We don't often quote Richard Nixon.....

 ...................but perhaps we should:

The unhappiest people of the world are those in the international watering places like the South Coast of France, and Newport, and Palm Springs, and Palm Beach.  Going to parties every night. Playing golf every afternoon.  Drinking too much.  Talking too much.  Thinking too little.  Retired.  No purpose

      So while there are those that would totally disagree with this and say, "Gee, if I could just be a millionaire! That would be the most wonderful thing."  If I could just not have to work every day, if I could just be out fishing or hunting or playing golf or traveling, that would be the most wonderful life in the world—they don't know life.  Because what makes life mean something is purpose.  A goal.  The battle, the struggle—even if you don't win it.

-Richard Nixon, as quoted here

Eternally............................

Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same House of Being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.

-Friedrich Nietzsche,  Thus Spoke Zarathustra

On reality..................................

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question “What is reality?”, to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” That’s all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven’t been able to define reality any more lucidly.

-Philip K. Dick

We should pay more attention to McKinley.....

Few episodes in McKinley's career reflected more distinctly the man's political and managerial style that his leadership of the war effort.  Never inclined toward bombast or over take-charge exhibitions, he displayed his normal indirect methods of management—listening more than talking, soliciting opinions and advice from many sources while keeping his own counsel until it came time for decision making.  Nor did he allow himself to get waylaid by the minutiae of the war enterprise.
     Yet no one in Washington maintained a more detailed understanding of the big issues emanating from the war, and on one deflected him from his chosen path. . . . Perceiving clearly the political and military dangers in a protracted war, he moved aggressively to pummel the enemy and thus end the conflict as quickly and decisively as possible.
     . . . A British commentator named Henry Norman, writing in the London Chronicle, foresaw a new fate for George Washington's famous admonition to his nation, "Avoid foreign entanglements."  This warning, said Norman, now "ceases to be the compass of the statesman and becomes the curio of the historian.

-Robert W. Merry,  President McKinley:  Architect of the American Century, as Merry writes about the end to the Spanish-American War.

The Execupundit.........................

............................raises an interesting, and important, question:

Who in today's media-political complex inspires trust?   Suggestions?

Plenty tough enough...............

To know and love God, Spinoza insisted, does not require the performance of any ceremonies, nor belief in any supernatural dogmas, nor the acceptance of any allegedly historical narratives in the Bible.  It only requires "the practice of justice and love towards one's neighbor."

-Anthony Gottlieb,  The Dream Of Enlightenment:  The Rise of Modern Philosophy

Here's hoping our hobgoblins are imaginary....

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."


-H.L. Mencken

Darwin would have approved................

"The rough and vulgar structure of English commerce is the secret of its life; for it contains 'the propensity to variation,' which, in the social as in the animal kingdom, is the principle to progress."

-Walter Bagehot, as excerpted from his 1873 text,  Lombard Street:  A Description of the Money Market

the openness of history............

“Life and study have persuaded me of the openness of history. There is no inevitability in history. Thinking about what might have happened, what could have happened, is a necessary element in trying to understand what did happen. And if, as I believe, individual acts of decency and courage make a difference, then they need to be recorded and remembered.” 

-Fritz Stern

Everybody................................

...an ounce of doing things is worth a pound of theorizing.  The very best thing you can do for the whole world is to make the most of yourself.  You can serve God and man in no more effective way than by getting rich;  that is, if you get rich by the creative method and not by the competitive one.

Beware of the competitive mind!!  No better statement of the principle of creative action can be formulated than the favorite declaration of the late "Golden Rule" Jones of Toledo:  "What I want for myself, I want for everybody."

-Wallace Wattles,  The Science of Getting Rich

Transitioning..........................

"We didn’t have much but we had it all."

Quote, and the rest of the story, from here.

Maybe.............................................

Movement........................................

      The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-absorbed madness to spiritual awakening.  Gratitude is peace.  Maybe you won't always get from being a brat to noticing that it is an e. e. cummings morning out the window.  But some days you will.  You will go from being a Doug or Wendy Whiner, with your psychic diverticulitis, able to eat only macaroni and cheese, to remembering "i thank You God for most this amazing / day."  You splurge on a pint basket of figs, or a pair of great socks.  You begin to feel friendship with your flowering pear tree, an interspecies oneness with it, although we usually keep these thoughts to ourselves, lest they be used against us at the commitment hearings.  In fact, your are able to use the word "wonder" again, even feel it, without despair that the New York literati or your atheist friends will find out and send you into exile.
-Anne Lamott,  Help Thanks Wow:  The Three Essential Prayers

thanks David

It's the unlearning part that's difficult.................

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ”

-Alvin Toffler

On giving.................................

"The wealth from giving generously is inexhaustible.  The power from not accumulating is boundless."
-Sung Ch'ang-Hsing

On beginnings and endings.........

Geniuses.........................................

“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” 
-Carl Sagan

cartoon via

On being careful what you wish for............

Mitch was once quoted as saying that his parents were very supportive, and always used to say, “Don’t expect your life to finish here. There’s a big world out there. Go out and see it.” Albom once mentioned that now his parents say, “Great. All our kids went and saw the world and now no one comes home to have dinner on Sundays.”
-as excerpted from this David Kanigan blog post

Fortunately...........................

"There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self."
-Aldous Huxley

"Celebrated by turning inward with family..."

Vintage George Will on Thanksgiving:

Thanksgiving, Hodgson notes, is an echo of the breaking of bread at the heart of Christian worship, and of a Jewish Seder. It also is a continuation, in today's abundance, of harvest festivals around the world, which began millennia ago, when abundance was so rare as to seem miraculous. Hodgson thinks that Thanksgiving expresses "the deepest of all American national feelings" -- gratitude. It is the inclusive gratitude "of a nation of immigrants who have lived for the most part in peace and plenty under the rule of law as established with the consent of the governed."