Your Quote of the Day

Heredity is what sets the parents of a teenager wondering about each other.
~ Dr. Laurence J. Peter

But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who
give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts,
such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.

~O. Henry
The Gift of the Magi

Sentimental, I know. But one of my favorite Christmas stories.

Mine, too, George.

"...for the gift without the giver is bare..."

The Vision of Sir Launfal by James Russell Lowell

~ There must be some easier way for me to get my wings.~
Clarence Oddbody
It's a Wonderful Life

'Our federal government should not be in the business of selecting which married couples it supports and which it treats with contempt.'
-Elizabeth Warren

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
(Hitchens died today)

"And now, sir, I'll go and look after the camels and those half-bred Jew boys what you call Abati, but I call rotten sneaks, for if they get their thieving fingers into those cannisters of picric salts, thinking they're jam, as I found them trying to do yesterday, something may happen in Egypt that'll make the Pharaohs turn in their graves and the Ten Plagues look silly."

Sergeant Quick in Queen Sheba's Ring by Rider Haggard.

*Picric salts are high explosives symbolising European science.

Isolationists ought to be stunned by such a prescient prophecy.

Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice. ~Unknown

“The madman is a dreamer awake”
― Sigmund Freud

“What is laid down, ordered, factual, is never enough to embrace the whole truth; life always spills over the rim of every cup.”
― Boris Pasternak

As ye have do it unto the least of these, my brother, you have done it unto me.

Henry Van Dyke's The Other Wise Man

"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), Inaugural Address, January 20, 1953

We have to be very careful about stereotyping Romany travellers nowadays......in case they put a curse on us. Jack Dee.

"We can always add to our knowledge. But we cannot subtract from it."
Arthur Koestler The Sleepwalkers.

So, Andrew? You never had a concussion right?

Just quoting Koestler, Tsar. I think he means the collective "we" in the sense of the accumulated knowledge of an entire culture. Individuals may suffer a concussion, come down with amnesia, incur brain damage. But "we" still have the knowledge that was acquired by an earlier generation.

I urge you to read the book that quotation is from; he pretty well demolishes his own argument later on by pointing out that the ancient Greeks of Euclid's time knew far more geometry than the European philosophers of the late Middle Ages.

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.
Eric Hoffer

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Vaclav Havel who died yesterday.

"A dictator is only as entrenched as his army is loyal."
Me

"Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it"
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)