Thought for Today

"It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived."

~~~~~ Rene Descartes

Thought for Today

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

~~~~~ Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides)

Thought for Today

"One measure of your success will be the degree to which you build up others who work with you. While building up others, you will build up yourself."

~~~~~ James E. Casey

Thought for Today

"It's not so much about what you ask as what you don't ask."

~~~~~ Michael Parkinson

Thought for Today

"Never underestimate the capacity of another human being to have exactly the same shortcomings you have."

~~~~~ Leigh Steinberg

Thought for Today

"The last of human freedoms – the ability to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances."

~~~~~ Viktor E. Frankl

Norman Borlaug Answers His Critics

Today would have been Dr. Norman Borlaug's 99th birthday. His long and fruitful life came to a end on September 2, 2009 at the age of 95.

Toward the end of his life, Dr. Borlaug, justifiably called "The Father of the Green Revolution" and "The Man Who Saved a Billion Lives," was the target of vicious and unrelenting criticism from a gaggle of radical "greens" – so-called "environmentalists" who long to return the earth to a state of nature and would, if they had the power, eliminate humanity, except, of course, for themselves.

Here is Dr. Borlaug's reply to his critics:

"Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things."

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

"There are many advantages in their being accustomed to the use of arms, and no possible disadvantage."

~~~~~ Joel Barlow

Thought for Today

"In life, particularly in public life, psychology is more powerful than logic."

~~~~~ Ludwig Quidde

Thought for Today

"My idea of an educated person is one who can converse on one subject for more than two minutes."

~~~~~ Robert Millikan

Thought for Today

"Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart."

~~~~~ Phyllis McGinley

Thought for Today

"Home life ceases to be free and beautiful as soon as it is founded on borrowing and debt."

~~~~~ Henrik Ibsen

Thought for Today

"Who bravely dares must sometimes risk a fall."

~~~~~ Tobias Smollett

Thought for Today

"Beware the wrath of a patient adversary."

~~~~~ John C. Calhoun

Thought for Today

"Courage is just fear, plus prayers, plus understanding."

~~~~~ Edward Albert

Thought for Today

"The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare."

~~~~~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Thought for Today

"Leaders get out in front and stay there by raising the standards by which they judge themselves – and by which they are willing to be judged."

~~~~~ Frederick W. Smith

Thought for Today

"It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed."

~~~~~ Albert Einstein

Thought for Today

"In all science, error precedes the truth, and it is better it should go first than last."

~~~~~ Hugh Walpole

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

"The day of fortune is like a harvest day, We must be busy when the corn is ripe."

~~~~~ Torquato Tasso

Thought for Today

"Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss."

~~~~~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Thought for Today

"All legislative experiments in the way of making forcible distribution of the wealth produced in any country have failed."

~~~~~ Leland Stanford

Thought for Today

"I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected."

~~~~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Thought for Today

"Little deeds are like little seeds, they grow to flowers or to weeds."

~~~~~ Daniel D. Palmer

Thought for Today

"Let us tell our legislators in advance, that this is a right, restraints on which, we will not, cannot bear; and that every attempt to restrain it is a palpable wrong on God and man."

~~~~~ Gerrit Smith

Thought for Today

"The People have a right to the Truth as they have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

~~~~~ Frank Norris

Thought for Today

"Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian."

~~~~~ Robert Orben

Thought for Today

"Sometimes we stare so long at a door that is closing that we see too late the one that is open."

~~~~~ Alexander Graham Bell

Thought for Today

"For the cause that lacks assistance, the wrong that needs resistance, for the future in the distance, and the good that I can do."

~~~~~ George Linnaeus Banks

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