Quotes

To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of the children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!
– RALPH WALSO EMERSON (1803 – 1882)

The things you own end up owning you.
– TYLER DURDEN, character in “Fight Club” (1999)

Common sense is not that common.
– VOLTAIRE (1694 – 1778)

The man of thought who will not act is ineffective; the man of action who will not think is dangerous.
– RICHARD NIXON (1913 – 1994)

In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time, no one was left to speak up.
– MARTIN NEIMOELLER (1892 – 1984)

Anyone can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not easy.
– ARISTOTLE (384 – 323 BC)

You have to use a mental anethesia. Otherwise you bleed for everybody who’s bleeding — the refugees, the orphans, the wounded children, the other doctors and nurses. If you get caught up in their misery too deeply, you get into a hole you can’t climb out of.
– BENJAMIN HAWKEYE PIERCE, character in M*A*S*H episode “The Interview” (1978)

Aim at nothing and you’ll hit it every time.
– ZIG ZIGLER

In police culture, there’s an unwritten code: Above all else, you protect your own. It comes from working on the streets, an us-against-them world where cops count on fellow cops for their very lives, where the thin blue line is the only thing standing in the way of the lying wife-beaters, conniving pimps, and crazed meth freaks. It’s a world where the probing ousiders — the pompus politicians, the nosy reporters, the cop-hating citizenry — couldn’t survive for a second.
– WILLAMETTE WEEK, author unknown

Every man I meet is superior to me in some way.
– RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803 – 1882)

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid dens of crime that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheecks who do not need to raise their voices.
– C.S. LEWIS (1898 – 1963)