Today is Mark Twain's Birthday

Today is Mark Twain's (Samuel Clemens) birthday so I though I would share a few of my favorite quotes:

I will start with a few on government:

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress.

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

We have the best government that money can buy.

What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.

(Too bad things have not improved much since his day.)

Some quotes about society in general:

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure.

Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

By trying we can easily endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

And my personal favorite:

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

Some Thoughts on the Two Towers and the Aftermath

Today we remember the terrorist attacks which destroyed the World Trade Center, and killed many innocent people.

It was a truly diabolical attack, carried out mercilessly.

I think we also need to reflect on how we responded, and continue to respond. I have some quotes which I think are relevant:

Thomas Jefferson
The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

Benjamin Franklin
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security

John Adams
There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

Henry David Thoreau
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt
The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.

Eleanor Roosevelt
Hate and force cannot be in just a part of the world without having an effect on the rest of it.

David Kaczynski
We've got to take back the ideal of justice, we've got to take back this principle of human dignity. We've got to take it back from vengeance, from hatred, we've got to say: look, we're all in this together. We are human beings.

Martin Luther King Jr
We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

Mohandas K Gandhi
What is obtained by love is retained for all time. What is obtained by hatred proves a burden in reality for it increases hatred.

Mohandas K Gandhi
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

Mohandas K Gandhi
Forgiveness is choosing to love. It is the first skill of self-giving love.

Albert Schweitzer
This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.

Jonathan Swift
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

William Blake
The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness.

Desmond Tutu
Without forgiveness, there's no future.

Matthew 5:44
But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you...


These might seem like a bunch of random quotes, but they relate to my own thinking about the attacks, and our response. We, as a people responded, our government responded, both here and abroad.

We voluntarily gave the government more power, looking for security. (See the Benjamin Franklin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt quotes above, and think about the risks there.)

I think we need to evaluate what has been done, and decide if we have taken the best road, and if there might be a better way. We have tried hatred and violence, maybe we should try love and forgiveness.

Struggle Against the Darkness?

I overheard a conversation recently between two people who were discussing all the darkness in the world, and how it was necessary to struggle against the darkness unceasingly.

I spent some time thinking about what I overheard, and concluded that they were mistaken in their basic assumptions.

First of all, it seems they are focused on the darkness in the world, so they see it everywhere. And, they see it as something wrong with the world.

I believe that light and darkness are not two separate things, but two sides of the same coin. There is a saying, from Buddhism, I think: nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Which means we put our labels on things, and call them good and bad, or light and dark; what we label something is based on what we can see, not on any absolute truth. It is impossible for any of us to see the whole truth about anything, so our understanding is necessarily limited.

Please understand I am not offering a defense to justify wrong actions, I believe we all have an innate sense of right and wrong, and should strive to live up to our own highest ideals of right action. I am suggesting that we should not be too quick to judge light and dark, or good and evil. I am also suggesting that there is a cycle of light and dark, and that cycle is larger than humanity.

That cycle will continue progressing from light to dark and back again, no matter how we might struggle against it.

I am also not suggesting that we do nothing, and simply stand back and allow things we see as wrong to happen and make no effort to stop them. (This may sound like I am contradicting myself, but keep reading, it will be clearer.)

What I believe is that there is no reason to "struggle against the darkness." If you think about light and dark, there is no struggle. Darkness does not pass because anyone struggled against it. Darkness passes when someone brings a light into the darkness, no struggle is needed. (Better to light one candle than curse the darkness.)

So, I think the people I overheard were wrong because they were focused on the "darkness" and they wanted to struggle against it. A better approach would be to look for ways to bring more light into the world; everyone has a light, maybe now is the time to let it shine.

Here are some lines from an old Incredible String Band song:

"One light, light that is one
though the lamps be many..."

Some of My Favorite Quotes

I was looking through an old journal yesterday, and I came upon these quotes which i wanted to share (I wrote down the names of the authors of the quotes, but not the sources where I found them):

"If you switch on the light in a dark room, it makes no difference how long it was dark because the light will still shine. Be teachable. That is the whole secret."
Vernon Howard

"You are created anew every moment."
Sri Aurobindo

"The difficulty is that we do not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions already made."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A free mind has the power to achieve all things."
Meister Eckhart

"Be free, gay, uncomplicated, a child. But be a strong child, fearing nothing."
Francois Fenelon

For me, these quotes are significant because of the difficulties I was experiencing in my personal life at the time I recorded them in my journal. They helped me get through a very dismal time, and come out a better and happier person, maybe even a little wiser. I offer them to anyone who needs some hope or light.

One last quote for the day:

"For all these years, you've protected the seed. It's time to become the flower."
Stephen C Paul

Can You Think and Grow Rich?

I have been talking about goals and success over the last few posts. I wanted to add a book recommendation, Napoleon Hill's classic, Think and Grow Rich.
If you have not read this book, it is a must read for anyone looking to achieve outstanding success.
I read it once a year, and find it a helpful guide to accomplishing my goals.
It is a book that many highly successful people credit as the starting point of everything they have achieved.
Although it is called Think and Grow Rich, and one of its major points is that your results are dependent on your thinking, it is a book about taking action.
I also read somewhere that Think and Grow Rich is responsible for creating more millionaires than any other book in the world. (I don't know if that is true or not, but I have read many biographies of successful individuals, and it is the book more of them mention than any other.)
You can purchase a copy from the link included below, or do a search of the internet, there are many websites offering free digital copies (usually in exchange for your email address); either way, get this book, read it, and most importantly, take action on what you learn.
(If you are reading it for the first time, I suggest that you quickly read it through once to familiarize yourself with its contents, and then read it more slowly, and really digest it, and take action.)

Some Thoughts About Work

My last post was about working towards your goals, and I shared some of my thinking on the subject. Today, I want to share some of my favorite quotes on work.


"Tomorrow is the day reserved for the labor of the lazy. I am not lazy. Tomorrow is the day when failure will succeed. I am not a failure. I will act now. Success will not wait. If I delay, success will become wed to another and lost to me forever. This is the time. This is the place. I am the person."
Og Mandino

"I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."
Henry D Thoreau

"The harder I work, the luckier I get."
Samuel Goldwyn

"When I work fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, I get lucky."
Armand Hammer

This next ones are not specifically about work, but I think they are relevant anyway.

"Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another."
Ernest Hemingway

"I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life was service.
I acted and behold, service was joy."
Rabindranath Tagore

"You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence is not an event - it is a habit."
Aristotle

"Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen."
Peter Marshall


And I want to close with a great quote from Bob Proctor:

"It's a strange thing, you have said it thousands of times I am sure… you will never know what you can do until you try. However the sad truth is, that most people never try anything until they know they can do it."
Bob Proctor

Working Towards Your Goals

I wanted to offer some thoughts about goals, I think that this is the perfect time to begin working towards greater accomplishments, especially if your goals include bringing value into the world. I will post some more thoughts about goals and achievement over the next few weeks. Please feel free to comment.

In order to be successful, you need some goals to work towards.
It has been often said that a person without goals is like a ship without a rudder, you just drift from day to day.

Some of the most successful people I have ever studied insist that it is not only necessary to have goals, but also necessary to have them written down.

That is just the first step, if you never take any action towards your goals, it's a little like sitting in your car with a map, but never starting the engine, or putting the car in gear. You never get out of your driveway.

It is not necessary to know every step you are going to take to get to your goal before you get started, it is much more important to get moving, and build momentum. It is easier to change direction than it is to start moving in the first place. Start from where you are right now, and do whatever seems like it will move you in the direction of your goal. Remember the old cliche about a journey of a thousand miles starting with a single step. You will get much further by taking a small step every day, rather than trying to map out every step perfectly before you start.

Perfectionism is most often an obstacle on the way to achievement, and generally an excuse not to take action. While having a plan is helpful, there is no way to cover every possibility, so be flexible in your planning, and use the plan to be sure you are moving in the direction you wish to go.

It is important to be consistent, and take action every day. At first, it will seem extremely difficult, but every day gets a little easier. As you take more steps towards your goal, the level of satisfaction you feel will grow, making it easier to continue. Repeated efforts will also become habitual, so you will not require as much discipline to continue making progress.

Lighten Up!

Those of you who follow me on twitter (look for me under username ecdumchus) know I stopped reading or listening to the news some time ago.

I found that just taking this step made me feel much better psychologically, without the constant input of gloom and doom about the world economy. I have been reading a small local newspaper which has news which directly affects me, things like road closings, local parades and events, but nothing about the economic sky falling.

I strongly urge everyone reading this to do the same. Unplug from the gloom and doom merchants, find something that makes you feel good. Even better, find something that makes you feel good and brings value into the world. Don't worry about getting paid for what you can do as much as what kind of value you can create in the world.

People focusing on bringing value to the economic table is the quickest way to get the economy growing again. It will not happen because of government bailouts, no matter how well intentioned.

Anyway, in the interest of lightening things up, I am making a commitment to begin regularly posting to this blog again, and encourage anyone who has a positive contribution to offer, to leave comments here.

Let's brighten the world! There has been enough darkness.

Real Friendship

This is a story I first found in a collection of middle eastern stories:

A man and his wife were sitting at home when there was a knock at the door. The man answered the door to find one of his friends standing there, looking very troubled.
"What's wrong?", he asked.
His friend replied, "I am so sorry to trouble you, but if I don't get $5000.00 by tomorrow, I will lose my business and my house. Can you help me?"
The man said, "Please don't worry, I will bring you $5000.00 by this evening."
His friend left, much relieved.
The man gathered up what cash he had, and even took some things of value and sold them, but all he could raise was $3000.00. So he went to all his neighbors and friends, asking to borrow whatever they could lend him.
Eventually, he had $5000.00, and took it to his friend.
His friend thanked him profusely, and said he would be forever grateful. The man told his friend it was nothing, and he should repay the money whenever he could.
The man returned home, sat in a chair, buried his head in his hands and cried.
His wife asked, "Are you crying because you are worried that we will not be able to repay what we have borrowed for your friend?"
The man looked up and said, "No, I am crying because my dearest friend in all the world was in need, and I did not know until he came to my door and told me so."


Wouldn't it be wonderful if we all felt this way about our friends?