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)