Competition
If you cannot win, make the one ahead of you break the record.
— Jan McKeithen
Both destiny’s kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person’s basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.
— David Foster Wallace
Listen to that still, quite voice in the back of the mind. It might be your destiny trying to get your attention.
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)
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
Creativity: a type of process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Too bad all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxi cabs and cutting hair.
— George Burns
— John Kenneth Galbraith, economist