"Life is not what it's supposed to be. It's what it is. The way you cope with it is what makes the difference." -Virginia Satir
A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions. - Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
“The study of the human character opens at once a beautiful and a deformed picture of the soul.” -- Mercy Otis Warren
I hope I haven't posted this one in this thread before, but it's got to be one of my favorites: "Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time." From Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist
Originally from some James Bond book: "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action."
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” George Orwell, 1984
Another thing Orwell said (and I'm quoting from memory so this might not be spot on): "Journalism is the practice of telling people what they need to hear, or what they don't want to hear. Everything else is public relations."
On this November 9th (for most of you) 2020, the 31st anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, I present the following quote from none other than V.I. Lenin himself: "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." Don't know how he would have felt about having been proven so correct
Here's my famous quote of the day. Upon rereading Bill Mauldin's brilliant book Up Front, as I do every Veteran's Day, I came across this, in a section where he talks about the prejudices a combat soldier will face when he comes back from World War II: "No normal man who has smelled and associated with death ever wants to see any more of it. In fact, the only men who are even going to want to bloody noses in a fist fight after this war will be those who want people to think they were tough combat men, when they weren't. The surest way to become a pacifist is to join the infantry." You can read more about this remarkable book in my blog: http://jayeltee.blogspot.com/2019/11/up-front-and-bill-mauldin.html
A career politician finally smelling the White House is not much different from a bull elk in the rut. He will stop at nothing, trashing anything that gets in his way; and anything he can't handle personally, he will hire out--or, failing that, make a deal. It is a difficult syndrome for most people to understand, because so few of us ever come close to the kind of Ultimate Power and Achievement that the White House represents to a career politician. - Hunter S. Thompson
“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” Kurt Vonnegut.
Not a believer, but the Bible's got some powerful imagery in it: 5 And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, 6 and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. 7 If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Luke 4: 5-7
