Saturday, July 05, 2008

Quotation Saturday

Will it ever stop raining in southern Indiana? I don't know yet.

The only thing I'm sure of at all right now is that it's another Quotation Saturday!

Here we go:

1. "Do not spoil what you have by desiring which you have not; but remember that what you have now was once among the things you only hoped for." --Epicurus

2. "Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved." --W.J. Bryan

3. "Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny." --Kin Hubbard

4. "Free and fair discussion will ever be found the firmest friend to truth." --George Campbell

5. "The true test of character is. . . how we behave when we don't know what to do." --John Holt

6. "It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded." --Anne Morrow Lindburgh

7. "Men like conventions because men make them." --G. B. Shaw

8. "There is truth in the high opinion that insofar as a man conforms, he ceases to exist." --Max Eastman

9. "Conventionality has slain the souls of more men and women than drink or immorality." G.B. Burgin

10. "Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." --Aldous Huxley

11. "They have a right to censure that have a heart to help; the rest is cruelty, not justice." -- William Penn

12. "Coquetry is an art of the intellect; flirtation is a function of the senses." --Don Marquis

13. "I must have been an insufferable child; all children are." --G.B. Shaw

14. "Don't stay away from church because there are so my hypocrites. There's always room for one more." --A.R. Adams

15. "Children can stand vast amounts of sternness. They rather expect to be wrong and are quite used to being punished. It is injustice, inequity, and inconsistency that kill them." --Father Robert Capon

16. "A good discussion increases the dimensions of everyone who takes part." --Randolph Silliman Bourne

17. "A sound discretion is not so much indicated by never making a mistake, as by never repeating it." --Christian Nestell Bovie

18. "There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in." --Graham Greene

19. "My experience. . . has been that when things are non-controversial, beautifully coordinated, and all the rest, it must be that there is not much going on." --JFK

20. "Culture is what your butcher would have if he were a surgeon." --Mary Pettibone Poole

21. "He is a modest little man who has a good deal to be modest about." --Winston Churchill

22. "Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend." --Agatha Christie

23. "Men. . . love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death. . . ." --Dostoyevsky

24. "Grownups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them." --Antoine De Saint-Exupery

25. "One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." --Elbert Hubbard

26. "A good man dies when a boy goes wrong." Boys' Ranch Roundup, 1966

27. "Money will buy a pretty good dog, but it won't buy the wag of his tail." --Josh Billings

28. "In life, as in chess, forethought wins." --Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton

29. "No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes." --William Gladstone

30. "In order for you to profit from your mistakes, you have to get out and make some." --Anon

31. "Laughter is much more important than applause. Applause is almost a duty. Laughter is a reward." --Carol Channing

32. "That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all of your life, but in a new way." --Doris Lessig

33. "Learning is the art of knowing how to use common sense to advantage." --Josh Billings

34. "The great use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it." --William James

35. "To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it." --Mother Teresa

36. "Two persons who love each other are in a place more holy than the interior of a church." --William Lyon Phelps

37. "One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." --Andre Gide

38. "Life isn't a matter of milestones but of moments." --Rose Kennedy

39. "The difference between liberty and liberties is as great as between God and gods." --Ludwig Bourne

40. "If your luck isn't what it should be, write a 'p' in front of it and try again." --Bob Edwards

41. "What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?" --George Eliot

42. "It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizens from falling into error; it is the function of the citizens to keep the Government from falling into error." --Robert N. Jackson

43. "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead

44. "The character that needs law to mend it, is hardly worth the tinkering." --Anon

45. "I can not and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." --Lillian Hellman

46. "The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his weight." --T. Roosevelt

47. "She was a town & country soprano of the kind often used for augmenting grief at a funeral." --George Ade

48. "Blaming the wolf would not help the sheep much. The sheep must learn not to fall into the clutches of the wolf." --Ghandi

49. "Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match." --Karl Kraus

50. "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." --Martin Luther King, Jr.

I am swept off my feet and rendered helpless by a witty turn of phrase. When I am finally able to get up again, I'm smarter, and nicer, and braver, and more. . . satisfied. . . than ever before. What do I mean by that? A lot of things. Including THAT.

The more words we know, the more we are able to understand, and the better our ability to communicate. When Malcolm X went to prison, he thought he was pretty smart. He was horrified to learn that he was merely street-smart, and that a simple book was beyond him because he didn't have the vocabulary to understand it. He obtained a dictionary, and painstakingly, because his writing skills were low, too, began to copy every single page, including the keys below, and the guide words above. He found that the excellent memory that had sustained him on the streets worked with words, as well. He dreamed of words at night. He thought of words while eating and working. He lay in his cell at night and thought about words. A couple of months after he had begun copying, he again picked up a book and attempted to understand it. This time, he could!

"In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks. I believe it took me a day. Then aloud, I read back, to myself, everything I'd written on the tablet. . . . I woke up the next morning, thinking about those words — immensely proud to realize that not only had I written so much at one time, but I'd written words that I never knew were in the world. . . No university would ask any student to devour literature as I did when this new world opened to me, of being able to read and understand. . .Months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I had never been so truly free in my life." --Malcolm X

Oh, my dears, the WORDS, the magical, powerful words. . . . By choosing one over the other, we change our lives, and by changing our lives, we change the world.


Mamacita, Scheiss Weekly