It does not require a majority to prevail
It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.
— Samuel Adams
There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves.
— Søren Kierkegaard
From now on, we live in a world where man has walked on the moon. And it’s not a miracle, we just decided to go.
— Jim Lovell
There is a scene in the movie Apollo 13 in which astronaut Jim Lovell is hosting a dinner party at his house. At some point in the evening he escapes the hubbub of his guests and takes a seat in a lawn chair in the back yard. When someone comes out to join him he utters the phrase above.
The moon landings were the culmination of a gargantuan series of tasks. Thousands of people invested hundreds of thousands of hours coordinating and delivering on thousands of tasks. It wasn’t a miracle that we landed on the moon. We just set our minds to it and decided to go.
Theme of the week: Just decide to go.
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
Sometimes I find myself agreeing with Umberto.
Other times I want to say, “Chill dude . . . Life is a Cabaret, old chum!”
My life is spent in one long effort to escape the commonplaces of existence.
— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, spoken by Sherlock Holmes in The Red-Headed League
Ditto.
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction.
Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
— Woody Allen