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