Something To Think About Archive

Writer Nora Roberts says: “Know what you want, work to get it, then value it once you have it.”

Martin Luther King believed that “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, on a recent tour of South American countries with a Democratic delegation, claimed that “We have much to learn from our counterparts in these countries…” Really? While I realize that with the politically motivated legal goings on here we are beginning to resemble the so-called “Banana Republics” to our south, you have to wonder why, if they have so much to teach us, are their citizens flooding our southern border?

To quote a recent paraphrasing by publisher Roger Kimball of Alexis de Tocqueville’s opinion of what de Tocqueville called “democratic despotism.” He wrote: Modern despotisms tended to infantilize citizens, not terrorize them outright. They turned people into sheep with the government as the benign-seeming but implacable shepherd.”

C.S. Lewis wrote: “Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did… When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”

Coach John Wooden believed that “The only thing harder to handle than winning too much is losing too much.”

Movie mogul Sam Goldwyn claimed that “I don’t want any “yes-men” around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth, even if it costs them their jobs.”

Rare kudos for President Biden’s recent summit with our Asian allies South Korea and Japan. Perhaps he’s finally recognizing that China is not a “competitor” as he claims but is, in fact, a cold war adversary. It’s too bad that he did not take the occasion to restart the negotiations on the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement scuttled by Donald Trump.

Author of human development books Joseph Chilton Pierce noted that “To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”

From January 1 to June 30 it cost Donald Trump’s campaign $17 million to raise $53.8 million while it spent $57 million during the same time period, with almost half of that going to legal expenses through his PAC to defend Mr. Trump against the indictments he is facing in four states. And let’s not forget the three special counsels at the Justice Department currently investigating the sitting president, Joe Biden, and his son Hunter whose sweetheart deal on income tax issues and a federal gun law violation defies belief. Surely we can do better.

Baseball Manager Tommy Lasorda claimed that “… the races are won and the fights are won by those who want to win most of all.”

Publisher Malcom Forbes believed that “Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.”

According to Bob Hope, “You never get tired unless you stop and take time for it.”

Desert Storm’s “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkorpf said: “The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.”

Benjamin Franklin advised us to “Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.”

Old politicians, unlike soldiers, seem to never fade away. Unfortunately for us, the electorate. You have Dianne Feinstein refusing to step aside even with her well-chronicled health issues including encephalitis, or swelling of the brain; Mitch McConnell recently blanked out during a press conference and was led away from the podium; and most dangerous of all, is the Leader of the Free World Joe Biden who, during a televised live meeting with Israel’s President, mentally drifted away mumbling, seemingly to himself, while reading from cue cards. America is increasingly being ruled by a gerontocracy, not that the younger generation of leaders inspires much confidence with their infighting and inability to work together, but at least they can utter a cogent sentence.

According to Hubert Humprhey, “The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.”

Writer Ray Bradbury once observed that “I’ve learned that by doing things, things get done.”

Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan defined the concept of “Fedspeak.”  as: “… a language of purposeful obfuscation to avoid certain questions coming up, which you know you can’t answer.”

“When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper…is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity,” Alexander Hamilton warned, “he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”