Quotations and Dreams to Live By

"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men." Rod Serling.

"I learned much about my academic colleagues. They fell into three categories. The first, and by far the most numerous, wanted only to be left alone to get on with their own work. But they were like hermit crabs: if you were foolish enough to tread on them, they nipped painfully. The second were intelligent and public-spirited, understood the problems and were positively helpful in solving them. Finally there was a tiny but inescapable minority of menacing nuisances who expressed their egos by causing trouble. The proble was how to avoid antagonizing the first group, to enlist the support of the second and to neutralize the third." Sir Michael Howard, Regis Professor of Modern History, Oxford.

"Discomfort endured in congenial company can be quite enjoyable." Sir Michael Howard, the motto of the Western Desert Society.

"“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” T.S. Eliot in “Choruses from the Rock.”

"Too old am I to be content with play; Too young to be untroubled by desire." Goethe's Faust.

"If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change." Tancredi in Giuseppe di Lampedusa's "The Leopard."

"I like my coffee Arabian style: Black as Night, Hot as Hades, Sweet as Love." George MacDonald Frazier's Flashman in "Flashman and the Tiger."

"As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know." The Zen of Donald Rumsfeld.

"Once in a while, I'm standing here, doing something. And I think, 'What in the world am I doing here?' It's a big surprise." The Zen of Donald Rumsfeld.

"Things will not be necessarily continuous. The fact that they are something other than perfectly continuous ought not to be characterized as a pause. There will be some things that people will see. There will be some things that people won't see. And life goes on. " The Zen of Donald Rumsfeld.

"Therefore the sage holds in his embrace the one thing (of humility), and manifests it to all the world.  He is free from self-display, and therefore he shines; from self-assertion, and therefore he is distinguished; from self-boasting, and therefore his merit is acknowledged; from self-complacency, and therefore he acquires superiority.  It is because he is thus free from striving that therefore no one in the world is able to strive with him." Lao Tzu.

"Good judgement is learned by experience. Experience is learned by bad judgement." Anonymous.

"Fools say they learn by experience. I prefer to profit by other people's experience." Otto von Bismark.

"Scorn not the vision; scorn not the idea. ... Power grows out of the barrel of a gun. A gun is certainly powerful, but who controls the man with a gun? A man with an idea." Keith Joseph, Conservative Member of the British Parliament, and Mentor to Margaret Thatcher.

"WE'RE going through!" The Commander's voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye. "We can't make it, sir. It's spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me." "I'm not asking you, Lieutenant Berg," said the Commander. "Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8500! We're going through!" The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. The Commander stared at the ice forming on the pilot window. He walked over and twisted a row of complicated dials. "Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!" he shouted. "Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!" repeated Lieutenant Berg. "Full strength in No. 3 turret!" shouted the Commander. "Full strength in No. 3 turret!" The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned. "The Old Man'll get us through," they said to one another. "The Old Man ain't afraid of hell!" . . . from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, James Thurber.

"Academic distinction by itself did not bestow the gift of a cultivated sensibility. Dons were not intellectuals. Most dons were professional men and women enjoying the rituals of their club, uninterested in the arts or indeed in general ideas. How many visitors dining at high table and expected to be dazzled by the conversation were first bewildered and then bored by the unintelligent university gossip." The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics, and Geniuses, Noel Annan, 2000.

"We find ourselves in the last of the three generations history chooses to repeat every now and then. The first generation needs a god, and so they invent one. The second erects temples to that god and tries to imitate him. And the third uses the marble from those temples to build brothels in which to worship their own greed, lust and dishonesty. And that is why gods and heroes are always, inevitably, succeeded by mediocrities, cowards and imbeciles." The Fencing Master, Arturo Perez-Reverte, 1988.

"Scientia non habet inimicum nisi ignorantem." Knowledge (science) has no enemy but the ignorant.

"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me." Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Issac McPherson, "No Patents on Ideas," 13 August 1813. Sometimes paraphrased as "Knowledge is like a candle. Even as it lights a new candle, the strength of the original flame is not diminished."

"I do not know what I may appear to the world. But to myself I seem to have been like a boy playing on the seashore, and enjoying myself in now and then finding a smoother peeble, or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." Sir Isaac Newton

"The political mind is a strange mixture of vanity and timidity, of an obsequious attitude at one time and a delusion of grandeur at another time, of the most selfish preferment combined with the sacrificing patriotism. The political mind is the product of men in public life who have been twice spoiled. They have been spoiled with praise and they have been spoiled with abuse. With them nothing is natural, everything is artificial." Calvin Coolidge

Why Quit? Manifesto: "Consider the quit at every juncture. You may be inspired to jump even if the ship isn't actually sinking. Always get out while you still can, but consider getting out the minute it crosses your mind.
Quit to combat stasis.
Quit to avoid exhaustion.
Quit as a method of crisis intervention.
Quit to prove a point.
Quit to see what you are made of.
Quit because you are driven to it.
Quit because you are inspired.
Quite because you can."
From The Quit: A Consideration of the Art of Quitting, Evan Harris, Simon and Shuster (no longer in print).

"Most marks come from the upper strata of society, which, in America, means that they have made, married, or inherited money. Because of this, they acquire status which in time they come to attribute to some inherent superiority, especially as regards matters of sound judgement in finance and investment. Friends and associates, themselves social climbers and sycophants, help to maintain this illusion of superiority. Eventually, the mark comes to regard himself as a person of vision and even a genius. Thus a Babbitt who has cleared half a million in a real-estate development easily forgets the part which luck and chicanery have played in his financial rise; he accepts his mantle of respectability without question; he naively attributes his success to sound business judgement. And any confidence man will testify that a real-estate man is the fattest and juiciest of suckers." David Maurer in The Big Con, originally published in 1940.

"What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact, that there are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean of one's being alone." Henry David Thoreau, Walden Pond, quoted in The Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett.

"Quiet resolution. The hardihood to take risks. The will to take full responsibility for decision. The readiness to share its rewards with subordinates. An equal readiness to take the blame when things go adversely. The nerve to survive the storm and disappointment and to face towards each day with the scoresheet wiped clean, neither dwelling on one's successes nor accepting discouragement from one's failures. In these things lie the great part of the essence of leadership, for they are the constituents of that kind of moral courage that has enabled one man to draw others to him in any age." S. L. A. Marshall, noted military historian.

"The essence of leadership: resolve, civility, and high standards."

"Every commander should keep constantly before him the great truth, that to be well obeyed, he must be perfectly esteemed."--John Paul Jones

"Men mean more than guns in the rating of a ship."--John Paul Jones

"In the eighteenth-century European balance of power, territory, population, and agriculture provided the basis for infantry, and France was a principal beneficiary. In the nineteenth century, industrial capacity provided the resources that enabled Britain, and later Germany, to gain dominance. By the mid-twentieth century, science and particularly nuclear physics contributed crucial power resources to the United States and the Soviet Union. In the next century, information technology, broadly defined, is likely to be the most important power resource."-- R. O. Keohane and J. S. Nye, Jr., "Power and Interdependence in the Information Age," in Foreign Affairs, September/October 1998.

"I will find a way. Or I will make one."--Seneca

"Although there may be nothing new under the sun, what is old is new to us and so rich and astonishing that we never tire of it. If we do tire of it, if we lose our curiosity, we have lost something of infinite value, because to a high degree it is curiosity that gives meaning and savour to life." -- Robertson Davies

"Go forth into the world in peace; be of good courage; hold fast that which is good; render no man evil for evil; strengthen the fainthearted; support the weak; help the afflicted; honor all men."--The Royal Navy Prayer

"Our legions are brim fill, our cause is ripe.
The enemy increaseth every day;
We at the height, are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shadows and miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures."--Brutus in Shakespear's Julius Caesar

"Responsibility is not yours to toss away. It is a privilege, not a right."--Vice Admiral Richard Bolitho in Beyond the Reef by Alexander Kent

"I wish to have no connection with ships that do not sail fast, for I intend to go in harm's way."--John Paul Jones

"He rises fastest who knows not whither he is going."--Oliver Cromwell

"It is confessed by all that from his youth he was of a vehement and impetuous nature, of a quick apprehension, and of a strong and aspiring bent for action and for great affairs."--Life of Themistocles by Plutarch

Click here for Randy's Dreamhouse (200 KBytes). Absolutely essential features include the helipad, the submarine in the moat, the cool car, and the robot chef. My apologies to Matt Groening and "Life in Hell."