Passion
Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
— Harold Whitman
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Damn the Torpedos
ByHeather
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.
Three Hardest Tasks
ByHeather
The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements but moral acts:
- to return love for hate
- to include the excluded
- and to say “I was wrong.”
— Sydney J. Harris, Pieces of Eight
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)
Klipstein’s Third Law of General Engineering
ByHeather
Dimensions will always be expressed in the least usable term. Velocity, for example, will be expressed in furlongs per fortnight.
Top 5 Guiding Principles of 2011
ByHeather
I have always found myself operating from a core set of operating principles — or “first principles,” if you will. Here are my guiding principles for 2011.
- Do the important stuff first
- If I want to read more, read more
- Pay attention
- Listen to my own voice
- Relationships matter
Commonplaces of Existence
ByHeather
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.