Every time I try to cull the piles and files of clippings and quotes saved as possible starters for articles, I am only reminded of why I saved each one. They are funny, or ouchily true, or concisely stated outrage, or… well, you get it. My culling stalls. I offer here a selection of thoughts of others for you to ponder for your own Aha! Hmmm. Ouch! Yes! No way! Well, duh moments. And when you’ve found your favorite one, call another Leaguer for coffee and conversation.

John Brandl - In a 1997 op-ed piece John Brandl wrote about the overemphasis on individual preferences over community which made governing difficult. “Individual choice itself becomes the only moral absolute…No wonder government, which has largely to do with accommodating differences of opinion, is so difficult. We live in a time when the working out of differences is unrecognized as legitimate, much less noble. We reject the existence of a public realm where the good of the whole requires more than each of us doing our own thing.” 1997! [Underlining added.]

Cornel West - “We must have both individual responsibility and collective accountability.”

Marie Curie - “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

Sinclair Lewis - “When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

Henry Steele Commager - “Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism and find criticism subversive.”

Emma Goldman - “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”

Voltaire - “Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others, to persecute those who do reason.”  And “Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is an absurd one.”

Samuel Johnson - “As any action or posture long continued will distort and disfigure the limbs; so the mind likewise is crippled and contracted by perpetual application to the same set of ideas.”

David Lloyd George - “You can’t cross a chasm in two small steps.”

Petrarch - “Believe me, many things are attributed to gravity and wisdom which are really due to incapacity and sloth. Men often despise what they despair of obtaining. It is in the very nature of ignorance to scorn what it cannot understand, and to desire to keep others from attaining what it cannot reach. Hence the false judgments upon matters of which we know nothing, by which we evince our envy quite as clearly as our stupidity.”

Eric Hoffer - “In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.” ready for your content.

 And before I go, please remember something Malcolm Forbes said, “Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.”  You are valued in the League.