12/15/08

Mistakes, obviously, show us what needs improving. Without mistakes, how would we know what we had to work on? -Peter McWilliams

12/11/08

Anger helps straighten out a problem as much as a fan helps straighten out a pile of papers. -Susan Marcotte

12/09/08

The journey to learning cannot be planned in advance and controlled like a journey to the moon. -Frank Smith

12/08/08

In the end, we decide if we're remembered for what happened to us or for what we did with it. -Randy K. Milholland

12/04/08

He who enjoys doing and enjoys what he has done is happy. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

12/03/08

Genuine beginnings begin within us, even when they are brought to our attention by external opportunities. -William Bridges

12/02/08

If at first an idea does not sound absurd, there's no hope for it. -Albert Einstein

12/01/08

Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good; it's the thing you do that makes you good. -Malcolm Gladwell

11/21/08

The spirit of humility is sweeter than honey, and those who nourish themselves with this honey produce sweet fruit. -St. Anthony of Padua

11/20/08

The benefits of education and of useful knowledge, generally diffused through a community, are essential to the preservation of a free government -Sam Houston

11/19/08

The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity. -Francis Maitland Balfour

11/18/08

You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics. -Charles Bukowski

11/17/08

Slow down and enjoy life. It's not only the scenery you miss by going too fast - you also miss the sense of where you are going and why. -Eddie Cantor

11/14/08

The kind of humor I like is the thing that makes me laugh for five seconds and think for ten minutes. -William Davis

11/13/08

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves. -Thomas Merton

11/12/08

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares. -Henri Nouwen

11/11/08

Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are. -Augustine of Hippo

11/07/08

Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. -Steve Jobs

11/06/08

All I ask is the chance to prove that money can't make me happy. -Spike Milligan

11/05/08

Glory is not a conceit. It is not a decoration for valor. Glory belongs to the act of being constant to something greater than yourself, to a cause, to your principles, to the people on whom you rely and who rely on you in rerun. -John McCain

11/04/08

If we fall, we don't need self-recrimination or blame or anger--we need a reawakening of our intention and a willingness to recommit, to be whole-hearted once again. -Sharon Salzberg

11/03/08

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted. Martin Luther King, Jr.

10/31/08

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. -H.P. Lovecraft

10/30/08

We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand. -Randy Pausch

10/29/08

Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike. -J.K. Rowling

10/28/08

Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well-ordered mind than a man's ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company. -Lucius Annaeus Seneca

10/27/08

Conscience is a dog that does not stop us from passing but that we cannot prevent from barking. -Nicolas de Chamfort

10/24/08

If we are to achieve a richer culture... we must weave one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place. -Margaret Mead

10/23/08

It’s never perfect when I write it down the first time, or the second time, or the fifth time. But it always gets better as I go over it and over it. -Jane Yolen

10/22/08

Language is an anonymous, collective and unconscious art; the result of the creativity of thousands of generations. -Edward Sapir

10/21/08

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else. -Emily Dickinson

10/20/08

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it. -Milton Friedman

10/16/08

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it. -Ellen Goodman

10/10/08

That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit. -Amos Bronson Alcott

10/09/08

When I only begin to read, I forget I'm on this world. It lifts me on wings with high thoughts. -Anzia Yezierska

10/08/08

Men build too many walls and not enough bridges. -Isaac Newton

10/07/08

Greatness lies not in being strong, but in the right use of strength. -Henry Ward Beecher

10/06/08

There are two ways of exerting one's strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up. -Booker T. Washington

10/02/08

The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny. -Albert Ellis

09/25/08

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. -Marie Curie

09/24/08

Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy. -Phyllis McGinley

09/23/08

Children are like wet cement. Whatever falls on them makes an impression. -Haim Ginott

09/22/08

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. -Albert Einstein

09/19/08

By learning you will teach; by teaching you will learn. -Latin Proverb

09/18/08

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair--the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page. -Stephen King

09/16/08

Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece. -Ralph Charell

09/15/08

There's always something to write about. If there's not then you need to live life more aggressively. -Min Kim

09/12/08

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes all the pressure off the second. -Robert Frost

09/11/08

All ideas are already in the brain, just as all statues are in the marble. -Carlo Dossi

09/09/08

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. -Albert Camus

09/08/08

The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it. -General H. Norman Schwarzkopf

09/03/08

Language does not leave fossils, at least not until it has been written. -Richard Brautigan

09/02/08

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze. -Thomas Carlyle

08/28/08

A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain. -Samuel Johnson

08/27/08

All students can learn and succeed, but not all on the same day in the same way. -William G. Spady

08/25/08

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that it all happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer. -Ernest Hemingway

08/22/08

You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind. -Timothy Leary

08/21/08

The battles that count aren't the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself—the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us—that's where it's at. -Jesse Owens

08/20/08

Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance too, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity. -Gustave Flaubert

08/19/08

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile. -Robert Cormier

08/18/08

Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe. -Franz Kafka

08/13/08

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind. -Vita Sackville-West

08/12/08

Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by "learning" we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information. -Martin Heidegger

08/11/08

Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human. Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we reperceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life. -Peter M. Senge

07/24/08

If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time a tremendous whack. -Winston Churchill

07/23/08

A good listener helps us overhear ourselves. -Yahia Lababidi

07/22/08

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. -Bertrand Russell

07/21/08

What are the facts? Again and again and again - what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history" - what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts! -Robert A. Heinlein

07/16/08

You can be totally rational with a machine. But, if you work with people, sometimes logic has to take a back seat to understanding. -Akio Morita

07/15/08

Do not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago. -Horace Mann

07/14/08

Life is easier than you'd think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable. -Kathleen Norris

07/10/08

I will not allow yesterday's success to lull me into today's complacency, for this is the great foundation of failure. -Og Mandino

07/08/08

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. -Robert F. Kennedy

07/07/08

Whatever your grade or postion, if you know how and when to speak, and when to to remain silent, your chances of real success are proportionately increased. -Ralph C. Smedley

07/03/08

The world is a story we tell ourselves about the world. -Vikram Chandra

07/02/08

If you're a teacher and you're trying to teach to the career needs of every individual student or you're trying to teach to the presumed career needs of a conglomeration of young people, then you're not going to do well. If you're a teacher and you make the health of the community the standard of your work, then you're going to teach better. If you teach with the good health of your community in mind, you're going to try to make every one of your students the best possible member of the community. You're going to fail a lot, but you're going to change the way you teach and maybe you'll succeed some, too. If you suppose to yourself, "Well, when these kids graduate, that's probably the last I'm going to see of them," you're going to teach differently than you would teach if you assume that you're going to spend the rest of your life with these people. These kids are going to grow up. They're going to take their place in the community you live in. They're going to be your fellow citizens, your fellow members. -Wendell Berry

07/01/08

Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines. -Bill Bryson

06/30/08

Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen. -Louis L'Amour

06/13/08

Some people are making such thorough preparations for rainy days that they aren't enjoying today's sunshine. -William Feather

06/12/08

It is better to sleep on things beforehand than lie awake about them afterwards. -Baltasar Gracian

06/11/08

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. -C.S. Lewis

06/10/08

There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor. -George Santayana

06/09/08

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers. -M. Scott Peck

06/06/08

Time changes all things: there is no reason why language should escape this universal law. -Ferdinand de Saussure

06/05/08

Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live. -Anais Nin

06/04/08

To forgive offenses is an act of penance most pleasing to God. -Servant of God John the Gardener

06/03/08

Mistakes, obviously, show us what needs improving. Without mistakes, how would we know what we had to work on? -Peter McWilliams

05/30/08

No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be. -Isaac Asimov

05/29/08

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. Lives, like money are spent. What are you buying with yours? Life begets life. Energy becomes energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich. -Oscar Wilde

05/28/08

Do not keep the alabaster box of your friendship sealed up until your friends are dead. Fill their lives with sweetness. Speak approving, cheering words while their ears can hear them, and while their hearts can be thrilled and made happier. The kind of things you mean to say when they are gone, say before they go. -George W. Childs

05/27/08

Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet. -Roger Miller

05/26/08

In war, there are no unwounded soldiers. -Jose Narosky

05/23/08

If it's wild to your own heart, protect it. Preserve it. Love it. And fight for it, and dedicate yourself to it, whether it's a mountain range, your wife, your husband, or even (heaven forbid) your job. It doesn't matter if it's wild to anyone else: if it's what makes your heart sing, if it's what makes your days soar like a hawk in the summertime, then focus on it. Because for sure, it's wild, and if it's wild, it'll mean you're still free. No matter where you are. -Rick Bass

05/22/08

Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out. -Oliver Wendell Holmes

05/20/08

Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It's one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period. -Nicholas Sparks

05/15/08

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does. -William James

05/14/08

If you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress. -Barack Obama

05/13/08

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

05/09/08

Nothing is more humbling than to look with a strong magnifying glass at an insect so tiny that the naked eye sees only the barest speck and to discover that nevertheless it is sculpted and articulated and striped with the same care and imagination as a zebra. Apparently it does not occur to nature whether or not a creature is within our range of vision, and the suspicion arises that even the zebra was not designed for our benefit. -Rudolf Arnheim

05/08/08

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real? -Ray Bradury

05/07/08

I come from a people who gave the Ten Commandments to the world. Time has come to strengthen them by three additional ones, which we ought to adopt and commit ourselves to: thou shall not be a perpetrator; thou shall not be a victim; and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander. -Yehuda Bauer

05/06/08

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. -Marcel Proust

05/05/08

A real individual has a spark of danger in him, a menace to society. Quench this spark and you quench the individuality, you obtain a social unit, not an integral man. All modern progress has tended, and still tends, to the production of quenched social units: dangerless beings, ideal creatures! -D.H Lawrence

05/02/08

Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence. -Samuel Beckett

05/01/08

If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be unhappy the rest of your life. -Abraham Maslow

04/30/08

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. -Dylan Thomas

04/29/08

We are all being sauteed in the sautee dish of life. -Robert Hass

04/28/08

Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me. - Sigmund Freud

04/25/08

Our language, or any civilised language, is like the phoenix: it springs anew from its own ashes. -T.S. Eliot

04/24/08

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day. -Robert Hass

04/23/08

Words have no language which can utter the secrets of love; and beyond the limits of expression is the expounding of desire. -Hafiz

04/22/08

People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated. -Lucille Clifton

04/21/08

Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated—thrown aside—a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions. -William Carlos Williams

04/18/08

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. -Percy Bysshe Shelley

04/17/08

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art. -Thomas Hardy

04/14/08

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment. -Carl Sandburg

04/11/08

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. -Aristotle

04/10/08

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own. -Salvatore Quasimodo

04/09/08

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. -Carl Sandburg

04/08/08

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language. -Lucille Clifton

04/07/08

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. -Rita Dove

4/04/08

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words. -Paul Engle

04/03/08

The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly. -Ogden Nash

04/02/08

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices, but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thought in clear form. -Albert Einstein

04/01/08

Whether or not you write well, write bravely. -Bill Stout

03/31/08

The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not and never persist in trying to set people right. -Hannah Whitall Smith

03/28/08

Persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds. -Laura Ingalls Wilder

03/27/08

When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language. -James Earl Jones

03/26/08

We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. -Joan Didion

03/25/08

The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible. -Arthur C. Clarke

03/24/08

If you send up a weather vane or put your thumb up in the air every time you want to do something different, to find out what people are going to think about it, you're going to limit yourself. That's a very strange way to live. -Jessye Norman

03/20/08

Writing is very improvisational. It's like trying to fix a broken sewing machine with safety pins and rubber bands. A lot of tinkering. -Margaret Atwood

03/19/08

The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience. -Emily Dickinson

03/18/08

For money you can have everything it is said. No that is not true. You can buy food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; soft beds, but not sleep; knowledge but not intelligence; glitter, but not comfort; fun, but not pleasure; acquaintances, but not friendship; servants, but not faithfulness; grey hair, but not honor; quiet days, but not peace. The shell of all things you can get for money. But not the kernel. That cannot be had for money. -Arne Garborg

03/17/08

Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. -Carrie Fisher

03/14/08

Holding on to anger, resentment and hurt only gives you tense muscles, a headache and a sore jaw from clenching your teeth. Forgiveness gives you back the laughter and the lightness in your life. -Joan Lunden

03/13/08

No life is bland to the one who's living it. The coolest student can be the most troubled. The funniest in the most pain. No one escapes loneliness. -Patricia Gaffney

03/12/08

Defining myself, as opposed to being defined by others, is one of the most difficult challenges I face. -Carol Moseley-Braun

03/10/08

Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind. -Leonardo da Vinci

03/07/08

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult. -E.B. White

03/06/08

To freely bloom--that is my definition of success. -Gerry Spence

03/05/08

Evil is like a shadow - it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stamp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it. -Shakti Gawain

3/04/08

Cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe?" Expediency asks the question, "Is it politic?" Vanity asks the question, "Is it popular?" But, conscience asks the question, "Is it right?" And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because one's conscience tells one that it is right. -Martin Luther King, Jr.

02/29/08

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it. -Toni Morrison

02/27/08

My poetry, I think, has become the way of my giving out what music is within me. -Countee Cullen

02/26/08

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence. -Alice Walker

02/21/08

Knowledge is the key that unlocks all the doors. You can be green-skinned with yellow polka dots and come from Mars, but if you have knowledge that people need, instead of beating you, they'll beat a path to your door. -Dr. Ben Carson

02/20/08

To get where you want to go you can't only do what you like. -Peter Abrahams

02/19/08

Knowledge is not power, it is only potential power that becomes real through use. -Dorothy Riley

02/14/08

The tragedy in life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. -Benjamin E. Mays

02/12/08

A man can make what he wants of himself if he truly believes that he must be ready for hard work and many heartbreaks. -Thurgood Marshall

02/11/08

It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it. -Lena Horne

02/08/07

Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over. -Octavia Butler

02/06/08

It is better to have dreamed a thousand dreams that never were than never to have dreamed at all. -Alexander Pushkin

02/05/08

I never wanted to be famous. I only wanted to be great. -Ray Charles

02/04/08

Luck is where opportunity meets preparation. -Denzel Washington

02/01/08

I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go. -Langston Hughes

01/31/08

Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten. -Neil Gaiman

01/30/08

We think very little of time present; we anticipate the future, as being too slow, and with a view to hasten it onward, we recall the past to stay it as too swiftly gone. We are so thoughtless, that we thus wander through the hours which are not here, regardless only of the moment that is actually our own. -Blaise Pascal

01/29/08

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 in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own -- for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone. -Rod Serling

01/28/08

There are fine things which you mean to do some day, under what you think will be more favorable circumstances. But the only time that is surely yours is the present, hence this is the time to speak the word of appreciation and sympathy, to do the generous deed, to forgive the fault of a thoughtless friend, to sacrifice self a little more for others. Today is the day in which to express your noblest qualities of mind and heart, to do at least one worthy thing which you have long postponed, and to use your God-given abilities for the enrichment of someone less fortunate. Today you can make your life - significant and worthwhile. The present is yours to do with as you will. -Grenville Kleiser

01/25/08

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. -Philip K. Dick

01/24/08

A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motorshow — full of potential but temporarily inactive. -Anthony Burgess

01/23/08

Slang is the poetry of everyday life. -S.I. Hayakawa

01/22/08

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it. -Neil Gaiman

01/18/08

If I were given the opportunity to present a gift to the next generation, it would be the ability for each individual to learn to laugh at himself. -Charles M. Schulz

01/17/08

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it. -James Baldwin

01/16/08

Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading toward success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good. -Vaclav Havel

01/15/08

God has given each person a capacity to reach some end. True, some are endowed with more talent than others, but God has left none of us talentless. -Martin Luther King, Jr.

01/14/08

Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion. I've seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges. I've felt them doing it. Words conjure. I try not to be careless about what I utter, write, sing. I'm careful about what I give voice to. -Toni Cade Bambara

01/10/08

The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before. -Neil Gaiman

01/09/08

It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live. -J.K. Rowling

01/08/08

That some good can be derived from every event is a better proposition than that everything happens for the best, which it assuredly does not. -James Kern Feibleman

01/07/08

I once listed all the good things I did over the past year, and then turned them into resolution form and backdated them. That was a good feeling. -Robert Fulghum