Life Is Heaven

The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you and the world's need of that work.  With this, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get.  Without this -- with work which you despise, which bores you, and which the world does not need -- this life is hell.

-- William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868 - 1963), American civil rights activist, educator, and author, To His Newborn Great-Grandson, address on his ninetieth birthday (1958)

Structure Is Everything

In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else.  We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words.  I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it's related to, and how it's related.  There really is little else to meaning.  The structure is everything.  There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons?  Just cells.  The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons.  All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.

-- Tim Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955) is the inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, which oversees its continued development, Weaving The Web : The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (1999)

We Conclude That He Would Not

Here, we analyze whether Plaintiff would be "substantially injure[d]" by a stay.  Largely for reasons we have already discussed, we conclude that he would not. 

First, as we have explained, Plaintiff does not have a possessory interest in the documents at issue, so he does not suffer a cognizable harm if the United States reviews documents he neither owns nor has a personal interest in. 

Second, we find unpersuasive Plaintiff's insistence that he would be harmed by a criminal investigation. "Bearing the discomfiture and cost of a prosecution for crime even by an innocent person is one of the painful obligations of citizenship." Cobbledick v. United States, 309 U.S. 323, 325 (1940). 

Third, because of the nature of the classified materials at issue here and based on the record, we have no reason to expect that the United States's use of these records imposes the risk of disclosure to the United States of Plaintiff's privileged information. 

-- United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruling in Donald J. Trump v United States of America, USCA 11 Case: 22-13005 (21 September 2022), staying a lower court ruling that denied the FBI access to classified documents seized from Mar-a-Lago

I Am Patient

I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it. 

-- Edith Sitwell (1887 - 1964), English poet and critic, The Last Years of a Rebel (1967)

Fleeting Instant

Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed.  Short, therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells.

-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121 - 180), Roman emperor from 161 to 180 and a Stoic philosopher, Meditations (c. AD 121–180), Book III, 10

After Silence

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

-- Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894 - 1963), British author, Music at Night and Other Essays (1931), "The Rest is Silence"

Old Men Delight

Les vieillards aiment à donner de bons préceptes, pour se consoler de n'être plus en état de donner de mauvais exemples.

Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer provide bad examples.

-- François VI, duc de La Rochefoucauld, le Prince de Marcillac (15 September 1613 - 17 March 1680), French author of maxims and memoirs,  Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665-1678), Maxim 93