Miscellaneous Thoughts

"There is always an easy solution to every human problem - neat, plausible and wrong."

H. L. Mencken, muckraker and newsman

"Never underestimate the power of a good ambiguity."

Peter Adler

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has."

Margaret Mead

Four rules for life:

  - Show up

  - Pay attention

  - Speak your personal truth

  - Don't be attached to the outcome

                         - Angeles Arrien, "The Four-Fold Way"

"You cannot teach anyone anything. You can only help them find it within themselves."

Galileo

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."

Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. General, President

"Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he or she sends forth a tiny ripple of hope. And crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of repression and resistance."

Speech given by Robert Kennedy in 1966 in South Africa

"To love is not to give of your riches but to reveal to others their riches, their gifts, their value, and to trust them and their capacity to grow."

Sanjit Singh, mediator and arbitrator

"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and help them become what they are capable of being."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Experience is that marvelous thing that enables us to recognize a mistake when we make it again."

Franklin P. Jones

"There is nothing stronger in the world than gentleness."

Han Suyin

"Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace, and power in it."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but takes us deeper into it."

Henri Nouwen

Sir Thomas More responds to the fanatic Roper's assertion that he would cut down every law in England to get at the Devil. More responds: "..this country's planted thick with laws…and if you cut them down, d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil the benefit of law for my own safety's sake."

On the importance of the rule of law: In Robert Bolt's play, 'A Man for All Seasons'