Something To Think About Archive

Mark Twain — ‘Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.’

Holocaust survivor Corrie ten Boom claimed that “Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.”

To paraphrase Norman Mailer: You don’t really know someone until you meet them in court.

According to author Harper Lee, “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

John D. Rockefeller said, “I do not think there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.”

The Trump Administration deserves criticism for inadvertently including the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic on the group chat regarding possible military strike details. Clearly a rookie mistake by national security advisor Mike Waltz that should never have happened, especially the use of a commercial app on personal phones for national-security conversations. But the real question is: If this was such an egregious breach of national security, why, then, did the Atlantic publish the entire meeting verbatim? THAT is the real breach of security. They could have simply reported on the mistake, kept the details private, and not put U.S. assets at risk.

General Douglas MacArthur believed that “The best luck of all is the luck you make for yourself.”

Retired Air Force Lt Colonel David Dale advice is that “No matter your role in life, find your mountain and begin the climb.”

As Lucille Ball once noted, “Remember that there are practically no “overnight” successes.”

According to Andrew Jackson: “One man with courage makes a majority.”

Teddy Roosevelt believed that “The purpose of life is to live it, to take the experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”

The income tax has been called “The fine you pay for being productive.”

According to Coach Dean Smith, the winningest coach in NCAA tournament history: “If you make every game a life and death proposition, you’re going to have problems. For one thing, you’ll be dead a lot.”

World War I pilot and Ace Eddie Rickenbacker believed that “There can be no courage unless you’re scared.”

Thoreau said, “Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.”

Author Ayn Rand, “Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision.”

Journalist Wilma Askinas wrote: “There is no better measure of a person than what he does when he is absolutely free to choose.”

Congressman, later President, William McKinley’s tariffs of 1890 raised tariffs on imported goods to about 48%, one of the highest rates in U.S. history at the time. This made foreign goods more expensive, which was meant to protect American manufacturers but hurt consumers instead. It also hurt American farmers who relied on exporting crops, as foreign countries retaliated with their own tariffs and contributed to the Panic of 1893 by reducing international trade. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff bill in 1930, also an attempt to protect American industries, worsened the Great Depression as U.S. exports dropped by over 60% between 1929 and 1933. The real answer to American prosperity, as President Trump has also stated, is a reduction in barriers to productivity, like regulations, onerous permitting processes and fees and taxes.

Don’t insist on having your own way. Insist on finding the best way.

Thoreau claimed that “The cost of a thing is the amount of life that must exchanged for it.”