Thought for Today

"In life there is nothing more unexpected and surprising than the arrivals and departures of pleasure. If we find it in one place today, it is vain to seek it there tomorrow. You can not lay a trap for it."

~~~~~ Alexander Smith

Thought for Today

"I have struck a city – a real city – and they call it Chicago... I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages."

~~~~ Rudyard Kipling

Thought for Today

"Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a person to listen to his own goodness and act on it."

~~~~~ Pablo Casals

Thought for Today

"Don't watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going."

~~~~ Sam Levenson

Thought for Today

"I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses."

~~~~~ Johannes Kepler

Thought for Today

"The public character of every public servant is a legitimate subject of discussion, and his fitness or unfitness for office may be fairly canvassed by any person."

~~~~ Charles Babbage

Thought for Today

"Pets, like their owners, tend to expand a little over the Christmas period."

~~~~~ Frances Wright

Thought for Today

"Controversy is only dreaded by the advocates of error."

~~~~ Dr. Benjamin Rush

Thought for Today

"The moral case for individual initiative in a free economy holds that people have a God-given right to use their creativity to produce things that improve our lives."

~~~~~ Paul Ryan

Thought for Today

"When we are afraid we ought not to occupy ourselves with endeavoring to prove that there is no danger, but in strengthening ourselves to go on in spite of the danger."

~~~~~ Mark Rutherford

Thought for Today

"Circumstances do not determine a man, they reveal him."

~~~~~ James Lane Allen

Thought for Today

"Everyone who remembers his own education remembers teachers, not methods and techniques. The teacher is the heart of the educational system."

~~~~~ Sidney Hook

Thought for Today

"Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can't get you off."

~~~~~ Bill Veeck

Thought for Today

"You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed."

~~~~~ Saki (H. H. Munro)

Thought for Today

"Anyone who tells a lie has not a pure heart, and cannot make a good soup."

~~~~~ Ludwig van Beethoven

Today is Beethoven's 242nd birthday. Alles Gute zum Geburtstag (Happy birthday), Ludwig!

Thought for Today

"The wisest mind has something yet to learn."

~~~~~ George Santayana

Thought for Today

"I mean, the general rule is if you're not prepared to make a mistake, you're not going to make much progress."

~~~~~ Maurice Wilkins

Thought for Today

"Moral cowardice that keeps us from speaking our minds is as dangerous to this country as irresponsible talk."

~~~~~ Margaret Chase Smith

Thought for Today

"Communism possesses a language which every people can understand - its elements are hunger, envy, and death."

~~~~~ Heinrich Heine

Thought for Today

"Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in."

~~~~~ Gustave Flaubert

Thought for Today

"A few years' experience will convince us that those things which at the time they happened we regarded as our greatest misfortunes have proved our greatest blessings."

~~~~~ George Mason

Thought for Today

"It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellow men."

~~~~~ George MacDonald

Thought for Today

"The chief internal enemies of any state are those public officials who betray the trust imposed upon them by the people."

~~~~~ Dalton Trumbo

Thought for Today

"Watch out when you're getting all you want. Fattening hogs ain't in luck."

~~~~~ Joel Chandler Harris

Thought for Today

"The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young."

~~~~~ Willa Cather

Thought for Today

"Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts."

~~~~~ Paul de Man

Thought for Today

"The need for Government is the need for force; where force is unnecessary, there is no need for Government."

~~~~~ Rose Wilder Lane

Thought for Today

"Teach a parrot the terms 'supply and demand' and you've got an economist."

~~~~~ Thomas Carlyle

Thought for Today

"The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat oneself."

~~~~~ Gamaliel Bailey

Thought for Today

"If you can't ignore an insult, top it; if you can't top it, laugh it off; and if you can't laugh it off, it's probably deserved."

~~~~~ Russell Lynes

Thought for Today

"There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up."

~~~~~ Rex Stout

Thought for Today

"In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years."

~~~~~ Jacques Barzun

Thought for Today

"If we become increasingly humble about how little we know, we may be more eager to search."

~~~~~ John Templeton

Thought for Today

"The first requisite of a sound monetary system is that it put the least possible power over the quantity or quality of money in the hands of the politicians."

~~~~~ Henry Hazlitt

Thought for Today

"Miracles sometimes occur, but one has to work terribly hard for them."

~~~~~ Chaim Weizmann

Thought for Today

"Knowledge is proud that it knows so much; wisdom is humble that it knows no more."

~~~~~ William Cowper

Thought for Today

"I do beseech you to direct your efforts more to preparing youth for the path and less to preparing the path for the youth."

~~~~~ Ben Lindsey

Thought for Today

"'Tis known by the name of perseverance in a good cause, and of obstinacy in a bad one."

~~~~ Laurence Stern

Thought for Today

"Nothing is so unproductive as the law. It is expensive whether you win or lose."

~~~~~ Gilbert Parker

Thought for Today

"It is the mind which creates the world around us, and even though we stand side by side in the same meadow, my eyes will never see what is beheld by yours, my heart will never stir to the emotions with which yours is touched."

~~~~~ George Gissing

Thought for Today

"Finish last in your league and they call you idiot. Finish last in medical school and they call you doctor."

~~~~~ Abe Lemons

Thought for Today

"Admitting Error clears the Score,
And proves you Wiser than before."

~~~~~ Arthur Guiterman

Thought for Today

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."

~~~~~ Peter Drucker

Thought for Today

"You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it."

~~~~~ Charles Buxton

Thought for Today

"Decisions! And a general, a commander in chief who has not got the quality of decision, then he is no good."

~~~~~ Bernard Law Montgomery

Thought for Today

"When old people speak it is not because of the sweetness of words in our mouths; it is because we see something which you do not see."

~~~~~ Chinua Achebe

Thought for Today

"Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late."

~~~~~ Felix Frankfurter

Thought for Today

"Don't look at the downside of everything that comes along. It helps life move along so much smoother and nicer."

~~~~~ George Smathers

Thought for Today

"A liar begins with making falsehood appear like truth, and ends with making truth itself appear like falsehood."

~~~~~ William Shenstone

Thought for Today

"Be careful how you spend your time: Spend your time in nothing which you know must be repented of."

~~~~ Richard Baxter

Thought for Today

"Better to fight for something than live for nothing."

~~~~~ George S. Patton

Thought for Today

"Our greatest glory consists not in never failing, but in rising every time we fall."

~~~~~ Oliver Goldsmith

Thought for Today

"Everybody is ambitious. The question is whether he is ambitious to be or ambitious to do."

~~~~~ Jean Monnet

Thought for Today

"Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit."

~~~~~ Martha Gellhorn

Thought for Today

"It is idle to await unanimity."

~~~~~ Robert Dale Owen

Thought for Today

"Governmental aid is a drawback rather than an assistance, as, although it may facilitate in the routine of artistic production, it is an impediment to the development of true artistic genius."

~~~~~ John Philip Sousa

Thought for Today

"One ship drives east and other drives west by the same winds that blow. It's the set of the sails and not the gales that determines the way they go."

~~~~~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

"Journalism"

Although reporters like to pretend that they practice a profession they call "journalism," they have no desire to submit to the discipline of a true profession – not if it would involve licensure, standards of practice, and sanctions for incompetence and malpractice.

Thought for Today

"Call it vanity, call it arrogant presumption, call it what you wish, but I would grope for the nearest open grave if I had no newspaper to work for, no need to search for and sometimes find the winged word that just fits, no keen wonder over what each unfolding day may bring."

~~~~~ Bob Considine

Thought for Today

"Truth gets well if she is run over by a locomotive, while error dies of lockjaw if she scratches her finger."

~~~~~ William C. Bryant

Thought for Today

"Hate is able to provoke disorders, to ruin a social organization, to cast a country into a period of bloody revolutions; but it produces nothing."

~~~~ Georges Sorel

Thought for Today

"It is a sign that your reputation is small and sinking if your own tongue must praise you."

~~~~~ Matthew Hale

Thought for Today

"A man can stand a lot as long as he can stand himself. He can live without hope, without friends, without books, even without music, as long as he can listen to his own thoughts."

~~~~~ Axel Munthe

Thought for Today

"The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea."

~~~~~ John Adams

Thought for Today

"The greater the difficulty the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests."

~~~~~ Epictetus

Thought for Today

"When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them."

~~~~~ Evelyn Waugh

Thought for Today

"In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas."

~~~~~ Alfred Whitney Griswold

Thought for Today

"Wise men, when in doubt whether to speak or to keep quiet, give themselves the benefit of the doubt, and remain silent."

~~~~~ Napoleon Hill

Thought for Today

"Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self."

~~~~~ Max Stirner

Thought for Today

"You can retire from a job, but don't ever retire from making extremely meaningful contributions in life."

~~~~~ Stephen Covey

Thought for Today

"We no longer have a free market in the United States, we have a government controlled free market."

~~~~~ Jim Bunning

Thought for Today

"Half the things that people do not succeed in are through fear of making the attempt."

~~~~~ James Northcote

Thought for Today

"To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed."

~~~~~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Thought for Today

"Remember there's always a voice saying the right thing to you somewhere if you'll only listen for it."

~~~~~ Thomas Hughes

Thought for Today

"A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind."

~~~~~ Lewis Mumford

Thought for Today

"The freedom now desired by many is not freedom to do and dare but freedom from care and worry."

~~~~~ James Truslow Adams

Thought for Today

"I have never seen an ass who talked like a human being, but I have met many human beings who talked like asses."

~~~~~ Heinrich Heine

Thought for Today

"When a citizen gives his suffrage to a man of known immorality he abuses his trust; he sacrifices not only his own interest, but that of his neighbor; he betrays the interest of his country."

~~~~~ Noah Webster

Thought for Today

"The state of Israel must, from time to time, prove clearly that it is strong, and able and willing to use force, in a devastating and highly effective way. If it does not prove this, it will be swallowed up, and perhaps wiped off the face of the earth."

~~~~~ Moshe Sharett

Thought for Today

"There is nothing wrong with America that faith, love of freedom, intelligence, and energy of her citizens cannot cure."

~~~~~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Thought for Today

"If you want to cut your own throat, don't come to me for a bandage."

~~~~~ Margaret Thatcher

Thought for Today

"Never chase a lie. Let it alone, and it will run itself to death."

~~~~ Lyman Beecher

Thought for Today

"To do a common thing uncommonly well brings success."

~~~~~ Henry J. Heinz

Thought for Today

"I am responsible. Although I may not be able to prevent the worst from happening, I am responsible for my attitude toward the inevitable misfortunes that darken life."

~~~~~ Walter Anderson

Thought for Today

"People may doubt what you say, but they will believe what you do."

~~~~~ Lewis Cass

Thought for Today

"People learn something every day, and a lot of times it's that what they learned the day before was wrong."

~~~~~ Bill Vaughan

Thought for Today

"He knows not his own strength who hath not met adversity."

~~~~~ William Samuel Johnson

Thought for Today

"Asking a critic to name his favorite book is like asking a butcher to name his favorite pig."

~~~~~ John McCarthy

Erin Bonsteel's Take on Last Night's Debate

Thought for Today

"The extravagant expenditure of public money is an evil not to be measured by the value of that money to the people who are taxed for it."

~~~~~ President Chester A. Arthur (A DEMOCRAT! How times have changed!)

Thought for Today

"When we build, let us think that we build forever."

~~~~~ John Ruskin

Thought for Today

"If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans."

~~~~~ James Herriot

Thought for Today

"I endeavor to be wise when I cannot be merry, easy when I cannot be glad, content with what cannot be mended and patient when there be no redress."

~~~~~ Elizabeth Montagu

Thought for Today

"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers."

~~~~~ Daniel J. Boorstin

Thought for Today

"It's about focusing on the fight and not the fright."

~~~~~ Robin Roberts

Thought for Today

"The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments."

~~~~~ Ludwig von Mises

Thought for Today

"Begin to free yourself at once by doing all that is possible with the means you have, and as you proceed in this spirit the way will open for you to do more."

~~~~~ Georges Clemenceau

Thought for Today

"The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides. Accept life, and you must accept regret."

~~~~~ Henri Frederic Amiel

Thought for Today

"All life demands struggle. Those who have everything given to them become lazy, selfish, and insensitive to the real values of life. The very striving and hard work that we so constantly try to avoid is the major building block in the person we are today."

~~~~~ Pope Paul VI

Thought for Today

"I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it."

~~~~~ William Faulkner

Thought for Today

"No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there."

~~~~~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Thought for Today

"There's nothing written in the Bible, Old or New testament, that says, 'If you believe in Me, you ain't going to have no troubles.'"

~~~~~ Ray Charles

Thought for Today

"Young men are apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are apt to think themselves sober enough."

~~~~~ Lord Chesterfield

Thought for Today

"What really matters is what you do with what you have."

~~~~~ H. G. Wells

Thought for Today

"Many promising reconciliations have broken down because while both parties come prepared to forgive, neither party come prepared to be forgiven."

~~~~~ Charles Williams

Thought for Today

"Too much good fortune can make you smug and unaware. Happiness should be like an oasis, the greener for the desert that surrounds it."

~~~~~ Rachel Field

Thought for Today

"We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us."

~~~~ Samuel Johnson

Thought for Today

"I do not bring forgiveness with me, nor forgetfulness. The only ones who can forgive are dead; the living have no right to forget."

~~~~~ Chaim Herzog

Thought for Today

"The wealth of the country, its capital, its credit, must be saved from the predatory poor as well as the predatory rich, but above all from the predatory politician."

~~~~~ James J. Hill

Thought for Today

"The surest way to be deceived is to consider oneself cleverer than others."

~~~~~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Thought for Today

"Let's all understand that these guiding principles cannot be discarded for short-term political gains. They represent what this country is all about. They are indigenous to the American idea. And these are principles which are not negotiable."

~~~~~ Barbara Jordan

Thought for Today

"I always lose the election in the polls, and I always win it on election day."

~~~~~ Benjamin Netanyahu

Thought for Today

"The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor."

~~~~~ H. L. Mencken

Thought for Today

"The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure."

~~~~~ David Herbert Lawrence

Thought for Today

"Yes, it's hard to write. But it's harder not to."

~~~~~ Carl Van Doren

Thought for Today

"All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

~~~~~ Leo Tolstoy

Thought for Today

"The mistake a lot of politicians make is in forgetting they've been appointed and thinking they've been anointed."

~~~~ Claude Pepper

Thought for Today

"I like animals because they are not consciously cruel and don't betray each other."

~~~~~ Taylor Caldwell

Thought for Today

"True republicanism is the sovereignty of the people. There are natural and imprescriptible rights which an entire nation has no right to violate."

~~~~~ Marquis de Lafayette

Thought for Today

"The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life."

~~~~~ Arthur Koestler

Thought for Today

"Don't leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented."

~~~~~ Richard Wright

Thought for Today

"Tomorrow lurks in us, the latency to be all that was not achieved before."

~~~~~ Loren Eiseley

Thought for Today

The more things change ...  

"When I was in Philadelphia during the Depression in 1930 or '31, I got a very sad job as a night watchman in a garage. The cars in the garage had been abandoned by their owners, since they had lost their jobs and couldn't keep up the payments."

~~~~~ Tom Glazer

Thought for Today

"I say to you that the price of liberty is and always has been blood, human blood, and if our liberties are lost, we shall never regain them except at the price of blood. They must not be lost."

~~~~~ J. Reuben Clark

Thought for Today

"Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds."

~~~~~ Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

Thought for Today

"If you are worthy of its affection, a cat will be your friend but never your slave."

~~~~ Theophile Gautier

Thought for Today

"Where all is but dream, reasoning and arguments are of no use, truth and knowledge nothing."

~~~~~ John Locke

Thought for Today

"Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean."

~~~~~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Thought for Today

"The strength and power of a country depends absolutely on the quantity of good men and women in it."

~~~~~ John Ruskin

Thought for Today

"Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things."

~~~~~ Adam Smith

Thought for Today

"Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear."

~~~~~ Thomas Babington

Thought for Today

"Don't let the opinions of the average man sway you. Dream, and he thinks you're crazy. Succeed, and he thinks you're lucky. Acquire wealth, and he thinks you're greedy. Pay no attention. He simply doesn't understand."

~~~~~ Robert G. Allen

Thought for Today

"People do not care how nobly they live, only how long, despite the fact that it is within everyone's reach to live nobly, but within no one's reach to live long."

~~~~~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Thought for Today

"Do what is right, not what you think the high headquarters wants or what you think will make you look good."

~~~~ Norman Schwarzkopf

Thought for Today

"Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset."

~~~~~ Saint Francis de Sales

Thought for Today

"I want to be able, as days go by, always to look myself straight in the eye."

~~~~~ Edgar Guest

Thought for Today

"Whatever failures I have known, whatever errors I have committed, whatever follies I have witnessed in private and public life have been the consequence of action without thought."

~~~~~ Bernard Baruch

Thought for Today

"A man with a surplus can control circumstances, but a man without a surplus is controlled by them, and often has no opportunity to exercise judgment."

~~~~ Marshall Field

Thought for Today

"We have the right as individuals to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money."

~~~~ Davy Crockett

Thought for Today

"Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way."

~~~~~ Charles Bukowski

Thought for Today

"The United States is a giant island of freedom, achievement, wealth and prosperity in a world hostile to our values."

~~~~~ Phyllis Schlafly

Thought for Today

"We are having the single worst recovery the U.S. has had since the Great Depression. I don't care how you measure it. The East Coast knows it. The West Coast knows it. North, South, old, young, everyone knows it's the worst recovery since the Great Depression."

~~~~~ Arthur Laffer

Thought for Today

"The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder."

~~~~~ Alfred Hitchcock

Thought for Today

"Do not be fooled into believing that because a man is rich he is necessarily smart. There is ample proof to the contrary."

~~~~~ Julius Rosenwald

Thought for Today

"It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense."

~~~~~ Robert Green Ingersoll

Thought for Today

"Lotteries, a tax upon imbeciles."

~~~~ Camillo di Cavour

Thought for Today

"The person that loses their conscience has nothing left worth keeping."

~~~~~ Izaak Walton

Thought for Today

"I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes."

~~~~~ Sara Teasdale

Thought for Today

"Bureaucracies are inherently antidemocratic. Bureaucrats derive their power from their position in the structure, not from their relations with the people they are supposed to serve. The people are not masters of the bureaucracy, but its clients."

~~~~ Alan Keyes

Thought for Today

"It is the lone worker who makes the first advance in a subject; the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to enterprise, thought, and perception of an individual."

~~~~~ Alexander Fleming

Thought for Today

"Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance."

~~~~~ Bruce Barton

Thought for Today

"Aye, I'm tellin' ye, happiness is one of the few things in this world that doubles every time you share it with someone else."

~~~~~ Harry Lauder

Thought for Today

"A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early."

~~~~~ Rupert Brooke

Thought for Today

"Nations have come under the control of haters and fools."

~~~~~ Carroll O'Connor

Thought for Today

"There is all of the difference in the world between paying and being paid."

~~~~~ Herman Melville

Thout for Today

"Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government."

~~~~~ Milton Friedman

Thought for Today

"What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long."

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell

Thought for Today

"The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults."

~~~~~ Alexis de Tocqueville

Thought for Today

"When a woman like that whom I've seen so much,
All of a sudden drops out of touch;
Is always busy and never can,
Spare you a moment, it means a man."

~~~~~ Alice Duer Miller

Thought for Today

"No one can drive us crazy unless we give them the keys."

~~~~~ Douglas Horton

Thought for Today

"The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm."

~~~~~ Aldous Huxley

Thought for Today

"Nothing else so destroys the power to stand alone as the habit of leaning upon others. If you lean, you will never be strong or original. Stand alone or bury your ambition to be somebody in the world."

~~~~~ Orison Swett Marden

Thought for Today

"In this administration, a place can be found for every bad man."

~~~~ John Philpot Curran

Thought for Today

"It is much easier to show compassion to animals. They are never wicked."

~~~~~ Haile Selassie

Thought for Today

"Seems like everything people oughta know they just don't want to hear. I guess that's the big trouble with the world."

~~~~~ Daniel Mainwaring

Thought for Today

"And 'tis remarkable that they talk most who have the least to say."

~~~~~ Matthew Prior

Thought for Today

"How fortune brings to earth the over-sure!"

~~~~~ Petrarch

Thought for Today

"What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities, of having a patient but restless mind, of sacrificing one's ease or vanity, of uniting a love of detail to foresight, and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully."

~~~~~ Victor Cherbuliez

Thought for Today

"If the laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of the lawyers."

~~~~~ George Savile

Thought for Today

"Do not hover always on the surface of things, nor take up suddenly with mere appearances; but penetrate into the depth of matters, as far as your time and circumstances allow, especially in those things which relate to your profession."

~~~~~ Isaac Watts

Thought for Today

"The only way to enjoy anything in this life is to earn it first."

~~~~~ Ginger Rogers

Thought for Today

"Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like."

~~~~~ Walter Benjamin

Thought for Today

"When you can't have what you choose, you just choose what you have."

~~~~~ Owen Wister

Thought for Today

"We didn't do wrong things because we didn't want to embarrass our parents."

~~~~~ Paul Prudhomme

Thought for Today

"Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your five senses. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone you can become expert."

~~~~~ William Osler

Thought for Today

"Courtesy is the one coin you can never have too much of or be stingy with."

~~~~~ John Wanamaker

Thought for Today

"An appeal is when you ask one court to show its contempt for another court."

~~~~~ Finley Peter Dunne

Thought for Today

"When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered."

~~~~~ Dorothy Thompson

Thought for Today

"If your only goal is to become rich, you will never achieve it."

~~~~~ John D. Rockefeller

Thought for Today

"An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life."

~~~~~ Robert A. Heinlein

Thought for Today

"It seems to be a law of nature, inflexible and inexorable, that those who will not risk cannot win."

~~~~~ John Paul Jones

Thought for Today

"No people do so much harm as those who go about doing good."

~~~~~ Mandell Creighton

Thought for Today

"The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits."

~~~~~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

For the RINO Who Has Everything ...

Today is Sen. Lamar Alexander's (RINO-TN) 72nd birthday, so I decided to propose an appropriate gift:

No, not this time around, but 2014 will be here before we know it. Lamar has been marinating in the Washington DC cesspool so long that, just like Al Gore's father, the late Sen. Albert Gore Sr., he has lost touch with his constituents. It's long past time for him to join his friend Richard Lugar in retirement.

Thought for Today

"Some for renown, on scraps of learning dote, And think they grow immortal as they quote."

~~~~~ Edward Young

Thought for Today

"All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened."

~~~~~ Hermann Hesse

Thought for Today

"It is vain to expect a well-balanced government without a well-balanced society."

~~~~~ Gideon Welles

Thought for Today

"The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else."

~~~~~ Frederic Bastiat

Thought for Today

"Nothing is given to man on earth – struggle is built into the nature of life, and conflict is possible – the hero is the man who lets no obstacle prevent him from pursuing the values he has chosen."

~~~~~ Andrew Bernstein

Thought for Today

"Hell has been described as a pocket edition of Chicago."

~~~~ Ashley Montagu

Thought for Today

"We may have found a cure for most evils; but we have found no remedy for the worst of them all, the apathy of human beings."

~~~~~ Helen Keller

Thought for Today

"Power and position often make a man trifle with the truth."

~~~~ George A. Smith

Thought for Today

"The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination."

~~~~~ Moses Hadas

Thought for Today

"The Supreme Court's only armor is the cloak of public trust; its sole ammunition, the collective hopes of our society."

~~~~~ Judge Irving R. Kaufman

Thought for Today

"Criticism and pessimism destroy families, undermine institutions of all kinds, defeat nearly everyone, and spread a shroud of gloom over entire nations."

~~~~~ Gordon B. Hinckley

Thought for Today

"You lie; you always were a liar, and you always will be a liar."

~~~~~ H. Rider Haggard (1884 – in anticipation of Barack Hussein Obama)

Thought for Today

"There is a contest old as Eden, which still goes on – the conflict between right and wrong, between error and truth. In this conflict every human being has a part."

~~~~~ Matthew Simpson

Thought for Today

"Lead from the front."

~~~~~ Audie Murphy

Thought for Today

"Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it."

~~~~~ Blaise Pascal

Thought for Today

"A guilty conscience is the mother of invention."

~~~~~ Carolyn Wells

Thought for Today

"You can't give the government the power to do good without also giving it the power to do bad – in fact, to do anything it wants."

~~~~~ Harry Browne

Thought for Today

"Well I just figure any man who risks his neck to save a dog's life isn't going to kill someone for gold teeth."

~~~~~ Alvin Adams

Thought for Today

"People don't ever seem to realize that doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune."

~~~~~ William McFee

Thought for Today

"All places where women are excluded tend downward to barbarism; but the moment she is introduced, there come in with her courtesy, cleanliness, sobriety, and order."

~~~~~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

Thought for Today

"One's age should be tranquil, as childhood should be playful. Hard work at either extremity of life seems out of place. At midday the sun may burn, and men labor under it; but the morning and evening should be alike calm and cheerful."

~~~~~ Thomas Arnold

Thought for Today

"Everyone is always in favour of general economy and particular expenditure."

~~~~ Anthony Eden

Thought for Today

"Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence."

~~~~~ Vince Lombardi

Thought for Today

"If you want people to listen, you have to have a platform to speak from, and that is excellence in what you do."

~~~~~ William Pollard

Thought for Today

"Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it."

~~~~~ Bertha von Suttner

Thought for Today

"Our economic freedom is founded on individual property rights; government should never be permitted to take those away."

~~~~~ Ernest Istook

Thought for Today

"I never thought I'd live to see the day that an American administration would denounce the state of Israel for rebuilding Jerusalem."

~~~~~ Mike Pence

Thought for Today

"The enemies of freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot."

~~~~~ William Ralph Inge

Thought for Today

"The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence."

~~~~~ Adam Smith

Thought for Today

"I like people who are enthused about things they do, like travel, sports, work. I like being with people who have things they're excited about."

~~~~~ Parker Stevenson

Thought for Today

"To do anything in this world worth doing, we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in, and scramble through as well as we can."

~~~~~ Sydney Smith

Thought for Today

"I am determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may find myself. For I have learned that the greater part of our misery or unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition."

~~~~~ Martha Washington

Thought for Today

"Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens."

~~~~~ John Marshall Harlan

Thought for Today

"If you put off everything till you're sure of it, you'll never get anything done."

~~~~~ Norman Vincent Peale

Thought for Today

"The majority see the obstacles; the few see the objectives; history records the successes of the latter, while oblivion is the reward of the former."

~~~~~ Alfred A. Montapert

Thought for Today

"I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees."

~~~~~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

Thought for Today

"Poverty of course is no disgrace, but it is damned annoying."

~~~~~ William Pitt

Thought for Today

"If you aren't rich you should always look useful."

~~~~~ Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Thought for Today

"No nation ever yet found any inconvenience from too close an inspection into the conduct of its officers, but many have been brought to ruin and reduced to slavery by suffering gradual impositions and abuses."

~~~~~ Edward Livingston

Thought for Today

"You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late."

~~~~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thought for Today

"A person wrapped up in himself makes a small package."

~~~~~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

Thought for Today

"To attempt to advise conceited people is like whistling against the wind."

~~~~~ Thomas Hood

Thought for Today

"Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another."

~~~~~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Thought for Today

"Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow firm there, firm as weeds among stones."

~~~~~ Charlotte Bronte

Thought for Today

"Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true."

~~~~~ Honore de Balzac

Thought for Today

"A man can do what he ought to do; and when he says he cannot, it is because he will not."

~~~~ Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Thought for Today

"Army: A body of men assembled to rectify the mistakes of the diplomats."

~~~~~ Josephus Daniels

Thought for Today

"Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth."

~~~~~ Anna Jameson

Thought for Today

"It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn."

~~~~~ Eric Hoffer

Thought for Today

"The proverb warns that 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself."

~~~~~ Thomas Szasz

Thought for Today

"When the heroes go off the stage, the clowns come on."

~~~~~ Heinrich Heine

Thought for Today

"Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind."

~~~~~ Daphne du Maurier

Thought for Today

"Sooner or later, those who win are those who think they can."

~~~~ Paul Tournier

Thought for Today

"The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation."

~~~~~ Isaac D'Israeli

Thought for Today

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."

~~~~~ Ariel Durant

Thought for Today

"When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt."

~~~~~ Henry J. Kaiser

Thought for Today

"If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion."

~~~~~ Friedrich August von Hayek

Thought for Today

"Misery is almost always the result of thinking."

~~~~~ Joseph Joubert

Thought for Today

"If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends."

~~~~~ Orson Welles

Thought for Today

"The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you."

~~~~~ Soren Kierkegaard

Thought for Today

"Every great man, every successful man, no matter what the field of endeavor, has known the magic that lies in these words: every adversity has the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit."

~~~~~ W. Clement Stone

Thought for Today

"A boy doesn't have to go to war to be a hero; he can say he doesn't like pie when he sees there isn't enough to go around."

~~~~~ Edgar Watson Howe

Thought for Today

"In matters of conscience, first thoughts are best. In matters of prudence, last thoughts are best."

~~~~ Robert Hall

Thought for Today

"No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority."

~~~~ Joseph Addison

Thought for Today

"Religion which requires persecution to sustain, it is of the devil's propagation."

~~~~ Hosea Ballou

Thought for Today

"Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house."

~~~~ Henri Poincare

Thought for Today

"It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising their sovereignty."

~~~~ James Monroe

Thought for Today

"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools."

~~~~~ Herbert Spencer

Thought for Today

"There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to go – if there are no doors or windows he walks through a wall."

~~~~~ Bernard Malamud

Thought for Today

"Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit."

~~~~~ Edward R. Murrow

Thought for Today

"They who do not understand that a man may be brought to hope that which of all things is the most grievous to him, have not observed with sufficient closeness the perversity of the human mind."

~~~~~ Anthony Trollope

Thought for Today

"Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity. And on issues that seem important to you, stand up and be counted at any cost."

~~~~~ Chauncey Depew

Thought for Today

"Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world."

~~~~~ Immanuel Kant

Thought for Today

"Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow firm there, firm as weeds among stones."

~~~~~ Charlotte Bronte

Thought for Today

"Gratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind."

~~~~~ Lionel Hampton

Thought for Today

"No one ever became, or can become truly eloquent without being a reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language."

~~~~~ Fisher Ames

Thought for Today

"America is hungry for people who believe in something."

~~~~~ Henry Hyde

Thought for Today

"God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road."

~~~~~ Isak Dinesen

Thought for Today

"Until one has loved an animal a part of one's soul remains unawakened."

~~~~~ Anatole France

Thought for Today

"Indifference may not wreck a man's life at any one turn, but it will destroy him with a kind of dry-rot in the long run."

~~~~~ Bliss Carman

Thought for Today

"Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until you have accomplished a purpose -- not the one you began with perhaps, but one you'll be glad to remember."

~~~~~ Anne Sullivan

Thought for Today

"Yes, forget your weakness, whatever that weakness may be. It is egotism, it is selfishness after. all, for it is a dwelling on self. Forget your weakness; and remember your strength."

~~~~~ Joseph Barber Lightfoot

Thought for Today

"The Constitution of the United States was made not merely for the generation that then existed, but for posterity – unlimited, undefined, endless, perpetual posterity."

~~~~~ Henry Clay

Thought for Today

"First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people."

~~~~~ Leo Rosten

"That explains a great deal about the Obama administration."

~~~~~ me

Thought for Today

"A hypocrite despises those whom he deceives, but has no respect for himself. He would make a dupe of himself too, if he could."

~~~~~ William Hazlitt

Thought for Today

"If it weren't for the rocks in its bed, the stream would have no song."

~~~~~ Carl Perkins

Thought for Today

"Fighting terrorism is not unlike fighting a deadly cancer. It can't be treated just where it's visible – every diseased cell in the body must be destroyed."

~~~~~ David Hackworth

Thought for Today

"The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves."

~~~~~ William Ellery Channing

Thought for Today

"The man who can speak acceptably is usually given credit for an ability out of all proportion to what he really possesses."

~~~~~ Lowell Thomas

Thought for Today

"Hope thou not much, and fear thou not at all."

~~~~ Algernon Charles Swinburne

Thought for Today

"I had faith in Israel before it was established, I have in it now. I believe it has a glorious future before it – not just another sovereign nation, but as an embodiment of the great ideals of our civilization."

~~~~~ Harry S. Truman

Thought for Today

"Temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use."

~~~~ Washington Irving

Thought for Today

"Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers."

~~~~~ Camille Paglia

Thought for Today

"Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them."

~~~~~ Alan Perlis

Thought for Today

"The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once."

~~~~ Rene Descartes

Thought for Today

"Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen."

~~~~~ Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides)

Thought for Today

"Popularity, I have always thought, may aptly be compared to a coquette – the more you woo her, the more apt is she to elude your embrace."

~~~~ John Tyler

Thought for Today

"Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own."

~~~~~ Nelson Algren

Thought for Today

"If the law is a bad law, there is always the contingent right to take action that you would not otherwise take."

~~~~~ James Callaghan

Thought for Today

"The strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination."

~~~~~ Robert Frost

Thought for Today

"For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished freedom is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while there was still time."

~~~~ George Sutherland

Thought for Today

"Do not rely completely on any other human being, however dear. We meet all life's greatest tests alone."

~~~~~ Agnes Macphail

Thought for Today

"If we believe a thing to be bad, and if we have a right to prevent it, it is our duty to try to prevent it and damn the consequences."

~~~~~ Lord Milner

Thought for Today

"Fullness of knowledge always means some understanding of the depths of our ignorance; and that is always conducive to humility and reverence."

~~~~~ Robert Millikan

Thought for Today

"When blithe to argument I come, Though armed with facts, and merry, May Providence protect me from The fool as adversary, Whose mind to him a kingdom is Where reason lacks dominion, Who calls conviction prejudice And prejudice opinion."

~~~~~ Phyllis McGinley

Thought for Today

"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers."

~~~~~ Charles William Eliot

Thought for Today

"The way to develop self-confidence is to do the thing you fear and get a record of successful experiences behind you."

~~~~~ William Jennings Bryan

Thought for Today

"No one had ever told me that whites were supposed to sing one kind of music and blacks another – I sang what I liked in the only voice I had."

~~~~~ Charley Pride

Thought for Today

"It's not the people in the South who create racial problems – it's the people who are governing."

~~~~~ Nat King Cole

Thought for Today

"When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid."

~~~~~ Maxim Gorky

Thought for Today

"Any man worth his salt will stick up for what he believes right, but it takes a slightly better man to acknowledge instantly and without reservation that he is in error."

~~~~~ Andrew Jackson

Thought for Today

"When the solution is simple, God is answering."

~~~~~ Albert Einstein

Thought for Today

"The human brain is a wonderful organ. It starts to work as soon as you are born and doesn't stop until you get up to deliver a speech."

~~~~~ George Jessel

Thought for Today

"He who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave."

~~~~~ George Berkeley

Thought for Today

"What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you'd like it to mean?"

~~~~~ Antonin Scalia

Thought for Today

"You make mistakes. Mistakes don't make you."

~~~~~ Maxwell Maltz

Thought for Today

"The tendency of taxation is to create a class of persons who do not labor, to take from those who do labor the produce of that labor, and to give it to those who do not labor."

~~~~~ William Cobbett

Thought for Today

"Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at the touch, nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening."

~~~~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The Obama Video: The Smoking Gun

Earlier this evening, watching the newly released Obama video on Hannity, I was struck by the contrast between Obama's relaxed eloquence despite the absence of notes or teleprompter and his more recent public speeches. There he was standing in the middle of a small crowd of students without even so much as a portable lectern in front of him, yet his words flowed smoothly and freely.

Contrast that with his well-known tendency to hesitate, stumble, mispronounce common words, blurt out ridiculous nonsense, and even lapse into total incoherence whenever, as candidate or President, he attempts to go off the 'prompter and speak extemporaneously. By now, we are no longer surprised to see Obama depending on his ever-present teleprompter even in such unlikely settings as a grade-school classroom or an athletic field. He (or, more likely, his handlers) realizes that especially in the age of YouTube, he can no longer afford to take the chance of generating fresh examples of Obamateurisms which can be endlessly replayed in the upcoming campaign.

I drew one inescapable, alarming but not surprising conclusion: the words Obama was so effortlessly speaking in that video represented what he really, honestly, deep-down believes. In essence, he has provided yet another demonstration of the essential truth of this Bible verse:

"O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh."
~~~~~ Matthew 12:34 (KJV)

That, to me, is the real smoking gun.

Thought for Today

"For those who do not think, it is best at least to rearrange their prejudices once in a while."

~~~~~ Luther Burbank

Thought for Today

"I believe that government is for the use of the people, and not the people for the use of the government."

~~~~~ Gerrit Smith

Thought for Today

"If the world seems cold to you, kindle fires to warm it."

~~~~~ Lucy Larcom

Thought for Today

"I'm getting sick and tired of doing anything half-way."

~~~~~ Knute Rockne

Thought for Today

"Above all we should not forget that government is an evil, a usurpation upon the private judgement and individual conscience of mankind."

~~~~~ William Godwin

Thought for Today

"Ideals are like the stars: we never reach them, but like the mariners of the sea, we chart our course by them."

~~~~~ Carl Schurz

Thought for Today

"I never use a score when conducting my orchestra. Does a lion tamer enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?"

~~~~~ Dimitri Mitropoulos

Thought for Today

"One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time."

~~~~~ Gioachino Rossini

Thought for Today

"The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them... Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will."

~~~~~ Michel de Montaigne

Thought for Today

Longfellow on Obama:

"Whenever nature leaves a hole in a person's mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit."

~~~~~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Thought for Today

"When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide."

~~~~ Victor Hugo

Thought for Today

"Of all tasks of government the most basic is to protect its citizens against violence."

~~~~ John Foster Dulles

Candidate for Quote of the Century

“Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age."

~~~~~ Richard S. Lindzen

Thought for Today

"God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless."

~~~~~ Chester W. Nimitz

Thought for Today

"You can tell by looking at me that I've got more miles behind me than I've got in front of me. When you reach that point, if you've got some good years left, you want to make sure that you use them wisely."

~~~~~ Tom Osborne

Thought for Today

"The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves."

~~~~ George Washington

Thought for Today

"I've had three wives and three guitars. I still play the guitars."

~~~~~ Andres Segovia

Thought for Today

"A happy home is one in which each spouse grants the possibility that the other may be right, though neither believes it."

~~~~~ Don Fraser

Thought for Today

"To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge."

~~~~ Nicolaus Copernicus

Thought for Today

"A man who trims himself to suit everybody will soon whittle himself away."

~~~~~ Charles M. Schwab

Thought for Today

"Some people think that doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back into the shell."

~~~~~ Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Thought for Today

"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."

~~~~~ Henry Adams

Thought for Today

"Common sense is genius in homespun."

~~~~~ Alfred North Whitehead

Thought for Today

"Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote."

~~~~ George Jean Nathan

Thought for Today

"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act."

~~~~~ Robert Jackson

Thought for Today

"We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution."

~~~~~ Abraham Lincoln

Deliberate or Inadvertent?

Six of the nine justices of the Supreme Court are Roman Catholic, including Obama's appointee Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor. In addition to Chief Justice John Roberts, Associate Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Sonia Sotomayor all are Catholic. Particularly considering that the Supreme Court is presently deciding the constitutionality of ObamaCare, I've been wondering whether Obama's thumb in the eye to all Catholics, obviously including those six Justices, was deliberate or inadvertent.

I'm inclined to think Obama knew exactly what he was doing. After all, he deliberately insulted the Supreme Court right to its members' faces during last year's State of the Union address. Consider, too, that in implementing this new policy, he disregarded the advice of Vice President Joe Biden and former White House Chief of Staff Bill Dailey, both Catholics, then coldly put Catholic HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius out front to announce it – much as the Nazis put the Jewish kapos in charge of loading the rest of the Jews into the cattle cars.

This summer, when the Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of ObamaCare, let's hope they remember this egregious insult and return the favor in kind.

Thought for Today

"Be courageous. I have seen many depressions in business. Always America has emerged from these stronger and more prosperous. Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith! Go forward!"

~~~~~ Thomas A. Edison

Thought for Today

"As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth."

~~~~~ Boris Pasternak

Thought for Today

"There is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest feelings of our nature, than the exercise of unlimited power."

~~~~ William Henry Harrison

Thought for Today

"Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort."

~~~~~ John Ruskin

Thought for Today

"There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth."

~~~~~ Charles Dickens

Thought for Today

"We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions."

~~~~~ Ronald Reagan

Thought for Today

"It is a clear truth that those who every day barter away other men's liberty will soon care little for their own."

~~~~~ James Otis

Thought for Today

"When truth is no longer free, freedom is no longer real: the truths of the police are the truths of today."

~~~~~ Jacques Prevert

Thought for Today

"Though everything else may appear shallow and repulsive, even the smallest task in music is so absorbing, and carries us so far away from town, country, earth, and all worldly things, that it is truly a blessed gift of God."

~~~~~ Felix Mendelssohn

On the occasion of Mendelssohn's 203rd birthday, enjoy this phenomenal performance of his Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Op. 49 by The Claremont Trio.

Thought for Today

"I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven."

~~~~~ Jascha Heifetz

Thought for Today

"Men are like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single one."

~~~~~ Richard Whately

Thought for Today

"Find fault with thyself rather than with others."

~~~~~ Ieyasu Tokugawa

Thought for Today

"The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment he can tolerate."

~~~~~ Douglas Engelbart

Thought for Today

"A good upbringing means not that you won't spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won't notice it when someone else does."

~~~~ Anton Chekhov

Thought for Today

"It's too bad I'm not as wonderful a person as people say I am, because the world could use a few people like that."

~~~~~ Alan Alda

Thought for Today

"No one has any idea what's next... the uncertainty of the business climate in America is frightening, frightening to everybody, and it's delaying the recovery."

~~~~~ Steve Wynn

Thought for Today

"I am concerned for the security of our great Nation; not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within."

~~~~~ Gen. Douglas MacArthur

Thought for Today

"Firmness in enduring and exertion is a character I always wish to possess. I have always despised the whining yelp of complaint and cowardly resolve."

~~~~~ Robert Burns

Thought for Today

"Biologically speaking, if something bites you it's more likely to be female."

~~~~~ Desmond Morris

Thought for Today

"The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same."

~~~~~ Stendhal

Thought for Today

"A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state."

~~~~~ Isabel Paterson

Thought for Today

"There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying."

~~~~~ Francis Bacon

Thought for Today

"The ideas which now pass for brilliant innovations and advances are in fact mere revivals of ancient errors, and a further proof of the dictum that those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it."

~~~~~ Henry Hazlitt

Thought for Today

"The trite saying that honesty is the best policy has met with the just criticism that honesty is not policy. The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy."

~~~~~ Robert E. Lee

Thought for Today

"The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power."

~~~~~ Daniel Webster

Thought for Today

"One may know how to gain a victory, and know not how to use it."

~~~~~ Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Thought for Today

"Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out – it's the grain of sand in your shoe."

~~~~~ Robert W. Service

Thought for Today

"Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to make the world a better place."

~~~~~ Moliere

Thought for Today

"There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats."

~~~~~ Albert Schweitzer

"This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave."

~~~~~ Elmer Davis

Thought for Today

"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts."

~~~~~ Edmund Burke

Blacks and Jews – A Picture Worth 1000 Words

The birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. is approaching, so I think it's appropriate to reflect a moment on his legacy. 

For decades, most of the so-called black leaders – the Jacksons, the Sharptons, the Farrakhans, the Reverend Wrights – have been doing all they can to demonize Jews. Their efforts have borne bitter fruit, even (Freddie's Fashion Mart; Crown Heights) including the murders of innocent people by young black men incited to mob violence by the words of those self-appointed leaders. 

Yet all of those leaders claim to follow in the footsteps of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

How can that be? I'm old enough to have met Dr. King in person, when he came to WKCR-FM, the Columbia University radio station, for an interview:

I'm not in the picture because I was a broadcast engineer, not a newsman, but all of us were honored to meet him and shake his hand. 

At that time, it was common knowledge that Dr. King, unlike some other prominent black leaders of the time (Elijah Muhammad; Malcolm X) held both Jews and Israel in the highest regard, and had zero tolerance for anti-Semitism either overt or covert, as, say, "anti-Zionism." Consider, for instance, these authenticated quotes assembled by Robert Spencer in Martin Luther King, Jr.: supporter of Israel:

"I cannot stand idly by, even though I happen to live in the United States and even though I happen to be an American Negro and not be concerned about what happens to the Jews in Soviet Russia. For what happens to them happens to me and you, and we must be concerned."

"Israel's right to exist as a state in security is uncontestable."

"Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity. I see Israel as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality."

"I solemnly pledge to do my utmost to uphold the fair name of the Jews -- because bigotry in any form is an affront to us all."

"When people criticize Zionists they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism."

Not surprisingly, then, when the time came that Dr. King needed the support of prominent Jewish leaders, it was always given generously and unstintingly. Here, for instance, is a picture of the famous march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama four years after that radio interview. In the front rank, marching between Ralph Bunche and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, is one of the most learned and respected rabbis of the time, Abraham Joshua Heschel. Directly behind Dr. King in the second rank is another prominent American rabbi, Maurice Davis.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, second from right, participating in the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, on March 21, 1965.

First row, from far left: John Lewis, an unidentified nun, Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Bunche, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Fred Shuttlesworth.

Second row: Visible behind (and between) Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph Bunche is Rabbi Maurice Davis.

Why were these rabbis there? For one reason: because it was the right thing to do. Here are a few of Rabbi Heschel's thoughts on racism, Dr. King and his movement, and the duty of Jews to help defeat the evil in any way they could:

"Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason."

"When I marched in Selma, my legs were praying."

"All it takes is one person… and another… and another… and another… to start a movement."

"A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought."

"Speech has power. Words do not fade. What starts out as a sound, ends in a deed."

Isn't it long past time to honor Dr. King's memory by boldly disavowing those who have made careers out of inducing us to hate one another? I hope that the day will come that self-aggrandizing hatemongers like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright, and Louis Farrakhan will rant in vain in near-empty halls. Of course, in a country as large and diverse as ours, they'll always have a few deluded followers. But we'll know we have arrived when their congregations have diminished to Westboro Baptist Church proportions.

Until that time comes, though, the majority of honorable, upstanding black Americans should be doing everything in its power to neutralize the poison being fed to the young by the minority of hate-spewing scoundrels. No one else can do the job. After all, those who have been led to believe that all of their troubles are the fault of the whites and the Jews are unlikely to listen to those of us who are both white and Jewish.

Thought for Today

"The rat stops gnawing in the wood, the dungeon walls withdraw, the weight is lifted, your pulse steadies and the sun has found your heart, the day was not bad, the season has not been bad, there is sense and even promise in going on."

~~~~~ Bernard De Voto

Thought for Today

"Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses."

~~~~~ George Washington Carver

Thought(s) for Today

"The chief executive who knows his strengths and weaknesses as a leader is likely to be far more effective than the one who remains blind to them."

~~~~~ John Adair

"As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president – with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln – just in terms of what we've gotten done in modern history."

~~~~~ Barack Hussein Obama

Thought for Today

"Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it."

~~~~~ Baltasar Gracian

Thought for Today

"He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers."

~~~~~ Charles Peguy

Thought for Today

"When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along."

~~~~~ Carl Sandburg

Thought for Today

"I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure – which is: Try to please everybody."

~~~~ Herbert Bayard Swope

Thought for Today

"The worst enemy of human hope is not brute facts, but men of brains who will not face them."

~~~~~ Max Eastman

Thought for Today

"Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens."

~~~~ J. R. R. Tolkien

Thought for Today

"You can be deprived of your money, your job and your home by someone else, but remember that no one can ever take away your honor."

~~~~~ William Lyon Phelps

Thought for Today

"America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large."

~~~~~ E. M. Forster