These are interesting times we live in. Allow me to share some of my favorite quotes. Wishing you peace, health and an extra dose of good sense to endure the upcoming year! I’m taking a second helping of good sense myself .
The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. -Steve (Stephen Bantu) Biko of South Africa
Success is not always fame or fortune. Success is picking up that burden and keep on walking and not letting the pain trip you up. -Maya Angelou
It is human to go through negative experiences, disappointments and frustrations. It is one of the ways leading us to maturity. -Kunkel & Dickerson (paraphrase of Kierkegaard)
Affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured, ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction. -John Donne
Happiness lies for those who cry, those who hurt, those who have searched and those who have tried. For only they can appreciate the importance of people who have touched their lives. – Unknown
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. -Fanshen (Chinese play re: revolution)
The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. – JFK
For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine…instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear…they will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. – Bible
The past may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme. – Mark Twain
What history teaches is that men have never learned anything from it. – Hegel
The treatment creates the disease; the illness is doctor-made. -Dr. Ganaway re: repressed memory therapy
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.- Friedrich Nietzsche
I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny – Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear. -Margaret Chase Smith (Republican senator in the 1950s McCarthy era)
God’s own country becomes stranger and stranger, but somehow they manage to return to normality. Everything – even lunacy – is massed produced here. But everything goes out of fashion very quickly. – Einstein re McCarthyism
The value of education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think. – Einstein
It seems to me an utterly futile task to prescribe rules and limitations for the conduct of war. War is not a game; hence one cannot wage war by rules as one would in playing games. – Einstein
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. – Theodore Roosevelt” The Man in the Arena” speech
Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices, but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thought in clear form. – variation of Einstein quote
Ronda is an attorney, writer, and entrepreneur. She is a contributing writer for the Huffington Post. Originally from Chicago, she has lived in Los Angeles and New York. She loves to travel and is passionate about education equity, especially for first generation college students.