Quote of the Day -- Terry Tempest Williams

Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.

-- Terry Tempest Williams

Quote of the Day -- Flannery O'Connor

I’m a full-time believer in writing habits…You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away.…Of course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that’s all the energy I have, but I don’t let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place.

-- Flannery O'Connor

Quote of the Day -- Diane Ackerman

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

--Diane Ackerman

Quote of the Day -- Emile Durkheim

Liberty is the daughter of authority properly understood. For to be free is not to do what one pleases; it is to be the master of oneself, it is to know how to act within reason and to do one's duty.

-- Emile Durkheim

Quote of the Day -- Jenny Odell

One thing I have learned about attention is that certain forms of it are contagious. When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something (if you were hanging out with me, it would be birds), you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things.

-- Jenny Odell

Quote of the Day -- Malcolm Gladwell

Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.

-- Malcolm Gladwell

Quote of the Day -- William James

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task. 

-- William James

Quote of the Day

Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

-- variously attributed to Einstein, Aesop's Fables, and other sources

Quote of the Day -- Tim Cook

Technology does not need vast troves of personal data, stitched together across dozens of websites and apps, in order to succeed. Advertising existed and thrived for decades without it. And we're here today because the path of least resistance is rarely the path of wisdom.

If a business is built on misleading users, on data exploitation, on choices that are no choices at all, then it does not deserve our praise. It deserves reform...

At a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement — the longer the better — and all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible...

It is long past time to stop pretending that this approach doesn't come with a cost — of polarization, of lost trust and, yes, of violence.

A social dilemma cannot be allowed to become a social catastrophe.

-- Tim Cook

Quote of the Day -- Kamala Harris

There will be a resistance to your ambition. There will be people who say to you, ‘You are out of your lane,’ because they are burdened by only having the capacity to see what has always been instead of what can be. But don’t you let that burden you.

-- Kamala Harris

Quote of the Day -- Isabel Wilkerson

The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the least that a person in the dominant caste can do is not make the pain any worse.

-- Isabel Wilkerson

Quote of the Day -- Potter Stewart

Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do

-- Potter Stewart

Quote of the Day -- St Therese of Lisieux

When one loves, one does not calculate.

-- St Therese of Lisieux

Quote of the Day --- Marcel Proust

Time…was one of those painters who keep a work by them for half a lifetime, adding to it year after year until it is completed.

-- Marcel Proust

Quote of the Day -- Mary H.K. Choi

It doesn’t get any less scary. All that happens is that you have less life left. It helps if you do your falling early, and it really helps if you do your reaching early.

-- Mary H.K. Choi

Quote of the Day -- James Baldwin

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

-- James Baldwin

Quote of the Day -- Cyril Connolly

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

-- Cyril Connolly

Quote of the Day -- Sandra Cisneros

True reading comes from pleasure, not obligation. When obliged to read something that doesn't speak to you, you'll ultimately forget it.

-- Sandra Cisneros

Quote of the Day -- Eddie S. Glaude,Jr

 In his reflection on Dr. King, Baldwin wrote that we were witnessing the death of segregation as we knew it, and the question was how long and how expensive the funeral would be. If only he knew. We are still in that funeral procession. To be sure, a world is dying, but we have been slow-walking to put it in the grave, and the costs are mounting. How many of our children are languishing in failing schools? How many of our loved ones are rotting in prisons and jails? How many are breaking their backs trying to make ends meet only to fall deeper and deeper into holes full of economic quicksand? How many have we put in the ground? And how many souls have been darkened because of the corrosive effects of America's original sin?

-- Eddie S. Glaude Jr, Begin Again

Quote of the Day -- Robert Benchley

Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.

-- Robert Benchley

Quote of the Day -- Robert Reich

No economy can continue to function when the vast middle class and everybody else don’t have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing without going deeper and deeper into debt.

-- Robert Reich

Quote of the Day -- Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Social media has changed the lives of millions of Americans with a suddenness and force that few expected. The question is whether those changes might invalidate assumptions made by Madison and the other Founders as they designed a system of self-governance. Compared with Americans in the 18th century—and even the late 20th century—citizens are now more connected to one another, in ways that increase public performance and foster moral grandstanding, on platforms that have been designed to make outrage contagious, all while focusing people’s minds on immediate conflicts and untested ideas, untethered from traditions, knowledge, and values that previously exerted a stabilizing effect. This, we believe, is why many Americans—and citizens of many other countries, too—experience democracy as a place where everything is going haywire.

-- Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell, The Atlantic

Quote of the Day -- Laozi

Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail.

-- Laozi

Quote of the Day -- George Leonard

Ultimately, practice is the path of mastery. If you stay on it long enough, you’ll find it to be a vivid place, with its ups and downs, is challenges and comforts, its surprises, disappointments, and unconditional joys. You’ll take your share of bumps and bruises while traveling – bruises of the ego as well as of the body, mind and spirit – but it might well turn out to be the most reliable thing in your life. Then, too, it might eventually make you a winner in your chosen field, if that’s what you’re looking for, and then people will refer to you as a master. But that’s not really the point.

What is mastery? At the heart of it, mastery is practice. Mastery is staying on the path.

 -- George Leonard

Quote of the Day -- Samuel Butler

Do not hunt for subjects, let them choose you, not you them.  Only do that which insists on being done and runs right up against you, hitting you in the eye until you do it.

-- Samuel Butler

Quote of the Day -- Dan Pfeiffer

The filibuster may seem like an odd thing to obsess over during a pandemic, a recession, and after an insurrection. But there is no other option. After nearly a decade, Democrats finally have the power to improve people’s lives and enact progressive policies. Right now we have one hand tied behind our back. When the voters go to the polls in 2022, I would rather they judge us for what we did than what Mitch McConnell stopped us from doing.

Getting rid of the filibuster is not easy. But it can be done. It’s not enough to just yell about those who disagree. We have to do the work.

-- Dan Pfeiffer

Quote of the Day -- Audre Lorde

It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.

-- Audre Lorde

Quote of the Day -- Trevor Noah

Unity doesn't mean you just do what the losers want.

-- Trevor Noah