Do you know what you need?

You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.

~ Walt Disney

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

~ Leo Rosten

Making Changes

Man is a creature of hope and invention, both of which belie the idea that things cannot be changed.
~ Tom Clancy

Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.
~ Thomas Edison

Liberty

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood;
And fired the shot heard round the world.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

--Thomas Jefferson

Friendship

Here is this week's quote, now that a wonderful friend has helped me recover the quotes mailing list.

Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.

~ Dinah Craik

Pointers to Wisdom

Search men's governing principles, and consider the wise, what they shun and what they cleave to.

~ Marcus Aurelius

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.

~ William Shakespeare in As You Like It

Information Age

Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog.

~ Doug Larson

The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.

~ Edward R. Murrow

Adventures

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

~ Albert Einstein

The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.

~ Edward Gibbon

Thinking for Communication

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

~ Carl Friedrich Gauss

Language Origins, Making Decisions

How amazing that the language of a few thousand savages living on a fog-encrusted island in the North Sea should become the language of the world.

~ Norman St. John-Stevas

A decision is the action an executive must take when he has information so incomplete that the answer does not suggest itself.

~ Adm. Arthur W. Radford

Forward progress?

Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.

~ Buckminster Fuller

I look to the future because that's where I'm going to spend the rest of my life.

~ George Burns

Begin with the End in Mind

I write about people who sometime in their life have a vision or dream of something that should be accomplished and they go to work. They are beaten over the head, knocked down, vilified, and for years they get nowhere. But every time they're knocked down they stand up. You cannot destroy these people. And at the end of their lives they've accomplished some modest part of what they set out to do.

~ Irving Stone, American writer and biographer

Manipulating for College Student Diversity

Show me a college where most of the learning results from exposure to other students, and I’ll show you an institution that isn’t worth the tuition it charges.

~ Roger Clegg in
Chronicle of Higher Education

Ben, on education

Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75.

A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.

~ Benjamin Franklin

Definitions: Creativity, Art, Success, Happiness

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

~ Scott Adams

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.

~Dale Carnegie

Trekkies and Wisdom

We're just very proud to honor Dad with this star. A lot of Star Trek fans helped us out with this.

--Chris Doohan, whose father, James Doohan--Lt. Cmdr. Montgomery Scott on the original 60's series--received a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame. The event was expected to be the final public appearance for the 84-year-old actor, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.

Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time.

--Theodore Roosevelt

How to Measure What is Worthwhile

Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.
~ Thomas Edison

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.
~ Vincent Van Gogh

Talent

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius.

~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage.

~ Publius Syrus

(editor's note: if you get from the second one that it's foolish to be silent, you should read it again... -K)

Messing Things Up

Foolproof systems don't take into account the ingenuity of fools.

~ Gene Brown

The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment.

~ Theodore H. White

Wrong Way to be Right

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

~ Edward de Bono

Attitudes

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
~ Marcus Aurelius

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
~ Thomas Alva Edison