Hump Day
Some days, it’s just not worth chewing through the leather straps.
Some days, it’s just not worth chewing through the leather straps.
Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead.
— David Farragut, Union Admiral during the American Civil War
On this date in 1862, David Farragut commanded a Union flotilla past two Confederate forts on the Mississippi River on his way to capture New Orleans. It wouldn’t be until more than two years later, at the Battle of Mobile Bay, when he would utter his famous phrase.
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
—James Madison, fourth US president (1751-1836)
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
— Clay Shirky
Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
Despite my obsession for productivity, I often find myself struggling to stay focused. I find this quote inspirational, especially on days when I have frittered away have of a morning on mundane tasks. Think bigger. Think beyond the moment. Follow your passions.
It is hard for a free fish to understand what is happening to a hooked one.
— Karl A. Menninger, The Human Mind
This quote is a more poetic version of the one I posted yesterday that said, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
According to Dr. George Watson at the University of Delaware, Karl Menninger was an early psychoanalyst who was probably referring to the criminal mind in this quote. Dr. Watson provides an expanded context of the quote.
“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
— Carl Sagan, astronomer and author (1934-1996)