Monday, September 28, 2015

Daily Quotations


From "Thought for today" postings on my Facebook timeline
[updated 29 Nov 2015]


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Facebook Collections Index


Thoughts for July 2015


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  1.  "The notion that only what is new and young is beautiful poisons our relationship to the past and to our own future. It keeps us from understanding our roots and the greatest works of our culture and other cultures. It also makes us dread what lies ahead of us and leads many to shirk reality." ~ Walter Kaufmann

  2.  "History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure." ~ Thurgood Marshall

  3.  "We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell." ~ Franz Kafka

  4.  "It was not because it was proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history. Great ideas do not burst upon the world unannounced. They are reached by a gradual development over a length of time usually proportionate to their importance. This is especially true of the principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence. Three very definite propositions were set out in its preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed." ~ Calvin Coolidge, 'Speech on the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence' (1926)

  5.  "The desire for wealth is nearly universal, and none can say it is not laudable, provided the possessor of it accepts its responsibilities, and uses it as a friend to humanity." ~ P. T. Barnum

  6.  "A character standard is far more important than ever a gold standard. The success of all economic systems is still dependent upon both righteous leaders and righteous people. In the last analysis, our national future depends upon our national character-that is, whether it is spiritually or materially minded." ~ Roger Babson

  7.  "How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can't say and what we can show and what we can't show — it's enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak." ~ Robert A. Heinlein, on censorship, in 'The Man Who Sold the Moon' (1950)

  8.  "I believe it is a religious duty to get all the money you can, fairly and honestly; to keep all you can, and to give away all you can." ~ John D. Rockefeller

  9.  "No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say 'Heil' to him, nor will they call him 'Führer' or 'Duce.' But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of 'O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!'" ~ Dorothy Thompson (1935)

10.  "Seeing that a Pilot steers the ship in which we sail, who will never allow us to perish even in the midst of shipwrecks, there is no reason why our minds should be overwhelmed with fear and overcome with weariness." ~ John Calvin

11.  "Individual liberty is individual power, and as the power of a community is a mass compounded of individual powers, the nation which enjoys the most freedom must necessarily be in proportion to its numbers the most powerful nation." ~ John Quincy Adams, Letter to James Lloyd (1 Oct 1822)

12.  "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve." ~ Henry David Thoreau, in "Walden" (1854)

13.  "Democracy is not a mathematical deduction proved once and for all time. Democracy is a just faith fervently held, commitment to be tested again and again in the fiery furnace of history." ~ Jack Kemp

14.  "It was through the Declaration of Independence that we Americans acknowledged the eternal inequality of man. For by it we abolished a cut-and-dried aristocracy. We had seen little men artificially held up in high places, and great men artificially held down in low places, and our own justice-loving hearts abhorred this violence to human nature. Therefore, we decreed that every man should thenceforth have equal liberty to find his own level. By this very decree we acknowledged and gave freedom to true aristocracy, saying, "Let the best man win, whoever he is." Let the best man win! That is America's word. That is true democracy. And true democracy and true aristocracy are one and the same thing. If anybody cannot see this, so much the worse for his eyesight." ~ Owen Wister, "The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains"

15.  "To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious." ~ Walter Benjamin

16.  "In real life, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game." ~ Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac

17.  "Rule I. — Deeply possess your mind with the vast importance of a good judgment, and the rich and inestimable advantage of right reasoning. Review the instances of your own misconduct in life; think seriously with yourselves how many follies and sorrows you had escaped, and how much guilt and misery you had prevented, if from your early years you had but taken due pains to judge aright concerning persons, times, and things. This will awaken you with lively vigour to address yourselves to the work of improving your reasoning powers, and seizing every opportunity and advantage for that end." ~ Isaac Watts, "The Improvement of the Mind" (1821 ed., p. 3)

18.  "To endure is greater than to dare; to tire out hostile fortune; to be daunted by no difficulty; to keep heart when all have lost it; to go through intrigue spotless; and to forgo even ambition when the end is gained — who can say this is not greatness?" ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

19.  "You must aim high, not in what you are going to do at some future date, but in what you are going to make yourself do to-day. Otherwise, working is just a waste of time." ~ Edgar Degas

20.  "Five enemies of peace inhabit with us — avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace." ~ Petrarch, De vita solitaria (1346)

21.  "My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements." ~ Ernest Hemingway

22.  "The Puritan ethic of marriage was first to look not for a partner whom you do love passionately at this moment but rather for one whom you can love steadily as your best friend for life, then to proceed with God’s help to do just that." ~ J.I. Packer

23.  "There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous." ~ Raymond Chandler

24.  "I am not what I ought to be — ah, how imperfect and deficient! I am not what I wish to be — I abhor what is evil, and I would cleave to what is good! I am not what I hope to be — soon, soon shall I put off mortality, and with mortality all sin and imperfection. Yet, though I am not what I ought to be, nor what I wish to be, nor what I hope to be, I can truly say, I am not what I once was; a slave to sin and Satan; and I can heartily join with the apostle, and acknowledge, "By the grace of God I am what I am."" ~ John Newton

25.  "Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity." ~ Eric Hoffer

26.  "We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it." ~ George Bernard Shaw

27.  "Logically the Neo-Pagan should get rid of the institution of marriage altogether; but the very nature of human society, which is built up of cells each of which is a family, and the very nature of human generation, forbid such an extreme. Children must be brought up and acknowledged and sheltered, and the very nature of human affection, whereby there is the bond of affection between the parent and the child, and the child is not of one parent but of both, will compel the Neo-Pagan to modify what might be his logical conclusion of free love and support some simulacrum of the institution of marriage." ~ Hilaire Belloc

28.  "The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato. Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them." ~ Sir Karl Raimund Popper

29.  "Not to oppose error is to approve it; and not to defend truth is to suppress it, and, indeed, to neglect to confound evil men - when we can do it - is no less a sin than to encourage them." ~ Pope St. Felix III (d. 492)

30.  "You will find men who want to be carried on the shoulders of others, who think that the world owes them a living. They don't seem to see that we must all lift together and pull together." ~ Henry Ford  [As quoted in Wisdom & Inspiration for the Spirit and Soul (2004) by Nancy Toussaint, p. 85]

31.  "If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals." ~ J.K. Rowling, 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire'



Thoughts for August 2015


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  1.  "It is — or seems to be — a wise sort of thing, to realise that all that happens to a man in this life is only by way of joke, especially his misfortunes, if he have them. And it is also worth bearing in mind, that the joke is passed round pretty liberally & impartially, so that not very many are entitled to fancy that they in particular are getting the worst of it." ~ Herman Melville, Letter to Samuel Savage (24 Aug 1851)

  2.  "True democracy consists not in lowering the standard but in giving everybody, so far as possible, a chance of measuring up to the standard." ~ Irving Babbitt

  3.  "If I did not believe that our work was done in the faith and hope that at some day, it may be a million years hence, the Kingdom of God will spread over the whole world, I would have no hope, I could do no work, and I would give my office over this morning to anyone who would take it." ~ Stanley Baldwin

  4.  "If a person's religious ideas correspond not with your own, love him nevertheless. How different would yours have been, had the chance of birth placed you in Tartary or India!"
 ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

  5.  "If I did not believe that our work was done in the faith and hope that at some day, it may be a million years hence, the Kingdom of God will spread over the whole world, I would have no hope, I could do no work, and I would give my office over this morning to anyone who would take it." ~ Stanley Baldwin

  6.  "Good God, what a brute man becomes when ignorant and oppressed. Oh Liberty! What horrors are committed in thy name! May every virtuous revolutionist remember the horrors of Wexford!" ~ Daniel O'Connell

  7.  "We never can have a true view of man unless we have a love for him. Civilisation must be judged and prized, not by the amount of power it has developed, but by how much it has evolved and given expression to, by its laws and institutions, the love of humanity." ~ Rabindranath Tagore

  8.  "A man who governs his passions is master of his world. We must either command them or be enslaved by them. It is better to be the hammer than the anvil." ~ St. Dominic de Guzman

  9.  "Happy the man, and happy he alone,
      He who can call today his own;
      He who, secure within, can say,
      Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today."

 ~ John Dryden, Imitation of Horace (1685)

10.  "About the time we can make the ends meet, somebody moves the ends."
 ~ Herbert Hoover, Quoted in obituaries (20 Oct 1964)

11.  "The vast possibilities of our great future will become realities only if we make ourselves responsible for that future." ~ Gifford Pinchot

12.  "You are old, Father William the young man cried,
      The few locks which are left you are grey;
      You are hale, Father William, a hearty old man,
      Now tell me the reason, I pray.

      In the days of my youth, Father William replied,
      I remember’d that youth would fly fast,
      And abused not my health and my vigour at first,
      That I never might need them at last.

      You are old, Father William, the young man cried,
      And pleasures with youth pass away;
      And yet you lament not the days that are gone,
      Now tell me the reason, I pray.

      In the days of my youth, Father William replied,
      I remember’d that youth could not last;
      I thought of the future, whatever I did,
      That I never might grieve for the past.

      You are old, Father William, the young man cried,
      And life must be hastening away;
      You are cheerful, and love to converse upon death,
      Now tell me the reason, I pray.

      I am cheerful, young man, Father William replied,
      Let the cause thy attention engage;
      In the days of my youth I remember’d my God!
      And He hath not forgotten my age."

 ~ Robert Southey, 'The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them' (1799)

13.  "It is not quite the same when we are seventy-two as when we are twenty-seven; still I am glad of what is left, and wish we might both hold out till the victory we have sought is won, but all the same the victory is coming. In the aftertime the world will be the better for it." ~ Lucy Stone, Letter to Susan B. Anthony (1891)

14.  "It isn't enough to love people because they're good to you, or because in some way or other you're going to get something by it. We have to love because we love loving."
 ~ John Galsworthy, 'A Bit O' Love' (1915)

"Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good."
 ~ C.S. Lewis, 'The Weight of Glory'

15.  "True love's the gift which God has given
      To man alone beneath the heaven:
      It is not fantasy's hot fire,
      Whose wishes, soon as granted, fly;
      It liveth not in fierce desire,
      With dead desire it doth not die;
      It is the secret sympathy,
      The silver link, the silken tie,
      Which heart to heart, and mind to mind
      In body and in soul can bind."

 ~ Sir Walter Scott, 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel,' Canto V, stanza 13 (1805)

      "Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
      Who never to himself hath said,
      This is my own, my native land!
      Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
      As home his footsteps he hath turn'd,
      From wandering on a foreign strand!
      If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
      For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
      High though his titles, proud his name,
      Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
      Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
      The wretch, concentred all in self,
      Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
      And, doubly dying, shall go down
      To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
      Unwept, unhonor'd, and unsung."

 ~ Sir Walter Scott, 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel,' Canto VI, stanza 1 (1805)

"Recollect that the Almighty, who gave the dog to be companion of our pleasures and our toils, hath invested him with a nature noble and incapable of deceit."
 ~ Sir Walter Scott, 'The Talisman,' Ch. 24 (1825)

16.  "I am a Canadian, a free Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, free to choose those who shall govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind." ~ John Diefenbaker, 1 Jul 1960

17.  "I am at liberty to vote as my conscience and judgment dictates to be right, without the yoke of any party on me, or the driver at my heels, with his whip in hand, commanding me to ge-wo-haw, just at his pleasure. Look at my arms, you will find no party hand-cuff on them!" ~ David Crockett (1834)

18.  "When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of Hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay." ~ Brian Aldiss, 1977

19.  "A feeling heart is a blessing that no one, who has it, would be without; and it is a moral security of innocence; since the heart that is able to partake of the distress of another, cannot wilfully give it." ~ Samuel Richardson (1754)

20.  "The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." ~ Winston Churchill, Speech to the House of Commons, 20 August 1940 [75 years ago today]

21.  "You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working ; and just so you learn to love God and man by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves." ~ Saint Francis de Sales

22.  "People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better." ~ Ray Bradbury

23.  "You must pursue facts for their own sake, but penetrated with a vivid sense of the problems of your own time. This is not a principle of perversion, but a principle of selection. You must have some principle of selection, and you could not have a better one than to pay special attention to the history of the social problems which are agitating the world now, for you may be sure that they are problems not of temporary but of lasting importance." ~ Arnold Toynbee, 'Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England' (1884)

24.  "There is what I call the American idea. I so name it, because it seems to me to lie at the basis of all our truly original, distinctive, and American institutions. It is itself a complex idea, composed of three subordinate and more simple ideas, namely: The idea that all men have unalienable rights; that in respect thereof, all men are created equal; and that government is to be established and sustained for the purpose of giving every man an opportunity for the enjoyment and development of all these unalienable rights. This idea demands, as the proximate organization thereof, a democracy, that is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government after the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness' sake, I will call it the idea of Freedom." ~ Theodore Parker, 'The American Idea,' a speech at New England Anti-Slavery Convention, Boston (29 May 1850)

25.  "The agricultural population, says Cato, produces the bravest men, the most valiant soldiers, and a class of citizens the least given of all to evil designs." ~ Pliny the Elder (b. AD 23; d. 25 Aug AD 79), "Naturalis Historia," Book XVIII, sec. 26

26.  "As long as a journalist tells the truth, in conscience and fairness, it is not his job to worry about consequences. The truth is never as dangerous as a lie in the long run. I truly believe the truth sets men free." ~ Benjamin Bradlee, Letter dated May 30, 1973

27.  "In each generation, with toil and tears, we have had to earn our heritage again. If we fail now, we shall have forgotten in abundance what we learned in hardship: that democracy rests on faith, that freedom asks more than it gives, and that the judgment of God is harshest on those who are most favored. If we succeed, it will not be because of what we have, but it will be because of what we are; not because of what we own, but, rather because of what we believe. For we are a nation of believers. Underneath the clamor of building and the rush of our day's pursuits, we are believers in justice and liberty and union, and in our own Union. We believe that every man must someday be free. And we believe in ourselves." ~ Lyndon Baines Johnson, Inaugural Address (20 January 1965)

28.  "When young, one is confident to be able to build palaces for mankind, but when the time comes one has one's hands full just to be able to remove their trash." ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1780

29.  "False and doubtful positions, relied upon as unquestionable maxims, keep those who build on them in the dark from truth. Such are usually the prejudices imbibed from education, party, reverence, fashion, interest, et cetera." ~ John Locke (1689)

30.  "Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place be afforded: it can give form to dark shapeless substances but cannot bring into being the substance itself." ~ Mary Shelley, Introduction to the 1831 edition of
Frankenstein

31.  "Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there." ~ Arthur Godfrey


Thoughts for September 2015


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  1.  "Men are capable of making great sacrifices, who are not willing to make the lesser ones, on which so much of the happiness of life depends. The great sacrifices are seldom called for, but the minor ones are in daily requisition; and the making them with cheerfulness and grace enhances their value." ~ Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington: quoted by Byron in A Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron with the Countess of Blessington (1834)

  2.  "If thinking men are few, they are for that reason all the more powerful. Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power." ~ Henry George

  3.  "Administrative purpose usually outruns the facts. Indeed the administrative official's ardor for facts usually begins when he wants to change the facts!" ~ Mary Parker Follett, 'Creative Experience' (1924)

  4.  "If reading becomes a bore, mental death is on the way. Children taught to read by tedious mechanical means rapidly learn to skim over the dull text without bothering to delve into its implications — which in time will make them prey to propaganda and to assertions based on scanty evidence, or none." ~ Joan Aiken, 'The Way to Write for Children' (1982

  5.  "Irrationality is dangerous, perhaps the most dangerous force stalking through the world today." ~ Frank Yerby

"Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win." ~ Jonathan Kozol

  6.  "Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights." ~ Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, 'Declaration of the Rights of Man' (1789)

  7.  "Animals do not betray; they do not exploit; they do not oppress; they do not enslave; they do not sin. They have their being, and their being is honest, and who can say this of man?" ~ Taylor Caldwell, 'Great Lion of God' (1970)

  8.  "The mistake a lot of politicians make is forgetting they've been appointed and thinking they've been anointed." ~ Claude Pepper

  9.  "There can be only one permanent revolution — a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man. How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself." ~ Leo Tolstoy, "Three Methods Of Reform"

"Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source." ~ Leo Tolstoy, "War and Peace"

10.  "It is all explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn't give enough." ~ Cyril Connolly

11.  "You can't appreciate home till you've left it, money till it's spent, your wife until she's joined a woman's club, nor Old Glory till you see it hanging on a broomstick on a shanty of a consul in a foreign town." ~ O. Henry, "The Fourth in Salvador" in "Roads of Destiny" (1909)

12.  "Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle — a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism." ~ Henry Louis Mencken

13.  "We plan, we toil, we suffer — in the hope of what? A camel-load of idol's eyes? The title deeds of Radio City? The empire of Asia? A trip to the moon? No, no, no, no. Simply to wake up just in time to smell coffee and bacon and eggs. And, again I cry, how rarely it happens! But when it does happen — then what a moment, what a morning, what a delight!" ~ J. B. Priestley

14.  "A 'consultant' is more often than not a person brought in to find out what has gone wrong, by the people who made it go wrong, in the comfortable expectation that he will not bite the hand that feeds him by placing the blame where it belongs." ~ Sydney J. Harris, 'Pieces of Eight' (1982)

15.  "Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race." ~ William Howard Taft, 'Popular Government: Its Essence, Its Permanence and Its Perils' (1913)

16.  "It is the modest, not the presumptuous, inquirer who makes a real and safe progress in the discovery of divine truths. One follows Nature and Nature's God; that is, he follows God in his works and in his word." ~ Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, letter to Alexander Pope

17.  "One thing I am convinced more and more is true and that is this: the only way to be truly happy is to make others happy. When you realize that and take advantage of the fact, everything is made perfect." ~ William Carlos Williams, letter to his mother from college (12 Feb 1904)

18.  "The Liberals are the flying saucers of politics. No one can make head nor tail of them and they never are seen twice in the same place." ~ John Diefenbaker

19.  "Legislators who are of even average intelligence stand out among their colleagues.... A cultured college president has become as much a rarity as a literate newspaper publisher. A financier interested in economics is as exceptional as a labor leader interested in the labor movement. For the most part our leaders are merely following out in front; they [only] marshal us in the way that we are going." ~ Bergen Evans

20.  "Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters." ~ Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check (1919)

21.  "The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do." ~ Barbara Brown Taylor, 'An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith' (2010)

22.  "Cunning is the dark sanctuary of incapacity. Every man can be cunning if he pleases, by simulation, dissimulation, and in short by lying. But that character is universally despised and detested, and justly too; no truly great man was ever cunning." ~ Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, letter to his godson and heir (ca. 1765)

23.  "Free institutions are not the property of any majority. They do not confer upon majorities unlimited powers. The rights of the majority are limited rights. They are limited not only by the constitutional guarantees but by the moral principle implied in those guarantees. That principle is that men may not use the facilities of liberty to impair them. No man may invoke a right in order to destroy it." ~ Walter Lippmann

24.  "Old friends are the great blessings of one's latter years. Half a word conveys one's meaning. They have memory of the same events, and have the same mode of thinking. I have young relations that may grow upon me, for my nature is affectionate, but can they grow old friends? My age forbids that. Still less can they grow companions. Is it friendship to explain half one says? One must relate the history of one's memory and ideas; and what is that to the young but old stories?" ~ Horace Walpole (1717-1797)

25.  "If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green." ~ William Faulkner, interview with Jean Stein in 'Paris Review' (Spring 1956)

26.  "Without free speech no search for Truth is possible; without free speech no discovery of Truth is useful; without free speech progress is checked, and the nations no longer march forward towards the nobler life which the future holds for man. Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day; the denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race." ~ Charles Bradlaugh, Speech at Hall of Science c.1880

27.  "A lively, disinterested, persistent looking for truth is extraordinarily rare. Action and faith enslave thought, both of them in order not to be troubled or inconvenienced by reflection, criticism or doubt." ~ Henri-Frédéric Amiel

28.  "The capacity of the human mind to resist knowledge is nowhere more painfully illustrated than in the postulate laid down by average minds that home is always to be just what it is now — forgetting that in no two consecutive generations has it remained the same." ~ Frances Willard

29.  "Liberty is one of the most precious gifts heaven has bestowed upon Man. No treasures the earth contains or the sea conceals can be compared to it. For liberty one can rightfully risk one's life." ~ Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)

30.  "As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame." ~ Elie Wiesel, Nobel acceptence speech (10 December 1986)

"Terrorism must be outlawed by all civilized nations — not explained or rationalized, but fought and eradicated. Nothing can, nothing will justify the murder of innocent people and helpless children." ~ Elie Wiesel, 'Hope, Despair, and Memory', Nobel Lecture (11 December 1986)


Thoughts for October 2015


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  1.  "Our attitude toward our own culture has recently been characterized by two qualities, braggadocio and petulance. Braggadocio — empty boasting of American power, American virtue, American know-how — has dominated our foreign relations now for some decades. Here at home — within the family, so to speak — our attitude to our culture expresses a superficially different spirit, the spirit of petulance. Never before, perhaps, has a culture been so fragmented into groups, each full of its own virtue, each annoyed and irritated at the others." ~ Daniel J. Boorstin

"A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It is a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity." ~ Jimmy Carter

  2.  "The seven blunders that human society commits and cause all the violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principles." ~ Mahatma Gandhi, Young India (1925)

"An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it. Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self sustained." ~ Mahatma Gandhi, Young India (1927)

  3.  "The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force." ~ George Bancroft, 'Literary and Historical Miscellanies' (1855)

  4.  "Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance.
        Where there is patience and humility, there is neither anger nor vexation.
        Where there is poverty and joy, there is neither greed nor avarice.
        Where there is peace and meditation, there is neither anxiety nor doubt."
 ~ St. Francis of Assisi, Counsels, Admonition 27.

  5.  "A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence skepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone." ~ Denis Diderot, 'Pensées Philosophiques' (1746)

  6.  "It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power." ~ David Brin

  7.  "Creeds and causal systems have argued with each other for millennia, and even so we and our ancestors have managed to live in a world of differing opinions. Philosophical disputes don't often affect the price of fish or wine." ~ Elizabeth Janeway, 'Improper Behavior' (1987)

"Sometimes you want to whisper in God's ear, 'God, we know you are in charge, but why don't you make it slightly more obvious?'" ~ Desmond Tutu, University of Michigan Wallenberg Lecture (29 October 2008)

  8.  "America's greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive." ~ John W. Gardner

"An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water." ~ John W. Gardner, 'Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too?' (1961)

"Where human institutions are concerned, love without criticism brings stagnation and criticism without love brings destruction." ~ John W. Gardner

  9.  "Early youth is a baffling time. The present moment is nice but it does not last. Living in it is like waiting in a junction town for the morning limited; the junction may be interesting but some day you will have to leave it and you do not know where the limited will take you. Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made. In this respect early youth is exactly like old age; it is a time of waiting before a big trip to an unknown destination. The chief difference is that youth waits for the morning limited and age waits for the night train." ~ Bruce Catton, 'Waiting for the Morning Train'

10.  "I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colours richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is content. " ~ Lin Yutang, 'My Country and My People' (1936)

11.  "A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt, 'You Learn by Living' (1960)

12.  "My experience of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them, or indisposed me to serve them; nor in spite of failures, which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge; or of the present aspect of affairs; do I despair of the future. The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow, and our desires so impatient; the work of progress is so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope." ~ Robert E. Lee, Letter to Lieutenant Colonel Charles Marshall (September 1870)

13.  "No theory of government was ever given a fairer test or a more prolonged experiment in a democratic country than democratic socialism received in Britain. Yet it was a miserable failure in every respect. Far from reversing the slow relative decline of Britain vis-à-vis its main industrial competitors, it accelerated it. We fell further behind them, until by 1979 we were widely dismissed as 'the sick man of Europe'...To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukaemia with leeches." ~ Margaret Thatcher, 'The Downing Street Years' (1993)

"I should therefore prefer to restrict my guidelines to the following: Don't believe that military interventions, no matter how morally justified, can succeed without clear military goals; Don't fall into the trap of imagining that the West can remake societies; Don't take public opinion for granted – but don't either underrate the degree to which good people will endure sacrifices for a worthwhile cause; Don't allow tyrants and aggressors to get away with it; And when you fight – fight to win."
~ Margaret Thatcher, 'Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World' (2002)

14.  "If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech at fourth annual Republican Women's National Conference (6 March 1956)

"People talk about the middle of the road as though it were unacceptable. Actually, all human problems, excepting morals, come into the gray areas. Things are not all black and white. There have to be compromises. The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower, a 1963 remark quoted by William Safire

"A good End cannot sanctifie evil Means; nor must we ever do Evil, that Good may come of it. Some Folks think they may Scold, Rail, Hate, Rob and Kill too; so it be but for God's sake. But nothing in us unlike him, can please him." ~ William Penn, 'Fruits of Solitude' (1693)

15.  "Let us by all means teach black history, African history, women's history, Hispanic history, Asian history. But let us teach them as history, not as filiopietistic commemoration. The purpose of history is to promote not group self-esteem, but understanding of the world and the past, dispassionate analysis, judgment, and perspective, respect for divergent cultures and traditions, and unflinching protection for those unifying ideas of tolerance, democracy, and human rights that make free historical inquiry possible." ~ Arthur M Schlesinger Jr, 'The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society' (1993)

"In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have." ~ Lee Iacocca

""The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly. " ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 'The Dawn of Day' (1903)

"The very word "Christianity" is a misunderstanding — in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross." ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 'The Antichrist' (1888)

16.  "Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive." ~ Noah Webster

"Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order, to efficiency of operation, to scientific advancement and the like." ~ William O. Douglas, 'Points of Rebellion' (1969)

17.  "Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied." ~ Arthur Miller

18.  "The American Dream, that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class." ~ James Truslow Adams, 'The Epic of America' (1931)

"One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils of the world can be cured by legislation." ~ Thomas Brackett Reed

"One, with God, is always a majority, but many a martyr has been burned at the stake while the votes were being counted." ~ Thomas Brackett Reed

"It is a very lonely life that a man leads, who becomes aware of truths before their times." ~ Thomas Brackett Reed

19.  "America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War." ~ John le Carre, 'The United States of America Has Gone Mad' (2003)

"The whole anti-terror threat has been terribly useful to politicians. It has been a way of manipulating us, it has been a way of giving police excessive powers, which they then misuse. I think we've got to draw back from that." ~ John le Carre (2010)

20.  "Trust your hunches... Hunches are usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level. Warning! Do not confuse your hunches with wishful thinking. This is the road to disaster." ~ Dr. Joyce Brothers

"Love comes when manipulation stops; when you think more about the other person than about his or her reactions to you. When you dare to reveal yourself fully. When you dare to be vulnerable." ~ Dr. Joyce Brothers

"Being taken for granted can be a compliment. It means that you've become a comfortable, trusted element in another person's life." ~ Dr. Joyce Brothers

"The world at large does not judge us by who we are and what we know; it judges us by what we have." ~ Dr. Joyce Brothers

21.  "The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are one, Security to possessors; two, facility to acquirers; and three, hope to all." ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process." ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

22.  "All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility." ~ Doris Lessing, 'Salon' interview (11 Nov 1997)

"The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border? There is a brotherhood among all men. This must be recognized if life is to remain. We must learn the love of man." ~ Pablo Casals

23.  "Democracy is the eagle on the back of a dollar bill, with 13 arrows in one claw, 13 leaves on a branch, 13 tail feathers, and 13 stars over its head -- this signifies that when the white man came to this country, it was bad luck for the Indians, bad luck for the trees, bad luck for the wildlife, and lights out for the American eagle." ~ Johnny Carson

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows: You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. ... You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know." ~ Michael Crichton

24.  "The gift of liberty is like that of a horse, handsome, strong and high-spirited. In some it arouses a wish to ride; in many others, on the contrary, it increases the urge to walk." ~ Massimo d'Azeglio

"There are persons who constantly clamor. They complain of oppression, speculation, and pernicious influence of wealth. They cry out loudly against all banks and corporations, and a means by which small capitalists become united in order to produce important and beneficial results. They carry on mad hostility against all established institutions. They would choke the fountain of industry and dry all streams." ~ Daniel Webster, Speech in the Senate (March 12, 1838)

"And now, Mr. President, instead of speaking of the possibility or utility of secession, instead of dwelling in these caverns of darkness, instead of groping with those ideas so full of all that is horrid and horrible, let us come out into the light of day; let us enjoy the fresh airs of Liberty and Union; let us cherish those hopes which belong to us; let us devote ourselves to those great objects that are fit for our consideration and our action; let us raise our conceptions to the magnitude and the importance of the duties that devolve upon us; let our comprehension be as broad as the country for which we act, our aspirations as high as its certain destiny; let us not be pygmies in a case that calls for men. Never did there devolve on any generation of men higher trusts than now devolve upon us for the preservation of this constitution, and the harmony and peace of all who are destined to live under it. Let us make our generation one of the strongest and the brightest links in that golden chain which is destined, I fondly believe, to grapple the people of all the states to this constitution, for ages to come." ~ Daniel Webster, Speech to the Senate In reference to the Slavery Compromise (7 March 1850)

25.  "Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self." ~ Max Stirner

"The Bill of Rights was not written to protect governments from trouble. It was written precisely to give the people the constitutional means to cause trouble for governments they no longer trusted." ~ Henry Steele Commager, Letter to the Editor, in The New York Times (1971)

"The justification and the purpose of freedom of speech is not to indulge those who want to speak their minds. It is to prevent error and discover truth. There may be other ways of detecting error and discovering truth than that of free discussion, but so far we have not found them." ~ Henry Steele Commager

"Whether history will judge this war to be different or not we cannot say. But this we can say with certainty: A government and a society that silences those who dissent is one that has lost its way." ~ Henry Steele Commager, on Vietnam (1966)

26.  "It's easy to be independent when you've got money. But to be independent when you haven't got a thing, that's the Lord's test." ~ Mahalia Jackson

"The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of trolls." ~ Robert Farrar Capon

"No nation ancient or modern ever lost the liberty of freely speaking, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves." ~ John Peter Zenger

27.  "Occasionally the rumor went about that the United States immigration authorities had set up headquarters in the San Francisco or Sacramento Chinatown to urge wetbacks and stowaways, anybody here on fake papers, to come to the city and get their files straightened out. The immigrants discussed whether or not to turn themselves in. 'We might as well,' somebody would say. 'Then we'd have our citizenship for real.' 'Don't be a fool,' somebody else would say. 'It's a trap. You go in there saying you want to straighten out your papers, they'll deport you.'" ~ Maxine Hong Kingston, 'The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts' (1976)

"Manners are made up of trivialities of deportment which can be easily learned if one does not happen to know them; manner is personality — the outward manifestation of one's innate character and attitude toward life.... Etiquette must, if it is to be of more than trifling use, include ethics as well as manners. Certainly what one is, is of far greater importance than what one appears to be." ~ Emily Post

28.  "If you keep thinking about what you want to do or what you hope will happen, you don't do it, and it won't happen." ~ Desiderius Erasmus

"A constant element of enjoyment must be mingled with our studies, so that we think of learning as a game rather than a form of drudgery, for no activity can be continued for long if it does not to some extent afford pleasure to the participant." ~ Desiderius Erasmus, letter to Christian Northoff (1497)

"A good prince will tax as lightly as possible those commodities which are used by the poorest members of society: grain, bread, beer, wine, clothing, and all other staples without which human life could not exist." ~ Desiderius Erasmus

29.  "My definition of man is "a cooking animal. The beasts have memory, judgment, and all the faculties and passions of our mind, in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook." ~ James Boswell

"The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved." ~ Sir Alfred Ayer, 'The Concept of Freedom' (1990)

30.  "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." ~ John Adams, letter to Abigail Adams (12 May 1780)

"Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make good use of it! If you do not, I shall repent it in Heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it!" ~ John Adams

"Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws." ~ John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson (2 February 1816)

"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." ~ John Adams, letter to John Taylor (15 April 1814)

31.  "If Democracy should fail, it would be because we had been so lacking in self-discipline that our personal problems had taken all our substance and energies, leaving us nothing of value to contribute to the commonwealth. " ~ Margery Wilson, 'The Woman You Want to Be' (1928)

"Those who dumb down the news, trivialize the news with in-studio shouting matches passing for debate, those who tart up the news with celebrity gossip, scandal and sensationalism are playing right into the hands of those that stand to gain the most from the news being seen as irrelevant and trivial and no more or less worth your attention than the next episode of 'American Idol.' [...] I worry that if it becomes no more than a reality show, something that could be scripted and rigged behind the scenes without anyone really getting upset about it, that our freedom of the press will become another one of those constitutionally granted rights that can be watered down and eventually taken away from us." ~ Dan Rather, speech 3 February 2011 at San Antonio College


Thoughts for November 2015


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  1.  "The world is full of fools; and he who would not wish to see one, must not only shut himself up alone, but must also break his mirror." ~ Nicolas Boileau

"Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l'admire." = "A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him." ~ Nicolas Boileau

"A man said to the universe: 'Sir I exist!' 'However,' replied the universe, 'the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.'" ~ Stephen Crane

"An illness is like a journey into a far country; it sifts all one's experience and removes it to a point so remote that it appears like a vision." ~ Sholem Asch

"Every dawn renews the Beginning, and to behold the earth struggling out of the formless void, out of the night, is to witness the act of creation." ~ Sholem Asch

  2.  "Courage! I have shown it for years; think you I shall lose it at the moment when my sufferings are to end?" ~ Marie Antoinette

"America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality." ~ Warren G. Harding, Speech in Boston, MA (24 May 1920)

"There is something inherently wrong, something out of accord with the ideals of representative democracy, when one portion of our citizenship turns its activities to private gain amid defensive war while another is fighting, sacrificing, or dying for national preservation." ~ Warren G. Harding, Inaugural address (4 March 1921).

"By the theory of our Government majorities rule, but this right is not an arbitrary or unlimited one. It is a right to be exercised in subordination to the Constitution and in conformity to it. One great object of the Constitution was to restrain majorities from oppressing minorities or encroaching upon their just rights. Minorities have a right to appeal to the Constitution as a shield against such oppression." ~ James K. Polk, Inaugural Address (4 March 1845)

  3.  "I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it always." ~ Andre Malraux

"Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love, and of thought, which, in the course of centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved." ~ Andre Malraux

  4.  "On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does." ~ Will Rogers

"Too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they don't want, to impress people they don't like." ~ Will Rogers

We are here just for a spell and then pass on. So get a few laughs and do the best you can. Live your life so that whenever you lose it, you are ahead." ~ Will Rogers

"There is one rule that works in every calamity. Be it pestilence, war, or famine, the rich get richer and poor get poorer. The poor even help arrange it." ~ Will Rogers

  5.  "Make no man your idol; for the best man must have faults, and his faults will usually become yours in addition to your own. This is as true in art as an morals." ~ Washington Allston

"Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to benumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals." ~ Ida Tarbell

"Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs." ~ Will Durant

"There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won." ~ Will Durant, 'The Story of Civilization'

  6.  "In spite of all the training you get and precautions you take to keep yourself alive, it's largely a matter of luck that decided whether or not you get killed. It doesn't make any difference who you are, how tough you are, how nice a guy you might be, or how much you may know, if you happen to be at a certain spot at a certain time, you get it." ~ James Jones (author of "From Here to Eternity"), Letter to his brother Jeff from Guadalcanal (28 Jan 1943)

"I'm an American, and always will be. I happen to love that big, awkward, sprawling country very much — and its big, awkward, sprawling people. Anyway, I don't like politics; and I don't make "political gestures," as you call it. I don't even believe in politics. To me, politics is like one of those annoying, and potentially dangerous (but generally just painful) chronic diseases that you just have to put up with in your life if you happen to have contracted it." ~ James Jones, 'The Paris Review' interview (1958)

"Good sense travels on the well-worn paths; genius, never. And that is why the crowd, not altogether without reason, is so ready to treat great men as lunatics." ~ Cesare Lombroso, 'The Man of Genius' (1891)

  7.  "The legacy we leave is not just in our possessions, but in the quality of our lives. The greatest waste in all of our earth, which cannot be recycled or reclaimed, is our waste of the time that God has given us each day." ~ Billy Graham

"I'm somewhat horrified because I don't think the young people today even know what history is. Some of them don't' even study History at school anymore or Geography and they don't know where one place is from another." ~ Joan Sutherland

"Humanity, surely, needs practical men who make the best of their work for the sake of their own interests, without forgetting the general interest. But it also needs dreamers, for whom the unselfish following of a purpose is so imperative that it becomes impossible for them to devote much attention to their own material benefit. No doubt it could be said that these idealists do not deserve riches since they do not have the desire for them. It seems, however, that a society well organized ought to assure to these workers the means for efficient labor, in a life from which material care is excluded so that this life may be freely devoted to the service of scientific research." ~ Marie Curie, 'Pierre Curie' (1923)

"The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of a murderer is blind: and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness." ~ Albert Camus

  8.  "People often say, with pride, 'I'm not interested in politics.' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.' ... If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics." ~ Martha Gellhorn, "White Into Black" in 'Granta' (January 1984)

"After a lifetime of war-watching, I see war as an endemic human disease, and governments are the carriers." ~ Martha Gellhorn, 'The Face of War' (1959)

"All wars are sacred to those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn't make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight?" ~ Margaret Mitchell, 'Gone With the Wind' (1936)

  9.  "Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us - and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along." ~ Carl Sagan

"The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true." ~ Carl Sagan

"What, then, is taste, but those internal powers, active and strong, and feelingly alive to each fine impulse? a discerning sense of decent and sublime, with quick disgust from things deformed, or disarranged, or gross in species? This, nor gems, nor stores of gold, nor purple state, nor culture, can bestow, but God alone when first his sacred hand imprints the secret bias of the soul." ~ Mark Akenside

10.  "Courage is a moral quality; it is not a chance gift of nature like an aptitude for games. It is a cold choice between two alternatives." ~ Charles Wilson, 1st Baron Moran, 'The Anatomy of Courage' (1967)

"Hope, like the gleaming taper's light,
Adorns and cheers our way;
And still, as darker grows the night,
Emits a brighter ray."
~ Oliver Goldsmith, 'The Captivity'

"I was ever of the opinion, that the honest man who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population." ~ Oliver Goldsmith

11.  "The salvation of the common people of every race and of every land from war or servitude must be established on solid foundations and must be guarded by the readiness of all men and women to die rather than submit to tyranny." ~ Winston Churchill, Speech at Zurich University (19 Sep 1946)

"There are three ways that men get what they want; by planning, by working, and by praying. Any great military operation takes careful planning, or thinking. Then you must have well-trained troops to carry it out: that's working. But between the plan and the operation there is always an unknown. That unknown spells defeat or victory, success or failure. It is the reaction of the actors to the ordeal when it actually comes. Some people call that getting the breaks; I call it God. God has His part, or margin in everything, That's where prayer comes in." ~ George S. Patton

"Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains that victory." ~ George S. Patton, 'Cavalry Journal' (1933)

"There is a great deal of talk about loyalty from the bottom to the top. Loyalty from the top down is even more necessary and much less prevalent. One of the most frequently noted characteristics of great men who have remained great is loyalty to their subordinates." ~ George S. Patton, 'War As I Knew It'

"Power always has to be kept in check; power exercised in secret, especially under the cloak of national security, is doubly dangerous." ~ William Proxmire

12.  "What a terrible time this is to be a Christian. The churches have failed and betrayed us, and the ministry preaches hate and murder. If there is a sane and reasoning voice in the Christian church today it is sadly silent." ~ Auguste Rodin (1840-1917)

"There is a continual exchange of ideas between all minds of a generation. Journalists, popular novelists, illustrators, and cartoonists adapt the truths discovered by the powerful intellects for the multitude. It is like a spiritual flood, like a gush that pours into multiple cascades until it forms the great moving sheet of water that stands for the mentality of a period." ~ Auguste Rodin (1840-1917)

"And therefore you must know that you can forfeit the grace and help of God by your willful sinning or negligence, though you cannot, without grace, turn to God. If you will not do what you can, it is just with God to deny you that grace by which you might do more." ~ Richard Baxter, 'A Call to the Unconverted to Turn and Live,' Preface (1658)

"As the fire doth mount upwards, and the needle that is touched with the loadstone still turneth to the north, so the converted soul is inclined to God. Nothing else can satisfy him, nor can he find any content and rest but in his love. In a word, all that are converted do esteem and love God better than all the world; and the heavenly felicity is dearer to them than their fleshly prosperity." ~ Richard Baxter, 'A Call to the Unconverted to Turn and Live,' Sermon I (1658)

13.  "There is no unmixed good in human affairs; the best principles, if pushed to excess, degenerate into fatal vices. Generosity is nearly allied to extravagance; charity itself may lead to ruin; the sternness of justice is but one step removed from the severity of oppression. It is the same in the political world; the tranquillity of despotism resembles the stagnation of the Dead Sea; the fever of innovation the tempests of the ocean. It would seem as if, at particular periods, from causes inscrutable to human wisdom, a universal frenzy seizes mankind; reason, experience, prudence, are alike blinded; and the very classes who are to perish in the storm are the first to raise its fury." ~ Archibald Alison (1757-1839)

"The constitutional right of free speech has been declared to be the same in peace and war. In peace, too, men may differ widely as to what loyalty to our country demands, and an intolerant majority, swayed by passion or by fear, may be prone in the future, as it has been in the past, to stamp as disloyal opinions with which it disagrees." ~ Louis Brandeis

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." ~ Louis Brandeis, 'Olmstead v. United States' (1928)

14.  "Peace is not a relationship of nations. It is a condition of mind brought about by a serenity of soul. Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is also a state of mind. Lasting peace can come only to peaceful people." ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

"The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation and the preservation of vested interests." ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

"No country or people who are slaves to dogma and dogmatic mentality can progress, and unhappily our country and people have become extraordinarily dogmatic and little-minded." ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

15.  "Not even the apparently enlightened principle of the 'greatest good for the greatest number' can excuse indifference to individual suffering. There is no test for progress other than its impact on the individual." ~ Aneurin Bevan, 'In Place of Fear' (1952)

"It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. It is too easy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end." ~ Felix Frankfurter, 'Davis v. United States', 328 U.S. 582, 597 (1946)

"Without a free press there can be no free society. That is axiomatic. However, freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society. The scope and nature of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press are to be viewed and applied in that light." ~ Felix Frankfurter, 'The New York Times' (28 Nov 1954)

16.  "There is a law which decrees that two objects may not occupy the same place at the same time — result: two people cannot see things from the same point of view, and the slightest difference in angle changes the thing seen." ~ Mildred Aldrich

"There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It's not one man's job. It's not one person's job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail — the bravery, even, of the lions." ~ Chinua Achebe, Paris Review interview (Winter 1994)

"The invention of IQ did a great disservice to creativity in education. Individuality, personality, originality, are too precious to be meddled with by amateur psychiatrists whose patterns for a 'wholesome personality' are inevitably their own." ~ Joel Henry Hildebrand

"Is there really someone who, searching for a group of wise and sensitive people to regulate him for his own good, would choose that group of people who constitute the membership of both houses of Congress?" ~ Robert Nozick

17.  "The United States has broken the second rule of war. That is: don't go fighting with your land army on the mainland in Asia. Rule One is, don't march on Moscow. I developed those two rules myself." ~ Bernard Montgomery, Interview, 2 July 1968

"Religion can get on with any sort of astronomy, geology, biology, physics. But it cannot get on with a purposeless and meaningless universe. If the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends, money, fame, art, science, and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center. Hence the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless, spirit of modern man." ~ Walter Terence Stace, 'Man Against Darkness' (1948)

18.  "The road to success is not to be run upon by seven leagued boots. Step by step, little by little, bit by bit - that is the way to wealth, that is the way to wisdom, that is the way to glory." ~ Charles Buxton (1823-1871)

"A miser grows rich by seeming poor; an extravagant man grows poor by seeming rich." ~ William Shenstone (1714-1763)

"I have been through the depths of poverty and sickness. When people ask me what has kept me going through the troubles that come to all of us, I always reply: 'I stood yesterday. I can stand today. And I will not permit myself to think about what might happen tomorrow.'" ~ Dorothy Dix, (1861-1951)

"In all the world there are no people so piteous and forlorn as those who are forced to eat the bitter bread of dependence in their old age, and find how steep are the stairs of another man's house." ~ Dorothy Dix, 'Every-Day Help for Every-Day People' (1926)

19.  "It is legitimate to have one's own point of view and political philosophy. But there are people who make anger, rather than a deeply held belief, the basis of their actions. They do not seem to mind harming society as a whole in the pursuit of their immediate objective. No society can survive if it yields to the demands of frenzy, whether of the few or the many." ~ Indira Gandhi, 'Freedom Is the Starting Point' (1976)

"Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained." ~ James A. Garfield

"I am an advocate of paper money, but that paper money must represent what it professes on its face. I do not wish to hold in my hands the printed lies of the government." ~ James A. Garfield

"Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile." ~ Billy Sunday

"All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource." ~ Peter Drucker

20.  "The best compliment to a child or a friend is the feeling you give him that he has been set free to make his own inquiries, to come to conclusions that are right for him, whether or not they coincide with your own." ~ Alistair Cooke

"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." ~ Nadine Gordimer, 'Censorship and its Aftermath' lecture (June 1990)

"It is not the conscious changes made in their lives by men and women — a new job, a new town, a divorce — which really shape them, like the chapter headings in a biography, but a long, slow mutation of emotion, hidden, all-penetrative; something by which they may be so taken up that the practical outward changes of their lives in the world, noted with surprise, scandal or envy by others, pass almost unnoticed by themselves. This gives a shifting quality to the whole surface of life; decisions made with reason and the tongue may never be made valid by the heart." ~ Nadine Gordimer, 'The Lying Days' (1953)

21.  "Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day." ~ Voltaire

Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives, and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time." ~ Voltaire

"All men would then be necessarily equal, if they were without needs. It is the poverty connected with our species which subordinates one man to another. It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence." ~ Voltaire, "Equality" in 'A Philosophical Dictionary' (1764)

"A multitude of laws in a country is like a great number of physicians, a sign of weakness and malady." ~ Voltaire

22.  "Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first." ~ Charles de Gaulle

"Friendship is the joy, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring all right out as they are, chaff and grain together, confident that a faithful, friendly hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of comfort, blow the rest away." ~ George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

"Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact." ~ George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), 'Impressions of Theophrastus Such' (1879)

"Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat." ~ George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), 'Scenes of Clerical Life' (1857)

23.  "Quemad viejos leños, leed viejos libros, bebed viejos vinos, tened viejos amigos." = "Burn old wood, read old books, drink old wines, have old friends. Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appeared to be best in these four things." ~ Alfonso X of Castile (1221-1284)

"Los que dejan al rey errar a sabiendas, merecen pena como traidores." = "Those who knowingly allow the King to err deserve the same punishment as traitors." ~ Alfonso X of Castile (1221-1284)

"I always considered an idle Life, as a real evil, but, a life of such hurry, such constant hurry, leaves us scarcely a moment for reflection or for the discharge of any other then the most immediate and pressing concerns." ~ Edward Rutledge (1749-1800)

"I have never believed that actual disruption of the Union can occur without blood; and if, through the madness of Northern Abolitionists, that dire calamity must come, the fighting will not be along Mason's and Dixon's line merely. It [will] be within our own borders, in our own streets, between the two classes of citizens to whom I have referred." ~ Franklin Pierce, Letter to Jefferson Davis (6 January 1860)

24.  "There are men — now in power in this country — who do not respect dissent, who cannot cope with turmoil, and who believe that the people of America are ready to support repression as long as it is done with a quiet voice and a business suit." ~ John Lindsay

"Government can't do anything for you except in proportion as it can do something to you." ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

"Time is the most terrible, the most discouraging, the most unconquerable of all obstacles, and one that may exist when no other does." ~ Marie Bashkirtseff (1878)

"The most tyrannical of governments are those which make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts." ~ Baruch Spinoza

"The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak." ~ Baruch Spinoza

25.  "The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: decide what you want." ~ Ben Stein

"Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams.Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in,but with what it is still possible for you to do." ~ Pope John XXIII

"We're mortal - which is to say, we're ignorant, stupid, and sinful - but those are only handicaps. Our pride is that nevertheless, now and then, we do our best. A few times we succeed. What more dare we ask for?" ~ Poul Anderson, 'Ensign Flandry' (1966)

"Keep on thinking. Keep your thinking close to the ground, where it belongs. Don’t ever trade your liberty for another man’s offer to do your thinking and make your mistakes for you." ~ Poul Anderson, 'Brain Wave' (1954)

26.  "Better to trust the man who is frequently in error than the one who is never in doubt." ~ Eric Sevareid

"The bigger the information media, the less courage and freedom they allow. Bigness means weakness." ~ Eric Sevareid

"Education by the State is a contradiction in terms. Intellectual development is only possible to those who have seen through society." ~ Celia Green, 'The Decline and Fall of Science' (1976)

"It is easier to make people appear equally stupid than to make them equally clever, so teaching methods are adopted which make it practically impossible for anyone to learn anything." ~ Celia Green, 'Letters from Exile: Observations on a Culture in Decline' (2004)

27.  "All the lessons of history in four sentences: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars." ~ Charles A. Beard (1874-1948)

"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence." ~ Charles A. Beard (1874-1948)

"In every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, and no matter what parents, the potentiality of the race is born again." ~ James Agee, 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men' (1941)

28.  "If my life is fruitless, it doesn't matter who praises me, and if my life is fruitful, it doesn't matter who criticizes me." ~ John Bunyan (1628-1688)

"The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose." ~ William Blake (1757-1827)

"In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them." ~ Brooks Atkinson (1894-1984)

"People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know." ~ Brooks Atkinson (1894-1984)

"Anyone of my generation who trusts government probably has an I.Q. that would make a good golf score." ~ Rita Mae Brown (b. 1944)

29.  "Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important." ~ C. S. Lewis

I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him." ~ C. S. Lewis

If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will ... then we may take it it is worth paying." ~ C. S. Lewis, 'Mere Christianity' (1952)

"A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in." ~ C. S. Lewis, 'Mere Christianity' (1952)

"Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young." ~ Mary Schmich, (1 June 1997)

30.   "We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder censorship, we call it concern for commercial viability." ~ David Mamet

"The problem is when you try to impose today's standards on people living back then. It's the politically correct thing to do, but it was a different era, a different country then." ~ Dick Clark

"Most Americans have never seen the ignorance, degradation, hunger, sickness, and futility in which many other Americans live. Until a problem reaches their doorsteps, they're not going to understand. They won't become involved in economic or political change until something brings the seriousness of the situation home to them." ~ Shirley Chisholm, 'Unbought and Unbossed' (1970)

"Congress seems drugged and inert most of the time. Even when the problems it ignores build up to crises and erupt in strikes, riots, and demonstrations, it has not moved. Its idea of meeting a problem is to hold hearings or, in extreme cases, to appoint a commission." ~ Shirley Chisholm, 'Unbought and Unbossed' (1970)

"Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race." ~ Jacques Barzun