quotes

"Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible"

    --- frank zappa

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

    --- Margaret Mead

"The will to be stupid is a very powerful force, but there are always alternatives."

    --- Lois McMaster Bujold

"It is necessary; therefore, it is possible."

Borghese

"The future is purchased by the present."

Samuel Johnson

There are so many good quotes out there I use them all the time in meetings and presentations. One good snippet can create a mood or enhance an idea.

"Learning is not compulsory....neither is survival."
                                                             Deming

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."
                                                                  T Roosevelt

"Regardless of your lot in life, you can build something beautiful on it."
                                                                                           Ziglar

"Decision is the spark that ignites action, until a decision is made nothing happens."
                                                                                                 Petersen

i so wanted to post a quote from Pulp Fiction but I just can't do it.  But it would be so, so funny and cool.

chris

"Freedom means putting up with stuff that pisses you off."  --Frank Zappa

Great music is written by people who are either running toward or away from God--BONO

Loved this quote I found from a link posted by a permie on here (can't recall which thread or who posted the link--sorry!):

"If you're a simple person today, and want to live simply, that is awfully seditious. And to advise people to live simply is more seditious still."
--Bill Mollison

From http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC28/Mollison.htm, 1991.

Better to die while living, then be dead while alive. Me

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Believe it or not, me - in a Sunwise lecture a few decades ago. I think someone else said something similar though.

You can't impress the ignorant. Me too, said after I worked very hard writing an incredible piece of software, the the client chose a piece of junk instead.

Keep your words short and sweet, they go down better when you have to eat them - Jim McGuiggan, a teacher of mine

You can't make anything "fool proof". Fools can be so ingenious at times.

Good ones, Fred and John!

Many folks know this one by Joseph Campbell:

Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.



But did you know he also said:

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

I don't have to have faith, I have experience.

I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave.

Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?

"Sooner or later you're gonna hafta face up to them... the fact is, you know too much already... you're no ignoramus... you know what they're doing all over the world is terribly, terribly wrong!"—R. Crumb.

For those of you too young to know R. Crumb's works, he was (primarily) a satirical cartoonist. He founded Zap Comix, created "Fritz the Cat", "Keep on Truckin" and illustrated dozens of musical album covers (including Big Brothers & the Holding Company's "Cheap Thrills").

2 good ones by Thomas Edison that might be applied to Paul's project.

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

Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Another great american philosopher:

You have to be odd to be #1

- Dr. Seuss

.... or to have shared one really great quote on social media ....  

I am actually using this next one as my signature.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein

-CK

I like that one.

-CK

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise, you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen who play with their boats at sea... "cruising" it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

"I've always wanted to sail to the south seas, but I can't afford it." What these men can't afford is not to go. They are enmeshed in the cancerous discipline of "security." And in the worship of security we fling our lives beneath the wheels of routine - and before we know it our lives are gone.

What does a man need - really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in - and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That's all - in the material sense, and we know it. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention for the sheer idiocy of the charade.

The years thunder by, The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.

Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?
Sterling Hayden, Wanderer

Time flies like arrow
Fruit flies like a banana 🍌
     -Groucho Marx-

"There is a simple solution to every complex problem: and it is almost always wrong. "


Samuel Clemens

One I spotted in Germany (Ditzum):



Which I would translate as: "Never trust a place where no weed grows."

Lemony Snicket named the Baudelaire Children after Charles Baudelaire, a French poet that said

Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art

Climate is what we expect, Weather is what we get ~ Mark Twain

Hedy Lamar

"I would challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see you are unarmed." Shakespeare

"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing." Oscar Wilde

"Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough" Ernest Hemmingway

"We drink the poison our minds pour for us and wonder why we feel so sick." Atticus

Meliorism (noun)- the belief that human effort can improve the world

"In the end we'll all become stories." Margaret Atwood

"Just for the record, darling, not all positive change feels positive in the beginning." S.C. Lourie

"We're all just a bunch of addicts, struggling with our drug of choice." JmStorm

"How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard." Winnie the Pooh

"Dying is the easy part, living is the trick." Atticus

"You'll always have morons like that, swallowing belief patterns whole so they don't have to think for themselves." Richard K Morgan, Altered Carbon

"Don't take criticism from people you wouldn't ever go to for advice."

"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it." Thoreau

"When you tear out a man's tongue you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say." Tyrion Lannister (Game of thrones but I just love this quote)

"Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy." Thomas Merton

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

"I want to help you, but you have to be a willing participant. Of you're not, then I am no longer helping you up; it is you who is pulling me down." Dr Steve Maraboli

"If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."

"Sometimes the only choices you have are bad ones. But you still have to choose." The Doctor (12th doctor)

"The world owes you nothing. It was here first." Mark Twain

"You need a little bit of insanity to do great things." Henry Rollins

"I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you are not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again" F Scott Fitzgerald

"I think it's very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person." Oscar Wilde

"My life can be described in one sentence: It didn't go as planned, and that's ok." Rachel Wolchin

"Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment, until it becomes a memory." Dr Suess

"It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?" Thoreau

"Sometimes your only available transportation is a leap of faith." Margaret Shepard

Stay away from negative people.  They have a problem for every solution.  - Albert Einstein

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” ― Mark Twain


By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
Benjamin Franklin

"The liberty of man consists solely in this, that he obeys the laws of nature because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been imposed upon him externally by any foreign will whatsoever, human or divine, collective or individual."

Mikhail Bakunin

When I read the quote below in a book on Sociology, I feel more hopeful:

"We've been conditioned to believe in the myth that evolution is about competition: the survival of the fittest. In this view, each creature struggles against all the other for scarce resources. Only the strongest ones survive to pass on their superior genes, while the weak deserve to lose and die out.
But evolution is every bit as much about cooperation as competition. Our very cells are the result of an alliance billions of years ago between mitochondria and their hosts. Individuals and species flourish by evolving ways of supporting mutual survival."

Douglas Rushkoff