Profound Thinking

Once in a while you come across a quote, thought, idea or bit of inspiration that really resonates with you. That happened today when I read the following. I think I will simply update this entry whenever I come across something that hits home.

• When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.
  - Benjamin Disraeli


• Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
  - Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1928; Olmstead v. United States)


• All these guys ... play [guitar] so fast, but the guy that wins is the guy that plays the melody and reaches the heart.
  - Les Paul at 90


• ...We should never permit ourselves to do anything that we are not willing to see our children do.
  - Brigham Young (Journal of Discourses, Vol. 14:192)


• Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves.
  - JRR Tolkien


• The only measure of what you believe is what you do. If you want to know what people believe, don't read what they write, don't ask them what they believe, just observe what they do.
  - Ashley Montagu


• It must take an incredible amount of faith to be an atheist.
  - me


• The problem with the solutions is that they cannot be implemented by committee. Katrina is a good example of what happens when no one is in charge... You can't manage a crises by consensus.
  - Mike Deering


• It's amazing how much better you feel once you've given up hope.
  - unknown [Comment: No, it's NOT profound, but it is pretty funny!]


• A man "has a right to use his knife to cut his meat, a fork to hold it; may a patentee take from him the right to combine their use on the same subject?"
  - Thomas Jefferson


• It's not what you play, it's what you play.
  - me [20 Dec 2005; E-mail to a friend. A reference to guitar gear vs. musicality.]


• I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
  - Tom Stoppard (British dramatist & screenwriter)