Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.
While in New York recently at a meeting of several hundred potential investors, I asked them all “If you have two companies to invest in and one had employee shareholders and the other did not, which one would feel would be the most secure, have less labor strife and be more motivated?” The crowd erupted with the affirmative for ESOPs. It is so simple and yet so foreign, but thanks to people like you the message is getting out. [Letter to Norman Kurland, January 27, 1989.]
Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
Everything that's realistic has some sort of ugliness in it. Even a flower is ugly when it wilts, a bird when it seeks its prey, the ocean when it becomes violent.
Each comprehended only that part of the mind of Iluvatar from which he came, and in the understanding of their brethren they grew but slowly. Yet ever as they listened they came to deeper understanding, and increased in unison and harmony.
Mieux vaut voir un chien enrage, qu'un soleil chaud en Janvier=--Better see a mad dog than a hot sun in January.
On the 23d of April, 1490, I began this book; and started again on the horse. Giacomo came to live with me on Saint Mary Magdalen's day in 1490; {49} he was ten years old. He was a thief, a liar, obstinate, and a glutton. On the second day I had two shirts made for him, a pair of socks and a jerkin, and when I placed the money aside to pay for these things, he stole it out of the purse and I could never force him to confess the fact, though I was quite certain of it--4 lire. On the following day I went to sup with Giacomo Andrea, and this same Giacomo supped for two and did mischief for four, since he broke three bottles, spilled the wine, and after this came to sup where I... Item: on the 7th of September he stole a silver point, worth twelve soldi, from Marco, who was living with me, and took it from his studio; and when Marco had looked for it for some time he found it hidden in Giacomo's box--lire 1, soldi 2. Item: on the 26th of the following January, being in the house of Messer Galeazzo di San Severino, in order to arrange the festivity of his joust, and certain henchmen having undressed to try on the costumes of rustics who were to take part in the aforesaid festivity, Giacomo took the purse of one of them, which was on the bed with other clothes, and stole the money he found in it--2 lire, 4 soldi. Item: Maestro Agostino of Padua gave me while I was in the same house a Turkish hide to have a pair of shoes made of it, and Giacomo stole this from me within a month and sold it to a cobbler for 20 soldi, with which money by his own confession he bought sweets of aniseed. Item: {50} again, on the 2d of April, Giovanni Antonio left a silver point on one of his drawings, and Giacomo stole it; it was worth 24 soldi,--1 lire, 4 soldi. The first year a cloak, 2 lire; six shirts, 4 lire; three doublets, 6 lire: four pairs of socks, 7 lire, 8 soldi.
Human felicity is produc'd not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.
Life will not perish! It will begin anew with love; it will start out naked and tiny; it will take root in the wilderness, and to it all that we did and built will mean nothing our towns and factories, our art, our ideas will all mean nothing, and yet life will not perish! Only we have perished. Our houses and machines will be in ruins, our systems will collapse, and the names of our great will fall away like dry leaves. Only you, love, will blossom on this rubbish heap and commit the seed of life to the winds.
The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.
Is there not glory enough in living the days given to us? You should know there is adventure in simply being among those we love and the things we love, and beauty, too.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
There is but one law for all; namely, that law which governs all law — the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity; the law of nature and of nations. [January 9, 1795. Needs citation.]
Some marry the first information they receive, and turn what comes later into their concubine. Since deceit is always first to arrive, there is no room left for truth.
All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oysters autobiography.
So, we'll go no more a roving So late into the night, Though the heart be still as loving, And the moon be still as bright. For the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul wears out the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe, And love itself have rest.
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
The main Business of natural Philosophy is to argue from Phenomena without feigning Hypotheses, and to deduce Causes from Effects, till we come to the very first Cause, which certainly is not mechanical.
So far as prejudice, or prepossession of opinion prevails over our minds, in the same proportion, reason is excluded from our theory or practice. Therefore if we would acquire useful knowledge, we must first divest ourselves of those impediments and sincerely endeavor to search out the truth: and draw our conclusions from reason and just argument, which will never conform to our inclination, interest or fancy but we must conform to that if we would judge rightly.
All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut. Whether this be the case with my history or not, I am hardly competent to judge. I sometimes think it might prove useful to some, and entertaining to others; but the world may judge for itself. Shielded by my own obscurity, and by the lapse of years, and a few fictitious names, I do not fear to venture; and will candidly lay before the public what I would not disclose to the most intimate friend.
If you drink much from a bottle marked "poison" it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.
At no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it.
There is absolutely nothing that can be taken for granted in this world.
[Louis Kelso’s] formula sounds like Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. The whole theory sounds crazy. But, then, one may recall, they said all that of Copernicus too. [January 20, 1972.]
If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.
Men learn little from others' experience. But in the life of one man, never the same time returns.
Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast, To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.
Those whose conduct gives room for talk Are always the first to attack their neighbors.
History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
You cannot begin to preserve any species of animal unless you preserve the habitat in which it dwells. Disturb or destroy that habitat and you will exterminate the species as surely as if you had shot it. So conservation means that you have to preserve forest and grassland, river and lake, even the sea itself. This is not only vital for the preservation of animal life generally, but for the future existence of man himself a point that seems to escape many people.
The success of most things depends upon knowing how long it will take to succeed.
We must adopt reforms which will expand the range of opportunities for all Americans. We can fulfill the American dream only when each person has a fair chance to fulfill his own dreams. This means equal voting rights, equal employment opportunity and new opportunities for expanded ownership, because in order to be secure in their human rights, people need access to property rights. [ 1970 State of the Union Message to the Congress , January 22, 1970]
To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. A better state of one's feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one's self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.
We must give the American worker the first option of ownership. [Speech at Duquesne, PA, January 21, 1985.]
For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk.
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
Not one of us knows what effect his life produces, and what he gives to others; that is hidden from us and must remain so, though we are often allowed to see some little fraction of it, so that we may not lose courage.
I still feel that sincerity and realism are avant-garde, or can be, just as I did when I started out.
I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.
Evil spreads with the wind; truth is capable of speading even against it.
I do not believe they are right who say that the defects of famous men should be ignored. I think it is better that we should know them. Then, though we are conscious of having faults as glaring as theirs, we can believe that that is no hindrance to our achieving also something of their virtues.
Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever. For what is the time of a man, except it be interwoven with that memory of ancient things of a superior age?
There is no first world and third world. There is only one world, for all of us to live and delight in.
I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes... But once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end.
How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection...That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.
We all live under the same sky, but we don't all have the same horizon. In an instant age, perhaps we must relearn the ancient truth that patience, too, has its victories.
It is not the right of property which is protected, but the right to property. Property, per se, has no rights; but the individual — the man — has three great rights, equally sacred from arbitrary interference: the right to his life, the right to his liberty, the right to his property…. The three rights are so bound together as to be essentially one right. To give a man his life but deny him his liberty, is to take from him all that makes his life worth living. To give him his liberty but take from him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty, is to still leave him a slave. [ Principle or Expedient? Annual Address to the New York State Bar Association, 21 January 1921, p. 18.]
One of the greatest disasters that happened to modern civilization was for democracy to inscribe “liberty” on its banners instead of “justice.” Because “liberty” was considered the ideal it was not long until some men interpreted it as meaning “freedom from justice”; then when religion and decent government attempted to bring them back to justice, organized into “freedom groups” they protested that their constitutional and natural rights were being violated. The industrial and social injustice of our era is the tragic aftermath of democracy’s overemphasis on freedom as the “right to do whatever you please.” No, freedom means the right to do what you ought , and ought implies law, and law implies justice, and justice implies God. So too in war, a nation that fights for freedom divorced from justice has no right to war, because it does not know why it wants to be free, or why it wants anyone else to be free. [Catholic Hour broadcast, January 5, 1941.]
I don't understand politics. I don't understand the concept of two sides. And I think that probably there's good on both sides, bad on both sides, and there's a middle ground. But it never seems to come to the middle ground. And it's very frustrating watching it, and seemingly we're not moving forward.
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.
A dreaded society is not a civilized society. The most progressive and powerful society in the civilized sense, is a society which has recognized its ethos, and come to terms with the past and the present, with religion and science, with modernism and mysticism, with materialism and spirituality; a society free of tension, a society rich in culture. Such a society cannot come with hocus-pocus formulas and with fraud. It has to flow from the depth of a divine search.
Know that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful... the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken.
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Every company sensitive to the need for innovative solutions to our problems owes it to itself to look at Kelso’s ideas. [January 13, 1970.]
"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace.
To succeed, you must have tremendous perseverance, tremendous will. I will drink the ocean, says the persevering soul; at my will mountains will crumble up. Have that sort of energy, that sort of will; work hard, and you will reach the goal.
The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well.
What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one.... Its this in-between that Im calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one which is really the realm of the artist.
Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.
Capital Homesteading is the bottom-up solution that puts money power and ownership power in the hands of every citizen, and that is what distinguishes the Just Third Way from all competing systems that contain elements of both socialist and capitalist systems. [Response of January 18, 2010 to Chris Dorf on Kelso Binary Economics Discussion Group Listserv, Kent State University.]
The laws in a democracy are always true exponents of the character, the tastes, habits, and passions of the people. The dominant passion of our people at the present moment is the acquisition of material wealth, either for its own sake, or for the sake of the ease, independence, and distinction it is supposed to be able to secure. Take any ten thousand men at random, and ask them what they most desire of government, and they will answer you, if they answer you honestly, — Such laws as will facilitate the acquisition of wealth. The facilitating of the acquisition of wealth is at the bottom of every question which has any bearing on our elections. Let these men vote, and they will vote for such laws as they believe will most effectually secure this end. But suppose such laws to be enacted, how many out of the ten thousand will be in a condition to take advantage of them? Certainly, not more than one in a hundred. There will be, then, nine thousand and nine hundred men joining with one hundred to enact laws which in their operation are for the exclusive benefit of the one hundred. The whole action, the inevitable action, of every popular government, where wealth is the dominant passion of the people , is to foster the continued growth of inequality of property. The tendency of all laws passed, if passed by the many, will be to concentrate the property in the hands of the few, because each one who aids in passing them hopes that his will be the hands in which it is to be concentrated; — at least, such will be the tendency, till matters become so bad that the many in their madness and desperation are driven to attempt the insane remedy of agrarian laws [redistribution of landed property /so as to achieve a uniform division of land — OED ]. When, under our new system of industry, which allows little personal intercourse between landlord and tenant, proprietor and operative, which connects the operative simply with the mill and the overseer, the concentration of property in a few hands becomes general, it involves the most fatal results. [ Brownson’s Quarterly Review , January, 1846.]
Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer.
They see nothing wrong in the rule that to the victors belong the spoils of the enemy.
I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.
Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.
Concerning the war in Vietnam, Senator George Aiken of Vermount noted in January, 1966, "I'm not very keen for doves or hawks. I think we need more owls." -- Bill Adler, "The Washington Wits"
A New Way of Taking Pills A physician one night in Wisconsin being disturbed by a burglar, and having no ball or shot for his pistol, noiselessly loaded the weapon with small, hard pills, and gave the intruder a "prescription" which he thinks will go far towards curing the rascal of a very bad ailment. -- Nevada Morning Transcript, January 30, 1861
"Obviously, a major malfunction has occurred." -- Steve Nesbitt, voice of Mission Control, January 28, 1986, as the shuttle Challenger exploded within view of the grandstands.
Sharks are as tough as those football fans who take their shirts off during games in Chicago in January, only more intelligent. -- Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every Teen Should Know"
ADA: Something you need only know the name of to be an Expert in Computing. Useful in sentences like, "We had better develop an ADA awareness. -- "Datamation", January 15, 1984
It is always preferable to visit home with a friend. Your parents will not be pleased with this plan, because they want you all to themselves and because in the presence of your friend, they will have to act like mature human beings. The worst kind of friend to take home is a girl, because in that case, there is the potential that your parents will lose you not just for the duration of the visit but forever. The worst kind of girl to take home is one of a different religion: Not only will you be lost to your parents forever but you will be lost to a woman who is immune to their religious/moral arguments and whose example will irretrievably corrupt you. Let's say you've fallen in love with just such a girl and would like to take her home for the holidays. You are aware of your parents' xenophobic response to anyone of a different religion. How to prepare them for the shock? Simple. Call them up shortly before your visit and tell them that you have gotten quite serious about somebody who is of a different religion, a different race and the same sex. Tell them you have already invited this person to meet them. Give the information a moment to sink in and then remark that you were only kidding, that your lover is merely of a different religion. They will be so relieved they will welcome her with open arms. -- Playboy, January, 1983
Pascal: A programming language named after a man who would turn over in his grave if he knew about it. -- Datamation, January 15, 1984
Failed Attempts To Break Records In September 1978 Mr. Terry Gripton, of Stafford, failed to break the world shouting record by two and a half decibels. "I am not surprised he failed," his wife said afterwards. "He's really a very quiet man and doesn't even shout at me." In August of the same year Mr. Paul Anthony failed to break the record for continuous organ playing by 387 hours. His attempt at the Golden Fish Fry Restaurant in Manchester ended after 36 hours 10 minutes, when he was accused of disturbing the peace. "People complained I was too noisy," he said. In January 1976 Mr. Barry McQueen failed to walk backwards across the Menai Bridge playing the bagpipes. "It was raining heavily and my drone got waterlogged," he said. A TV cameraman thwarted Mr. Bob Specas' attempt to topple 100,000 dominoes at the Manhattan Center, New York on 9 June 1978. 97,500 dominoes had been set up when he dropped his press badge and set them off. -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"