Learning Humility

Question: How can I learn to be humble?

Answer: Get humiliated!

Question: And if that doesn't work?

Answer: Get humiliated again.

Self-debasement

No one can better make one look like a fool than one's self.

"Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents" (in American politics)

From William Burke's speech given in Parliament on April 23,1770.

"Whilst men are linked together, they easily and speedily communicate the alarm of any evil design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel, and to oppose it with united strength. Whereas, when they lie dispersed, without concert, order, or discipline, communication is uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance impracticable. Where men are not acquainted with each other’s principles, nor experienced in each other’s talents, nor at all practised in their mutual habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts in business; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy. In a connection, the most inconsiderable man, by adding to the weight of the whole, has his value, and his use; out of it, the greatest talents are wholly unserviceable to the public. No man, who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours, are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

One hundred years later the last sentence had been altered to become the oft quoted "misquote": The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

It is time (in America) for good men to "man up", stand up and speak up!

Six Honest Serving Men

I KEEP six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.

Rudyard Kipling

Let them serve you and they'll help you get to the bottom of almost anything.

A Kick in the Pants by Teddy

If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month.

Theodore Roosevelt

Abe Lincoln on canine anatomy

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.


Abraham Lincoln

Do you love me? Feed my sheep.

A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of friends.

George Washington