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All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant. -- Aldous Huxley


Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities. -- Aldous Huxley

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. -- Benjamin Disraeli

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. -- Galileo Galilei


Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third. -- Ambrose Bierce

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. - Winston Churchill

Common sense is a collection of prejudices acquired by age 18 -- Albert Einseiin


Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement. – Henry Ford

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal. --- Henry Ford

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty --- Henry Ford

To be content with little is hard; to be content with much, impossible. --Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook and a good digestion. -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

To wear your heart on your sleeve isn't a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best. -- Margaret Thatcher


I am desperately trying to figure out why Kamikaze pilots wore helmets. -- Dave Edison


Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children. -- George Bernard Shaw

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering - because you can't take it in all at once. -- Audrey Hepburn


The art galleries of Paris contain the finest collection of frames I ever saw. -- Humphrey Davy

Choices

Sheena Iyengar on the Art of Choosing







"We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely by the impositon of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ideas with which we learn to freeze, the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience." -- Joan Didian- The White Album

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To wear your heart on your sleeve isn't a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best. -- Margaret Thatcher


I am desperately trying to figure out why Kamikaze pilots wore helmets. -- Dave Edison

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children. -- George Bernard Shaw

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering - because you can't take it in all at once. -- Audrey Hepburn

The art galleries of Paris contain the finest collection of frames I ever saw. -- Humphrey Davy

Choices

Being clever is a gift; being kind is a choice...


Tomorrow...your life begins. How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make? Will inertia be your guide or will you be guided by your passions? Will you follow dogma or will you be original? Will you choose a life or ease or a life of service...and adventure? Will you wilt under criticism or will you follow your convictions? Will you bluff it out when you're wrong?...or will you apologise? Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love? Will you play it safe or will you be a little bit swashbuckling? When its tough, will you give up or will you be relentless? Will be a cynic or will you be a builder? Will you be clever at the expense at of others, or will you be kind?
- Jeff Bezos at Princeton-U graduation address (May 2010)

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"A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance."



"All the perplexities, confusion and distress arise not from the defects of the constitution, not from the want of honor or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of coin, credit and circulation".
- John Adams (1787)

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The reformist politician's dilemma:

“We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.”
- Jean-Claude Juncker, prime minister of Luxembourg,  in 2007

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"It is an illusion to suppose that military weakness rather than military power makes a nation more influential in pressing for disarmament…. Virtue is respected only when it is backed by power; power without virtue is disastrous; but virtue without power is helpless. The fate of the merely virtuous is often decided in the assemblies of the powerful without reference to and at the expense of the virtuous."
 
- Prof. Raj Krishna (1965)