I Accept

Is "I accept responsibility" the new "Your call is very important to us"? Probably.

--Seth Godin

Cosmic Joke

Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

--Martha Gellhorn

Cannot Sleep Forever

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.

--Thomas Jefferson

Choose Your Blastocyst

Can't we just use gay blastocysts? Or terrorist blastocysts? Or liberal blastocysts? I mean, we have DNA testing for that these days.

--Hoosier X

Better Solutions ???

Are there better solutions than violence? Of course there are. But they are all vastly more complicated, and furthermore they take time, hard thinking, and patience.

--Steve Dayton

Accountable

A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.

--John Stuart Mill

Belief Divides

We have seen that ceremonies are not religion, that going to a temple is not religion, and that belief is not religion. Belief divides people.

--Jiddu Krishnamurti

Patience

Patience. A minor form of despair disguised as a virtue.

--Ambrose Bierce

Related To All Things

You may call this thought by whatever fancy words you wish--psychology, theology, sociology, or philosophy--but you must think of Mother Earth as a living being. Think of your fellow men and women as holy people who were put here by the Great Spirit. Think of being related to all things.

--Ed McGaa

Wicked

Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed. Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united--and they can only be united against other people.

--Leo Strauss

All Men

It is not too early, it is never too early, for the nation steadfastly to follow its great constitutional traditions, none older or more universally protective against unbridled power than due process of law in the trial and punishment of men, that is, of all men, whether citizens, aliens, alien enemies or enemy belligerents.

--Supreme Court Justice Wiley B. Rutledge (1947)

How Will I Be...?

We often wonder: "How will I be when I die?" The answer to that is that whatever state of mind we are in now, whatever kind of person we are now: that's what we will be like at the moment of death, if we do not change....You can see the demigod realm being acted out every day perhaps in the intrigue and rivalry of Wall Street, or in the seething corridors of Washington and Whitehall. And the hungry ghost realms? They exist wherever people, though immensely rich, are never satisfied, craving to take over this company or that one, or endlessly playing out their greed in court cases. Switch on any television channel and you have entered immediately the world of demigods and hungry ghosts.

--Sogyal Rinpoche

Gentle People

Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.

--Garrison Keillor

Called To Account

A person will be called to account on Judgment Day for every permissible thing he might have enjoyed but did not.

--The Talmud

Make Yourself

You need to claim the events of your life to make yourself yours.

--Anne-Wilson Schaef

The Master

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

--Martin Heidegger