Youth

There is always some specific moment when we become aware that our youth is gone; but, years after, we know it was much later.

-- Mignon McLaughlin

Roses

God gave us memories so that we might have roses in December.

-- James M. Barrie

RIP, Jerry Ford

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.

-- Gerald R. Ford (July 14, 1913 - December 26, 2006), 38th president & 40th vice president of the United States, on being sworn into office August 9, 1974 following the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.

Ford remains the only US president to hold office without ever winning a national election.

Kid's Eye View

I love summa' ... Christmas is the best!

-- An Australian Kid

Godfather Of Soul

Thank God for the journey.

-- James Brown, The Godfather of Soul, May 3, 1933(?) - December 25, 2006

Requisites For Contented Living

Nine requisites for contented living: Health enough to make work a pleasure. Wealth enough to support your needs. Strength enough to battle with difficulties and overcome them. Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake them. Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished. Charity enough to see some goods in your neighbor. Love enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others. Faith enough to make real the things of God. Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.

-- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832), German Poet, Dramatist, Novelist

Anything But Live For It

Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it, anything but live for it.

-- Charles Caleb Cotton

Price Of Freedom

The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with a good deal of rubbish.

-- Robert Jackson

Astronomies Change

The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth.

-- Harry Emerson Fosdick, preacher and author (1878-1969)

Test Of A Good Religion

It is the test of a good religion whether you can make a joke about it.

-- British author G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton

Easier To Get In

It is easier to get into something than to get out of it.

-- Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, writing in the 1970s; cited in James Mann, "Rumsfeld versus Rumsfeld" (Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2006)

Information Progression

void -> noise -> signal -> data -> information -> knowledge -> wisdom -> enlightenment -> nirvana

The right side is religion, and the left is physics.

-- Chuck Fuller

Surprise

I doubt whether the world holds for anyone a more soul-stirring surprise than the first adventure with ice cream.

-- Heywood Campbell Broun, 1888 - 1939

Tolerance

The highest result of education is tolerance. Long ago men fought and died for their faith; but it took ages to teach them the other kind of courage, the courage to recognize the faiths of their brethren and their rights of conscience. Tolerance is the first principal of community; it is the spirit which conserves the best that all men think.

-- Helen Keller

Pinochet

Sometimes democracy must be bathed in blood.

-- Augusto Pinochet (November 25, 1915 - December 10, 2006), former military ruler of Chile

RIP Jeane Kirkpatrick

Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world's policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world's midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war.

-- Jeane Kirkpatrick (November 19, 1926 - December 7, 2006), U.S. public official. "Dictatorship and Double Standards, Commentary" (New York, Nov. 1979).

Iraq Study Group

The current approach is not working, and the ability of the United States to influence events is diminishing.

-- Lee H. Hamilton, co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, New York Times, 12/7/2006

A Music Bath

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1809 - 1894)

Plague Of Mankind

The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity.

-- Thomas Szasz

Traditions

Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from happening.

-- Barbara Tober

Ice Storm

Life in the Midwest. Sometimes it's hot out, sometimes cold. Last night it turned cold after being warmer than average for more than a week (mid-60s on Thanksgiving Day).

We woke up December 1st to the results of an overnight ice storm. Our two 50-foot Chinese Elms bore the brunt of the damage. Here's what it looked like first thing in the morning.

NMH

Either I've been missing something or nothing has been going on.

-- Karen Elizabeth Gordon