One of us has a proclivity for cutting to the quick, grabbing the essence of what's going on in a situation, and responding with a short pithy statement. Over the years, some of his friends began collecting these sayings and eventually compiled them into a little book that they called "Bill's Wisdom." Here are the most printable of Bill's quotations. You'll also find here some of our other favorites and quotations by people from times past that seem particularly apt in light of current events.
On Relationships:
- The essence of trust is "how safe is it for me to be me in this situation as opposed to being careful?"
- Assume underlying good intentions.
- If you can't explain it to an eight-year old, you probably don't understand it yourself.
- If you want to teach your children to hit people, whenever you catch them clobbering someone, hit them over the head.
- Once we label people we proceed to sort only for behavior that verifies our label (proves we were right) and at that point we are no longer interacting and responding to the person, but to the stereotype of the label.
- If you're uncomfortable, then it must be your move.
- You don't get to choose who you fall in love with, but you do get to choose what you do about it.
- Owning your emotions is the essence of maturity. Not owning your emotions is the primary way to sabotage your relationships.
On Life and Living (Serious):
- What you do today makes who you are tomorrow.
- It's the height of stupidity to keep on doing the same thing and expect a different outcome.
- We're the first species that is able to change the course of our own evolution. We've changed the way we do things over the last 100,000 years in a way that squirrels and other species haven't.
- When you think you have the answer, you've lost your capacity to listen.
- When you find yourself giving advice, eavesdrop.
- The principle characteristic one needs to perpetrate evil is righteousness.
- The price of security is freedom; the price of freedom is security.
- Your goal seems to be to have a pleasant life while saving the world.
- A lot of people are walking around dead, only they don't know it.
- If you have enough money you can distract yourself from living.
- This country is infected with the great American Hurry-Up disease.
- The man who made time, made a lot of it.
- My three rules for life are: (1) Know what you want; (2) Take what you get; and (3) No whining.
- The dues humans pay for being a meaning-driven species are existential crises. There are no other species asking "what should I do with my life?"
- You make every important decision in your life with insufficient information.
- We all get stuck as we go through life, and need help. Schools teach us that that's cheating--you're supposed to be able to do it yourself.
- We all decide by the end of our first three years of life whether the world is a safe place or a dangerous place.
- It's not what you experience, it's what sense you make of it.
On Life and Living (Humorous):
- Brewing rudely-named ales in a trash can in your cellar makes you sexy. Giving away the same ale makes you lots of friends.
- Never get in a pissing contest with a skunk.
- Neckties cut off the flow of blood to the brain.
- If you spend too much time looking up your own asshole, you get a stiff neck.
- Send me in coach, I don't smoke.
- When all else fails, eat!
- I was in love once for 3 days, then the swelling went down.
- So far, every time I've cried, I've stopped later on.
- Whining is anger coming through a very small hole.
- Don't tell me what to do unless you want me not to do it.
- It's not right, it's not fair, this always happens to me.
- You're not supposed to confuse an erection with love.
- If at first you don't succeed, quit -there's no sense making a fool of yourself.
- They said it couldn't be done and he smiled and went right to it. He tackled the job that couldn't be done, and by God he couldn't do it (with apologies to Eugene Fields.)
- Super, peachy keen, swell, pretty good, and not bad.
- The world is 95% ludicrous and 5% sublime. Our job is to figure out which is which. When in doubt, stick with ludicrous.
- I'd rather be a person than a wife.
- Life sucks woodpecker eggs.
On Society and Institutions:
- In order to get the attention of public institutions, you have to be either bad, sick, or crazy.
- Every culture has to decide what behaviors are good, bad, sick, stupid, and crazy. If it's good, you reward it. If it's bad, you punish it. If it's sick, you cure it. If it's stupid, you educate it. If it's crazy, you confine it.
- How a society decides to label behaviors determines how it uses its resources. For example, since drugs are bad we have a war on drugs and have spent billions punishing people. Had we instead decided drug use was stupid, we would have gone for education. If we'd thought it was sick, we'd have tried to cure it.
- The educational system in this country is stupid; the health-care system is sick; and the judicial system is criminal.
- The school contract is "I'll promise to teach you if you'll promise not to learn."
- When people decide they can't put all the bad guys in prison, they build a prison for themselves, call it a gated community, and move in.
- Under communism, man is manipulated by man - whereas under capitalism, it's the other way around. John Kenneth Galbraith.
- Life is the sum of what you focus on. Winifred Gallagher
- When things are easy, a person doesn't really learn abut himself. It's what a person does at the moment of his greatest struggle that shows him who he really is. John Chatterton
- One of the most persistent cultural tics of the early 21st century is Americans’ reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news. Frank Rich
- Life is a matter of luck and the odds in favor of success are in no way enhanced by extreme caution. Erich Topp
- The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. Henry Miller
- Live passionately, love completely, learn humbly, and leave boldly. Kerry and Chris Shook
- The eyes only see what the mind is prepared to comprehend. Henri L. Bergson
- Our problems are caused by solutions. Eric Sevareid
- A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. Sir Winston Churchill
- Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unneccessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unneccessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. William Strunk, Jr.
- Go out into the world where your heart calls you. The blessings will come, I promise you that. I wish for you the insight to recognize the blessings as such, and sometimes it's hard. But you'll know it's a blessing if you are enriched and transformed by the experience. So be ready. There are great souls and teachers everywhere. It's your job to recognize them. Sy Montgomery
- Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to allwe now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand. Albert Einstein
- Man is the only animal who can make promises. Frederick Nietzsche
- Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from. Terry Tempest Williams
- When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. Unknown
- People are down on the things they're not up on. Patty Lemer
- The foolish reject what they see, not what they think. The wise reject what they think, not what they see. Huang Po
- Dependency, especially on political and religious authority, is the distinguishingn mark of a barbarous and primitive society, while autonomy - liberty - is the mark of a modern and civilized one. Arthur Herman
- Dishonesty is a uniquely human form of behavior. J.P. Sartre
- Fundamentally, there is no such thing as a grown-up person. Andreé Malraux
- Certainty is inversely proportional to knowledge. Irvin Yalom
- He has a first-rate mind -- until he makes it up. Violet Bonham Carter
- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Goethe
- Things are in the saddle and they ride mankind. Ralph Waldo Emerson
- You have to believe in yourself. Ella Rentschler (at age 3)
- My fundamental maxim of government is "never trust the lamb to the wolf." John Adams, 2nd US President
- As for living, our servants can do that for us. George Bernard Shaw
- You can't solve problems with the same mindset that created them. Albert Einstein
- The meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of. Sigmund Freud
- We all suffer perceptual distortions, so we need help in clarifying our data interpretation in every domain of experience. Michael Murphy
- Wherever there is perception, there is deception. Most of our perceptions are erroneous. We have to keep asking ourselves: "Am I sure?" Thic Nhat Hanh
- Even the Gods are helpless against stupidity. Frederick Nietszche
- Alas for those who never sing, but die with all their music in them. Oliver Wendell Holmes
- The unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates
- Intelligence being a generalized move for well-being...there is no trace of intelligence in those creating a neutron bomb--but ah, what brilliant intellect is there! Joseph Chilton Pearce
- The power that others have to annoy us is a power that we give them. Charles L. Asam
- The better part of wisdom is knowing when to say goodbye. George Leonard
- Don't look at me in that tone of voice. Bill's mother
- More and more the universe looks like a great thought rather than a great machine. Astronomer James Jeans
- Socialism is whatever brings happiness to the people. General Vo Nguyen Giap
- Few ideas are correct ones, and which they are none can tell, but with words we govern men. Benjamin Disraeli
- The central thing you need to have to understand your government is an automatic built-in bullshit detector. Noam Chomsky
- We tend to refer to our most barbaric and crapulous behavior as "inhuman," whereas, in point of fact, it is exactly human, definitively and quintessentially human, since no other creature habitually indulges in comparable atrocities. This negates neither our occasional virtues nor our aesthetic triumphs, but if a being at least a little more than human is not waiting around the bend of time, then evolution has suffered a premature ejaculation. Tom Robbins
- Despite all our past self-destructive behavior from which we could have learned, many people who should know better dispute the need for limiting our population and continue to assault our environment. Others join that assault for selfish profit or out of ignorance. Even more people are too caught up in the desperate struggle for survival to be able to enjoy the luxury of weighing the consequences of their actions. Jared Diamond
- Journalism is not a product looking for a niche market--it is a vital extension of democracy and, without diversity, journalists are merely the agents of power when they should be the agents of the people. John Pilger
- Learn every day as if you will live forever. Live every day as if you will die tomorrow. John Wooden
- Go see what Billy's doing and tell him to stop. Bill's mother
- I live on a big round ball, I never do dream I may fall..... I don't even know where we are, they tell me we're circling a star. Jesse Winchester
- The Good Old Days - I was there. Where was they? Moms Moberley
- What is my country? If battling was my nature, what country would I battle for? Elizabeth Brewster
- Normally our thoughts have us rather than we having them. David Bohm
- No bureau, no plan, no established project, nor road, no consessionaire, no works of man of any kind has consequential value. Ansel Adams
- To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. Mary Oliver
- I destroy my enemy when I make him my friend. Abraham Lincoln
- Afghanistan taught us an invaluable lesson ... It has been and always will be impossible to solve political problems using force. Russian General Boris Gromov.
- Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind. War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today. John F. Kennedy
- Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Voltaire
- This we know: all things are connected like the blood which unites one family. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. Chief Seattle
- Virtue and truth produced strength, strength dominion, dominion riches, riches luxury, and luxury weakness and collapse - fatal sequence repeated so often. John Anthony Froude
- To see what's in front of one's nose is a constant struggle. George Orwell
- Concern for man himself and his safety must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations. Albert Einstein
- They made a wasteland, and called it peace. Tacitus
- Those who cannot learn from history, are doomed to repeat it. Santayana
- Waging a war is simple, but running a country is very difficult. Pham Van Dong
- Thus far, the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. Bernard Brodie in 1946
- There are no winners in any war. There are only those who have survived it, and those who haven't. Any war, now, no longer amounts to military tactical operations and striking the flank. It is terror, hiding in wait right next door, which is the strongest weapon of mass destruction. There is no rear. There is no front line either. Sergei Mikhalych
- I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the rights of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpation. James Madison, 4th U.S. President.
- Democracy is a means of living together despite our differences. Democratic deliberation is an alternative to physical violence. It is predicated on the assumption that it’s possible to disagree agreeably, that it’s better to laugh than cry, that one can vigorously contest the positions of one’s adversary without questioning his or her personal integrity or motivation, and that parties to a debate are entitled to the presumption that their views are legitimate if not correct. Thomas Mann
- The hiring out of concentration camp inmates to industrial enterprises yields an average daily return of 6-8 marks from which 70 pfennigs must be deducted for food and clothing. Assuming a camp inmate's life expectancy of 9 months we multiply this sum by 270; the total is 1,431 marks. This profit can be increased by rational utilization of the corpse, i.e. by means of gold fillings, clothing, valuables, etc., but on the other hand every corpse represents a loss of 2 marks which is the cost of cremation. Report from the Cost Accounting Department of the WVHA (SS Economic Administration Main Office) during the 3rd Reich.
- Those who would give up their liberties for a little safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. Benjamin Franklin
- Regulation in favour of the workmen is always just and equitable though not when in favour of the masters...and must be found in every improved and civilized society. Adam Smith
- They (early explorers) committed the same stupidities again and again: unwarranted pride in overstated accomplishments; refusal to acknowledge disastrous oversights; ignoring the experience of previous explorers; constant repetition of previous errors - and hence created a long history of unneccessary sufferings and deaths. Nothing was learned, and everything forgotten. Arthur Wichmann
- Terrorism is an autoimune disease. Its purpose is to cause harm by provoking an over-reaction. Adam Gopnick.
- "Terrorism" is the calculated use of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature through intimidation, coercion or instilling fear. US Code and Army Manuals
Bill Dillon (KG4QFM)
and
Pat Watt (KG4QFQ)
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September 3, 2009
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