Howard Thurman

Some advice from this philosopher, theologan, educator: "Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

Anonymous

"A good way to judge people is by observing how they treat those who can do them absolutely no good."

Emerson

"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principlies."

Emerson

"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles."

Robert Bridges

Some lines from this one time English poet laureate:
"Gird on thy sword, O man, thy strength endue,
In fair desire thine earth-born joy renew.
Live thou thy life beneath the making sun
Till Beauty, Truth, and Love in thee are one."

Stephen Kellert

In his book "In the Wake of Chaos" he notes that chaos has mostly been ignored as acedemic intellectuals have been mostly uninterested in physical systems which were not readily amenable to analysis and manipulation. He gives this example: "Turbulence remains an unsolved problem for classical physics. There is still no adequate theoretical account of the whorls and eddies that appear in waterfalls, whirlpools, and wakes."

Debatable Question

The US population has reached 300 million and growing. Are human beings a burden or a resource? I believe they are a resource.

Facts vs Ideas

Joseph Epstein writes: "Facts are ugly,thorny things. Ideas are velvety and suave, and bring comfort by suggesting that our understanding of - and hence control over - the world is on the rise. Ideas can be immensely seductive. What a beatiful idea it is, for example, to bring democracy to Araby! And then arise the obdurate facts of rancorous tribalism to destroy the seduction."
But the ideas and goals remain.

Dr. Seuss

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who matter don't mind, and those who mind don't matter."

Daniel Dreisbach

This Professor at American University lectures: "The rhetoric of "separation of church and state' and "a wall of separation" has been instrumental in transforming judicial and popular construction of the First Amendment from a provision protecting and encouraging religion in public life to one restricting religion's place and role in civic culture. This fact would have alarmed the framers of the constitution, and we ignore it today at the peril of our political order and prosperity."

Will Rogers

"Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for."

Joel Kotkin

A quote from this senior fellow at the new America Foundation: "As Tocqueville noted over 170 years ago. America has flourished not because of geniuses in Washington but due to its constitution, fertile land mass, egalitarianism, entrepeneurship, unique spiritual vitality and attachment to local community and family. This combination of factors has always made us different from other countries, and in this deeply cynical and secular age, now more so than ever before."

Thoreau

Unique thoughts are always subject to group protected consensus opinion. I am reminded of Thoreau's content to hold his position alone: "Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already."

Josh Billings

"The best time to hold your tongue is the time you feel you must say something or bust."

Superstition

In "Summa Theologiae" Thomas Aquinas wrote: "Superstition is a vice contrary to religion by excess, not that it offers more to the divine worship than true religion, but because it offers divine worship to whom it ought not, or in a manner it ought not."

WSJ 10/13/06

Ask the best place to be if an H-bomb goes off, the gadget's legendary father Edward Teller responded, "Standing next to somebody who says: "What was that?"

The Generalist

You will find the names of successful "Specialists" in the news and in encyclopedias, with details of accomplishment in their fields of specialty. But if you seek not fame but yet personal fulfillment and a peace within, become a "Generalist" and follow your curiosity to learn all you can about where-ever it leads you.

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"If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know." (Steve Wright)

Alexander Pope

More words of wisdom from this celebrated poet:
"The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,
With loads of learned lumber in his head.
Such laboured nothings, in so strange a style,
Amaze the unlearned, and make the learned smile."

Kin Hubbard

"Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune."

Henry Margenau

A quote from this Professor Emeritus of Physics and Natural Philosophy, Yale University: "But God endowed man with a soul, an abstract entity capable of making contact with Him".

Fact

The human eye, with its connection to the brain, can perform more image processing than all the supercomputers in the world put together.

Sachel Paige

"Smile well and often. It makes people wonder what you're up to."

Wilder Penfield

This neurosurgeon, in his book "The Mysteries of the Mind", writes: "The mind seems to act independently of the brain in the same sense that a programmer acts independently of his computer, however much he may depend upon the action of that computer for certain purposes."

Kin Hubbard

"Don't knock the weather. If it didn't change once in awhile, nine out of ten people couldn't start a conversation."

Our Blessings

A mere 150 years ago we didn't have electric light, running water, indoor sanitation, TV, cars, airlines, computers. Our ancesters could not have imagined what have now. But we tend to take our opportunities for granted giving little thought to the entrepreneurs in our capitalistic system who made it all possible.

Cherokee Indian Proverb

"Don't let yesterday use up to much of today."