The Brave Man

It is not the critic that counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement. And at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

- President Theodore Roosevelt, Paris 1910

Some Wonderful Quotes on Confidence

Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.

~Eleanor Roosevelt

It's not who you are that holds you back, it's who you think you're not.

~Author Unknown

We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies.

~Roderick Thorp, Rainbow Drive

I quit being afraid when my first venture failed and the sky didn't fall down.

~Allen H. Neuharth

If you hear a voice within you say "you cannot paint," then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

~Vincent Van Gogh

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

What a fool, quoth he, am I, thus to lie in a stinking dungeon, when I may as well walk at liberty! I have a key in my bosom, called Promise, that will, I am persuaded, open any lock in Doubting Castle.

~John Bunyan

If you really put a small value upon yourself, rest assured that the world will not raise your price.

~Author Unknown

Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.

~Peter T. Mcintyre

Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they're yours.

~Richard Bach, Illusions

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered - either by themselves or by others.

~Mark Twain

Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside of them was superior to circumstance.

~Bruce Barton

Aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn't know that so it goes on flying anyway.

~Mary Kay Ash

Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.

~Norman Vincent Peale

The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable.

~Paul Tillich

When the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, it may be that they take better care of it there.

~Cecil Selig

The things we hate about ourselves aren't more real than things we like about ourselves.

~Ellen Goodman

I was thinking of my patients, and how the worst moment for them was when they discovered they were masters of their own fate. It was not a matter of bad or good luck. When they could no longer blame fate, they were in despair.

~Anaïs Nin

Your problem is you're... too busy holding onto your unworthiness.

~Ram Dass

It's me who is my enemy
Me who beats me up
Me who makes the monsters
Me who strips my confidence.

~Paula Cole, "Me," This Fire

If I am not for myself, who will be?

~Pirke Avoth

Once you become self-conscious, there is no end to it; once you start to doubt, there is no room for anything else.

~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates his fate.

~Henry David Thoreau

Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honor of a critic.

~Jean Sibelius

When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.

~African Proverb

Great tranquility of heart is his who cares for neither praise nor blame.

~Thomas à Kempis

We probably wouldn't worry about what people think of us if we could know how seldom they do.

~Olin Miller

You're never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.

~Lou Holtz and John Heisler, The Fighting Spirit

The way you treat yourself sets the standard for others.

~Sonya Friedman

Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.

~E.F. Schumacher

Men are not against you; they are merely for themselves.

~Gene Fowler, Skyline, 1961

Stand Still

Stand still and look until you really see.

-Anon

Levels of Ignorance

He who knows not and knows not that he knows not, is a fool—shun him!
He who knows not and knows that he knows not, is unlearned—teach him!
He who knows and knows not that he knows, is asleep—awaken him!
He who knows and knows that he knows, is enlightened—follow him!

- Chinese Proverb

Balance and Enlightenment

The more in balance we ourselves are, the less we feel a need for correcting everybody else's worldviews. The more enlightened you yourself are, the less you are obsessed with making everybody else be like [and think like] you.

- Flemming Funch

Start with Adam

“ ..if anybody were to start where Adam started, he would not get further than Adam did…”

- Karl Popper, philosopher, 1979

Permanent Presence of Past

“… one of the most important properties of all fields of production [is] the permanent presence of the past of the field, which is endlessly recalled even in the very breaks which dispatch it to the past.”

- Pierre Bourdieu, sociologist, 1984

Every Picture

“… every picture owes more to other pictures painted before than it owes to nature.”

- E.H. Gombrich

Opposite of Talking

"The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting."

- Fran Lebowitz

Prejudice

"Expressing dislike of something you don't know is usually known as prejudice."

- Bjarne Stroustrup

Stupid to be Said

"Anything too stupid to be said is sung."

- Voltaire

Seeker of Truth

"If you would be a real seeker aftert is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things."

- Rene Descartes

In Mathematics

"In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."

- Johann von Neumann

What the World Needs

"What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left."

- Oscar Levant

Harming a Cause

"The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments."

- Friedrich Neitzsche

Young Fools

"The surprising thing about young fools is how many survive to become old fools."

- Doug Larson

Life

"Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim."

- Bertrand Russell

Perfect Bureaucrat

"The perfect bureaucrat everywhere is the man who manages to make no decisions and escape all responsibility."

- Brooks Atkinson

Equanimity in Opinions

"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions."

- Albert Einstien

We are What

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is, then, not an act but a habit.

- Aristotle.

The Only Way to Succeed

The only way to succeed is to be brave enough to risk failures.

- Bobby Jindal

The Most Beautiful Experience

The most beautiful experience in this world is the experience of the mysterious.

- Albert Einstien

The Future

The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.

- John Schaar

Formulation of Problem

The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may merely be a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advances.

- Albert Einstien

Mistake

A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it, is committing another mistake.

- Confucius

Why Have One?

If you never change your mind, why have one?

- Edward DeBono

Listening

Listening is the beginning of understanding. Wisdom is the reward for a lifetime of listening. Let the wise listen and add to their learning and let the discerning get guidance.

- Proverb

Self Regulation

Goal directed self-imposed delay of gratification is perhaps the essence of emotional self-regulation: the ability to deny impulse in the service or a goal, whether it be building a business, solving an algebraic equation or pursuing the Stanley Cup.

- Daniel Goleman (in Emotional Intelligence)

Persistence

Persistence is a twin sister of excellence. One is a matter of quality and the other a matter of time.

- Marabel Morgan

The Mind that is not baffled

When we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, when we know longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

- Wendell Berry

Problem

Any stimulus, question, task, phenomenon or discrepancy for which an explanation is
immediately not known is a problem.

- Arthur Costa, Bena Kallick

On Successful Technology

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

- Richard P. Feynman

Constantly Trying to Understand

As children, we were constantly trying to understand the world about us. We were endlessly curious. We wanted reasons for everything. We asked "why?" and "how?" and "when?" and "where?" until our parents, realizing the limitations of their own knowledge, may have become frustrated and impatient. Then we went to school and did the same thing to our teachers, only to discover their limitations. We concluded that no-one knew the answers to the really important questions of life, and instead got busy learning those things other people decided were good for us.

- Philip Chandler

Ordinary Man vs Warrior

The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes
everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.

- Carlos Castaneda

Some Quotes by Edison

"Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. Accordingly, a 'genius' is often merely a talented person who has done all of his or her homework."

My main purpose in life is to make enough money to create ever more inventions.... The dove is my emblem.... I want to save and advance human life, not destroy it.... I am proud of the fact that I have never invented weapons to kill....

I readily absorb ideas from every source, frequently starting where the last person left off.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus and apply your mental and physical energies to the problem at hand - without growing weary. Because such thinking is often difficult, there seems to be no limit to which some people will go to avoid the effort and labor that is associated with it....

If we all did the things we are really capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves....

The three things that are most essential to achievement are common sense, hard work and stick-to-it-iv-ness.....

Pretty much everything will come to him who hustles while he waits. I believe that restlessness is discontent, and discontent is merely the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.

Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do in the first place doesn't mean it's useless....

Results? Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward....

As a cure for worrying, work is far better than whiskey. I always found that, if I began to worry, the best thing I could do was focus upon doing something useful and then work very hard at it. Soon, I would forget what was troubling me.

Time is really the only capital that any human being has and the thing that he can least afford to waste or lose...

From his neck down a man is worth a couple of dollars a day, from his neck up he is worth anything that his brain can produce.

Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge....

Be courageous! Whatever setbacks America has encountered, it has always emerged as a stronger and more prosperous nation.... Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith and go forward!

If parents pass enthusiasm along to their children, they will leave them an estate of incalculable value....

- Edison

Good judgement and experience

"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement."

- Anon

Never

"I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting."

- Mark Twain

98 percent

"Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then--we elected them."

- Lily Tomlin

Our memory

"Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?"

- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Idiot

“He talks like an idiot, and behaves like an idiot. But don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.”

- Groucho Marx

Habit

Habit is a cable. We weave a third of it each day and at last we cannot break it.

- Horace Mann, American Educator, 1796-1859

Democracy vs Dictatorship

"The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting."

- Charles Bukowski

Second Half

"The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half."

- Fyodor Dostoevsky

Don't discourage

“Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.”

- Bertrand Russell

Self respect

"That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong."

- William J. H. Boetcker

Practical Wisdom

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe, said Abe Lincoln. Astonishing how much profoundly practical wisdom is packaged into that simple declaration. Time spent in sharpening the tool is time well-spent; so is time spent in thinking through a problem and thoroughly understanding the problem before rushing off to solve it. And in most cases, since there is almost nothing new under the sun, there are already known solutions to many problem. So the most efficient method to solve a problem is to first seek the solution that someone may have figured out already.

-Atanu Dey

Give me six hours

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe

- Abraham Lincoln.

Questions

The questions we ask ourselves have a profound effect on the way we think.

- Philip Chandler

Is there life?

Is there life before death?

- Graffito

Boys will be boys

Boys will be boys and so will a lot of middle aged men.

- Ken Hubbard

The natural economic tendency

The natural economic tendency is for resources to move to where they are most productive. Market prices act as signals to bring about these shifts. The market price for computer programmers has soared in recent years. Small, specialized software companies are more effective than the Dilbert sector at using programmers. Thus, they can afford to pay programmers higher wages, while the Dilbert sector cannot. The more complaints that one hears from such firms of a shortage of technical workers, the more confident one can be that market forces are working to allocate technical workers to their most productive uses.

- Arnold Kling

The new industrial state

"So complex, indeed, will be the job of organizing specialists that there will be specialists in organization. More even than machinery, massive and complex business organizations are the tangible manifestation of advanced technology."

- John Kenneth Galbraith, "The New Industrial State," p. 16.

Let's see the battle scars then

So let’s see your battle scars then. Show me the wounds you’ve endured as a result of pursuing goals you couldn’t achieve. Let’s see that bankruptcy, that broken heart, the rejection letter, the lawsuit, the divorce, the public humiliation. Show me the total failures, the brutal disappointments, the smack-downs.

- Steve Pavlina

Tha Habit of Reason

Yet another masterpiece by Brand Blanshard:

Then what is thinking? It is this: a directed effort to reach the truth by solving some particular problem that stands in the way.

The first step is to make the problem specific.

The second step is to form theories freely of how to rid yourself of that burden.

[The third] step is to develop in foresight the consequences of your proposals.

The fourth and final step in thinking is to compare the consequences of your proposals to see which is best in the light of your scheme as a whole.

Life is a succession of big and little crises, and one main aim of education is to supply us with the strategies necessary for dealing with them. Furthermore, dealing with them thoughtfully may become a habit. Indeed, my thesis today is that if you have acquired that habit of reasonableness, you will have acquired the best thing that an education can bestow.

An hour, a day, a life ordered by reflective choice strikes them as gray and dull.

He was so present-minded about what was before his mind that he was absent-minded about what was before his eyes. [about John Dewey]

Why is it that, with all the advantages and with the appeal to reason open to most of us, so few people succeed in guiding their way by thought? The true answer is that each of us is a divided self. A person is a bundle of impulses or drives, of which the drive to know is important but feeble, and the others, especially when acting together, are far more powerful. Why more powerful? The answer is biological.

Now the reason our impulses to feed and fight, to fear and rage, are so hard to control is that their roots are millions of years old in our racial history; the reason foresight and logic are so feeble in restraining them is that their cortical bases are relatively recent, only a few hundred thousand years old; they are therefore relative newcomers in the management of behavior.

One may fall back on the airy line of Walt Whitman and say: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.” So what? he would add. Well, that “what” is that you have stopped thinking.

There is not one rule for thinking in religion and another for science; there is one great honest rule for both: Adjust your belief to the evidence.

If you are not a better citizen, a better man or woman, a better member of society, because of the years you have spent here, then either you or the university has fallen down on the job.

Thought is no enemy of feeling; indeed it may itself be driven by a passion for truth, as it was in Einstein, for example, and in his favorite philosopher, Spinoza.

That excellent English critic F. L. Lucas says, “Imagine the greatest man you can think of, in a bad temper; does he still, at the moment, seem great? No. Not even were he Alexander. Real greatness implies balance and restraint.”

I have not heard of an American jailed for being too thoughtful; but our jails are full of people who are there because they surrendered to impulse before they took thought.

The modern Socrates was, I think, Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein was three men: one, the man with an old sweater and baggy trousers who stood on a Princeton street corner eating an ice cream cone or helped a little schoolgirl who had heard that he was good at figures; two, the physicist who pursued to the end of that revolutionary trail of thought that ended in the tiny formula E = MC2, energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light; and three, the postwar Einstein, who dedicated himself to saving the world that he saw his formula might destroy.

Men like Socrates and Einstein are what William James called “quarto and folio editions of mankind.” You and I are paperbacks.

Democracy and distinction are subtly at war with each other. The pressure of the media and the shrinking of the world are casting our minds into molds. The route to escape is through thought. By taking thought, we can choose our own media, select our own music, create our mental environment; we can surround ourselves with the best that has been thought and said in the world.

India

by Late Benigno Aquino

“Here is a land in which a few are spectacularly rich while the masses remain abjectly poor, where freedom and its blessings are a reality for a minority and an illusion for the many, a land consecrated to democracy but is a land of privilege and rank, a republic educated to equality but mired in an archaic system of caste.”

- Source not known.

Learn from History

"Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history."

- George Bernard Shaw

Government

"Government is too big and too important to be left to the politicians."

- Chaster Bowles

Finally

"I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it."

- Rita Mae Brown

Beauty

"I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?"

- Jean Kerr

Two Kinds of Light

"There are two kinds of light--the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures."

- James Thurber

Act to Feel

It is easier to act yourself into a better way of feeling than to feel yourself into a better way of action.

- O. H. Mowrer

Automatic Creative Mechanism

Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend upon its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than "you" ever could by conscious thought. "You" supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic creative mechanism then supplies the means whereby.

- Maxwell Maltz

Good Idea

The best way to get a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

- Linus Pauling

Fanaticism

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts, when you have forgotten your aim.

- George Santayana

Ideas

If you are waiting to have a good idea before you have any ideas, you won't have many ideas.

- David Allen

Big Things and Small Things

You have got to think about the big things while you are doing the small things so that all the small things go in the right direction.

- Alvin Toffler

Affairs of Life

The affairs of life embrace a multitude of interests, and he who reasons in any one of them, without consulting the rest, is a visionary insuited to control the business of the world.

- James Fenimore Cooper

Enemy

It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.

- Sally kempton

Vision and Venture

Vision is not enough. It must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps; we must step up the stairs.

- Vaclav Havel

Consumer of Time and Energy

This constant, unproductive preoccupation with all the things we have to do is the single largest consumer of time and energy.

- Kerry Gleeson

Adjustment

We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs subordinate self-confidence to face drastic without inner trembling.

-Eric Hoffer

Anxiety

Anxiety is caused by lack of control, organization, preparation and action.

- David Kekich

Human Nature

“Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” “Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow upto the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable."

John Stuart Mill (On Liberty)

Vitality

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ignorance and Apathy

"Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care."

- William Safire

College

"Fathers send their sons to college either because they went to college or because they didn't."

- L. L. Henderson

Democracy

"Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve."

- George Bernard Shaw

Calamities

"Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others."

-Ambrose Bierce

Mark of A Great Player

The mark of a great player is in his ability to come back. The great champions have all come back from defeat.

-Sam Snead

Liberal Education

Libreal education is about learning to learn, to think for yourself, on your own and in collaboration with others. Liberal educations leads us away from naive acceptance of authority, above self-defeating relativism and beyond ambiguous contextualism. It culminates in principled reflective judgement. Learning critical thinking, cultivating the critical spirit is not just a means to this end, but is a part of the goal itself. Yes, there is much more to a liberal education, than critical thinking. There is an understanding of the methods, principles, theories and ways of achieving knowledge which are proper to the different intellectual realms. There is an encounter with the cultural, artistic and spiritual dimensions of life. There is the evolution of one*s decision making to the level of principled integrity and concern for the common good and social justice. There is the realization of the ways all our lives are shaped by global as well as local political, social, psychological, economic, environmental, and physical forces. There is the growth that comes from the interaction with cultures, languages, ethnic groups, religions, nationalities, and social classes other than one*s own. There is the refinement of one*s humane sensibilities through reflection on the recurring questions of human existence, meaning, love, life and death. There is the sensitivity, appreciation and critical appraisal of all that is good and all that is bad in the human condition. As the mind awakens and matures, and the proper nurturing and educational nourishment is provided, these others central parts of a liberal education develop as well.

-Peter A Facione

Being a Professor

Being a professor is a curious job - the better you are, the less your students come to need you.

-Peter A Facione

Nation's future

The future now belongs to the societies that organize themselves for learning...nations that want high income and full employment must develop policies that emphasize the acquisition of knowledge and skills by everyone, not a select few.

-Ray Marshall & Marc Tucker

Call for change

We are more apt to endure the status quo, even as it slowly deteriorates, than we are to call for a radical change. Regrettably however, when the call for change comes, it often requires a far greater upheavel to make necessary transformations, or, on occasion, the situation has deteriorated beyong the point of no return. In those situations we find ourselves wondering why we waited so long for doing something.

-Peter A Facione

Heuristic

Any heuristic is only a shortcut, not a failsafe rule. It may work out well much of the time to rely on the heuristic, but it will not work out the best all of the time.

-Peter A Facione

Decisions

Decisions those good drivers make in those moments of crisis, just like the decisions which practiced atheletes make in the flow of a game or the decisions that a gifted teacher as she or he interacts with the students are borne of expertise, training and practice.

-Peter A Facione

Insanity

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.

-Albert Einstein

Critical thinking is pervasive

As long as people have purposes in mind and wish to judge how to accomplish them, as long as people wonder what's true and what's not, what to believe and what to reject, critical thinking is always going to be necessary.

- Peter A Facione

Bravest

"The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out and meet it"

-Thucydides, Circa 460 BC - 400 BC

Make no little plans

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big."

- Daniel Burnham

Very few

Very few really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring the answers from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own mind - justification, explanations, forms of consolation without which they can't go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.

-Vampire Marius in Ann Rice's book The Vampire Lestat.

Border case

What can we learn [about critical thing] in such a case? May be more than we can learn from just looking at the easy cases. For when a case is on the borderline, it forces us to make important distinctions. It confronts us and demands a decision: In or out? And not just that, but why?

-Peter A Facione.

Questions

We run into questions when we test our understanding further. We humans learn better when we stop frequently to reflect rather than just plowing from top of the page to the bottom without coming for air.

-Peter A Facione.

Becoming educated

Becoming educated does not absolutely guarantee a life of happiness, virtue or economic success, but it surely offers a better chance at those things. And it is clearly better than enduring the consequences of making bad decisions and it is better than burdening family, friends and all the rest of us with the unwanted and unavoidable consequences of those poor choices.

-Peter A Facione.

Cross roads

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."

-Woody Allen

Great conversation

Desire

The key that unlocks energy is desire. It's also the key to a long and interesting life. If we expect to create any drive, any real force within ourselves, we have to get excited.

-Earl Nightingale

Free speech

"We live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, and censured simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That’s the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we’re in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it’s time to make a run for the fence."

-Daniel Gilbert

From Stumbling on Happiness

"The eye and brain are conspirators, and like most conspiracies; theirs is negotiated behind closed doors, in the back room, outside of our awareness"

"Distorted views of reality are made possible by the fact that experiences are ambiguous­, that is, they can be credibly viewed in many ways, some of which are more positive than others. To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion. So what does all of this have to do with forecasting our emotional futures? As we are about to see, we may live at the fulcrum of reality and illusion, but most of us don't know our own address"

"When we have an experience­ -- hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room -- on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage"

"Not to think about the future requires that we convince our frontal lobe to do what it was designed to do, and like a heart that is told not to beat, it naturally resists that suggestion"

"The price we pay for our irresponsible explanatory urge is that we often spoil our most pleasant experiences by making good sense of them"

"To learn from experience, we must remember it, and for a variety of reasons, memory is a faithless friend"

-Daniel Gilbert

Giving up

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.

-Thomas Edison

Taking things for granted

"Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted."

-Aldous Huxley

Always somebody

"There's always somebody who is paid too much, and taxed too little - and it's always somebody else."

-Cullen Hightower

Business

"Business isn't primarily a financial institution. It's a creative institution. Like painting and sculpting, business can be a venue for personal expression and artistry, at its heart more like a canvas than a spreadsheet."

-Randy Komisar

Authentic Happiness

We can build happiness by deliberately creating more pleasure, engagement and meaning in our daily lives.

The Pleasant Life consists of thinking and feeling positively about our past, present and future until we are experiencing life at the top of our ‘set range’.

The Engaged Life grows when we know our highest strengths and recraft our lives to use them as often as possible. We experience fullness and flow; we lose track of time and feel a deep sense of satisfaction.

The Meaningful Life is possible when we use our strengths and talents to serve something greater than ourselves. There is no limit to meaning - it is completely adjustable and plastic.

-Martin Seligman

Passion and Drive

"Passion pulls you towards something you cannot resist. Drive pushes you towards something you feel compelled or obligated to do. If you know nothing about yourself you can’t tell the difference. You can’t understand the crucial difference until you find them at war inside."

-Randy Komisar(in The Monk and the Riddle).

Perfection

"Try as hard as we may for perfection, the net result of our labors is an amazing variety of imperfectness. We are surprised at our own versatility in being able to fail in so many different ways."

-Samuel McChord Crothers

Million Dollars

"No one can earn a million dollars honestly."

-William Jennings Bryan

Better

IT only gets better when YOU get better.

-Anon

No expedient

"There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking."

-Thomas Alva Edison

Unanimity

"Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity."

-Christopher Morley

DIY

If there is something really cool and you can't understand why somebody hasn't done it before, that's because you haven't done it yourself.

-Lion Kimbro

Morality

"I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it."

-G.K.Chesterton

Critic

"I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."

-Richard Pryor

Fear

I believe that anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do, provided he keeps doing them until he gets a record of successful experiences behind him.

-Eleanor Roosevelt

Why Free Speech

Because we are not infinitely wise, our rationality is bounded; because we are not equally wise; because ideas matter, and because markets work.

Everything you see around yourself began as an idea, was embodied in stuff, and survived in the marketplace competition with other stuff.

Bad ideas have to be confronted. Free speech and expression is important because it exposes bad ideas. Censoring of expression is bad because the censors cannot be infinitely wise because no one is.

-Atanu

The Focal Point

The focal point is PEOPLE, not technology - hence many of the design aspects are not "foolproof". They are possible only when supported by public education and enforcement.

-BRTS FAQ

Business and Government

“The govt should not be in the business of doing business.”

-Adi Godrej (Source not available)

Stupidity

Like I say, India is not poor for nothing. It takes concerted cumulative stupidity over decades to bring a large economy to its knees. Behold the bureaucrats and marvel at their madness.

-Atanu

Confidence

I believe that the final bug in TEX was discovered and removed on November 27,1985. But if, somehow, an error still lurks in the code, I shall gladly pay a finder's fee of $20.48 to the first person who discovers it. (This is twice the previous amount, and I plan to double it again in a year; you see, I really am confident!)

-Knuth (in the preface of TeX: The Program)

Good Listener

"A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something."

-Wilson Mizner

Happy Childhood

"A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts."

-Colette

Statistics

"The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you."

-Rita Mae Brown

Appropriate Response

"Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane."

-Philip K. Dick

Understand

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."

-Upton Sinclair

Social cost of vehicles

First, there is the cost of building and maintaining roads, bridges and flyovers.
Second, traffic police and traffic lights cost large sums. No driver wants to pay for them. But when a power failure puts traffic lights out of action, traffic jams bring home to drivers their true value.
Third, we suffer hundreds of deaths and disabilities every year from road accidents.
Fourth, we suffer high costs of congestion.
Fifth, cars impose high social costs by occupying parking space
Sixth, vehicles impose high costs through pollution, which leads to respiratory and other disease. Respiratory disease is the number one killer in India. By subsidising petrol and diesel, we subsidise deaths by pollution.
Seventh, vehicular pollution causes smog that makes it impossible for planes to land in Delhi in winter, forcing them to travel to distant airports to dump their disgruntled passengers. This imposes high costs on the passengers, the airlines, and on tourism.

-Swaminomist

Freedom with a pinch of responsibility

I believe in the freedom of people to travel where and when they want. But this freedom imposes a wide array of hidden costs on a city economy, and car-owners should pay these costs in full. Otherwise we will be subsidising pollution, fuel adulteration, congestion, respiratory disease, and the disappearance of green spaces.

-Swaminomist

Gratitude

"Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors."

-Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Money

We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called "the visible God": money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out. It creates a hole in our sense of ourselves and of this country, and it leaves us with few alternatives but to try to fill that hole with money and the things money buys...

-Curtis White

Peak Oil

Humans have always sought perpetual motion, and for a moment, the petroleum industry has given it to us. The problem is that you have 300 million Americans who take $2.50 gasoline for granted in a country whose architecture, land use patterns, agriculture, prosperity, and cast of mind have been have been built around cheap oil. These oil tribe people, and their political leaders, don't care about peak oil, they care only about price. Meanwhile, the Chinese are where we were in 1910, with car sales doubling every three years.

-Randy Udall

Reasonableness

It is a firm conviction of mine that the characteristic which a college should aim above all to produce is reasonableness. What does reasonableness mean? Not skill in reasoning, though it is always the better for that. It is not even wholly a matter of the intellectual side of our nature, though a trained intelligence is essential to it. It is the pervading habit and temper of a mind that has surrendered its government to reason. On the intellectual side it shows itself as reflectiveness, the habit of examining the meaning of a proposed belief, and looking to its grounds and consequences, before accepting it. On the practical side it is justice, a scrupulous regard for the rights of others as well as of oneself. On the emotional side, it is partly good taste—such an adjustment of feeling to its object that one is never wrought up over molehills nor cavalier about mountains, and partly, again, that equanimity of mind which comes of having made one’s peace reflectively with the best and worst that life may bring. Reasonableness, in this complex sense, seems to me the finest flower of an education.

Well, in this matter of the reasonable spirit, the business of education is to put pictures on the wall, and point at them, and then hope that in our sluggish hearts and minds admiration will begin to stir. None of the pictures it holds up can show us fully what reasonableness is. But when it holds up Plato, for example, we can see in the play of that clear and all-encompassing intelligence what reflectiveness means at its best. When we turn to such figures as Marcus Aurelius and Abraham Lincoln, we see the reasonable mind in another aspect, the aspect of imperturbable justice and magnanimity. As for reasonableness in feeling, we have on the one hand the long line of entries from Longinus through Goethe to Eliot, from whom we may learn sobriety of taste, and on the other the long line of saints from Buddha to Schweitzer to tell us the secrets of inward peace. Qualitative existence means living in the presence of these people till we find ourselves thinking as they do, feeling as they do, and walking in their far-sighted ways.

-Brand Blanshard

Quantity and Quality in American Education

A fine masterpiece by Brand Blanshard, written about half a century back.

Americans have acquired a habit that, so far as I know, is theirs uniquely, of grateful and persistent giving to the colleges that nursed them.

We live in better days. Wherever the traveler goes in America, the evidences of public care for education strikes his eye.

The business of the state, said the philosopher Bosanquet, is not to produce the good life, which it cannot do, but to hinder the hindrances to the good life.

If the good life is to be lived with any fullness, it normally needs health of body and training of mind, and these things call for that unfortunate crass necessity, money. Here quality is more dependent on quantity than we may wish to think Sir Arthur Queller-Couch, after listing a dozen of the great poets of the last century, points out that nine of these were university men, with the background of means that this implies, and that of the remaining three, Browning was the son of a prosperous banker, Rosetti had a private income, and Keats, the only one without any sort of backing, died, broken with the struggle, at 25.

When quality is set over against quantity, two different things may be meant by quality. One is quality as such, as opposed to quantity as such. The other is higher quality as opposed to lower quality.

Plain men did not know what to make of the strange little German dominie and his bizarre announcement that we were living in a new world which was governed by the formula E = mc2, but when, aided by the magic of such formulas, there began to issue from the laboratories packets that could blast whole cities in a moment, they could only bow to a magic they could not in the least understand.

Have you noticed, again, how advertisers are aping the quantitative exactness of the scientists, whether it makes sense or not; we are assured that a soap will eliminate so many per cent more bacteria; I learned recently, as I listened to my radio, that if I used a new shampoo, the brightness of my hair would be increased up to 35 per cent.

We find every sort of cause or product urged upon us in language that seeks to borrow prestige from its use in physical science; and imitation is the sincerest flattery.

If we happen to want bright hair or red hair or curly hair, he can help us (though unfortunately not if what we want is just hair); but if we want to know whether it is of any importance to have one kind of hair or another, if we want to know what is worth reading, or feeling, or doing, if we want to know about the ends of life as opposed to the means, we find him silent. He is not only silent; he is deliberately and even ostentatiously silent.

This tendency to draw a sharp line between fact and value and to insist that knowledge or intelligence, identified with scientific method, has no concern with value, has been fortified by recent changes in the philosophy of science.

[Judgements] are expressions of the nonrational part of our nature.

When you call anything good or bad, the reflective man may interest himself in the cause or effect of your thus exploding into speech, but to consider whether your remark is true or not is to mistake the business of intelligence.

When you call anything good or bad, the reflective man may interest himself in the cause or effect of your thus exploding into speech, but to consider whether your remark is true or not is to mistake the business of intelligence.

The realm of values is bundled up by the scientists and other custodians of knowledge and left like an unwanted child on the doorstep for some passer-by to pick up.

Plato says: “It is not the life of knowledge, not even if it included all the sciences, that creates happiness and well-being, but a single branch of knowledge—the science of good and evil. If you exclude this from the other branches, medicine will be equally able to give us health, and shoemaking shoes, and weaving clothes. Seamanship will still save life at sea and strategy win battles. But without the knowledge of good and evil, the use and excellence of these sciences will be found to have failed us.”

The fact is that the measurable things of the world—its dollars and ships and refrigerators—are of value only as they contribute to nonmeasurable things, such as justice and happiness and love and poetry and laughter. In the end the usefulness of useful things lies in the help they give us in getting these useless things.

That is a vicious circle, education for gadgets, for education, and how is one to escape from it? Not by crying out that things are in the saddle and ride mankind, or trying to live like Gandhi or Thoreau; it is too late in the day to secede from civilization.

No, the only feasible escape is to make quantity subserve quality, to accept this vicious circle as a ring that provides a solid setting for a pearl of incalculable price.

One feels at once that such a world would be shrunken and impoverished, for so much that we are and do is made possible by these things. Would life in such dreary poverty be worth living at all? Well, let me remind you that this was the world of Socrates and Sophocles and Aristotle, of Virgil and St. Augustine and Dante. There was nothing poverty-stricken about these minds; indeed it is to these minds precisely that men in other times turn when they want to escape from their own poverty.

It is for persons, for better and more sensitive persons, for the knowledge and love and goodness of persons, that all the machinery of civilization exists.

My conclusion is that the machinery of civilization is to be justified only so far as it contributes to the qualities of persons.

Yet dislike may have keen eyes.

Ivor Brown has remarked that “there are naturalists without wonder, scholars without awe, theologians without worship, economists without anger, historians who never laughed or hated or despaired. They may be wise, but who is jealous of their wisdom? It is possible to know everything and understand nothing.”

Consider the ideal drawn for the American college by James Russell Lowell at Harvard’s 250th anniversary. What the college should try to produce, said Lowell, is a type of man, “a man of culture, a man of intellectual resources, a man of public spirit, a man of refinement, with that good taste which is the conscience of the mind, and that conscience which is the good taste of the soul.” The crown of quantity, and its justification, is quality.

Important as it is not to confuse quality with quantity, it is still more important, and far more difficult, not to confuse second-rate quality with first-rate.

Consider first how strong the forces are that make the good the enemy of the best and the commonplace the enemy of the good.

Economically, we are still a society in which production is determined by profit. The man who is producing books knows that his profits depend on circulation; the man who is producing movies knows that his profits depend on the length of the line at the box-office. Now if what he wanted in both cases is the largest number of buyers, the proper course is not to appeal to this or that group, with this or that taste, but to the largest possible group. And how is that to be reached? The answer can be given in mathematical terms—by appealing to the lowest common denominator. And where is this common ground to be found? Hardly in thoughtfulness, or in moral or psychological acuteness, or an interest in delicate portraiture. It is found rather in what is primitive about us, in sex and fear and anger, in sensation in both meanings of the term, and in those infantile daydreams of ourselves as princesses or supermen that all of us have when young and some of us never lose. Hence publishers find it profitable to fill the racks in stations and drugstores with paperbacks celebrating violence.

Here you see in vivid form the effect of mass appeal in confusing values.

Many of our movie heroes rare incarnations of what a critic has described as “ferocity modified by fatuousness.” The heroines were all dolls of faultless face, form, and costume, mammoth wealth, and total absence of ideas.

The profit motive is not the only leveler of values. Another is our impulse to conformity, which seems to be stronger in these days than ever before.

Van Wyck Brooks says, “the desire not to be of the herd is in itself a herd desire. It is a recognition of the herd of which the original man is incapable.”

They dislike the exceptional man or woman, because such a person is a challenge to their own standards and ways of thought. We all feel the tug of this impulse; Bernard Shaw has remarked that “the best of us is nine hundred and ninety-nine per cent mob (Mr. Shaw was no mathematician) and one per cent quality.”

Since this repressive attitude is directed against difference as such, it operates against good as well as bad; indeed the nonconformist intellectual, described as an egg-head, is particularly suspected because he touches the springs of fear and envy.

There is another and related force that makes against the first-rate. It is the curious conviction, more often felt than clearly formulated, that the very notion that some persons and subjects are better than others is undemocratic.

Snobbishness, to be sure, is an unpleasant trait. But so is inverted snobbishness that resists as priggish the suggestion that some types of manners, mind, and moral ought to be accepted as true titles of nobility.

“For all practical purposes you know the answer already. There may be disputes about who is better than who on the level of the third-rate, but there is surprisingly little dispute about the figures at the top.”

It is of no use to hang golden apples beyond a student’s reach if there is no ladder by which he can get to them. The point I would emphasize is that putting the ladder in place is chiefly the student’s business rather than the teacher’s. Unless the student has a genuine specific levity which carries him upward, some authentic interest, ambition, or enthusiasm, the teacher has nothing to work with.

And if I were advising students about their programs, I would say, watch your enthusiasms; keep them alight; only by letting the flame grow brighter will you ever do anything first-rate.

Samuel Butler said there were two rules about human motive, a general rule and a special one. The general rule was that everyone could make anything of himself if he wanted to badly enough. The special rule was that everyone was more or less an exception to the general rule. But that general rule is a charter of life.

Then some day you see a piece in a journal and realize that a new writer has arrived, a writer of idiosyncrasy and power and grace. You, the teacher, have not taught him those things. Like so many others, he has found himself by falling in love; he has had an affair with English prose. He has achieved with delight and by himself a quality that no amount of instruction could convey.

It is a great thing for a university to turn out engineers and doctors in regiments. It is a fine thing for a given engineer or doctor to a mastery of his technique. But the highest tribute to a college is not to have produced masses of technicians with a perfect technique. It is to have stamped on its sons and daughters the priceless imprint of the reasonable mind.

Just one such person—thoughtful in his judgments, fair in all his dealings, unruffled in his sweetness of temper, fearless because he has looked before and after and made his terms with life and death—just one such person may give light to a whole community. His spirit is beyond price because you cannot buy quality with any amount of quantity. And if he lives at an altitude hard to reach, we may remind ourselves, with Spinoza, that all precious things are as difficult as they are rare.

- Brand Blanshard

Maslow Ladder

Physiological Needs – Food, water, sleep, air
Safety Needs – A home, family, physical security
Love Needs – Belonging to a group, being accepted by others
Esteem Needs – Feeling good about a level of competence, recognition for excellence
Self Actualization – Becoming all that one is capable of becoming, maximizing potential

Maslow says happiness is generally acquired by satisfying the above needs in the top-down order.

- Abraham Maslow

Cricket - the silly game

The proof that the game is silly is that the unthinking masses consider it significant. If that was not enough, the Indian government gets into the act as well, dictating who can play, who can broadcast the matches, and other trivial pursuits. You know that something is wrong with the whole exercise when the government of India has to get involved in a game. My antipathy towards government involvement in anything other than in law and order, money supply, and defense is deep and abiding.

-Atanu

Stuff and the State

We need to distinguish between employment and production, between money and income, between aggregate production and distribution. India’s economic policies have stressed employment and not production. That, in no small measure, is why India is poor. Until India’s economic policies shift away from employment and towards production, India’s fortunes are unlikely to change.

-Atanu

Stuff

If an economy produces a heck of a lot, and yet a significant percentage of the population is poor, then we know that there is a problem of distribution. In that case, we can improve the situation by a better distribution through transfer of stuff to those who are poor. But if the aggregate production of stuff divided by the total population is a small number, the economy will be a poor one irrespective of the distribution. Merely taking from Peter to give to Paul makes no difference to the aggregate amount of stuff available.

-Atanu

Arithmetic

A bit of arithmetic is often all that is required to demonstrate the idiocy that pervades public discourse around the world.

-Atanu

Civilized Human Being

To my mind, the ability to make distinctions is one of the more important characteristics of a fully civilized human being.

-Atanu

Virtue of Education

Education inoculates the civilized person from the virus of fanaticism and despair. Education makes people productive and so stuff gets produced. When stuff gets produced, poverty is reduced. With material wealth, the necessary condition for development is satisfied. Educated people have a stake in the future and therefore have an interest in informing themselves about policies that are beneficial. They then make an informed choice among various leaders based on their policy prescriptions. This results in a peaceful and prosperous society.

-Atanu

Tribalism

“Rootless individual identity seeks to tie itself to some group with a large following, whether Scientology, Islam, cricket, movie star—the details are not important. It is primitive tribalism, a drive to be part of something that is much larger than oneself, a drive to belong to a group and thus inherit some of the power of that group.”

-Atanu

Stay in the middle

"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over."

-Aneurin Bevan

When something is wrong

"Some national parks have long waiting lists for camping reservations. When you have to wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong."

-George Carlin

Remember

"When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."

-Mark Twain

Men, again

"The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever."

-Anatole France

I am only one.

“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.”

-Helen Keller

Nobody But Yourself

As a consequence of these inventions, and practice at using them, what has emerged is shared patterns of behaviour and activities, what we call culture. And because culture is social 'software', it can evolve much more quickly than the hard-wired 'hardware' parts of what makes us us – our bodies, our emotions and our instincts.

So we now live in a world where we are trying to employ 21st century social software while we remain trapped in bodies that are largely prehistoric – they evolve very slowly, and haven't changed much in tens of thousands of years. One obvious consequence of this is the physical and emotional illness that comes from our visceral reaction to stress: What used to be an evolutionary advantage (the ability to move very fast and strike very hard when you're about to be eaten by something bigger than you) has become an evolutionary handicap, a worse-than-useless vestige of our prehistoric past.

Unless we are extraordinarily diligent and extremely self-aware and self-competent, we give up everything that make us us – we give up being nobody-but-ourselves and we become everybody else.

-Dave

Nirvana

A dialogue in a medium that allows for effective communication between articulate people who have substantial shared context and understanding of each other's worldview is about as close to intellectual and emotional nirvana as it gets.

-Dave

Men

"When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken."

-Benjamin Disraeli

Social History

"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good."

-Thomas Sowell

To buy

"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."

-P.J.O'Rourke

Religion

The OED defines religion as "human recognition of superhuman controlling power and especially of a personal god entitled to worship and obedience".

-Dave

Vision and Action

If we have a bold, coherent, inspiring and realistic vision of the future, it will serve as the guide to purposeful action.

-Atanu

Culture

This Culture and these subcultures can now hardly be escaped – there is no place to go to get away from Civilization Culture, its artifacts, its messages – to be, as Cummings says, "nobody-but-yourself".

-Dave

Teach to Feel?

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being
can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know,
you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day,
to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight;
and never stop fighting.

-EE Cummings.

Right

"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it."

- G.K. Chesterton