Running the Country
Too bad all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxi cabs and cutting hair.
— George Burns
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To Be Is To Do . . . Be Do Be Do
ByHeather
To be is to do — Socrates
To do is to be — Jean Paul Sartre
Do be do be do — Frank Sinatra
To do is to be — Jean Paul Sartre
Do be do be do — Frank Sinatra
I posted this quote for the sole reason that it always makes me smile. But as I looked at the list of names, and their sequence, I realized that, in a simplistic way, these simple words also reflect our evolution of philosophy and thought. Socrates lived more than 2,400 years ago and his influence on thought is legendary. Jean Paul Sartre was a prominent French philosopher at the peak of the twentieth century. Frank Sinatra was born only ten years after Sartre but has come to embody a later generation.
Indecisiveness
ByHeather
I used to think I was indecisive, but now I’m not so sure.
— Unknown
The Death of Ponzi Schemes
ByHeather
So Social Security will be broke in seven years. First Bernie Madoff, now this. It’s like Ponzi schemes don’t even work anymore.
– Bill Muse, Top 5 Rumination
What the framers meant by ‘the people’
ByHeather
Even though the framers were pretty bad about race, and they certainly didn’t understand sex equality, the one thing the framers got was class. They understood that the biggest risk was to create an aristocracy. And so they insisted, as Madison said, that ‘the people’ meant ‘not the rich more than the poor.’ We’ve completely betrayed that commitment.
— Lawrence Lessig
Watch Lessig’s entire 12-minute interview with Bill Moyerswhen Lessig was on a march to end corruption…
Writing: Create a Context
ByHeather
The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
Science is a way of thinking
ByHeather
“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)