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