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August 2006

“A lot of people hate heroes,” he continues. “I was criticized for portraying people who are brave, honest, loving, intelligent. That was called weak and sentimental. People who dismiss all real emotion as sentimentality are cowards. They’re afraid to commit themselves, and so they remain ‘cool’ for the rest of their lives, until they’re dead—then they’re really cool.”
Mark Helprin
novelist

Whoever is responsible [for the history of life] is just trying out various possibilities. We don't have an intelligent designer (ID), we have a bungling consistent evolver (BCE). Or maybe an adaptive changer (AC). In fact, what we have in the most economical interpretation is, of course, evolution.
Lisa Randall
physicist.

We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context which we cannot properly describe.
Christopher Alexander

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is
the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a
minimum. (so as to increase the infantile dependence they thrive on)..
Thomas Szasz
author, professor of psychiatry (1920- )

Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed.
Peter F. Drucker

Testing can show the presence of errors, but not their absence.
Edsger Dijkstra
computer scientist (1930-2002)

The myriad forms of expression that man has developed, and the visible differences between men, are at odds with the abstractions that inform the values of civilization. Yet the ties that bind all men seem to rest on those abstractions and not on the obvious differences that characterize mankind as a whole. And language has shaped the very abstractions that civil society depends on. But paradoxically, language also plays its role as the last frontier of identity. It binds us through the abstract power and symbolic significance it confers, but at the same time celebrates the variety in life. The Indian Nobel economist, Amartya Sen, has fleshed this out in his recent book on the very idea of identity and the conflicts based on it in the modern world.
JD 

As many people will admire or praise you as will envy or hate you, no matter what your achievement or success. A no-win situation. So let your vanities slip away and focus on the only thing that matters: be true to yourself, enrich yourself from within and share this with others; be alert to your own nature, observe others, do what you like and try to do it well. What else can you do?
JD

Put another way:

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Carl Jung