Aphorisms

Fulsome words seldom fool, and make their speaker seem uncool. If some point you would make clearly, say it plainly and sincerely.
Unless a heart completely breaks, in time ‘tis sure to mend. Since the broken heart will no more beat, if yours does, in time you will rejoice my friend.
‘Tis the error of youth to confuse standard of living with quality of life. In winning the most, we lose what’s best. How many of us never grow up?
“Learned helplessness” has hobbled my own life, and many others’. When I was young, situations in my family were such that nothing could help them. The lesson I learned was that things can’t be helped. It has been extremely difficult “unlearning” this lesson. Watch out for its influence in your own life, or end up like me.
“The Group” never came up with any fresh idea. Ideas always come first to individuals. It’s unwise to assume that the next big thing can’t possibly come from…you.
A daily dose of vitriol never cured an ill marriage, unless “death by poison” is a cure. So if you’ve any intention of saving your post-wedding train-wreck, the first step is to watch what you say, and the second is to watch how you say it; i.e., shut the hell up when you feel the least inclined to do so. Angers easily escalate, driving matrimony to acrimony, with alimony in tow.
A good family is a garden in the desert of human life. Keep your garden watered and weeded, or of hunger and thirst die.
A good government provides a means of redressing the grievances it inflicts on its citizens. There’s no good in a government that indemnifies itself against the consequences of its abuses.
A good man would rather silently endure an injustice than cure it by inflicting one on another.
A good marriage gives the heart wings, a bad one leaves it in chains.
A large part of the high cost of healthcare is due to people waiting until a medical problem requires expensive intervention, when earlier detection and intervention would have been relatively inexpensive. Ergo, an insurance company can offer lower premiums if it insists that people get checked out regularly. If we miss an appointment, our premiums go up until we get it done. This catches medical conditions early, when treatment is less expensive. If some disease or disorder slips through the process and becomes so critical that an expensive intervention is required when it is detected, payment is made with no questions asked. If this were the policy of all insurance companies, who wouldn’t be able to afford insurance?
A man can easily be taken out of the jungle, but taking the jungle out of the man? The world has yet to see such a miracle.
A man can see better the right way through life who learns to look for it with something better than his “I”.
A public friend but secret foe finds fresh foes in former friends’ abodes.
A society more focused on finding new amusements than on the proper care and guidance of its growing children will find its end profoundly un-amusing.
A spouse is not a lifestyle accessory. It should be obvious, but look at how many people ditch their spouses for the same reason they do a car…time to trade up.
A stitch in time may save nine, but killing one terrorist recruits two. Enemies multiply faster than rabbits when justice is believed undue.
A thousand times I have seen men do things they knew perfectly well they shouldn’t, but pride makes wise men do what any average fool wouldn’t.
A woman sought a rich husband and so put an ad online to catch one. In her ad, she extolled the virtues of her beautiful face and shapely figure. A rich man saw this and responded, asking why any smart rich man would invest in a depreciating asset. Poor girl. Pop culture puts so high a value on appearance, who can blame her for thinking that her beauty is what made her beautiful?
Acts of indifference, much more often than hate, are among the greatest evils that we perpetrate.
Alike in ways that matter, different in ways that don’t; let that be the rule you will use, or stay un-married if you won’t.
All of Jesus’ apostles but St. John were slain because they wouldn’t admit Jesus’ resurrection was a lie. Would you die for a lie? If not, maybe they didn’t.
All wars are avoidable.
Although it’s to his credit, he may live to regret it, who lets his sense of chivalry send him rushing to the aid of every damsel in distress. His regret becomes apparent when her distress becomes permanent.
Although no problem solves itself, all problems (however overwhelming) are temporary, except death. Suicide swaps temporary problems with solutions for the only permanent problem without one. Better think hard about this before doing away with yourself. If you’re too bewildered by things to think clearly, contact your Bishop immediately.
Always doing nothing? Nothing will always have to do you.
Americans say we believe there should be no taxation without representation. We fought for independence partly on this note. But legal aliens, who do pay taxes, are not allowed to vote. Give them the vote or leave them untaxed: how that would change some policies!
Among the blessings God gives, your children are the most precious. Be as careful as you can with these little hearts and souls.
Anger is the black-flamed inferno, which burns the soul to ashes, and scorches love into indifference.
Angry words are felt more deeply than are deeply heard, and so seldom are believed. Many a foe’s a former friend, who beyond grief grievous words aggrieved.
Answered prayers too often elicit far too little gratitude; God is not a vending machine. It’s time to change our attitude.
Any American willing to arrest another American and/or incarcerate one indefinitely under the NDAA is no American.
Any police force loses its freedom to enforce law the instant it feels free to break it with impunity. To use whatever means necessary to remove the police force from power that does so is every citizen’s patriotic duty.
Any realistic calculation of a country’s actual unemployment rate must include those employed in its armed forces. Cunning politicians keep the unemployment rate artificially low by maintaining large standing armies, thus taking attention off their ineptitude as leaders.
Any system must be disrupted that produces injustice, whether deliberately or as an unintended consequence of its routine operation.
Apart from children, no one is deserving or worthy of others’ love. Yet, it’s the effort that makes it worth it.
As far as I know, marketing is the one discipline that is at the crossroads of all others. Science, business, economics, religion, anthropology, psychology, sociology, music, art, history and on and on. That’s why I love it so.
As long as we are open to God’s influence and guidance, we will have what we need when we need it to fulfill our particular destiny. What help is there for us if we are therefore not open to God?
Ask people who their role models are. If they give boring, predictable answers, they’re boring, predictable people. Think about this if you’re ever in the position of hiring someone.
At one level, the main difference between Jesus’ message and Moses’ message is this. Moses taught us that we should obey the rules intended to keep us safe out of fear of God’s anger and wrath. Jesus taught that this is almost impossible for creatures as scatterbrained as humans are, for myriad reasons. Instead, if we can stay focused on just one thing - loving God and each other like we should - we’ll end up following the rules even if the rules had never been given. When our objective is keeping the one we love happy, we don’t have to remind ourselves to avoid doing what hurts them.
Attempting to force the Hand of God often earns a slap.
Be careful if you’d carefree be. Care is the only thing you have less of the more you take.
Be careful when throwing stones…you might hit yourself. I knew a hot-headed preacher a while back, and I always felt he had a grudge against women, though I never asked outright. He said that women’s demand for abortion rights was proof that they were in fact the weaker sex. “You can’t trust women to act responsibly with their bodies, and even they know it, which is why they expect to be given this ‘out’ for the consequences of their recklessness. It just proves that the old stereotypes are right. Women without husbands are accidents waiting to happen.” I was like, “Yeah? How many men have been relieved to hear their girlfriends were getting an abortion? How many losers swore to dump them if they didn’t? What’s that say about men?” The look that came over his face was indescribable. Regret’s the biggest bitch.
Be careful young man where you sleep, how often and with whom. When you find the one you’d keep, she might not feel like keeping you.
Be gentle, if a good man you’d be, with the ladies with whom God’s blessed your life; whether mother, daughter, sister, friend or wife. Without these, life is like a vase without a bouquet: pointless, sad and empty.
Be kind to your foes and critics, for they mercilessly show you where there’s room for improvement.
Be less interested in proving that you are right, than in learning what is right.
Be master of your impulses, or be mastered by them. No crime was ever committed by someone in possession of themselves.
Be wary of hero worship. Thomas Jefferson was probably our most highly educated president. Besides being an inventor and one of the main authors of our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, he spoke many foreign languages and had a massive personal library. But…not only did he own slaves, he cheated on his wife with at least one and mercilessly refused to acknowledge any of his children by her as his own. If these last points were all we knew about Jefferson, we’d mark him as the very worst kind of man possible, the kind we’d cross the street to save our children from meeting.
Be wary to marry unless spouses agree
With this very sound philosophy
The lovers are best who love each other less
Than they do their offspring.
Because of hardness of heart, how many are dead who needn’t be, who overlooked the words of Jesus, “Love thy enemy”?
Betray a friend to have your name withdrawn from circulation. No one names their son “Judas” in this or any nation.
Beware new business tools. Innovation in management methods usually benefit those most who adopt them first. Thereafter, everyone else is just playing catch-up. The problem is that we never know which new tool is going to hit the mark and really work, or just turn out to be another flash in the pan fad until after the fact. Then, we’ve lost our opportunity to do anything other than play catch-up. I suppose it’s a valid point of view to say that it’s better to play catch-up than take the risk of losing everything. There’s one word in this paragraph that is far more important than any other, and alone accounts for why I bothered writing it and making you read it. Which word is it? If you get the right answer, you’re management material.
Beware when confronting tyrants. Just because you’re right doesn’t mean you’ll win.
Bishop’s Definition of Cultural Psychosis: marching on Washington to support legalizing gay marriage when your grandmother has to decide which she’ll live without this January – prescriptions or heat.
Blew your wages on luxuries, so have no bread and butter. Louis Vuitton makes a first class bag, but a piss-poor Sunday supper.
Borrow only for what is worth more than what you borrow. ‘Tis most unwise to do otherwise; today’s lenders will own you tomorrow.
Both Reagan and Clinton won office with 43% of the vote. I have nothing to say about the quality of leadership demonstrated by either of these men, but only about the irony that either should hold office when at least 57% of the American people considered each unsuitable; for if 43% of us voted for them, 57% of us voted against them. Is it good policy to allow anyone to hold the most important office in the world when 57% of the voters think he shouldn’t? I propose therefore, that whenever a candidate “wins” with less than 50% of the popular vote, there should be a runoff between this candidate and whomever came in 2nd, eliminating all other candidates from the ballot. If we still get a bum, we can’t say we didn’t ask for it.
Bragging about the good you’ve done is as bad as the worst thing you’ve done but kept secret.
Buddha discerned some great truths, but at what cost and to whom? We’d have little good to say about any modern man who ditched his wife and newborn child to go find himself.
Burnt down his heart with hateful speech, then blamed him for the smoke she reaped.
Buy everything you want at the store today, find Want in store tomorrow.
Buying in is not the same thing as selling out.
By default, he is the Wrong Person to hold public office who Wants To. Thus, our elections are really about choosing the lesser of two mediocrities.
Can you avoid your fate? The Greek tragedies teach that our fate more quickly finds us the harder we work to avoid it.
Can you finish tomorrow what you didn’t start today?
Change what you do if you would change what you are.
Children come into the world as geniuses. It’s what family and society does to them next that determines whether they’ll turn out that way.
Children feel invincible, so to guard against consequences which they lack the wisdom to foresee, we give them rules. Hence, The Ten Commandments.
Children learn better what is right when you explain than when you scream. It makes the difference between normal and neurotic; I know because I’ve seen.
Christian missionaries from America go into diverse foreign places and try to convert the foreigners to an American style of Christianity. They build a church that looks like an American church, staff it like one, and even decorate it like one down to the organ and piano which they use to accompany the same hymns they sing back in the States. In doing all of this, they’ve done less to spread the Gospel than to spread American culture, and it is very hard for a church so planted to take serious root. It’s like casting seed on stony ground; as soon as the first batch of missionaries are gone, the church tends to dry up. Better to adapt the methods to local ones as much as possible, while preserving the message. If the locals overseas already worship their gods in temples with gongs and incense, or around a bonfire with drums and chanting, then that’s the kind of church we should be planting.
Christians should live like every day is Easter….because it is.
College is not 13th grade. Sit down, listen up, close your mouth, open your book and take some paper out. It’s time to get with the program.
Concerning applying The Scriptures to modern daily life, some parts were written for the culture back then, but some apply all of the time and to all men.
Concerning public welfare, good governments should make these its highest priority: children, single mothers, pregnant women, widows, the infirm and the elderly.
Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, so we sue the town that opens its meetings with prayer. But we ignore without pause the other half of the clause, “nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Of this kind of thing…beware.
Control your fear of losing, not what you’re afraid to lose. Another’s heart is never kept which in fear’s chains is abused.
Court a lady when she’s courted by another, you do three hearts injustice.
Definition of a rut: being inside the box we need to think outside of.
Delayed his work to enjoy his leisure, so quickly found himself with neither.
Depression is self-deception.
Did you really expect your candidate to fix the machine that got him where he is because it was broken? Please.
Didn’t get up, fell behind, the day was over so he went under.
Do all today’s work all day today, or spend all your days on yesterday’s.
Do I believe in spanking children? Yes and no. What passed for a spanking regarding my daughter was a single swat on her diapered bottom. I never used it except when she needed to learn a lesson the first time I taught it to never do something again. From my hand she got three such spankings, and each one brought nearly as many tears to my eyes as to hers. Three important rules follow: never spank a child when you’re angry, because then it’s revenge, not correction; never use a spanking to “show who’s the boss”, but to correct dangerous or otherwise unacceptable behavior; and only use it to correct when doing so ensures something never gets repeated. If one spanking didn’t get your kid to stop playing in the street, one hundred won’t.
Do nothing that would embarrass your parents, if it came out that you did it.
Dogs will be your best friends ever, but cats are seldom more than art that moves. Sometimes.
Don’t be fooled. No one is ever as good, or as bad, as they seem, and I am hardly an exception to this. I have sometimes been credited with the most extraordinary moral qualities by those I’ve helped in various ways, yet I consider myself very average. If I seem exceptional, my best guess is that it is only when I am compared against the deplorable moral standards that have become the “new normal” in this increasingly dystopian culture. Probably the best things about me are that 1) I know what a mess I am and 2) the fact that I am not okay with it motivates me to at least try being a better man than I am. Shouldn’t this be how all men feel? If they did, I’d blend right in. If I stand out, it’s only because they don’t.
Don’t be surprised if the people you love best are the ones who hurt you most. Remember: we only open our hearts to those we love, and so are invulnerable to all others’ insults. So, take heart and don’t be bitter; the depth of the hurt you receive is a measure of how deeply you love.
Don’t blame God for your miseries. 99% of our sorrows in life come from this: people not doing what they should, and doing what they shouldn’t.
Don’t confuse encouragement with advice. Offer encouragement in an instant, but with advice be reticent.
Don’t criticize others’ sins thinking you’ll get in trouble with God if you don’t. How many of the men who cornered the adulteress did God punish for not stoning her?
Don’t reward businesses with your business who don’t take your business seriously.
During the wretched period of history that Americans had slaves, field hands had to be fed, housed, clothed, and given medical care even when there was no seed to sow, no crop to tend, no harvest to gather. The machines that replaced them did the work of hundreds of field hands and needed fuel and maintenance only on the few days they were in use each year. Thus, agricultural slavery was doomed anyway by the coming industrial revolution. The Civil War accomplished nothing but the snuffing out of at least 750,000 lives on fields of battle, who never returned to work their own fields, tend their own shops or raise their sons and daughters. To the modern American political liberal who says otherwise, I ask, “Where’s your horse and buggy?”
Each dollar we’ve spent on fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan is a dollar flushed down the toilet. We will never achieve our stated goals in countries with cultures that are so diametrically opposed to them. There is no way our leaders didn’t know this when they chose to get us involved, and no way those who are keeping us involved don’t.
Each of us is born into a family that may or may not be particularly good. We have no choice in the matter. But we do have a choice in the friends we make and keep. Friends should be the family we get to choose for ourselves.
Earth’s tiniest flowering plant is a species of duckweed, wolffia microscopica. The entire plant from root to blossom can fit through the eye of a needle. But what makes it more than amazing is that it is also the fastest reproducing plant in the world, doubling its mass every 24 to 36 hours. If you have a ton of the stuff today, then by this time tomorrow you can have 2 tons. It grows in a thin layer on top of still and slow-moving water, and can grow in water that is too contaminated to be good for anything else. As it grows, it purifies the water, removing everything from industrial chemicals to heavy metals like lead. But wait, there’s more! It can be used as a biofuel. In other words, anything that runs on coal or diesel fuel can run on duckweed and the oil extracted from it. If we cultivated duckweed in ponds of sewage in the middle of the desert, we could in a month or two completely free ourselves of fossil fuels for the generation of electric power and for running diesel engines. But wait, there’s more! It’s a carbon neutral fuel; growing it takes 100% of the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere that is put there by burning it. The same oils it contains that let us use it for bio-diesel can be turned into bio-plastics, taking more petroleum out of the loop. But wait, there’s more! It can be used to feed livestock; everything from chickens to cows to sheep and even fish. When it’s cultivated in sanitary conditions, even people can eat it. In parts of the world, they do and call it “meal weed.” Rich in protein, it’s used to thicken soups and for enriching bread. But wait, there’s more! You can plow the stuff into Earth’s deserts and turn them into first class farmland. This humble little plant, the tiniest flower in the world, is truly a gift from God. But most of us have never heard of it. What else have we never heard of?
Economics is based on the assumption that consumers are rational, and that their purchases and other economic-related behavior is based on logic. How then to account for the fact that a simple marketing experiment in which consumers chose ground beef that was 85% lean almost every time rather than ground beef that was 15% fat? The two are the same. There’s very little rational about any aspect of human behavior, including our behavior regarding money. Yet the economic policies designed and implemented by our governments never ever take this into account.
Employers and colleges often talk about how highly they value diversity. They’ll prove it by taking steps to ensure that enough women and ethnic groups are on the payroll or the campus. There is nothing inherently bad about this, but how often have they only achieved the appearance of diversity rather than its substance? True diversity comes only from finding people who differ in ways that are not so superficial.
Even if we win the shoving match between man and Nature, we still lose.
Even two pretty faces look badly. Don’t be two-faced.
Even when I’ve felt the most useless, I had to admit I wasn’t. The greatest failure succeeds superbly as a cautionary tale.
Ever notice how only those in poverty blame Fate? The wealthy always credit themselves.
Evidently, it is President Obama’s policy to let dyed in the wool deadbeat dads walk free and unpunished even as it puts single mothers and their children on the streets. I know a woman, the mother of two, who is losing her home because her children’s father refuses to pay his child support and now owes in excess of $70,000. Her mortgage lender was the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, and it is that branch of the Obama administration that will be foreclosing on her shortly, reducing her and her children to homelessness. And the cruelest twist? She voted for him in the 2012 election. Egad!
Fail because you tried and failed, not because you didn’t.
Falling in love at first sight is just another kind of impulse purchase. And my professional opinion as a marketer is that there never was an impulse purchase that didn’t end in cognitive dissonance, a.k.a., buyer remorse.
Fascinating.
Feel others’ pain as if your own, then others’ pain you’ll seldom own.
Finish what you start, or be finished by what you didn’t.
Friends become lovers, but lovers seldom friends; too bitter are the ashes left when the fire of passion ends.
From liking to loving, indifference to loathing,
Thus went their hearts’ unmet needs.
Great gardeners grow gardens with more than great seeds,
They must also pull out all the weeds.
From my Father: Chicken one day, feathers the next.
From my Father: The path of least resistance always leads downhill.
From my favorite movie, Kingdom of Heaven: “What man is a man who does not try to make the world better?”
From the behavior of modern men and women, it seems there is some confusion about the difference between exercising liberties and taking them.
Funny how the instant Thanksgiving is over, it’s like it never happened. Don’t believe me? Two words for you: Black Friday.
Get a grip on yourself or lose what you’ve got.
Getting even proves you’re odd.
Give each person alive today their own beach blanket to lie on, and we’d all fit in the panhandle of Texas. The earth is not overpopulated, merely overcrowded.
Given the broken down political system in the United States, I wonder if it might be more effective to vote with our HR paperwork than at the polls. If everyone who had been on the end of some kind of injustice directly perpetrated by or indirectly underwritten by the federal government went to their HR department tomorrow and changed their federal withholdings to $0, what would happen? At the rate this government blows money, it would shortly escalate into a fiscal crisis that might not be survivable.
God doesn’t make anyone anyone else’s whipping boy. I’ve been patiently observing the Westboro Baptist Church’s folly for many years now. I understand they feel that God is going to punish the United States for the “unpunished sins” of a few, and that various crimes, natural disasters and other tragedies are the just desserts of a corrupt people in the hands of an angry God. I think such a point of view might come as a shock to the One who said, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”
God doesn’t punish sin so much as sin is sin’s own punishment. No child needs a scolding who’s burnt his fingers playing with forbidden matches.
God set us down in a world overflowing with every resource with which to solve our problems and make life joyously abundant. Why are we still suffering?
God takes the side of those who are on God’s side. So the question is, which side is God’s?
Good advice, however good, when offered more than requested, results more often in resentment than in the thanks expected.
Good grief, don’t kill yourself. Someone at some point is going to need your help, but you won’t be there to give it. God forbid you should have that on your conscience…for Eternity.
Good manners are how we show others that we respect them.
Gorge today, gout tomorrow.
Government need not fear citizens who need not fear government.
Have I fallen? Many times, and many times found myself falling forward.
Have you noticed that our armies are no longer fighting armies? They’re fighting the local equivalent of rednecks.
He awoke today with only what he’d thanked God for the night before, so now will wake no more.
He can’t get up who gives up.
He can’t save face who’s two-faced.
He did what?!? He bailed out the companies who foreclosed on single mothers’ homes, but did nothing to ensure that they stop? Egad! Give him the big house, not the White House!
He eventually gets taken out who frequently takes the easy way out.
He gains more who gives up greed than his greed ever gained him. Though he thought it made him free, the riches he got restrained him.
He has no hope to make one well, who makes six things at once. He’d need more hands than Shiva, to make with excellence.
He helps himself who others helps.
He is less of a man who thinks himself more of one for the large number of women he’s bedded. Dogs do no differently, but at least they’re not braggarts.
He loses all else he holds, who tightly holds a grudge.
He makes probably the only mark he will in life who writes on others’ walls.
He must rush when he wouldn’t who delays when he shouldn’t.
He needs advice most who offers it where it isn’t wanted.
He only sought her praise, but received naught but her scolding. Too late! Too late! The knot was tied, to a she-wolf in sheep’s clothing.
He overheard his wife in prayer, thanking God for her good husband. Silently he joined right in, “Thank you, Lord, for my sweet wife, for she’s what makes me good.”
He raises a crop of resentment who spills his seed recklessly.
He tried his best to help two friends save their troubled marriage, and was severely punished for it. Listening is good, giving encouragement is great, getting involved…God help you.
He tries others’ patience who hasn’t any.
He waited his turn with tapping foot, to see if he got hired. In six weeks received the boot; Impatience got him fired.
He was the winter, she was the spring, and her sparkling eyes did blind him. But how much more blind was the spring? Winter’s future lay behind him!
He won his first game of roulette, then squandered his winnings and all else he had by his second. Be wary when winning’s easy, or see how easily one wins poverty.
He won the fight with someone else, thus lost the one within himself.
Health and fitness don’t last long when we eat more than we need. How much more so the human heart when its only food is greed?
Hearty hearts hardly hurt, halt, hesitate or hate.
Heaven’s halls reverberate with each prayer each man utters, beseeching God to fulfill his needs, but too seldom to fulfill each other’s.
Here’s irony for you. In Barack Obama we supposedly have our first African American president. Well, his father was African, but not American. His mother was American but not African. No one in Pres. Obama’s family was ever required to move to the back of the bus or got lynched merely on the suspicion of some crime, and no one in his family was threatened for attending a freshly-desegregated “white” public school. I suppose he’d be Irish if we put an apostrophe after the O in his last name…O’Bama. Politicians will co-opt anything they think will help them get where they want to get. Don’t be duped.
Here’s to the young who wish to be wise: Learn from your elders’ mistakes or suffer a very unpleasant surprise.
Hindsight is a waste if we never learn from our mistakes. Only a fool repeats the same action hoping something different will happen.
Honored promises promise honors.
How about this? When you file your taxes from now on there will be a form allowing you to allocate to different government departments percentages of the taxes you’ve paid. If you want 50% of what you have to pay anyway to go toward Defense or Education or whatever…it does. This puts control of how taxes are spent in the hands of the taxpayers themselves.
How close is civilization to folding? See how the elderly its esteem are holding.
How do you know a wise rich man from a foolish one? Look at their wives. A woman with a beautiful heart may or may not have a pretty face, but a rich man with an ugly wife is without question winner in the wisdom race.
How grown up are the grown-ups? I recently heard a report from a 14 year old fellow I know – the girlfriend that dumped him to date someone else complained to their mutual friends about how quickly he got over her. I’ve seen men and women in their 40s do no differently. Fascinating.
How quickly we find causes worth killing for, how slowly those worth dying for.
How strange that we weep for those we believe are in Heaven. Let us weep for the suffering of the dying, let us weep over the sting of separation from those we love, and especially let us weep when we ponder how much more we might have done to save our loved-ones who die before their time, but to weep for those we believe to be in God’s presence? Somehow, it feels like hypocrisy to me.
Human intelligence falls along a bell-shaped curve, with very few really intelligent or really unintelligent people. The largest portion of the human race falls right in the middle. On a grading scale, that means most people are operating at C+ intelligence level. These are the people who are designing and operating our businesses and government institutions. Is it any wonder things aren’t run better than they are?
Humans have a perplexingly inexhaustible confidence in our own judgment, regardless how often we mistake evil for good.
I ain’t often right, but when I am, watch out!
I am a man of Faith, and as such believe that I will one day face a Judgment for my behavior. On that day, God is going to ask me what I did for his children. "I sent so-and-so to you because he had this problem and I knew you could help. Did you help him? How?" I will have to answer those questions thousands of times, once for each person in some kind of need who came my way. How will I answer? At the end of the day, when I've uttered my last response, what expression will be on God's face as he considers what to do with me? Will it be one of pride and approval or of disappointment and disgust? I believe either is possible. I know which expression I don’t want to see.
I can’t tell you what the meaning of life is. I think it may differ for each of us. But life’s purpose seems pretty clear: live to make the world better for all of God’s children. Even if all we did was try, we’d have a better world than the one we’ve got.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m tired of seeing insurance premiums driven up by deadly floods one year and food prices by drought the next. Why not a system of canals, pipelines and reservoirs intended to impound the flood waters that create havoc when they hit, and reuse them for agricultural irrigation in dry years? The reservoirs could be assembled in America’s vast, dry deserts on land that isn’t good for anything else. Such a system could even have saved New Orleans from the worst effects of Hurricane Katrina.
I don’t know if this document was authentic, but I saw a copy of a government memo in which some key decision maker on some panel responsible for giving us our modern form of social welfare stated that it was important to do so to keep “blacks” out of the “white” job market, lest they acquire the affluence and influence to become an ascendant political power in the United States. It was dated in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Food for thought.
I don’t mind paying taxes, at least no more than I mind paying for anything. It’s what I’m getting for my money that determines how I swallow the bill. To see the fruits of my labor being blown bailing out the people who are foreclosing on single mothers’ homes; that’s what sucks. If I’m not going to bitch about that, I’ve no right to bitch about anything.
I don’t need much, but can’t live without what I do.
I got in trouble in 7th grade English. We had to give a short presentation about one of our personal heroes. Other kids presented athletes, presidents, and civil rights leaders. I presented Jesus. I didn’t say he was the son of God or worked miracles or that people should dump their own religion to become Christians. All I said was that he was the author of a philosophy of life that has only produced good in the world wherever it’s been sincerely adopted. I got sent to the principal’s office where I was shortly joined by my mother, summoned to hear what a troublemaker I’d been. In a way, the school made my point for me.
I had the curious experience of hearing a student tell me how his older brother liked it in jail. He was fed 3 meals a day, had a bed and roof, all the peace and quiet he desired, and was far safer than his younger brother in the neighborhood where they were raised. Does that say something about our jails or our neighborhoods?
I have great respect for the U.S. Constitution. At the time, it was the greatest safeguard of liberty against the incursions of an unjust government that had ever been conceived of. Yet, the men who conceived of it could not have foreseen the role that corporations have taken in the electoral process. At this point, we need an amendment (or a new constitution) that makes it impossible for candidates for office to benefit from campaign contributions from big dollar donors. With such a feature added to the process, voters can be assured that no candidate has had the unfair advantage of a big dollar donor who is motivated by the desire to maintain the status quo. The small, independent visionary’s voice will get equal billing at last.
I have had some extreme moments as a college educator. I have talked four students out of suicide, and broken up more than one fist-fight between students. I’ve had students confide to me that they were dying, and others have found out in my classes that they were pregnant. I have had students complain to my supervisors when I failed them for cheating, and have had their parents call me to take me to task for not rescheduling a quiz that was announced on the syllabus when their children chose to watch the MTV video music awards the night before I gave it, and failed it. I’ve even been chewed out by my supervisors for going the extra mile for students. But my most perplexing moment came when 25% of the class got the following “fun” extra credit question wrong: “If it is September in the United States, what month is it in Australia?” Every single one of these kids went to public schools paid for by your tax money.
I have studied the basic problem of “Civilization,” and my best guess is that mammals are simply too hot-blooded to develop a civilization without a religion at its foundation. Without an ennobling influence, we are simply a kind of gifted ape, and one that is unfortunately burdened with violent tendencies that preclude our peaceful coexistence even with others of our own species for very long. We need something that can encourage us to be liberated from those impulses if we are to achieve anything greater than anarchy.
I hesitate an opinion to state on the rightness of abortion. The rhetoric’s replete with emotional entreats, there’s no sense from such nonsensical commotion. There should be no issue if a fetus is just tissue, as there is none with pulling a tooth. But if it’s a person then it’s infanticide, so to end this debate let’s learn what’s the truth.
I hold no man’s beliefs against him, unless they require me to believe the same.
I knew a man who’d lost the use of his eyes, but it’s my earnest opinion he had more vision than 99% of those who hadn’t.
I once knew a guy so lazy he’d only date pregnant women.
I only want to know three things. How the hell did things get like this, what the hell can I do about it, and who the hell’s with me?
I seldom saw my father drink, and don’t recall ever seeing him even a little bit tipsy. When I was little, he’d have a six pack nearby as he watched a ballgame or a NASCAR race, but I don’t recall him ever finishing one at one go. By the time I was 7 or 8 years old, I don’t recall him touching any kind of alcohol except for special occasions like New Year’s Eve. I never heard him say a stronger word than “Crap” and never saw him lose his temper in the way others often do. He had the zaniest sense of humor, and always had something encouraging to say when it was needed. We had battles with water pistols well into my 20s. He was curious about science, tinkered a lot and even made some of his own tools to save him a trip to a hardware store. He fixed the family cars himself, and I once saw him swap out an engine on a 1974 or ’75 Chevy Vega. We spent hours talking about new ways to build things, and he even had some funny ideas about perpetual motion machines; he didn’t seem to get that friction wasn’t something you could entirely design out of a machine. He had the strongest work ethic of any man I ever met, and wouldn’t think twice about going in to work sick enough to keep most of us in bed. His family came first. Yet, though he wasn’t cut from the same cloth as most men, he was still a man, in the end.
I shudder to wonder if I will be judged not for the evil I did, but for the good I didn’t.
I sometimes think life isn’t hard enough. I’ve learned far more about myself when I was at the end of my rope than I ever did when life was “good.” While I don’t wish a hard life on anyone, I wonder how much more our lives and relationships with others would mean to us if we had to endure some truly national or worldwide crisis. The Great Depression of the 1930s taught people the value of a good family, an honest day’s work and of money - lessons we seem to have forgotten.
I think children have to go through a certain sociopathic phase for their moral development. If all children kept each other’s feelings in mind all the time, then none of them would learn how valuable it is to do so, for they’d never feel the sting when others don’t.
I think of a gun like a contraceptive: better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. It is written that those who live by the sword will die by it, and I believe it, so God forbid I should ever use a weapon aggressively. But as long as there are some who do, who refuse to live peaceably with the rest of mankind and will not lay down their weapons, the rest of us dare not.
I was invited to a friend’s house to watch a Redskins game. I paid more attention to the effect it had on the people around me than to the game itself. Fascinating.
I will not run for office unless I clearly have no alternative. Until then, I will agitate for justice until I am convinced that agitation cannot achieve it.
I would like to see the United States adopt a reciprocal immigration policy. Whatever some foreign country’s policy is toward Americans visiting or living there, that should be our policy towards its citizens who come here. How quickly things would change, and how much for the better!
I would rather have seen Fred Rogers become President of the United States than any other man who has held that office in my lifetime.
I wouldn’t go as far as Will Rogers, who said he never met a man he didn’t like, but it’s certainly true I’ve never hated anyone in my whole life.
I’d be a wealthy fellow indeed if I had a penny for every good marriage that went bad that started out with no greater problem than this: men seldom realize that women’s words have hidden meanings, women that men’s seldom do.
I’d like to tell you what I know about change, but it’s never the same one minute to the next.
I’m grateful for lots of things, but for this more than anything else: That God is not as impatient with people as people are with each other. What hope would we have if He were?
I’m grieved by others’ sorrows, more deeply than my own. Their tears took root within my heart, and there they’ve deeply grown.
I’ve never seen any real conflict between theology and the theories of evolution and natural selection. I am unwilling to put any limitations on the Almighty and he is certainly free to use whatever tools he wishes to accomplish his ends. He needs, for example, some way to fill environmental niches that have been vacated by species that have gone extinct. Rather than speak a new species into being, he’s set up a system that fills such vacancies on its own in time. The camel I’ve been unable to swallow is abiogenesis: the evolution of the first living thing from non-living precursors. The brightest scientific minds our civilization has so far produced have been unable to set up an experiment in which non-living chemicals self-organize into a living thing, regardless how simple. It seems self-evident that such a thing requires a Very Bright Mind indeed.
I’ve seen too many last minute miracles to doubt God exists and cares about us. Perhaps He waits sometimes to bless us, so there’s no question Who to thank.
I’ve stood in many famous places looking at the myriad monuments and memorials we have erected to the lasting glory of great politicians, soldiers, the wealthy, and the wise and asked, “Where are the monuments to their mothers?” We need a National Monument to Motherhood. It says something about us that there isn’t one.
If “ignorance of the law is no excuse” be one of our legal principles, how much more so should this be one: there is no excuse for an ignorant law. Is it?
If a spouse dies, they leave when they’d rather stay. But a bad marriage that ends in divorce? Divorce proves God exists; it’s a miracle that anyone survives it.
If all humans are descended from the same common ancestor, then everyone in the world who is not your ancestor, aunt, uncle, descendent, niece or nephew, is in fact your biological cousin.
If all it takes is a kind, encouraging word to turn someone’s unhappy life around, what kind of man would I be to withhold it?
If by breaking wind before a friend, you’re very apt to lose him, how much more noisome unkind words when on your friend you use them!
If God is the father of all, then all are brothers and sisters.
If I had a penny for every man that was destroyed by getting what he wanted, I’d be next.
If I had opportunity to do whatever I wanted to do, the first thing I’d do is build a private school with curricula and pedagogical methods structured around the results of students’ Myers-Briggs tests. The public school system as we have received it is designed to accommodate average students, but most students are not truly average in terms of aptitude, and there really IS no such thing as “average” when it comes to personality. Public schools are failing, in part because they employ methods amounting to little more than pounding square pegs into round holes; bad for the pegs, bad for the holes.
If I’d read Orwell for the first time today, I might not think it fiction.
If I’m the only person in the world who believes what I do as far as spiritual beliefs go, and I probably am, then that’s good enough for me. If someone else ever decided they wanted to believe what I do (so far...no) then let it be because they think their hunger for God can be satisfied the way mine is, and not because I tried to bring them around to my way of thinking. If people of all faiths took this as a first principle, there’d be a lot less grief in the world.
If Necessity is the mother of invention, then Insatiable Curiosity is its father. Learn enough about enough, and the accumulated data instantly auto-correlate to a creative critical mass and dazzlingly detonate in a kaleidoscopic mushroom cloud of thrilling and astounding innovation! A preposterous, fulsome-sounding sentence, but those gifted (or afflicted) with a certain kind of mind will agree it’s somewhat understated.
If Roe vs Wade this precedent made: it’s her body so it’s her business, then (though I don’t smoke it) why can’t we all toke it? It becomes self-evident that I have no authority over my own body.
If the history of the human race were reduced to a 12 hour clock, we left the stone age at 11:57. We cannot hope in these last 3 minutes to undo the cultural and psychological tendencies we’ve acquired in the deep mysterious hours which preceded them. We are, and shall be for many “hours” to come, stone age people dumped in a high tech world.
If there’s anything good about your significant other’s jealousy, it’s this: it shows they’re afraid of losing you.
If there’s no excuse for defiance of just laws that are impartially enforced, then there’s none for failing to defy those that are neither just nor impartially enforced.
If time is money and time’s the stuff life’s made of, you pay with life each time you anything buy.
If we all loved our enemies, we’d have none.
If we collectively distribute healthcare costs by paying insurance premiums, would it be possible to distribute the cost of sending our kids to college by paying into some kind of higher-ed collective?
If we’d spent as much tax money on agricultural and energy self-sufficiency as we have on fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’d have these problems solved by now, and could have avoided all the problems we’ve made for ourselves and others in those places.
If you dislike your past, you’ll like your future less. Most of us are set in our ways by the age of seven.
If you had a chance to meet a real bona-fide angel in the flesh, would you really want to? I think it would be unsettling at best, and few of us would like hearing what it had to say.
If you love someone, what’s precious to them is important to you. If you love God, show it by taking good care of others. Even your enemies are God’s children.
If you think we live in a just society, try suing a government agency that has perpetrated an injustice against you. You have finite resources to pursue your case, but they have essentially unlimited resources with which to defend themselves.
If you want to have money for things you need, think of what you’re spending on things you don’t. A pack a day smoker in NYC loses a tank of gas every three days.
If you want to know what someone’s really like, watch what makes them laugh.
If you wonder what your true potential is, do something other than wonder about it.
If you would harvest good-will, plant virtues. No one resented Johnny Appleseed.
If you’re married, be careful with your spouse’s heart, or be careful whom you marry. How many men have married a friend but woke up with an adversary?
If your kids are raised by MTV when they should be raised by you, once you’re old and alone, Egad! what then will you do?
If your motive in helping is to get thanked, you need more help than have help to give.
Impulse purchases always purchase worthlessness.
Impulses fed by a little indulgence grow swiftly to overwhelming effulgence.
In a truly egalitarian society, the cream is supposed to rise to the top. However, we don’t have an egalitarian society. Nepotism, sexism, and racism (among other –isms) introduce inefficiencies to the system. These hinder its ability to excel. As fast-paced as progress seems to be, it would be much more so were these limiting factors absent. It is therefore in our best interests to make them so.
In dealing with a certain kind of man, the best punishment is to leave him as he is.
In five minutes of scrubbing, however dirty he may have been, any man who can fit into a shower will be squeaky clean…on the outside. The question that should haunt each of us is: How can we scrub the dirt from our souls, and how long will it take?
In principle, I admire the Intentional Community concept. No living arrangement that I can imagine is as suited to fulfilling human psychological needs as a group of like-minded people setting up their own village.
In the Christian Scriptures, it is written that the empire of Rome would be re-established before the 2nd coming of Christ. I used to take this literally, and expected something like the European Union to form inclusive of the territory once ruled by Rome. While this has happened at last, in terms of political ideals and practices, the country in the modern world that most resembles the ancient Roman Empire is the United States of America, even down to an eagle being our national emblem. Underlying all of this, an important question: How did the early Christians know that the Roman Empire would fall?
In the fullness of time, when the idea is prime, no power on Earth can stop it. Incumbents fight to thwart our will, but can’t defeat our logic.
Increasingly, I find that “unlearning” what I think I know is as important as learning what I don’t.
Innovation is pointless if it doesn’t solve the consumer’s problem. Let their problems be the driver of innovation, rather than innovation for its own sake, and the resulting product will be well-poised to be great.
Instead of personal income taxes, why not a 10% national sales tax? People living below the poverty line would be exempt, otherwise, every purchase we make has 10% added to it. This is collected at the municipal level, which passes 10% of that on to the state, which passes 10% of what it receives on to the Federal Government. If you can’t run your federal government on that, it’s too big.
Ironic that the actual definition of "civilization" is "living in cities" when it's IN cities that we see the highest concentration of uncivilized behavior.
Is ignorance bliss? Then politics is sublime.
It is hard for a nation to be civilized whose citizens lack the ennobling influence of Faith; without this, we have little incentive to not behave like apes. If there’s no Heaven or Hell to receive our souls, no God to fear or love, the best lives we can imagine are those ruled by indulging passion and vice than by showing compassion or by being nice. A man may or may not be descended from monkeys, but without God in his heart, a monkey’s about all he is.
It is probably fair to say it’s unfair to expect all of us to be at the same place on the road to enlightenment.
It’s a narrow-minded man who thinks there’s only one way to make love to his woman. Apart from the purely sexual way of doing so, he makes love to the woman who holds his heart each time he goes to work, does the laundry, washes the dishes, helps with the homework, gets up to handle the 4 o’clock feeding...and so forth.
It’s easier to break a cup than make one. The same is true for cities. When we build no new cities at home, but take pride in destroying old ones overseas, it’s a sign we’re on our way out. We’ve become our own worst enemy.
It’s true: beggars can’t be choosers. We have to take what we’re offered or do without. How much more true this is when the weak lack liberty.
Jesus has said that we will reap what we sow. Further, that those who live by the sword shall die by it. These are things said by the only person that I know of who ever raised himself from the dead, which I feel gives his words an authority far above those of any other historical figure, regardless how well-regarded for their wisdom or accomplishments. Perhaps we should take what he said…seriously.
Jesus’ message boils down to this: We’ll have everything we need in terms of prosperity and peace of mind if we make our priority seeking the Kingdom of God, and the way to seek that is to make compassion, love and forgiveness the guiding principles of our lives. That’s the Good News, and that’s why we’re supposed to broadcast it. But there’s an important caveat: it works best if everyone is doing it. See the urgency?
Judging others is like poorfreading: sumhow, every won else’s misteaks are hard two miss, while hour own mite as well bee invisable.
Jump to conclusions to conclude your inclusion.
Just about the only thing worse than being in debt is putting others there.
Keep to yourself what others need, and others will keep to themselves when needed.
Ladies, is it purest love you feel, or more akin to lust? Ask yourself if in his hands, your children’s lives you’d trust.
Less watching, more doing! We’re surrounded by screens, and only because we do so little with our own lives that we need to live vicariously to feel alive at all. Thus, my students talk about what to watch now that Jersey Shore’s been cancelled, instead of what they learned volunteering at the shelter or about the books they’re writing.
Let no one say you withheld your help
When help was there and needed
From those who suffered silently
Yet were willing to receive it.
Let there be at least be one country on the surface of the Earth where consenting adults have the liberty to live how they wish without having someone else get in their faces about it, provided that they infringe no one else’s rights to do so in doing so. For my part, I say let it be the United States.
Liberals accuse me of being conservative, conservatives of being liberal. Though I’m neither, neither am I moderate. In some ways, I’m more liberal than most liberals, more conservative than most conservatives. Politically bi-polar, I suppose. I think we’re operationalizing our political ideologies at the wrong level of abstraction, as if everything follows along a continuum from one extreme to another. What if, instead, political ideology doesn’t fall on a left-right scale, but on a multidimensional one? If so, then our present understanding of things is itself a contributing factor to why we make so little progress through politics.
Liberty never walks hand in hand with Ignorance.
Live as if what you believe were true; if you’re right, proof will surely come to you.
Live each day as if it’s your last, because eventually, it will be.
Livingry is the term coined by Buckminster Fuller to describe life-enhancing technologies, products and services, in contrast to “weaponry” which may save some lives, but only by taking others. Every dollar we earn as returns on investments in weaponry would be 100 times that return if invested in livingry. Money spent on weapons now increases the probability that we’ll have to spend more on weapons later. Money spent on livingry decreases that likelihood. Nothing’s lost, and we gain everything.
Losing one’s temper shows a lack of tempering.
Love is the treasure we receive more of the more given.
Love thy lover’s children, almost as if thine own. God did place them in thy care, to give a loving home. Their angels gaze unblinkingly, and note all words and deeds, renowned for lacking sympathy shouldst fools a child mistreat. See that thou forgettest not, thy daughter lives elsewhere, for her sake then love these well, as thou wouldst her wert thou there.
Love, honor, and cherish, are among the vows we take. But how swiftly they forget these vows, which with harsh words daily break.
Managers tend to fall into two broad categories based on management style. Theory X managers think their employees are motivated by fear and money and require constant supervision because they inherently dislike work. Theory Y managers think their employees are motivated by all kinds of things and work best when supervised the least. Both attitudes are wrong. No organization will work at peak efficiency that exclusively uses one management style over the other. A realistic assessment would be that each organization has employees who absolutely require management by a Theory X boss, as well as those that can be loosely managed by a Theory Y supervisor. In fact, some employees will be best managed by one or the other at different times during their tenure at the company.
Many of our problems arise from the fact that even though we’re spiritual and intellectual beings, we’re stuck in physical bodies like other animals, and so must deal with the animal aspects of our existence as well. Definitely a complicating factor.
Marry someone who is a good conversationalist, who “gets you” and accepts you for who you are, with a gentle and patient heart, who isn’t happy unless you are, and who shares your opinions about faith, raising kids, and money. Notice, I said nothing about how sexy you should find them. Marry someone because they’re “hot” and you’ll eventually learn how hot the flames of Hell really are.
Marx defined the history of the world as the struggle of one class against another. This falls far short of the truth, mistaking the symptom for the cause. Our history is the story of our struggles against our baser impulses. No grief in the world derives from any cause other than this.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs leaves out one important element. Think about what it might be.
Meaningful changes are extremely difficult to achieve in any country as geographically large, culturally diverse, and economically complex as this one is, because policies that might help alleviate misery in part of the country will create misery in some other if applied uniformly to all. Thus, candidates for office who propose significant changes seldom stay in the race to its end. The candidates who survive the process are those whose policies are the least likely to result in significant changes to the status quo, if elected.
Men cannot hope to overcome the gods. But we suffer injustice at the hands of men, not gods. Can men be overcome? Oh yes.
Men fall in love with what they see, women with what they hear, yet Heaven’s greatest match so far, was a man who had no eyes, and a woman with no ears.
Mercy isn’t worth it when shown only to those worthy of it.
Modern government is mostly about group A deciding how to use group B’s money to get group C to keep A in office. Well, maybe it was always this way.
Money has its uses, like any other tool, but hoard more hammers than he needs and the carpenter looks a fool.
Most grieve for their dead loved ones, not so much for those who left us for the hereafter, as for what those left behind experience thereafter.
My birthday is to me more a time of reflection and introspection than celebration. It’s hard to celebrate when I think of how much more I had hoped to have to. Beyond this, I feel unworthy and self-conscious when others make a fuss over me. Just tell me “Happy Birthday,” and I’ll be thrilled.
My goal in raising a child is to invent a useful human being, to make every effort that she or he enjoys a life of accomplishment and fulfillment and, thus, leave the world in better shape for their having been in it.
My students aren’t my kids, but they’re someone’s; God’s, if no one else’s. So God forbid I should fail to show them the same care and consideration I hope my daughter’s professors show her when the time comes.
Never consider suicide. Those who do have missed the truth; we are all on a mission from God to help each other. Never abandon your mission.
Never drink and write, or always drink and write…can’t make up my mind. Where’s that bottle?
Never leave the one you’re with to with another be. That other’s secret thought will be, “You’ll do it too, to me.”
Never love unless thou loveth deeply and completely, and this despite unloved thou art; loving less though less beloved should be, poor heart, beneath thee.
Never make your priority one who makes another theirs.
Never saying what they mean, nor meaning what they say; all politicians are alike this way.
Never underestimate the power of trial and error. It’s why we have light bulbs.
No country crumbles as easily as one built on high technology. Just twelve angry men could bring it to its end, if for ten days denied it power and petroleum.
No man ever made the right decision with the wrong head.
No man is more than a boy who has not faced his own death at least once.
No one says they want to live an unhappy life, but how many live in ways that make a happy life unobtainable!
No taxation without representation, on the principle that those taxed should have a say in how it’s spent. But representation without taxation? The untaxed masses get to decide how to spend others’ taxes?!? Egad!
Nothing torments me like seeing those I love in torment.
Obsess so much over what might happen that you lose focus on solving today’s problems, and it probably will happen.
Of course the meek will inherit the Earth. Is it not the tendency of the “great” to destroy each other?
Offer praise enthusiastically, but accept it blushingly.
Oh senator, oh president, oh representative, you take the very food from the mouths of our children so that idlers can buy their cigarettes and booze. Bad enough, but much worse, that you thought we would let this go unanswered.
On battlefields, the enemy never makes a priority of targeting the other side’s cowards. Take heart; Evil often finds you when you’re doing the most Good.
On your birthday, does it not make more sense to give presents to your parents than to get them from them? Try it next time.
One hand holds the wood to work, the other holds the tool. One job at a time, good sir, or be taken for a fool.
One of my older friends confided that the thing she most regretted in her life was having had an abortion in the 1970s. She said it had always “haunted” her, and she felt particularly low every year on the date her child’s birthday would have been. Years later, I lost first one child then another through miscarriage, and that was bad enough that I wrote poetry about each one. What must it have been like for this lady? There’s something to think about.
What you gonna do when the Industrial Revolution runs out of gas?
One of these days, all of this will be behind you. The question is – in the balance of our lives, is that good news, or bad?
One sometimes longs for the days when dueling was considered an appropriate way to settle differences.
One thing I just can’t get over: in the South, some public schools are named after Confederate generals. My future step daughter goes to Robert E. Lee Elementary. There are pictures of him in the hallways. Every time I find myself at that school and see a little African-American kid, I think, “Really?!? Don’t your parents have something to say about any of this?!?”
One way to get to know people is to ask them the genie question: If you were given three wishes, what would they be? Another is to ask them the God question: What would you ask God if He showed up and was willing to stick around long enough to answer any three questions for you? You can learn a lot about people from the wishes they’d make and the questions they’d ask.
Originally developed under the auspices of IBM to help grapple with cultural issues across its worldwide distribution of offices, Geert Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions give us an interesting way of describing foreign cultures and making them comprehensible to us. As a framework for doing so, perhaps its greatest value is as a diagnostic tool when cultures start to fail. It’s also interesting as a personal diagnostic tool. Look at how your country scores on the cultural dimensions, and then ask yourself how much your own score would fit in with your country’s. You’ve just discovered the degree to which you’re a world citizen.
Others failed and so did you. Now you know what not to do.
Others will care less for you if you’re careless with others.
Our best opportunities are those we offer others.
Our form of government was conceived of, ironically enough, by men. As such, it was designed with male psychology in mind and makes no provision for anything else. A significant improvement in the process of governance could be effected if we reorganized the branches of government thus. We would replace the legislative branch of government with a male and female council. In the female council, only females could hold office, and only female citizens could vote for them. Similarly in the male council. We would replace the executive branch of the government with an Elder Council, in which representatives can be either male or female of at least 65 years of age, elected by the population at large. The candidate for “President of the United States” would be a member of the Elder Council elected to that office by the members of the three councils in general, and so, becomes more of a “Prime Minister” than a president. Such a system would introduce such a level of equity to the legislative process, and to the process of government in general, that few citizens would have anything to complain about. Then again, who am I kidding?
Our world would be more beautiful if we were more concerned with how much good we see with our own eyes than with how good we look in others’.
Out of sight, out of mind…the wrong approach to take with God. You just need to learn to “see” with different eyes. It becomes impossible to live in the same old way when we become aware of God’s presence everywhere, every day.
Parents and teachers are archers. With our children and our students we take aim at the world’s woes and let fly!
Part of the formula for having success in life is learning things, and nobody is surprised by this. But no less a part is unlearning things. We have operating against us so many things we think we know, assumptions and poorly drawn conclusions, that it’s a miracle we have anything good in our lives.
Passion begins the marriage, which without compassion ends. Lovers cannot love for life, unless they’re foremost friends.
Passion without love is easy enough, but love without passion shows a lack of compassion.
Pay attention in school now, or be “too poor to pay attention” later.
Paying his child-support should be a great source of personal pride to a father who doesn’t live with his child. Falling behind for any reason other than having no income should be as great a source of personal shame. Better to starve than that your child should lack for anything.
People complain about how marriage puts women at a disadvantage, especially because traditional vows include the bride’s to “obey” her husband. Critics don’t realize marriage was invented to protect women, not “subject” them. Were there no such thing as marriage, how many boyfriends would stick around when their girlfriends turned up “late”? Marriage shouldn’t imprison women at home, but protect them from raising their children alone. Men as much as women had better know it.
People confuse selling with marketing. Selling is a tiny part of marketing. A salesman asks “What can I do to get people to buy my product?” A marketer asks, “What problems do people have that I can make a profit solving?” Worlds of difference.
People have asked why I still believe in God, when he lets so much evil go on. I think that’s the wrong question. What we should be asking is “Why does God still believe in us, when we keep starting the evil He sent us to stop?”
People have occasionally accused me of being wise. I prefer to think of myself as “cautiously pessimistic.” I’m probably less wise than most men my age, truth be told, but hopefully make up for it in other ways.
People have told me the Founding Fathers of the United States were all kinds of things, even atheists. Well, if so, then not publicly. Every single one of them signed a document stating that all of us are endowed with certain unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that it was self-evident that these rights were endowed to us by our Creator. Some of the founders were downright scoundrels, but atheists? Please.
People keep talking as if the human race can be saved through talking. Shut up already and DO something. We have to Make the Change happen that needs to happen. Buy land, build a town organized on whatever principles you think are right, and let the world go to pieces without your help, or save itself by following your example.
People will say they believe all kinds of things, but what they really believe is revealed by how they live. Thus, regardless what they say, most Americans believe the purpose of life is to find entertaining ways to kill time between meals.
People worry too much about how pretty their houses are. We need to be building houses that can produce all the energy, water, and even some of the food its occupants need, and be able to dispose of all of their wastes. We already can, but nobody seems interested.
Perhaps I was a lucky father to have such a smart daughter. When she was little, I found that correcting her risky or unacceptable behavior with a simple explanation of why it was dangerous or wrong almost always worked. Then again, perhaps all children have this capacity. Try it on yours and let me know.
Perhaps it’s a sin for men to marry men, but each of us sins how he chooses. We indulge our worst vices as if sacraments, which God’s patience profoundly abuses. For the sins of another, God punishes none, nor will He you for not casting a stone.
Personally, I’d like to live forever. It’ll take that long to satisfy my curiosity about everything.
Plan, then do. Talk only about what you’ve done, never about what you’re going to.
Point your finger at something and a dog will look where you’re pointing. A cat? It’ll come sniff your finger. Ergo: cats are pointless.
Positivity promises no perfection, but negativity negates it.
Poverty is one thing, indebtedness another. Live within your means, though poor, or your labor’s owned by others.
Problems don’t solve themselves.
Proretrogression: the modern mental picture of the mental picture people had in the past about how the future would look.
Public misery needs to reach a certain critical mass before voters become willing to make meaningful changes. What that critical mass is varies with how distracted voters are by bread and circuses, and by how compassionate they are toward others. If we are more concerned how our favorite NFL team is doing than about the single mom facing foreclosure next door, things may get worse for a long time before they start getting better.
Public schools have to have bake sales to pay for our kids’ science lab equipment, but the Pentagon gets a new aircraft carrier whenever it wants one? $@$^&@$&*@!!
Putting lovers in their place will leave you without one.
Racism and sexism are pitifully childish, for we confuse the cup with the drink. Our cups come in different sizes and colors, but are all filled at the same sink.
Racist Dude, stop complaining about “lazy blacks” feeding off the public trough. Numerically, far more “white” people are living on welfare than are African Americans. Wise up.
Raise earthworms and feed them newspapers and campaign flyers. The content of these was never of greater benefit to society as after passing through the guts of a worm. Then, at least, it'll grow potatoes.
Reading great books is important. We have thousands of years’ worth of accumulated human thoughts, ideas, and feelings. Some are amazingly deep and beautiful. When we read them, in a way, they become our own thoughts, ideas, and feelings, and thus enrich our lives, expand our minds and hearts, and change the world…One Word At A Time.
Regarding elections: I’m more interested in how voter turnout turns out than in which of these jackanapes wins.
Regarding nuclear weapons being used against us, it isn’t the hotheaded retards running countries like North Korea that we need to worry about. It’s the small group with money, a grudge, and nothing to lose. When/If it comes, there will be no warning.
Regardless what religion people may profess anywhere in the world, look at our great buildings to see where we really put our faith. Until just a few hundred years ago, we lavished the greatest care and creativity on our temples, churches, mosques. Now? Skyscrapers, housing corporate headquarters for banks and brokerages. Marx called religion the opiate of the people. How right he was, but man’s religion has become Money.
Remember when you were a little kid and played war? Why didn’t you play peace?
Rubbing against others’ hearts our own get polished. Nothing’s polished to its highest luster without at least a little friction.
Sacrifice your fears, or live with them forever. I say “sacrifice” because sometimes our fears become so precious to us, we don’t know what to do without them. Giving them up becomes about as easy as cutting off one’s own arm.
Seek equanimity in the face of troubles, and seek contentment with what you have. Seek these and you’ll find few disappointments.
Seeking wealth for the leisure it brings is like collecting books but never reading them.
She ain’t pretty, she just looks that way.
She gave him four shrieking reasons why she evicted her husband, then when he didn’t beg to stay, expressed to her friends her dismay, “I don’t see how he could so easily walk away.”
She got schooled who tried to teach her man a lesson.
She loses the fight who thinks it right to use sex as a weapon. She got what she wouldn’t, for her marriage went to Hell, and completely bypassed Heaven.
Sheep can be led, but goats must be driven. This is the only real difference between Theory Y and Theory X.
Since God’s omnipresence means He is Everywhere all at once, there is nowhere in the Universe where it’s possible for someone to be truly alone.
Since you think the sky’s your limit, why not put yourself right in it?
Slavery can be defined as “the entitlement of one man to the fruits of another’s labor for his own leisure.” The reason you can’t afford to send your kid to that summer science camp? You’re paying for some slacker’s malt liquor.
So you let others teach your kids they’re descended from apes. Maybe they are, given how they behave. What do apes fling?
So you’re unable to help. Are you ever unable to hurt? It seems not.
So, you’re no longer someone’s husband. You are still uncle to your ex-wife’s nieces. Your mother in law loved you as a son. Even if it sometimes makes you uncomfortable, there is no excuse to treat these others less tenderly than before. Those who do, do so out of pride; an ugly excuse for an ugly show of indifference.
Some of my Christian friends object to my friendships with those of other faiths. I think this is very short-sighted. I’ll gladly make friends with anyone who agrees there’s something at work in the world that’s bigger than ourselves. I also find it a strange position to take given Jesus’ command to spread the Gospel; I guess these guys only want to preach to the choir.
Some of the Southern States have got portions of either the Confederate States flag or the Confederate battle flag incorporated into their own state flags. This has caused a lot of resentment among African-Americans in those states and even elsewhere. They see it as a sign of latent white supremacist feelings. This isn’t the right attitude to have at all, for two reasons. First, the presence of these Confederate flags in state flags was adopted as a last gesture of defiance by the Southern States that were left prostrate after the Civil War. “You can conquer us, but you cannot make us capitulate” so to speak, and Southerners of a certain disposition still see it that way. Second, if I were an African-American, rather than insisting that the offending parts of these flags be removed, I’d insist that they remain, as eternal testaments to the depraved depths to which the human heart and soul can sink. These things aren’t symbols of white power and pride, but of white shame. Its cause should never be forgotten.
Some will cheat because they’re bored, or think themselves entitled. Others because the one they loved made them feel unloved and belittled.
Somehow, suicidal people keep finding me. Thank God.
Something tells me there won’t be any more American Revolutions in the future. They won’t be necessary, since what will most likely happen is the natural collapse of a roof that has been patched so many times, it has become almost all patches and no roof. So the question isn’t how do we knock down this leaky roof, but what are we going to do when it crumbles on its own?
Stab a back, get stabbed back.
Students: If an A is obtainable, is there ever any good reason not to obtain one?
Studies have shown that being persuasive (getting people to agree to do, think or believe what they otherwise wouldn’t) depends primarily on how good the leader looks, secondarily on how good the leader sounds, and only something like 5% on what the leader actually says. This means that a good looking, smart-sounding politician has a better chance selling a lie than a less attractive stutterer does selling the truth. This is why I think politicians should never campaign personally. How different the outcome of our elections might be if politicians’ campaign speeches were only printed in newspapers instead of televised!
Such evidence I’ve often told, how modern life makes lead from gold. Children’s glorious unfettered brains, waxing waxy in pedagog’s chains, these dazzling minds which God beglittered, end up FaceBooked and over-Twittered.
Sustainable civilization depends on the soundness of policies affecting these variables: education, energy, agriculture, commerce, justice and waste management. If its policies are unsound in any of these, it cannot endure.
Take heart, the good you do to others makes ripples. Since it’s inevitable that some will come back to you…you’d do good to make the biggest splash you can.
Take school lightly, heavy burdens follow.
Teach your children to be curious about things, and they’ll practically teach themselves everything else.
The 2nd Amendment has only this as its objective: to ensure that private citizens have access to the same weapons an unjust government might use against them. A just government has nothing to fear from citizens so armed, so makes no efforts to keep such arms out of citizens’ hands. Beware the government that even suggests doing so; it’s up to something.
The best political system is one that rewards office to citizens with the best ideas and the most rational plans for fulfilling them. Yet for this there is no precedent, as I have yet to see such a president.
The cat that piteously meows outside the back door stops to lick itself when the door is opened. That’s a politician for you.
The children born in the next generation or two face a very high risk of being the last generation born into a technological society.
The contemporary definition of a lady or gentleman appears to be “someone who thinks they are superior to everyone else.” Perhaps this is why we see so few of them anymore? A lady or a gentleman is simply a person who puts first the comfort and feelings of those around them.
The course a life takes is determined by planning and action, not by wishful thinking.
The difference between an average citizen and a patriotic one? A patriot feels that the welfare and safety of his country now and in the future is his personal responsibility. If the government itself does something to imperil that welfare and safety, patriots put a stop to it.
The elderly are a vast resource of wisdom, a true national treasure. We should have an annual parade and national holiday for everyone over 70, and they shouldn’t have to pay taxes. Instead, we shut them up in nursing homes, out of sight, out of mind, or else they dwell in abject poverty. God have mercy on us!
The emptiest life comes from being full of oneself.
The entire teaching of Christ would be deducible if all we had were his words concerning The Four Loves: love God with your whole being, love your neighbor as yourself, love other believers with a Godly love, and love your enemies.
The European racism that set the stage for race-based slavery in America and elsewhere was based on the most absurdly wrong conclusions. Europeans saw the African living in his village hut and said to themselves, “Savages! God set them down in a continent overflowing with resources and look how little they’ve done with it. No cities, no universities or cathedrals, no museums. They are still in the stone-age so must be little more than animals.” Africans looked at the European living in his overcrowded tenement and said, “Savages! God set them down in a continent overflowing with resources, and look what they’ve done to it. Their cities are little more than open sewers, the water in their rivers is unfit to drink because of their filth, and look how they make war for money or religion. Clearly, little more than animals.” Which group was closest to the truth?
The farmer who ate his corn today, could’ve eaten two years in half of one.
The Germans recovered from the world economic crisis of 2008 fairly quickly. Rather than laying off workers in the face of declining revenues, they retained them at lower wages and shorter work weeks. When the economy started picking back up, American firms had to recruit new hires to replace the ones they’d fired. It takes on average about 90 days for a new hire to become adept at his job, so each German firm had the advantage of a 90 day head start over its American competitor.
The gossiping tongue injures its owner’s character more than anyone else’s.
The great thing about a zombie apocalypse is that people would have too little time on their hands to keep giving each other grief.
The human Heart is desperately dark, I doubt its happy fate. When raised by Spongebob instead of God, even Angels act like Apes.
The husband happily works himself to death to make the wife feel happy who makes him feel important. But what does he do if she doesn’t?
The irony of an easy life is that it makes life hard in ways that are subtle but crucial. I doubt anyone realizes the true value of an honest day’s work and the money it brings who hasn’t gone a week or two without eating because they’re broke.
The irony of civilization is that those who work hardest seem to have making the world worse their objective.
The little student failed her test
Distracted by day-dreaming
Her mother failed her own much worse
Instead of guidance…she gave screaming.
The longer a problem goes unsolved, the more we tend to disengage from trying to solve it. We get used to it being there, until it seems a normal part of the environment. How much of our circumstances as individuals and a nation are because of this?
The more I learn, the more insecure I become that I have learned enough.
The more I ponder Lincoln, the less I like him. Having won our highest office by making a promise (reiterated in his inauguration speech) that he would not use force to preserve the Union, he then recruited an army to do so, and drove the border states into the arms of the Confederacy practically with whips. With his Emancipation Proclamation, he “freed” his enemies’ slaves, but was perfectly at ease requiring his friends’ slaves to continue toiling in chains for his own convenience, essentially making the Confederacy’s point for them. In his Gettysburg Address, he referred to “the government of the people, by the people, for the people,” at a time when it was against the law for women or African Americans even to vote. Were he really “honest Abe”, he’d have said, “government of black and white men and women, by white men, for white men”. The American Civil War is still our most costly war in terms of American life: 750,000 soldiers died, and how many civilians fell is known to none but God. But we do know that every person who fell was an American, and that each death can be laid at the feet of Abraham Lincoln.
The more I see injustice become the status quo and the more I see men’s power growing faster than their reason, the more strongly I suspect civilization will have to fall before we can save it.
The more you take, the less you get. The less you take, the more it satisfies.
The most addictive drug that was ever invented is “free money for nothing.” White slaveholding families who claimed to be Christian (and therefore should’ve known better) were as enslaved to the free money for nothing drug as welfare recipients are today.
The most convincing sign of one’s own inferiority is one’s sense of superiority to others. Few things are as comically shameful as acting like a snob.
The most interesting questions usually begin with “What if…”
The next time I hear some guy say “I’m not a racist, but….” I think I’m gonna puke.
The older I get the more I see, although my eyesight’s failing, the hidden strings moving everything and which winds are prevailing.
The only safe assumption is one that isn’t made.
The only thing keeping most people from going stark raving mad is the fact that we are all a little bit crazy anyway. Any truly intelligent person who ever got a glimpse of how the world works would snap like a twig. Our own irrational thinking is the buffer that keeps us from doing so.
The past’s the best predictor of how the future goes. Examine your lover’s past, for their character it shows.
The poor should seek justice only from God, not the courts, for in winning their case they lose all their cash.
The process of “growing up” is something that only stops when our hearts do.
The reason military occupations always fail is this: the occupier is faced with the unenviable task of trying to change the indigenous culture. It would take at least a generation of benevolent guidance to do so. Have you ever heard of an army doing such as this?
The richest husband is one whose wife feels treasured; he loses both who invests his time more in riches than in her heart.
The river knows its place, and does what it’s supposed to. Not so the human race, doing only what it wants to.
The same town that condemned a widow’s farm to make the land available for development so that everyone (except the widow) would benefit from the increased tax revenue also suspended her grandchildren from school for praying with their friends beneath the American flag. Why? Seeing this made ONE atheist student feel awkward. Really?
The secessionist hothead himself goes up in flames who yanks from the bonfire the burning log he wants to save. When Americans were almost all farmers, such a thing was possible, but no longer. Interstate economic entanglements emerged because of the industrial and digital revolutions, and it would take a miracle to disentangle them now. A seceding American state would create for itself far more problems, and worse ones, than it hopes to remedy by leaving.
The second most contemptible thing a person can do is fail to cherish and protect the people in their care. The first most contemptible thing is to harm them.
The seemingly random acts of Nature are often those of desperation.
The swiftest runner in a race is indeed the one who wins it, but rushing ruins an hour’s embrace, for it’s over in a minute.
The taken vow the promise made, when broken, breaking hearts are made.
The taller the building you would build, the deeper you must dig the foundation. Nothing great was ever built any other way, whether of stone, or of the human heart.
The things you think you own, own you. (Stolen from a student)
The trash that occupies our landfills, the sewage that we dump into our rivers, even the smoke that goes into our air from power-plants and factories…each creates specific problems for us. The great inventor, Buckminster Fuller, said that “Waste is just a misplaced resource.” All of our wastes have economic value if we can find a way to capture and re-utilize them in a cost-effective way.
The Trinity? Easy to understand. Are we not made in God’s image? Do we not possess mind, body and soul? Look no further to find Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
The United States has been in a continuous state of war somewhere in the world since the 1990s. Why? What could be so important that such strenuous efforts are so necessary? From Orwell we learn about the economic objectives of continuous war; each weapon expended against an enemy must be re-ordered from a factory that wouldn’t be running in peacetime. Thus, continuous war keeps unemployment lower than it would be if we were at peace. At least, that’s the ulterior motive for it.
The Universe is a deeply mysterious thing, and the thing that is the most deeply mysterious about it is…Earth.
The voice of reason in this demented world is like the ripple left in an angry ocean by a pebble’s drop.
The wise husband listens to his wife’s sorrows and offers more sympathy than solutions.
The world should be a garden, and not just some land-fill, but it’s your planet, baby; do with it what you will.
The worst injuries suffered by children at their parents’ hands don’t leave bruises. Much deeper are the wounds they leave, when wretched words in contemptible tones the unworthy parent uses.
Their heart isn’t in it if they require you to win it.
There are far too many free fish swimming around to bother angling after one that’s already on someone else’s hook.
There are two kinds of people in the world; those who think there are two kinds of people in the world and those who think more.
There have been a spate of mass shootings in the United States lately. Always, the perpetrator is someone with either undiagnosed or untreated mental health issues. Yet the public response is always the same: we need to make guns unavailable. I could understand and even support this point of view if it were otherwise rational people doing these things for some kind of criminal intent – say, to get money. The problem is not the gun; the problem is the untreated mental health issue that puts sufferers and those around them in danger. Solve that problem, and you solve a host of others as well.
There is a short list of things that scare me: clowns, people with dementia, being screamed at by those I love, and dentists. But one that scares me much more than these is this: that my child might for any reason in any way suffer.
There is no excuse for a man to hit a woman who isn’t harming a child.
There is no rest for those who’d rather rest than work.
There is no such thing as too much education.
There is no surer, swifter way to lose God’s favor than by harming or neglecting a child.
There never was a war that wasn’t started by a leader.
There’s a lesson to be had if you think about why that warm, glowy, Christmas “peace on Earth, good will toward men” feeling doesn’t linger past Christmas. People typically feel it 2 weeks out of the year. How different life would be if they felt it the other 50! So, why don’t we?
There’s an irony in desperation. People who are desperately unhappy will do desperate things to make themselves less so, yet such things as these mostly make them more so.
There’s an ugly strain of hypocrisy throughout our so-called democracy. More lives have been ruined by gambling, alcohol and tobacco than by one man marrying another. Yet culture winks at the former and condemns the latter as the root cause of cultural decline. Is the reason not obvious? There’s no easy way for straight people to make money from those who aren’t. Any motive other than this is false pretense. Someone please fill in the blank, “The love of _____ is the root of all evil.”
There’s an unjust irony in the case of the woman who got laid off and had to choose between feeding her children or paying her student loans. The damage to her credit from the defaulted student loan kept many an employer’s door closed to her, making it virtually impossible for her to repay those same loans. She settled for several part time jobs doing things completely unrelated to her degree, and each paycheck has a student loan payment deducted from it. This is beyond unjust; it’s psychotic.
There’s more poison in a traitor’s kiss than in a serpent’s bite, so give your word sincerely, with others walk upright.
There’s never a good excuse for bad manners.
There’s something about human psychology that will turn any capitalist into a socialist when he’s unable to solve his own financial problems. We tend to seek collective solutions to our personal problems in hard times. The only way to ensure socialism never gets a foothold is to implement policies that tend to encourage personal prosperity. Desperation is socialism’s biggest salesman.
There’s something to be said for those who maintain equanimity in these unbalanced times.
They are worthy of neither who love their old children less than a new lover.
They end up hanging themselves by the rope they force others to the end of.
They invest in socialism who buy stock hoping to get a dividend, for investors represent a collective effort to generate and redistribute profits. Similarly those of us who can afford and buy health insurance, which is nothing but the collective effort to redistribute costs. Sometimes the most hot-headed opponents of socialism are its sincerest practitioners.
They invite the use of force against them who use force to compel the upright to do what they know is wrong, or to forbear doing what they know is right.
They raise a consumer and a family-quitter who make their TV their baby sitter.
They turn to arms when denied lawful means to redress the injustices inflicted by their government. And justly so.
They who do good only in the presence of witnesses
Are concerned with no greater good than their own public-images.
Things tend to worsen with no effort. Improvements must be made to happen.
Think hard when casting votes, for who would be your president. Your taxes are portions of your life; will he spend your life how you’d have it spent?
Think less about yourself, not less of yourself.
Think of all the beautiful things God has put on this planet, and then realize that this planet is only one grain of sand on a beach the size of the Universe.
Think twice today or suffer two sorrows tomorrow.
Though poor, should I hate the rich or tax them to death? Each yacht each wealthy man buys, buys a year’s groceries for the yacht builders’ children and wives.
Though race, religion, language and borders Divide us, we are United by our Refusal to let them Misguide us.
Time is never misspent encouraging the discouraged.
Time: the more taken, the less wasted.
To a suicidal former student, paraphrased. I’m glad you came to me with this, but ugh, please don’t go under over some guy. I’m your professor not your father, but I love you like a daughter, and no father could be prouder than I am of how great you’re doing. You used to do the least you could to pass, but look at you now, you’re getting As at last. I’m sure you can do just about anything you set your mind to do. So your last lover left you feeling unlovable…so what? A lady’s heart’s a treasure, and his treating treasure like trash is a comment about his heart, not yours. I don’t wish to sound condescending, but at your age you haven’t loved enough men to see how wrong that last one was. Remember, this thing that jerk just did to you, has happened to all others too, so feeling unlovable doesn’t mean you are. It’s just a feeling and feelings change, believe me. Never yield to a suicidal feeling, especially over some wretched retard who wipes his feet on the heart of every woman that he can. You weren’t unlovable, just unwise in whom you chose to offer your heart. The only really unlovable person is one who gets their kicks making others feel that way. You know that’s so not who you are. There are 7 billion people in the world, which means about three and a half billion men. So the odds are mighty high One of them is yours and looking for you now. When he finds you all he’ll want to do is give you a happy life…but not if you’re not here for him to find. So take my advice and not your life, or you’ll ruin so many others’. Be patient, have some faith and put all thoughts of suicide aside. Concentrate for now on God, college, and career. Put these first now, and the rest will come later, I swear.
To feels things deeply invites disaster, thus the heart that serves becomes our master.
To Men: A young man avoids responsibility because he thinks it a ball and chain to his happiness. An older man embraces it, for his happiness depends on the care he takes of his commitments to others. The higher the probability you’ll have a good life, and one with few regrets, the younger you are when you learn this: Nothing’s as personally fulfilling as fulfilling your obligations personally.
To Men: Sure, she’s beautiful, but she probably makes up for it in other ways. Never jump right in.
To Men: You were born into families with women, you go to school with women, work with women and sometimes have them as very close friends. Be wise and listen carefully to the things they say when bemoaning their relationships with their boyfriends and husbands. Take these to heart and the woman you love, or hope to, will have no cause to say the same things about you to others.
To please their investors, they downsized and realized a considerable savings last year. The investors were thrilled, the customers were not. This year, they folded. You can only liquidate each asset once, be careful which one.
To study something well, do so in groups, and like you mean to teach it.
To Women: Avoid a man who would court you while you’re being courted by another. Such as this has no respect for social boundaries, and if capable of doing this, there’s no telling what else he’s capable of doing. Also, consider his motives: frequently a man such as this does this to boost his own ego by denying the “prize” to some other man. If he “wins,” the thrill of victory wears off shortly, and he’ll need to win something else, perhaps someone else. Ask your mothers and grandmothers if I’m right or wrong.
To Women: some men achieve greatness on their own. When such as these take a bride, she seldom means more to him than a lifestyle accessory. You’ll mean the most to a man who achieves greatness because you’re beside him. The greatest man grows great with the help of a great wife, and so greatly thanks her. Indeed, a great wife is usually the greatest thing about any man, great or not.
Tolerance is not the same thing as acceptance, and we should resent being pressured to embrace what we are only morally required to tolerate.
Too often we live too short a season, to learn the principles to live with reason.
Took his first revenge so was taken by a second.
Tread carefully. One lesson history teaches us is that one can be completely right about a thing and still lose the argument.
Tread lightly upon the Earth; she’s alive in ways few comprehend. If she chokes on the filth of civilization, all she need do is “cough” to make humanity extinct. Remember Noah’s Flood?
Treat credit like income and you’ll dislike the outcome.
True prophets never seek profits, except what profits the heart.
Truly good people don’t brag about the good they’ve done. One of the things they required of us in graduate school was attending presentations made by freshly minted doctoral students hoping for jobs at our university. One of these said something that made an interesting comment about human nature. A nationally recognized company had given a sizeable donation to a nationally recognized charity, then spent many times the donated amount advertising that they’d done so. How did it affect our opinion of that company? I know how it affected mine. There’s a lesson there.
Try to make your prayers unselfish, asking only guidance for yourself and happily-ever-afters for others.
Two discouraged men, from two different towns, shuffled down a street one day, conspicuous by their frowns. Then Jesus landed in their way, and addressed them like their brother, “God’s will is if you’d help yourselves, you first must help each other.” The first man heard the second’s woes, who then advised the first, and both men’s hearts were lightened when they should’ve felt their worst. They wrote a book about it called, “From Despair to Glory,” of how we just can’t stay depressed lifting others’ hearts to joy.
Two lovers’ daily fight too soon puts love to sudden flight.
Typical Modern Marriage: Classmate to soul-mate, soul-mate to roommate, roommate to cell-mate.
Unhatched eggs rot and…we’re all eggs. Get hatching!
Unless you’re a river, you’ll never get done what you need to lying in bed 24/7.
Unseen eyes observe us, unheard lips advise and encourage us, and unfelt hands guide us. That’s an angel for you.
Use what’s right with you to fix what’s wrong with you.
Vanity’s insanity. We look in mirrors and think we see ourselves. We don’t; we see only the tool given by the Creator to permit us to interface with the physical world and, for a time, do good in it. What makes you “you” is what lives inside.
War, I suspect, is mankind’s true natural state. All else is manifestly against his nature.
Water impounded behind a dam is of no use to anyone. But let it out to irrigate crops or generate electricity, and things happen. It is no different with wealth.
We are the children who are not children. We came into the world with no expectations, and have found them all met. We had no hopes, and each has been fulfilled. We saw nothing. We saw nothing. We saw nothing, and what we saw was enough. The children who are not children, astonishingly old, but too young to have learned anything at all. Always in the process of becoming, yet never being. Planning and scheming for tomorrows which never completely exactly particularly become todays. We read the thoughts of others, and these become our own, thinking nothing knew, nothing knew under the sun.
We as good as perpetrate the injustice that we tolerate. Silence is endorsement.
We begin dying the instant we stop growing. This is no less true for our hearts and minds than for our physical bodies.
We cannot uninvent nuclear weapons. Their tendency is to proliferate. With patience, the raw materials can be extracted from sea water. Eventually, any dedicated individual with moderate skills will be able to build one. Eventually, one will.
We do an injustice by seeking justice against those who do wrong when desperate.
We have absolutely no choice regarding what kind of family we’re born into, but we absolutely do regarding what kind we make.
We hunted and hunted Osama bin Ladin until we cornered and killed him. Did it occur to anyone to pray that he’d change his ways? There’s no better cheerleader than a convert.
We need to start thinking more about the future if we want to have one.
We want to avoid suffering in love, but we’ll never know how happy we can be when loved if we have never had to suffer because we loved another and weren’t.
We’ve been poor stewards of the garden we’ve been given. The first question is: what are we going to do about it? The second question is: what’s the Landlord going to say when he Checks In?
What are we in the world for, if not each other?
What hurts or angers God? Only this: words and deeds that even indirectly hurt ourselves and each other.
What I regret most among the regrets I see, are not so much my own regrets, but those that others have had for knowing me. A terrible thing.
What if all our ideas about the afterlife are wrong? What if, instead of whatever we may think, there is only one soul in the world, and it re-incarnates in the past, present, and future at will? All the people in the world might just be one person, living simultaneously in 7 billion different incarnations. Think twice about screaming at your kid or spouse for something trivial, or dropping bombs on some foreigner, because you may be on the receiving end of all that someday, or may already have been. Love thy neighbor as thyself, because…he might be.
What if reincarnation were true? Who makes war risks becoming the father of his slain enemies. I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
What kind of Christian am I? I approach my faith like this: I pretend I’ve never heard of Christianity but have found a Bible somewhere. I open it and start reading. What sense do I make of the Gospels? My feeling is that I get a more clear picture of what was in Jesus’ mind when I let the Gospels speak for themselves than I ever could trying to make sense of the 2,000 years of accumulated “cultural cobwebbery” coming from most pulpits. Modern Christianity is scarcely Christian. Jesus’ light has been filtered through so many generations and so many cultures, it’s lost much of its dazzling brilliance. For one, neither Jesus nor the apostles ever made a provision for clergy in their movement. Religions need priests, and Christianity isn’t a religion; it’s a Way of Life, Based on a relationship we have with God, Taught us by his Son, and Shared with other believers. There is no such thing as a Christian priest. Our “need” to have clergy in Christianity adds an unnecessary and confusing layer to a set of principles that are only effective because of their simplicity. And this is just one example.
What kind of country do we live in? One in which we boycott a fast-food restaurant chain because the founder is opposed to homosexuality for religious reasons, but blithely fill our cars with gasoline imported from countries that routinely put homosexuals to death for the same reasons. Fascinating.
What mean words don’t hide what words mean? No man comprehendeth thee, if thy every word’s a sting.
What’s a kid learn in a school that doesn’t teach the Golden Rule? How to be a more cunning fool.
Whatever our point, there are better words than bitter ones.
Whatever your job may be, let Prudence be your career. Prudence pays the highest wages, with raises every year.
When confronted with doing what you know is right OR staying out of trouble, what will you do? Failing to do what is right invokes consequences much worse than the one you hope to avoid by playing it safe.
When did I realize I was doing too much writing on the laptop (and too late at night) and not enough by hand? The moment came when, uncertain how to spell it, I took pen to paper and wrote out “unknowledgeable” and waited for the little red squiggle.
When he’s glad to come home and she’s sorry to see him leave; there’s a happy marriage for you.
When Homeland Security arrested and incarcerated his friend for months without due process under the Patriot Act, he attempted to break him out of prison. At his own trial, the judge accused him of taking the law into his own hands. “Of course,” he replied, “the law has never been anywhere else; I am, after all, an American.” And he was right.
When I watched my maternal grandparents jitterbugging to 1940s swing, the expression on my face must have betrayed my incredulity. My grandfather said: “Just because there’s snow on the roof doesn’t mean there ain’t a fire in the furnace, boy!” On the eve of my 45th birthday, I get it.
When it comes to campaign contributions, corporations and other high-equity donors give their money not to the candidates with the greatest vision, but to the ones they consider the least likely to do something that will hurt their profits if elected. Any candidate considered visionary is therefore dangerous, and is ignored by the big dollar contributors. Given the high cost of advertising, only those candidates who get the big contributions get the public’s attention, so voters end up putting someone in office with little inclination to make any effective improvements to whatever needs it, and no idea how to do so if they were inclined to. In other words, we are really only free to vote for candidates selected for us by wealthy firms and individuals.
When people are burning to death, they’ll accept a bucket of water from the first person who offers it. I know a man who was married to a woman who was terrified of living alone; in fact, it’s why she married him. His wife dealt with her fear by withholding love in an attempt to control what she was afraid of losing. It was a poor strategy in the end, for after years of never telling him she loved him, of never telling him that he looked good in his new suit, or that his new haircut looked good, after years of resenting his relationships with his family and friends, and even the time he spent away from home doing his job, it came back to her in a karmic kind of way. He had an overseas penpal whose husband treated her in the same manner this man’s wife treated him. He accepted her water.
When presented with new facts, adjust your point of view to accommodate them. Never let your opinion become a personal dogma.
When we deny to others the liberties we cherish, we’ve not long to wait to watch liberty perish.
When workers feel like nothing, nothing’s what they’ll do.
When your Fears guide you, your destination is Regret.
When your government wants to conscript your children for a war: “I am disinclined to spend a large fraction of my life lavishing love, attention, money, and effort on a child simply so some buffoon (elected or not) can send that child to have his or her guts spattered across some distant battlefield. Go to Hell.”
Which is the bigger fool, the fool or the “wise man” who belittles him?
While I customize my advice to each person in pain, the essence of what I usually tell people contemplating suicide is that their misery is the inevitable and natural result when a person who thinks deeply and feels things deeply hasn’t found their mission in life. Being in that spot creates a tension that builds until it becomes a crisis of despair and futility. When we reach that point, we need to remember three things. 1. Suicide just swaps temporary problems that can be solved for a permanent one that can’t. 2. The solution to the temporary problems is in finding and sticking to your mission. 3. Our mission is to help others and encourage them to adopt the same mission. So, find some way to help others and your life will start to turn around, and despair and futility will grow into fulfillment and peace of mind.
While the squeaky wheel gets the oil, be careful how loudly you complain, for the nail that sticks out gets hammered harshly back in again.
Who spends on himself each penny he earns, will never have the wealth he yearns.
Who thinks himself deserving of his woman’s love, will get what he deserves.
Who thinks marriage is a prison thinks not how it liberates to freely love the heart that’s given.
Who truly has faith in God and a family that loves him truly, has all he truly needs.
Will a boy grow up to behave like an angel who thinks he’s descended from apes? The ills it’d cure the school perpetuates, which tells only half of the truth. Regardless what “clay” from humans He made, God was the potter in sooth.
Women complain that men fear commitment. We don’t. We fear loving someone who wants to be loved for who she is, but who will hate us in the end for not becoming what she thinks we should be.
Work hard but intelligently, play hard but cautiously, love deeply and completely or not at all.
You owed 100 dollars but had just 99, “Can’t pay that one” to yourself you said, so blew 99 on wine. Poor fool!
You’re never truly alone if others have you in their hearts.
You’ve wondered how to tell true love, since you made this world your home; ‘tis when two make each other’s joy more important than their own.
Your brain receives its best nutrition when amply stuffed with erudition.
The Tyrant’s Mark? He threatens with punishment those who will not cooperate with his perpetration of an injustice against them, who will not sit smiling with folded hands as he usurps their rights and liberties
Be slow to judge others. You never know what hidden cross they bear, what secret sorrow, what silent desperation drives them to do what they do.
My primary objective is to learn everything. My secondary objective is to use what I learn to make the world better.
Everything that ever escalated was preceded by someone saying it wouldn’t.
Sometimes the devil you know seems less risky than the angel you don’t. “Seems” is the issue.
Whether global, national, or personal, no problem can be solved if we continue to engage in the behavior that created it.
The switch on the bedside lamp will ALWAYS be located as inconveniently as possible for the hand reaching for it.
Each child brought into the world gives the world another chance to be better.
Welcoming one of your children to the world changes you and adds another layer of depth and meaning to the Universe.
All the world’s great composers, writers, artists, philosophers and inventors started out as…babies. Of course, so did its tyrants and child molesters. The main difference is this: the kind of care and encouragement they received from their families.
Preaching tolerance but having none? You’ve lost the race before begun.
They come at last to lonely ends, who make double standards their closest friends.
It betrays all trust, as of course it must – one single double standard. Imposed, it’s just harassment. Endured, it ends all sentiment.
Civilization is an iterative process. Each time it fails, it often rebuilds slightly better. The big question is whether it will ever “graduate” and achieve sustainable stability.
What must be, will be.
It is written that in the End Times the Earth will “wax old like a garment” and that “travel and communication” would greatly increase. As you sit there hundreds of miles away, perhaps on the other side of the Earth, reading this, I ask you, can you name a stream or river from which you’d feel safe drinking?
Regardless of our station, there’s no greater contradiction than in “righteous indignation.”
If God is on your side, why does the Sun still shine on your enemies? Time to see The Light.
Even on the darkest night, the Sun is shining somewhere.
We have done more to deplete and pollute the world since the Industrial Revolution than in all of preceding history. If this goes on much longer, we won’t.
Our short lives prevent us from personally seeing the long-term consequences of short-term self-indulgences. Our children’s playgrounds are built atop our great grandparents’ toxic landfills.
“Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there’s footprints on the Moon.” Well, yeah, but it’s been 40 years since we left any. At this point in our technological evolution, humanity’s only real limits are self-imposed. We COULD do just about anything, but lack the vision and the will.
When I was young, I asked, “How can suffering ever be good for the soul?” My poverty taught me generosity. My broken heart and loneliness taught me empathy. My disappointments taught me compassion. My ignorance taught me humility. My resentment taught me forgiveness. My self-indulgent consequences taught me patience. At middle age I’m still not the man I want to be, so the only question I ask now is, “What will I learn tomorrow?”
Love isn’t at all like what romance-intoxicated Hollywood sells, it’s what our open hearts and honest souls offer against the worst odds in even the most overwhelming circumstances.
Think you’re in love with someone? If they had some accident or got a disease that made if impossible for them ever to express their feelings for you sexually ever again, or that left them tragically disfigured for life, would you still stay…forever? If not, then you’re not.
We are justifiably outraged by the injustices we endure at the hands of those entrusted with ensuring justice. But how silent we become in the face of injustice endured by others. Such as this will be not our enduring, but our undoing.
People should stop whining about the government. Given the excessive influence campaign finance has in selecting the candidates we vote for, it’s fair to say we’ve got the best government money can buy.
Think again if you think God’s got your back when you’re not up front.
The humble little seed becomes the grandest tree. Think twice before you write off me.
Doing nothing about wrong makes nothing right.
Noncompliance with injustice is not your right; it’s your duty. Nothing gets better when we do nothing.
Most problems aren’t actually problems; they’re symptoms. Racism, sexism, crime, failing public schools, poverty – just symptoms. So what’s the problem? Humans don’t take God seriously.
History is an emergent property of human internal psychological motives and responses to external stimuli. Since psychology is predictable, within certain limits, so is History. That being the case, the next great Dark Age is just about due. Sleep tight…
Aptitude but no attitude leads to desuetude. Attitude but no aptitude leads to hebetude.
Distance and time are trivial matters to friends who’ve made places for themselves in each other’s hearts. I haven’t seen some of my high school friends since 1986, but when we recently got together, we picked up right where we left off.
Forbidden Fruit tastes oh so sweet, but its heart’s a seed that sows Defeat.
The sooner we learn this, the less we’ll be sad, things are not bad because they’re forbidden, but forbidden because they are bad.
We unwisely say to ourselves, “I’ll be fine. It won’t happen to me.” Everyone who ever had “It” happen to them thought so too.
Why, in the 2nd decade of the 21st Century, are superhero movies such blockbusters? Well, even an imaginary hero is better than none at all.
Trying to figure out life in this media-obsessed civilization is like looking for The Pleiades in Times Square.
Why am I the way I am? As a teen, I looked at the world, said, “Thousands of years of development and THIS is the best we can do? Bullshit!” Speculative fiction stretched my perception of how different the world could be. So, that’s the world I’m aiming for, and since only geeks can get there, here I am.
I wash my face in sunshine, breathe deep the crescent moon. I’m right at home where e’er I am, for the Cosmos is my room.
Creativity is an uncontrollable impulse. The art enriching our hearts and souls is sneezed from someone else’s.
He cruises for bruises whose temper he loses.
The secret to world peace and personal equanimity? Never let biology be boss of your psychology.
We only see the stars for one reason: they shin in darkness.
After watching so mane people’s marriages perish in flames, including my own, I think I’ve got the solution boiled down to one simple rule, and you can quote me on this. “The marriage has the highest probability of lasting a lifetime if each person makes the other’s happiness a higher priority than their own.” Of course, this only works when both people in the relationship are doing it.
A true friend is someone who sticks around when the chips are down.
What is a friend? A fun, affectionate person of similar temperament to your own, who considers your problems of no less priority than their own, who will tell you what you need to hear, not what you would like to hear, who overlooks your non-critical glitches (especially the entertaining ones), and expects nothing less than absolutely all of this from you as well.
Using politics to find solutions to human problems is about as effective as a one-legged cat trying to bury a turd on a frozen pond.
By default, when the government inflicts upon its citizens the very injustices from which its duty is to shelter them, it indemnifies those citizens against all consequences to themselves arising from the steps taken to secure their liberties.
Dear Abby, I keep looking for other iconoclastic voodoo death-rock redneck punk-rock mystic swami mad-scientist composer paranormal-investigator artist philanthropic absinthe-drinking hookah-smoking writer/poets like myself to meet up with for an old-fashioned formal tea parties with a steampunk twist. Why is this so hard? Signed, Gobsmacked in Spotsylvania
As long as we are made from meat, we’ll tend to act like apes: vicious, selfish narcissists, whom Utopia repudiates.
Hanging On. Life was always risky and often rather stupid, as if the hand of Fate were sprained, and we’re hunted by the Anti-Cupid. I’ve been alive for quite a while. Among the truths I’ve learned: patience, patience is much required; then all things come for which we’ve yearned. Thought today be drenched with tears, tomorrow’s on its way. So never quit, no, don’t give up, no matter what you’re feelings say.
No one needs a particular kind of friend, just one friend who’s particularly kind.
No nation can excel in terms of justice, liberty, and standard of living that excels in ignorance.
The moment when you’ve “learned enough” is the same which finds you obsolete.
In a way, it’s infinitely good how few realize that few things are worse than realizing one is a finite being in a Universe that isn’t.
Life can be compared to a set of puzzle boxes, one nested inside of the other. The reason “solving” it seems to stump so many of us might be our trying to solve the puzzles the way we do real ones, starting with the one on the outside. I suspect and suggest that we need to adjust our frame of reference. In the puzzle box of life, maybe it’s necessary for each of us to start with the puzzle at the center and work our way out. Perhaps only THEN will life, the world, and our place in it make any real sense.
The only “fair” thing about life is this: absolutely NOBODY has it easy ALL the time.
If you want to lower the unemployment rate, build a new city. Think it over.
What I’ve observed is that, by and large, nice guys finish last. We teach our kids to have nice manners, be considerate of others, put others first, etc. The result? The greedy, selfish, aggressive people dominate the game, and pull ahead. The world is run not by givers and helpers, but by takers and users.
Oh cranky baby fighting sleep, you make it hard the peace to keep. Your tummy’s full of mother’s milk, cry all you want, Dad loves you still.
To love, but not be loved. Ah, the greatest gift from Hell above.
If as much effort had been put toward stimulating job growth as has been put into “Obamacare,” the increased standard of living would obviate the need for such a complex, costly, and mediocre program.
I firmly believe that, in the absence of aneurological handicap of some kind, each child enters the world as a potential DaVinci. It’s what their families, the schools and our culture do to them that turns them into career criminals and lackluster consumers.
Three men in a half-swamped tub, lost at sea, bobbing on the waves, disliked being wet so debated what to do. At last they agreed to let the water drain out by pulling the plug. That’s our government rub a dub dub.
English slang makes me sympathetic to ESL students. In other news, I dig burning rubber in my cool cherry hot rod.
The irony we fail to see? “The only fool I fool is me.”
WAR. He held his baby one last time, he kissed his wife goodbye, and flew off to Afghanistan, where, for nothing there he died. His ghost now haunts a battlefield too obscure to win him fame, his child sees just his photograph, and barely knows his name. We fight a war we cannot win, when each foe we slay makes more. Unless the stakes are life or death, no more must we wage WAR.
We live in a C+ civilization. Disagree? Next time you’re at McDonald’s, take note of the PRINTED sign on the DRIVE-THRU window for menus in BRAILLE.
The seasons change and so do I, though I really can’t say how, unless it be by increments as Now fades into Now.

Aphorisms

Patrick B. Bishop

Aphorisms

Aphorisms

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