"A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on."
-Carl Sandburg

5 Steps for Happiness

(1) Connect
Developing relationships with family, friends, colleagues and neighbours will enrich your life and bring you support
(2) Be active
Sports, hobbies such as gardening or dancing, or just a daily stroll will make you feel good and maintain mobility and fitness
(3) Be curious
Noting the beauty of everyday moments as well as the unusual and reflecting on them helps you to appreciate what matters to you
(4) Learn
Fixing a bike, learning an instrument, cooking – the challenge and satisfaction brings fun and confidence
(5) Give
Helping friends and strangers links your happiness to a wider community and is very rewarding
-Foresight Report (as reported in London Times, 7-22-08)

“Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature.”
–Benjamin Franklin

"When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set."
-Lin Yutang

"Socialism has the problem that before wealth can be distributed, there has to be wealth created to distribute. As the Scandinavian welfare states have discovered, things work well so long as the population has the old Protestant Ethic that says work is good, idle hands are the devil's workshop, and one ought not take advantage of charity if one does not need it. Over generations this fades, particularly if there is a concerted effort to undermine the religious base of these beliefs, with the result that more and more of the citizenry choose to be recipients of benefits rather than creators of wealth. That process continues and the outcome isn't entirely predictable."
-Jerry Pournelle

"Yet the paradox of science is that every answer breeds at least two new questions. More answers, more questions. Telescopes and microscopes expanded not only what we knew, but what we didn't know. They allowed us to spy into our ignorance. New and better tools permit us new and better questions."
-Kevin Kelly

"Free" health-care costs us something precious, and no less precious for being invisible. Because there's a word for someone who has their food, housing and care provided for them... for people who owe their existence to someone else. And that word is "slaves."
-Bill Whittle

"Perceived truth is more powerful than truth itself."
-Michel Fortin

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that Nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
-John Stuart Mill

Old-Fashioned Work Ethic

"When I was very young, I worked with old-fashioned persons that were building old-fashioned things for old-fashioned customers in the old-fashioned way.
They'd all smoke all the time around flammable things and never cause a fire. They'd drink themselves blind after work, but never miss the following day. They were late if they weren't 30 minutes early, too. They always carried a newspaper. If someone brought them a phone while they were working (It's for you.) there was someone dead on the other end of the line."
-Sippican Cottage

Wisdom from an Atheist

"In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive."
-David Foster Wallace (self-described atheist)

"Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head."
-David Foster Wallace

"Don't worry about being kicked from behind, that's how you know you're in front."
-unknown

"As a general proposition, when told by unanimous elites that a particular course of action is urgent and necessary to avoid disaster, there's a lot to be said for going fishing."
-Mark Steyn