Sunday, June 22, 2014

Thoughts for July 2014


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  1.  "What country ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." ~ Thomas Jefferson

  2.  "The line between good and evil does not lie between 'us' and 'them,' between the West and the rest, between Left and Right, between rich and poor. That fateful line runs down the middle of each of us, every human society, every individual. This is not to say that all humans, and all societies, are equally good or bad; far from it. Merely that we are all infected and that all easy attempts to see the problem in terms of 'us' and 'them' are fatally flawed."
~ N. T. Wright

  3.  "You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do." - Eleanor Roosevelt

  4.  "Our popular Government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have already settled - the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains - its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it. It is now for them to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion; that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets, and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided there can be no successful appeal back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal except to ballots themselves at succeeding elections. Such will be a great lesson of peace, teaching men that what they can not take by an election neither can they take it by a war; teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war." ~ Abraham Lincoln, Special Session Message, July 4, 1861

  5.  "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." ~ Benjamin Franklin

  6.  "No compromise on the main purpose; no peace till victory; no pact with unrepentant wrong -- that is the Declaration of July 4th, 1918." - Winston Churchill, speaking at a joint Anglo-American rally in Westminster, July 4, 1918, against calls for a negotiated truce with Germany.

  7.  "The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change and the realist adjusts the sails." ~ William Arthur Ward

  8.  "Before borrowing money from a friend, decide which you need more." ~ unknown

  9.  "The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." - Socrates

10.  "It is not an ad hominem attack to see if the source of the information we’re considering has credibility or expertise in the field. Anybody could be right or wrong about anything, but the odds are better with a credible, experienced expert." ~ Craig Good

11.  "Money poisons you when you've got it, and starves you when you haven't." ~ D.H. Lawrence

12.  "Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip." – Winston Churchill

13.  "Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it." - Rene Descartes

14.  "Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation. Your character is what you really are while your reputation is merely what others think you are." - John Wooden

15.  "He who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors." ~ Thomas Jefferson

16.  "Truth is generally the best vindication against slander." ~ Abraham Lincoln

17.  "And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years." ~ Abraham Lincoln

2nd thought for today: "The truth is that you just keep getting older. You take each stage at a time. If I got to this age it's because I've lived a lot, that's all." ~ Jose Aguinelo dos Santos (World's oldest living man, born 7 Jul 1888)

18.  "Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins." ~ Edith Wharton

19.  "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." ~ Richard Feynman

20.  "Sometimes recognizing a lie is simple. If you offer reiki, homeopathy, acupuncture or craniosacral therapy to treat any disease you are lying to your patients and almost certainly to yourself, as these therapies are not based on reality and do nothing." ~ Dr. Mark A. Crislip

21.  “Most Americans do not think of liberty and freedom as a set of texts, or a source of controversies or a sequence of controversies or a system of abstractions. They understand these ideas in another way, as inherited values that they have learned early in life and deeply believe." ~ David Hackett

22.  "In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity." ~ Albert Einstein

23.  "Talk is cheap, except when Congress does it." ~ Cullen Hightower

24.  "This loathsome term [Islamophobia] is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliche conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics." ~ Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, a former member of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT)

25.  "This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take." ~ Thomas Jefferson

26.  "Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste." ~ Emily Bronté

27.  "Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they’ve got none to spend. That’s our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out." ~ D.H. Lawrence

28.  "The price of wisdom is eternal thought." ~ Frank Birch

29.  "Keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final." ~ Roger Babson

30.  "Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power." ~ Seneca

31.  "Cependant, qui sait? La terre a des limites, mais la bêtise humaine est infinie!" = "But who knows? The earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is infinite!" ~ Gustave Flaubert


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