding on the people, gives them a power to make bad laws. The right of the judge to inflict punishment, gives him both power and opportunity to oppress the innocent; yet none but crazy men will from thence determine that it is best to have neither a legislature nor judges." ~ Oliver Ellsworth, 19 Nov 1787

30.  "There is one inevitable criterion of judgment touching religious faith in doctrinal matters. Can you reduce it to practice? If not, have none of it." ~ Hosea Ballou