Thoughts for March 2016

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  1.  "Be content to be what you are, and prefer nothing to it. Neither fear your death's day nor long for it." ~ Martial, 'Epigrams' (ca. 80-104 AD)

"The conqueror is regarded with awe; the wise man commands our respect; but it is only the benevolent man that wins our affection." ~ William Dean Howells (1837-1920)

"All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise." ~ William Dean Howells, 'The Rise of Silas Lapham' (1885)

"All the fundamental concepts which make up the kind of people we are today had their modern conception in the Tudor and Stuart periods. For us, that's the milk in the coconut." ~ Louis Booker Wright (1899-1984)

"At best Americans give but a limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest." ~ Ralph Ellison, 'Shadow and Act' (1964)

"Military cemeteries in every corner of the world are silent testimony to the failure of national leaders to sanctify human life." ~ Yitzhak Rabin


  2.  "A leader is someone who helps improve the lives of other people or improve the system they live under." ~ Sam Houston (1793-1863)

"All new states are invested, more or less, by a class of noisy, second-rate men who are always in favor of rash and extreme measures, But Texas was absolutely overrun by such men." ~ Sam Houston (1793-1863)

"The first law of history is not to dare to utter falsehood; the second is not to fear to speak the truth." ~ Pope Leo XIII (1883)

"Be mindful of this — that to exercise pressure upon the indigent and the destitute for the sake of gain, and to gather one's profit out of the need of another, is condemned by all laws, human and divine. To defraud any one of wages that are his due is a great crime which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven." ~ Pope Leo XIII, 'Rerum Novarum' (Of New Things) (1891)

"From the equality of rights springs identity of our highest interests; you cannot subvert your neighbor's rights without striking a dangerous blow at your own." ~ Carl Schurz (1829-1906)

"Certain people in the United States are driving nails into this structure of our relationship, then cutting off the heads. So the Soviets must use their teeth to pull them out." ~ Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931)

"We had 10 years after the Cold War to build a new world order and yet we squandered them. The United States cannot tolerate anyone acting independently. Every US president has to have a war." ~ Mikhail Gorbachev, interview with The London Daily Telegraph (7 May 2008)


  3.  "Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility." ~ William Godwin, 'Enquiry Concerning Political Justice' (1793)

"If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is strong; but he really punishes me because his argument is weak." ~ William Godwin (1756-1836)

"For birthdays are mere records of time, not registers of distance. They tell me how long I have been on the road, not how far I have travelled." ~ Frank W. Boreham

"Character, courage and competence are the bedrock on which the whole edifice of leadership rests in any profession." ~ Gen. Matthew Ridgway (1895-1993)

"Man is the most dangerous predator on Earth. It is bred in his bones. He has had to fight for a living since time immemorial, and he always will. That’s human nature and it’s not going to change." ~ Gen. Matthew Ridgway(1895-1993)

"Deep in the human nature there is an almost irresistible tendency to concentrate physical and mental energy on attempts at solving problems that seem to be unsolvable." ~ Ragnar Frisch, 'From Utopian Theory to Practical Applications' (1970)

"Fanaticism has been properly described as redoubling one's effort after one's aim has been forgotten, and this definition will serve as a good introduction to the fallacy of technology, which is the conclusion that because a thing can be done it must be done. The means absorb completely, and man becomes blind to the very concept of ends." ~ Richard M. Weaver, 'Ideas have Consequences' (1948)


  4.  "The only good luck many great men ever had was being born with the ability and determination to overcome bad luck." ~ Channing Pollock (1880-1946)

"The best thing I ever learned in life was that things have to be worked for. A lot of people seem to think there is some sort of magic in making a winning football team. There isn't, but there's plenty of work." ~ Knute Rockne (1888-1931)

"First you destroy those who create values. Then you destroy those who know what the values are, and who also know that those destroyed before were in fact the creators of values. But real barbarism begins when no one can any longer judge or know that what he does is barbaric." ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski (1932-2007)

"Even in the winter, in the midst of the storm, the sun is still there. Somewhere above the clouds, it still shines and warms and pulls at the life buried deep inside the brown branches and frozen earth." ~ Gloria Gaither (b. 1942)

"You cannot lead by memo, you cannot lead by shouting, you cannot lead by delegation of your responsibility. You must lead by example." ~ Gen. Charles Krulak, USMC (b. 1942)

"Sun Tzu remains relevant because his basic tenets stand the test of time. They focus on those areas of conflict that are timeless. They do not focus on specific tactics or on specific operational issues. They focus on those things that are key to success in any conflict, to include the business world." ~ Gen. Charles Krulak, USMC (b. 1942)


  5.  "The eternal raison d'etre of America is in its being the "sweet land of liberty". Should a land so dreamed into existence, so degenerate through material prosperity as to become what its European critics, with too much justice, have scornfully renamed it the "Land of the Dollar" — such a development will be one of the sorriest conclusions of history, and the most colossal disillusionment that has ever happened to mankind." ~ Frank Norris (1870-1902)

"The trouble in modern democracy is that men do not approach to leadership 'til they have lost the desire to lead anyone." ~ William Beveridge (1879-1963)

"Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens." ~ William Beveridge (1879-1963)

"The immanence of grace always and everywhere does not make salvation history cease to be history, because history is the acceptance of grace by the historical freedom of human beings and the history of spirit coming ever more to itself in grace." ~ Karl Rahner, 'Meditations on the Sacraments' (1977)

"We should be especially suspicious of interventions that seem both inefficient and inequitable; for example, rent controls in New York or Moscow or Mexico City, or price supports and irrigation subsidies benefiting affluent farmers, or low-interest loans to well-heeled students." ~ James Tobin (1918-2002)


  6.  "Every beauty which is seen here below by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come." ~ Michelangelo (1475-1564)

"Waste no time with revolutions that do not remove the causes of your complaints but simply change the faces of those in charge." ~ Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540)

"If a village is attacked and women and children are killed, the responsibility is not with the soldiers but with the people whose crimes necessitated the attack." ~ Gen. Philip Sheridan (1831-1888)

"Rule 29: Always make your opponent think you know more than you really do." ~ Gen. Philip Sheridan (1831-1888)

"Reduction to poverty brings prayers for peace more surely and more quickly than does the destruction of human life." ~ Gen. Philip Sheridan (1831-1888)

"We are obviously all hurt by inflation. Everybody is hurt by inflation. If you really wanted to examine who percentage-wise is hurt the most in their incomes, it is the Wall Street brokers. I mean their incomes have gone down the most." ~ Alan Greenspan (1974)


  7.  "It is because gold is rare that gilding has been invented, which, without having its solidity, has all its brilliancy. Thus, to replace the kindness we lack, we have devised politeness which has all its appearance." ~ Pierre-Marc-Gaston de Levis (1764-1830)

"To judge of the real importance of an individual, one should think of the effect his death would produce." ~ Pierre-Marc-Gaston de Levis (1764-1830)

"Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine to the mind." ~ Luther Burbank (1901)

"Preconceived notions, dogmas, and all personal prejudice and bias, must be set aside, listening patiently, quietly and reverently to the lessons, one by one, which Mother Nature has to teach, shedding light on that which was before a mystery, so that all who will may see and know." ~ Luther Burbank (1895)

"Succeeding is not really a life experience that does that much good. Failing is a much more sobering and enlightening experience." ~ Michael Eisner (b. 1942)

"Politics? Boring? Politics is history on the wing! What other sphere of human activity calls forth all that is most noble in men's souls, and all that is most base? Or has such excitement? Or more vividly exposes our strengths and weaknesses? Boring? You might as well say that life itself is boring! " ~ Robert Harris, 'Imperium' (2006)


  8.  "An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought." ~ Simon Cameron (1799-1889)

"A politician weakly and amiably in the right is no match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong." ~ Edwin Percy Whipple (1819-1886)

"State interference is an evil, where it cannot be shown to be a good." ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 'The Common Law' (1881)

"Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so." ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 'Natural Law', Harvard Law Review (1918)

"The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas; the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market." ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., dissenting in Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919)

"The most modest and retiring dragon in the world, if he's as big as four cart-horses and covered with blue scales, cannot keep altogether out of the public view. And so in the village tavern of nights the fact that a real live dragon sat brooding in the cave on the Downs was naturally a subject for talk." ~ Kenneth Grahame, 'Dream Days' (1898)

"If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other causes for prejudice by noon." ~ Howard Aiken (1900-1973)

"I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether." ~ Neil Postman (1931-2003)


  9.  "Good government is known from bad government by this infallible test: that under the former the labouring people are well fed and well clothed, and under the latter, they are badly fed and badly clothed." ~ William Cobbett (1763-1835)

"The tendency of taxation is to create a class of persons who do not labor, to take from those who do labor the produce of that labor, and to give it to those who do not labor." ~ William Cobbett (1763-1835)

"Those great and good men foresaw that troublous times would arise, when rulers and people would become restive under restraint, and seek by sharp and decisive measures to accomplish ends deemed just and proper; and that the principles of constitutional liberty would be in peril, unless established by irrepealable law. The history of the world had taught them that what was done in the past might be attempted in the future. The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances." ~ David Davis, Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. (4 Wall.) 2 (1866)

"Authority has every reason to fear the skeptic, for authority can rarely survive in the face of doubt." ~ Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962)

"If ignorance paid dividends, most Americans could make a fortune out of what they don't know about economics." ~ Luther H. Hodges (1898-1974)

"If you've got a religious belief that withers in the face of observations of the natural world, you ought to rethink your beliefs — rethinking the world isn't an option." ~ Paul Myers (b. 1957)


10.  "A single word indicative of doubt, that any thing, or every thing, in that country is not the very best in the world, produces an effect which must be seen and felt to be understood. If the citizens of the United States were indeed the devoted patriots they call themselves, they would surely not thus encrust themselves in the hard, dry, stubborn persuasion, that they are the first and best of the human race, that nothing is to be learnt, but what they are able to teach, and that nothing is worth having, which they do not possess." ~ Frances Trollope, 'Domestic Manners of the Americans, (1832)

"What is opportunity, and when does it knock? It never knocks. You can wait a whole lifetime, listening, hoping, and you will hear no knocking. None at all. You are opportunity, and you must knock on the door leading to your destiny. You prepare yourself to recognize opportunity, to pursue and seize opportunity as you develop the strength of your personality, and build a self-image with which you are able to live - with your self-respect alive and growing." ~ Maxwell Maltz (1889-1975)

"Small children, given a playground, a meadow or a stretch of street, will at once begin to create a sport based on the relationships of trees, posts, benches or whatever. When the code is complete and sides chosen, woe to the child who makes the aberrant move in the game. There are cries of "You can't do that. It's the rule!" The odd phrase "It's the rule," shouted by children all over the world in different languages, is an impassioned demand for the maintenance of an orderly world." ~ Heywood Hale Broun (1918-2001)

"Sometimes the things we want most are the hardest to get. That means you need to be even more determined to succeed. That's what it takes to be a winner. You have to want it bad enough to stick with it no matter how tough things get." ~ Chuck Norris (b. 1940)

"I've always found that anything worth achieving will always have obstacles in the way and you've got to have that drive and determination to overcome those obstacles on route to whatever it is that you want to accomplish." ~ Chuck Norris (b. 1940)


11.  "We cannot meet the threat of dictatorship if we turn this country into a wishy-washy imitation of totalitarianism, where every man's hand is out for pabulum and virile creativeness has given place to the patronizing favor of swollen bureaucracy." ~ Vannevar Bush (1890-1974)

"A belief may be larger than a fact. A faith that is overdefined is the very faith most likely to prove inadequate to the great moments of life." ~ Vannevar Bush, 'Science is Not Enough' (1967)

"He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery." ~ Harold Wilson (1967)

"Bear in mind that brains and learning, like muscle and physical skill, are articles of commerce. They are bought and sold. You can hire them by the year or by the hour. The only thing in the world not for sale is character." ~ Antonin Scalia (1996)

"The First Amendment has not repealed the basic rule of life, that he who pays the piper calls the tune. When you place the government in charge of funding art, just as when you place the government in charge of providing education, somebody has to pick the content of what art is going to be funded, what subjects are going to be taught." ~ Antonin Scalia, speech at the Juilliard School (22 Sep 2005)

"Humanity’s universal sin is far, far worse than those traditional vice lists cited for Greeks and Jews by Paul in Romans 1–3. It is this: we have accepted violence as civilization’s drug of choice, and our addiction now threatens creation itself." ~ Marcus J. Borg (1942-2015)

"A learning experience is one of those things that say, "You know that thing you just did? Don't do that." ~ Douglas Adams (1952-2001)


12.  "I imagine that thinking is the great desideratum of the present age; and the cause of whatever is done amiss may justly be reckoned the general neglect of education in those who need it most, the people of fashion. What can be expected where those who have the most influence have the least sense, and those who are sure to be followed set the worst examples?" ~ George Berkeley (1685-1753)

"God sends children for another purpose than merely to keep up the race — to enlarge our hearts, to make us unselfish, and full of kindly sympathies and affections; to give our souls higher aims, and to call out all our faculties to extended enterprise and exertion." ~ Mary Howitt, 'Hope On! Hope Ever! Or, the Boyhood of Felix Law, (1840)

"How do you know so much about everything? was asked of a very wise and intelligent man; and the answer was, by never being afraid or ashamed to ask questions as to anything of which I was ignorant." ~ John Abbott (1821-1893)

"Don't let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use." ~ Earl Nightingale (1921-1989)

"Wherever there is danger, there lurks opportunity; wherever there is opportunity, there lurks danger. The two are inseparable." ~ Earl Nightingale (1921-1989)

"When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened." ~ John M. Richardson, Jr. (b. 1938)

"A peculiarity of the American historical sensibility allows us to be proud of great-grandfathers (or even grandfathers) who lived in crushing poverty, while the poverty of a father is too close for comfort." ~ Patricia Hampl, 'Spillville: A Collaboration' (1987)


13.  "As the greatest things often take their rise from the smallest beginnings, so the worst things sometimes proceed from good intentions." ~ Joseph Priestley (1782)

"I believe the root of all happiness on this earth to lie in the realization of a spiritual life with a consciousness of something wider than materialism; in the capacity to live in a world that makes you unselfish because you are not overanxious about your own comic fallibilities; that gives you tranquility without complacency because you believe in something so much larger than yourself." ~ Hugh Walpole (1884-1941)

"The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory." ~ Paul Fix (1901-1983)

"The joy of life discovered by the Greeks is not a profane type of enjoyment: it reveals the bliss of existing, of sharing — even fugitively — in the spontaneity of life and the majesty of the world. Like so many others before and after them, the Greeks learned that the surest way to escape from time is to exploit the wealth, at first sight impossible to suspect, of the lived instant." ~ Mircea Eliade (1907-1986)

"People will continue to search for answers to universal and perplexing problems. But to find meaningful answers, one must first know what questions to ask." ~ Jacque Fresco (b. 1916)

"Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country - and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians." ~ Charles Krauthammer (b. 1950)


14.  "A conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against the doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs. On the other hand, representatives of science have often made an attempt to arrive at fundamental judgments with respect to values and ends on the basis of scientific method, and in this way have set themselves in opposition to religion. These conflicts have all sprung from fatal errors." ~ Albert Einstein, 'Science, Philosophy and Religion, A Symposium' (1941)

"Communism is a degraded version of the Western message. It retains its ambition to conquer nature, to improve the lot of the humble, but it sacrifices what was and must remain the heart and soul of the unending human adventure: freedom of enquiry, freedom of controversy, freedom of criticism, and the vote." ~ Raymond Aron (1905-1983)

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951)

"Great revelations of nature, of course, never fail to impress in one way or another, and I was no stranger to moods of the kind. Mountains overawe and oceans terrify, while the mystery of great forests exercises a spell peculiarly its own. But all these, at one point or another, somewhere link on intimately with human life and human experience. They stir comprehensible, even if alarming, emotions. They tend on the whole to exalt." ~ Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951)

"Unions, communities, people, everybody's going to have to learn to accept that in the United States you have a capitalist society, and that capitalism, from a business viewpoint, is survival of the most productive." ~ Don Blankenship, 'Mine War on Blackberry Creek' (1986)


15.  "There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." ~ Andrew Jackson, Veto Mesage Regarding the Bank of the United States (1832)

"The wisdom of man never yet contrived a system of taxation that would operate with perfect equality." ~ Andrew Jackson, Proclamation Regarding Nullification (1832)

"What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass." ~ William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne

"Neither man nor woman can be worth anything until they have discovered that they are fools. This is the first step towards becoming either estimable or agreeable; and until it be taken there is no hope. The sooner the discovery is made the better, as there is more time and power for taking advantage of it. Sometimes the great truth is found out too late to apply to it any effectual remedy. Sometimes it is never found at all; and these form the desperate and inveterate causes of folly, self-conceit, and impertinence." ~ William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne

"Neither federal nor state government acts compatibly with equal protection when a law or official policy denies to women, simply because they are women, full citizenship stature - equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities." ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Writing for the court, United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515 (1996)

"There are so many false starts, unexpected obstacles, and surprising turns along the path to change. Daily work often drains energy needed for change. Leaders must pick causes they won't abandon easily, remain committed despite setbacks, and communicate their big ideas over and over again in every encounter." ~ Rosabeth Moss Kanter (b. 1943)


16.  "A watchful eye must be kept on ourselves lest while we are building ideal monuments of Renown and Bliss here we neglect to have our names enrolled in the Annals of Heaven." ~ James Madison, Letter to William Bradford (9 Nov 1772)

"No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause; because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time." ~ James Madison, Federalist No. 10

If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the general welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one subject to particular exceptions." ~ James Madison, Letter to Edmund Pendleton (21 Jan 1792)

"You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know." ~ Rene Daumal, (1908-1944)

"A case can be made ... that secrecy is for losers. For people who don't realize how important information really is. The Soviet Union realized this too late. Openness is now a singular, and singularly American, advantage. We put it in peril by poking along in a mode of an age now past. It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most pervasive of Cold War-era regulations. It is time to begin building the supports for the era of openness that is already upon us." ~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 'Secrecy' (1998)

"Am I embarrassed to speak for a less than perfect democracy? Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies which are free of sin? No, I don't. Do I think ours is, on balance, incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? Yes, I do." ~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003)


17.  "Live for something. Do good, and leave behind you a monument of virtue that the storms of time can never destroy. Write your name in kindness, love, and mercy on the hearts of thousands you come in contact with year by year, and you will never be forgotten. Your name and your good deeds will shine as the stars of heaven." ~ Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847)

"The human mind feels restless and dissatisfied under the anxieties of ignorance. It longs for the repose of conviction; and to gain this repose it will often rather precipitate its conclusions than wait for the tardy lights of observation and experiment. There is such a thing, too, as the love of simplicity and system, — a prejudice of the understanding which disposes it to include all the phenomena of nature under a few sweeping generalities, — an indolence which loves to repose on the beauties of a theory rather than encounter the fatiguing detail of its evidences." ~ Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847)

"History is a slippery business; the past is not a constant but a landscape that mutates according to argument and opinion." ~ Penelope Lively (b. 1933)

"An ending is an artificial device; we like endings, they are satisfying, convenient, and a point has been made. But time does not end, and stories march in step with time." ~ Penelope Lively (b. 1933)

"And in another year everything will be different yet again. It is always like that, and always will be; you are forever standing on the brink, in a place where you cannot see ahead; there is nothing of which to be certain except what lies behind. This should be terrifying, but somehow it is not." ~ Penelope Lively, 'Consequences' (2007)

"The Enlightenment may have indeed outlived its usefulness, but it is only through Reason's protocols that one can make a coherent case for Reason's limitations. O ye of little skepticism, kindly acknowledge your debt to that idiom on which you so glibly heap scorn." ~ James K. Morrow (b. 1947)


18.  "Intellect alone, however exalted, without strong feelings — without even, irritable sensibility — would be only like an immense magazine of powder, if there were no such element as fire in the natural world. It is the heart which is the spring and fountain of all eloquence." ~ Ralph Erskine (1685-1752)

"The Government of the absolute majority instead of the Government of the people is but the Government of the strongest interests; and when not efficiently checked, it is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised." ~ John C. Calhoun, Speech to the U.S. Senate (15 Feb 1833)

"The very essence of a free government consists in considering offices as public trusts, bestowed for the good of the country, and not for the benefit of an individual or a party." ~ John C. Calhoun, speech (13 Feb 1835)

"A government for the people must depend for its success on the intelligence, the morality, the justice, and the interest of the people themselves." ~ Grover Cleveland (1837-1908)

"A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world." ~ John Updike (1932-2009)

"Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead?" ~ John Updike (1932-2009)


19.  "Our government, conceived in liberty and purchased with blood, can be preserved only by constant vigilance. May we guard it as our children's richest legacy, for what shall it profit our nation if it shall gain the whole world and lose "the spirit that prizes liberty as the heritage of all men in all lands everywhere"?" ~ William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925)

"In this, our land, we are called upon to give but little in return for the advantages which we receive. Shall we give that little grudgingly? Our definition of patriotism is often too narrow. Shall the lover of his country measure his loyalty only by his service as a soldier? No! Patriotism calls for the faithful and conscientious performance of all of the duties of citizenship, in small matters as well as great, at home as well as upon the tented field." ~ William Jennings Bryan, 'The Jury System' (1890)

"I am unalterably opposed to any species of vigilantes or to any other extra-legal means of a majority exercising its will over a minority … I believe that if majorities are entitled to have their civil rights protected they should be willing to fight for the same rights to minorities no matter how violently they disagree with their views. Further, I am convinced that this is the only way they can be preserved. I believe that the American concept of civil rights should include not only an observance of our Constitutional Bill of Rights, but also absence of arbitrary action by government in every field." ~ Earl Warren (1891-1974)

"I believe the preservation of our civil liberties to be the most fundamental and important of all our governmental problems, because it always has been with us and always will be with us and if we ever permit those liberties to be destroyed, there will be nothing left in our system worthy of preservation. They constitute the soul of democracy. I believe that there is grave danger in this country of losing our civil liberties as they have been lost in other countries." ~ Earl Warren (1891-1974)

"It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties — the freedom of association — which make the defense of our nation worthwhile." ~ Earl Warren, United States v. Robel, 389 U.S. 258 (1967)


20.  "Beauty's a fragile boon, and the years are quick to destroy it,
        Always diminished with time, never enduring too long.
        Violet's always fade, and the bloom departs from the lily;
        When the roses are gone, nothing is left but the thorn."
              ~ Ovid, 'Ars Amatoria' (The Art of Love) (2 AD)

"The most dangerous enemy of the truth and freedom amongst us is the compact majority." ~ Henrik Ibsen, 'An Enemy of the People' (1882)

"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers." ~ Charles William Eliot, 'The Happy Life' (1896)

"The principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee." ~ Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915)

"It has taken me all my life to understand it is not necessary to understand everything." ~ Rene Coty (1882-1962)

"Many instructional arrangements seem "contrived," but there is nothing wrong with that. It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. Their relevance to a future usefulness need not be obvious. It is a difficult assignment. The conditions the teacher arranges must be powerful enough to compete with those under which the student tends to behave in distracting ways." ~ B. F. Skinner, 'Free and Happy Student' in 'The Phi Delta Kappan' (September 1973)

"The thing I remember best about successful people I've met all through the years is their obvious delight in what they're doing and it seems to have very little to do with worldly success. They just love what they're doing, and they love it in front of others." ~ Fred Rogers, 'The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember' (2003)


21.  "May all our words, actions and behaviour always be for the instruction and edification of those who have dealings with us, always having charity burning in our hearts." ~ St. Angela Merici, Rule, Ch. IX, 21-22 (1474-1540)

"The life of Christ concerns Him who, being the holiest among the mighty, and the mightiest among the holy, lifted with His pierced hand empires off their hinges, and turned the stream of centuries out of its channel, and still governs the ages." ~ Jean Paul (1763-1825)

"The wish falls often warm upon my heart that I may learn nothing here that I cannot continue in the other world; that I may do nothing here but deeds that will bear fruit in heaven." ~ Jean Paul (1763-1825)

"The past and future are veiled; but the past wears the widow's veil; the future, the virgin's." ~ Jean Paul (1763-1825)

"Time, which is so often an enemy in life, can also become our ally if we see how a pale moment can lead to a glowing moment, and then turn to a moment of perfect transparency, before dropping again to a moment of everyday simplicity." ~ Peter Brook (b. 1925)

"Time was too much a part of love, for even in fairy tales the proof of love was not its first moment, but its latest ones — that people lived happily ever after. Love at first sight was nothing but infatuation until proved by time." ~ Margaret Mahy, 'The Tricksters' (1986)


22.  "No man can establish title to an idea — at most he can only claim possession. The stream of thought that irrigates the mind of each of us is a confluent of the intellectual river that drains the whole of the living universe." ~ Maurice Valency (1958)

"A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time." ~ Louis L'Amour (1908-1988)

"Do not let yourself be bothered by the inconsequential. One has only so much time in this world, so devote it to the work and the people most important to you, to those you love and things that matter. One can waste half a lifetime with people one doesn't really like, or doing things when one would be better off somewhere else." ~ Louis L'Amour (1908-1988)

"We are, finally, all wanderers in search of knowledge. Most of us hold the dream of becoming something better than we are, something larger, richer, in some way more important to the world and ourselves. Too often, the way taken is the wrong way, with too much emphasis on what we want to have, rather than what we wish to become." ~ Louis L'Amour (1908-1988)

"Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends." ~ Paul Fussell, 'The Great War and Modern Memory' (1975)

"Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable." ~ Edith Grossman, 'Why Translation Matters' (2010)


23.  "There is a certain blend of courage, integrity, character and principle which has no satisfactory dictionary name but has been called different things at different times in different countries. Our American name for it is "guts"." ~ Louis Adamic (1899-1951)

"I believe that the fundamental alternative for man is the choice between "life" and "death"; between creativity and destructive violence; between reality and illusions; between objectivity and intolerance; between brotherhood-independence and dominance-submission." ~ Erich Fromm, 'Credo' (1965)

"What should move us to action is human dignity: the inalienable dignity of the oppressed, but also the dignity of each of us. We lose dignity if we tolerate the intolerable." ~ Dominique de Menil (1908-1997)

"Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. ... Everything science has taught me — and continues to teach me — strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. Nothing disappears without a trace." ~ Wernher von Braun, 'This Week' magazine (24 Jan 1960)

"For me, the idea of a creation is not conceivable without invoking the necessity of design. One cannot be exposed to the law and order of the universe without concluding that there must be design and purpose behind it all." ~ Wernher von Braun (1912-1977)

"To be forced to believe only one conclusion — that everything in the universe happened by chance — would violate the very objectivity of science itself. What random process could produce the brains of a man or the system of the human eye?" ~ Wernher von Braun (1912-1977)


24.  "A moment's reflection will convince any one that prosperity cannot come from continued plunging into debt." ~ Andrew Mellon (1855-1937)

"A bonus or subsidy can be paid only by taking money out of the pockets of all the people in order that it shall find its way back into the pockets of some of the people." ~ Andrew Mellon (1855-1937)

"I hate government. I hate power. I think that man's existence, insofar as he achieves anything, is to resist power, to minimize power, to devise systems of society in which power is the least exerted." ~ Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990)

"The only ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realise, is to feel ourselves to be at home here on earth." ~ Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990)

"We have never preached violence, except the violence of love, which left Christ nailed to a cross, the violence that we must each do to ourselves to overcome our selfishness and such cruel inequalities among us. The violence we preach is not the violence of the sword, the violence of hatred. It is the violence of love, of brotherhood, the violence that wills to beat weapons into sickles for work." ~ Bl. Oscar A. Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, 'The Violence of Love' (1977)

"When we estrange ourselves from history we do not enlarge, we diminish ourselves, even as individuals. We subtract from our lives one meaning which they do in fact possess, whether we recognize it or not. We cannot help living in history. We can only fail to be aware of it." ~ Robert Heilbroner (1919-2005)

"We may make progress only by freeing ourselves from the rut of the past, but without this rut an orderly society would hardly be possible in the first place." ~ Robert Heilbroner (1919-2005)


25.  "He will provide the way and the means, such as you could never have imagined. Leave it all to Him, let go of yourself, lose yourself on the Cross, and you will find yourself entirely." ~ St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380)

"Reflect that God requires nothing else of us except that we show our neighbors the love we have for God." ~ St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380)

"Selfish love makes us unappreciative and ungrateful because we attribute all we have to our own shrewdness. And what is the evidence? Our ingratitude, shown in the sins we commit every day. Gratitude, on the other hand, is proof that we are attributing to God alone all that we have." ~ St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380)

"That vivid present of theirs, how faint it grows! The past is only the present become invisible and mute, and because it is invisible and mute, its memoried glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are to-morrow's past." ~ Mary Webb, 'Precious Bane' (1924)

"Courage takes many forms. There is physical courage, there is moral courage. Then there is a still higher type of courage — the courage to brave pain, to live with it, to never let others know of it and to still find joy in life; to wake up in the morning with an enthusiasm for the day ahead." ~ Howard Cosell (1918-1995)

"I now say that the world has the technology – either available or well advanced in the research pipeline – to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called “organic” methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low income, food-deficit nations cannot." ~ Norman Borlaug, 1970 Nobel Peace laureate, January 1997 interview for The Atlantic Monthly.

"Some of the environmental lobbyists of the western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they would be crying out for tractors, and fertilizer, and irrigation canals, and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things." ~ Norman Borlaug (1914-2010), 1970 Nobel Peace laureate, 30th Anniversary Lecture, The Norwegian Nobel Institute, Oslo, September 8, 2000


26.  "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." ~ Charles Mackay (1812-1889)

"The house of delusions is cheap to build, but draughty to live in, and ready at any instant to fall." ~ A. E. Housman (1859-1936)

"It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound—that he will never get over it." ~ Robert Frost (1874-1963)

"Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time. No one learns more about a problem than the person at the bottom." ~ Sandra Day O'Connor (b. 1930)

"Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?" ~ Sandra Day O'Connor (b. 1930)

"Religion is for people who're afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who've already been there." ~ Vine Deloria Jr. (1933-2005)


27.  "To hold power has always meant to manipulate idiots and circumstances; and those circumstances and those idiots, tossed together, bring about those coincidences to which even the greatest men confess they owe most of their fame." ~ Alfred de Vigny, 'Stello' (1832)

"Observe this fact: in the history of mankind, every ruler who has lacked personal greatness has been forced to compensate for the deficiency by setting up the executioner at his right hand like a guardian angel." ~ Alfred de Vigny, 'Stello' (1832)

"If teaching has any purpose, it is to implant true insight and responsibility. Education must lead us from irresponsible opinion to true responsible judgement. It must lead us from chance and arbitrariness to rational clarity and intellectual order." ~ Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)

"There are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of." ~ James Callaghan (1912-2005)


28.  "Let us look at our own faults, and not at other persons'. People who are extremely correct themselves are often shocked at everything they see; however, we might often learn a great deal that is essential from the very persons whom we censure. Our exterior comportment and manners may be better — this is well enough, but not of the first importance. We ought not to insist on every one following in our footsteps, nor to take upon ourselves to give instructions in spirituality when, perhaps, we do not even know what it is. Zeal for the good of souls, though given us by God, may often lead us astray, sisters; it is best to keep our rule, which bids us ever to live in silence and in hope. Our Lord will care for the souls belonging to Him." ~ Teresa of Avila, 'The Interior Castle' (1577)

"Everybody, my friend, everybody lives for something better to come. That's why we want to be considerate of every man — Who knows what's in him, why he was born and what he can do?" ~ Maxim Gorky, 'The Lower Depths' (1902)

"When you have never done a thing before and that thing is not simply and clearly right or wrong, you frequently do not know if it is a cruel thing, you just go ahead and do it. Maybe later you'll be able to determine whether you acted cruelly. Too late, of course, but at least you'll know." ~ Russell Banks, 'The Angel on the Roof' (1999)

"When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day — but by the minute." ~ Iris Chang (1968-2004)

"If you wish for something hard enough, the fairy tales teach us, you can get it in the end. But it's hardly ever the way you thought it would be, and the endings aren't always happy ones." ~ Jennifer Weiner, 'Good in Bed' (2001)

"Sometimes the worst thing that happens to you, the thing you think you can't survive...it's the thing that makes you better than you used to be." ~ Jennifer Weiner, 'Fly Away Home' (2010)


29.  "Let it, then, be henceforth proclaimed to the world, that man's conscience was created free; that he is no longer accountable to his fellow man for his religious opinions, being responsible therefore only to his God." ~ John Tyler, eulogy for Thomas Jefferson (11 Jul 1826)

"It shall be my first and highest duty to preserve unimpaired the free institutions under which we live and transmit them to those who shall succeed me in their full force and vigor." ~ John Tyler, 10th U.S. President (1841)

"The old men ask for more time; the young waste it. And the philosopher simply smiles, knowing there is none there." ~ R. S. Thomas (1913-2000)

"The two-party system has given this country the war of Lyndon Johnson, the Watergate of Nixon, and the incompetence of Carter. Saying we should keep the two-party system simply because it is working is like saying the Titanic voyage was a success because a few people survived on life-rafts." ~ Eugene McCarthy, in the Chicago Tribune (10 Sep 1978)

"We do not need presidents who are bigger than the country, but rather ones who speak for it and support it." ~ Eugene McCarthy, in The New York Times (11 Dec 2005)

"Children, you must remember something. A man without ambition is dead. A man with ambition but no love is dead. A man with ambition and love for his blessings here on earth is ever so alive. Having been alive, it won't be hard in the end to lie down and rest." ~ Pearl Bailey, 'Talking to Myself' (1971)


30.  "All the evils that men cause to each other because of certain desires or opinions or religious principles are rooted in ignorance." ~ Moses Maimonides (1135-1204)

"The more we desire for that which is superfluous, the more we meet with difficulties; our strength and possessions are spent in unnecessary things, and are wanting when required for that which is necessary." ~ Moses Maimonides, 'Guide for the Perplexed' (ca. 1190)

"Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen." ~ Moses Maimonides (1135-1204)

"Do you know why this world is as abad as it is? ... It is because people think only about their own business, and won't trouble themselves to stand up for the oppressed, nor bring the wrong-doers to light.... My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt." ~ Anna Sewell, 'Black Beauty' (1877)

"He said cruelty was the devil's own trade-mark, and if we saw any one who took pleasure in cruelty we might know who he belonged to, for the devil was a murderer from the beginning, and a tormentor to the end. On the other hand, where we saw people who loved their neighbors, and were kind to man and beast, we might know that was God's mark." ~ Anna Sewell, 'Black Beauty' (1877)

"Change is, I believe, inevitable. The question is only whether we can think our way through to a better outcome before the next generation is damaged by a future and bigger crisis." ~ Mervyn Allister King (b. 1948)

31.  "Of all things, good sense is the most fairly distributed: everyone thinks he is so well supplied with it that even those who are the hardest to satisfy in every other respect never desire more of it than they already have." ~ René Descartes, 'Le Discours de la Méthode, (1637)

"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things." ~ René Descartes (1596-1650)

"The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will also laugh afterwards." ~ Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, 'Dead Souls' (1842)

"The majority of us lead quiet, unheralded lives as we pass through this world. There will most likely be no ticker-tape parades for us, no monuments created in our honor. But that does not lessen our possible impact, for there are scores of people waiting for someone just like us to come along; people who will appreciate our compassion, our unique talents. Someone who will live a happier life merely because we took the time to share what we had to give. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have a potential to turn a life around. It's overwhelming to consider the continuous opportunities there are to make our love felt." ~ Leo Buscaglia (1924-1998)

"We need not be afraid to touch, to feel, to show emotion. The easiest thing in the world is to be what you are, what you feel. The hardest thing to be is what other people want you to be. Don’t let them put you in that position." ~ Leo Buscaglia, 'LOVE' (1972)

"To love is to risk not being loved in return. To hope is to risk pain. To try is to risk failure, but risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing." ~ Leo Buscaglia, 'Living, Loving, and Learning' (1985)