Optimism

"Always be an optimist ... at least until they start moving animals in pairs to Cape Canaveral."
--Author Unknown

Grasp

"If you can keep your head about you when all about you are losing theirs, its just possible you haven't grasped the situation."
--Rose Kennedy

Walk

"Don't be a marshmallow. Walk the street with us into history. Get off the sidewalk. Stop being vegetables. Work for Justice."
--Dolores Huerta (1930- ) American activist

Self

"The hardest challenge is to be yourself in a world where everyone is trying to make you be somebody else."
--E. E. Cummings

Deja Vu IV

"A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt....

If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake."

--Thomas Jefferson, June 4, 1798, in a letter to John Taylor of Philadelphia, after passage of the Alien and Sedition Act

Christmas

"And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves, and said unto them, 'It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.'"
--Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 21:12


"Blessed are the peacemakers:
for they shall be called the children of God."
--Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 5:9

Home

"I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should. We all come home, or ought to come home, for a short holiday, the longer, the better, from the great boarding school where we are forever working at our arithmetical slates, to take, and give a rest."
--Charles Dickens (1812-1870) English Novelist

Lesson

"Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child, as it is to the caterpillar." --Bradley Miller

Interest

"The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves."
--Plato

Absurdity

"One day the absurdity of the almost universal human belief in the slavery of other animals will be palpable. We shall then have discovered our souls and become worthier of sharing this planet with them."
--Martin Luther King, Jr

Strange

"Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught falsehoods in school. And the one man that dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool."
--Plato

Cranks

"There never was an idea stated that woke men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank."
--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894) American Poet
Source: Over the Teacups, 1891

Wrinkles

"Age wrinkles the body. Quitting wrinkles the soul."
--Douglas Macarthur

Inevitability III

"Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian." --Lee Simonson

Outposts

"It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head."
--Sally Kempton

Until

"Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."
--Thomas Jefferson

Courage IV

"Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace."
--Amelia Earhart, 1927

Purpose III

"It is my intention to make my entire life a rejection of and protest against the crimes and injustices of war and political tyranny which threaten to destroy the whole human race and the world with it. By my monastic life and vows I am saying NO to all the concentration camps, the aerial bombardments, the staged political trials, the judicial murders, the racial injustices, the economic tyrannies, and the whole socioeconomic apparatus which seems geared for nothing but global destruction in spite of all its fair words in favor of peace." --Thomas Merton, from "Honorable Reader"

Accept

"There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them."
--Denis Waitley, Author and Speaker

Cognition

"Studies have shown a relation between memory and cognitive problems and the estrogen loss associated with menopause. Great: I'm turning into an idiot simply because I'm losing the hormone that makes me a woman. Then again, this does explain quite a bit about men."
--Michelle

Mass

"The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning." --Ronald Barthes

Silence

"Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent."
--Napolean Bonaparte

Passion

"Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference."
--Iris Murdoch

Why

"Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we've been bombing over the years been complaining?"
--George Wallace, Former Alabama Governor

How III

"So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause."
--George Lucas, Senator Amidala in Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005)

Talent

"It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous." --Robert Benchley

Respect

"I hate victims who respect their executioners."
--Jean-Paul Sartre

Boring

"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring."
--Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters, 1999