Public Speaking
The human brain starts working the moment you are born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public.
The human brain starts working the moment you are born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public.
The descent into dysfunction is a long, slow process. At no point is there a conscious choice to be dysfunctional.
— Unknown, possibly original
I have always loved to collect intangible things. One of my favorites collections consists of opening lines of great novels. Who can forget “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . ” Other greats include “Who is John Galt?” Or “Howard Rork laughed.” My all-time favorite opening line comes from Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides: “My wound is geography.”
But lo, I digress. By far my largest stash of immaterial things are the countless quotes, words of wisdom, poems, and pithy sayings I have collected over the years. I have a library card catalog filled with hand written 3×5 cards with quotes accumulated from the days before computers had entered my life. In the intervening years I have made several vain attempts to catalog my precious to no avail. The first installment came and went in a HyperCard stack that is long gone. A Microsoft Access database of pearls of wisdom sits unused on an old Windows machine somewhere in the house. …
— John Kenneth Galbraith, economist
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!”
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
— Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)