The Hairy Reasoner Philosophy « The Hairy Reasoner

The Hairy Reasoner Philosophy

Be ~~nice~~ good, be happy, stay busy and don’t worry;
(OK, worry a little.)
Learn, but think for yourself.
And always take responsibility for yourself. – T.H.Reasoner

Be Nice Good

“Do unto others as you would wish them do onto you.�? – Many (I recommend that everyone find time to read this. It’s not very long.)

“The measure of a man’s real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.�? – Thomas Babington Macaulay

“The best index to a person’s character is (a) how he treats people who can’t do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can’t fight back.�? – Abigail van Buren (Pauline Esther Friedman)

“Character is doing the right thing when nobody’s looking. There are too many people who think that the only thing that’s right is to get by, and the only thing that’s wrong is to get caught.�? – J. C. Watts

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character give him power.�? – Abraham Lincoln

“Wise people, even though all laws were abolished, would still live the same life.�? – Aristophanes

“There is no pillow so soft as a clear conscience.�? – French proverb

“To see what is right and not to do it is cowardice.�? – Confucius

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.�? – Harry S. Truman (It’s amazing how many people have taken – or been given – credit for this statement, from Little League coaches to Ronald Reagan.)

“Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.�? – Sophocles

“No legacy is so rich as honesty.�? – William Shakespeare

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.�?- Aesop

“You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.�? – Kahlil Gibran

“Relativity applies to physics, not ethics.�? – Albert Einstein

“You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.�? – Booker T. Washington

“You cannot get ahead while you are getting even.�? - Dick Armey

“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.�? – Buddha

“How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.�? – Marcus Aurelius

“Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that crushed it.�? – Mark Twain

“Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right.�? – Isaac Asimov

I do not accept the notion that “Might makes right.�? It just gets Its way.

“I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.�? – Thomas Jefferson

“To listen closely and reply well is the highest perfection we are able to attain in the art of conversation.�? – Francois de La Rochefoucauld (because…)

“The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.�? – Joseph Joubert

“There are seven sins in the world: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principle.�? – Mohandas Gandhi

“Morality cannot be legislated but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.�? – Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking others to live as one wishes to live.�? – Oscar Wilde

“You will not become a saint through other people’s sins.�? – Chekhov

“Immorality: The morality of those who are having a better time.�? – H. L. Mencken

“The Prohibitionists just seem sore at the world. Why not settle this Prohibition fifty-fifty? Let the Prohibitionists quit drinking.�? – Will Rogers (and quit smoking and quit watching TV and movies they don’t like and quit listening to music and quit saying anything that might possibly offend anyone else and quit using birth control and whatever else they don’t want to do and most importantly, quit having sex!)

“When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned.
Do not have sex with the authorities.�? – Matt Groening (Doh!)

“Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.�? – Victor Hugo

It isn’t always what you say, but how you say it.

Be Happy

“Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness, and just be happy.�? – Guillaume Apollinaire

“All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.�? – Samuel Butler

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.�? – J.R.R. Tolkien

“Without music life would be a mistake.�? – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“He who is contented is rich.�? – Lao Tzu

“Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.�? – Dalai Lama

“While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness is not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.�? – H.G. Wells

“Life is too short for bad attitudes.�? – Jorge Marco Contreras Death Row Inmate, San Quentin State Prison

“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

“There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money either.�? – Robert Graves

“I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.�? – Joseph Addison

“It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.�? – e.e. cummings

“I’d rather be a failure at something I enjoy than a success at something I hate.�? – George Burns

“To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common–this is my symphony.�? – William Henry Channing

“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.�? – Agatha Christie

“You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.�? – Thomas Wolfe

“Happiness is like a cat, if you try to coax it or call it, it will avoid you; it will never come. But if you pay no attention to it and go about your business, you’ll find it rubbing against your legs and jumping into your lap.�? – William J. Bennett

“My definition of success is to live your life in a way that causes you to feel a ton of pleasure and very little pain – and because of your lifestyle, have the people around you feel a lot more pleasure than they do pain.�? – Anthony Robbins

“Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.�? – Sir James Barrie

“The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.�? – e.e. cummings

Stay Busy

“Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately rise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.�? – Blaise Pascal

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing.�? – George Bernard Shaw

“Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.�? – Samuel Johnson

“The golden opportunity you are seeking is in yourself. It is not in your environment; it is not in luck or chance, or the help of others; it is in yourself alone.�? – Orison Swett Marden

If necessity is the mother of invention, curiosity is the father.

“In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.�? – Robert Louis Stevenson

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.�? – E. B. White

Don’t Worry

“Grief is the agony of an instant, the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.�? – Benjamin Disraeli

“Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due.�? – William R. Inge

“All of us could take a lesson from the weather; it pays no attention to criticism.�? – Unknown

“Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can’t build on it; it’s only for wallowing in.�? – Katherine Mansfield

“What is the essence of America? Finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom ‘to’ and freedom ‘from’.�? – Marilyn Vos Savant

“Worrying is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you anywhere.�? – Unknown

OK, Worry a Little

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.�? -William Pitt

“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.�? – Thomas Jefferson

“A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.�? – Dwight D. Eisenhower

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.�? – Thomas Jefferson

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.�? – Albert Einstein

“If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.�? – Jean-Paul Sartre

“You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.�? – Jeannette Rankin

“Why of course the people don’t want war…. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship…. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they’re being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.�? – Hermann Goering

“There are no warlike peoples, just warlike leaders.�? – Ralph Bunche

“It is war that wastes a nation’s wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.�? – George Santayana (If Santayana was still around, he’d have to add “rich cowards�? to his list of progenitors.)

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. – Bertrand Russell

“Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.�? – Laurens Van der Post

“Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.�? – George Bernard Shaw

“Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.�? – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“Avoid clean people who have a dirty stare.�? – Malcolm De Chazal

“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.�? – Susan B Anthony

“Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.�? – Albert Camus

“Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.�? – Adam Smith

“We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.�? – Jonathan Swift

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.�? – H.L.Mencken

“A closed mind is like a closed book: just a block of wood.�? – Chinese Proverb

“Beware the man of one book.�? – St. Thomas Aquinas

“Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.�? – Ronald Reagan

“In politics stupidity is not a handicap.�? – Napoleon I Bonaparte

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.�? – Charles Darwin

“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.�? – Aesop

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors�? – Plato

“The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.�? – Oliver Wendell Holmes

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.�? – Theodore Roosevelt

“The Right thinks that our country already has a moral identity, and hopes to keep that identity intact. It fears economic and political change, and therefore easily becomes the pawn of the rich and powerful – the people whose selfish interests are served by forestalling such change.�? – Richard Rorty

“[F]ear never creates; it petrifies.�? – Gustavo Gutierrez (I’ve never understood how “good enough�? is better than “better.�?)

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.�? – H.L. Mencken

“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.�? – P.J. O’Rourke

“When nations grow old, the arts grow cold and commerce settles on every tree.�? – William Blake

Learn

“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.�? – T.H. Huxley

“The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.�? – Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.�? – Admiral Hyman G. Rickover

“An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don’t. It’s knowing where to go to find out what you need to know; and it’s knowing how to use the information you get.�? – William Feather

“I believe that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience, that the process and the goal of education are the same thing. I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.�? – John Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed

“Learning is not attained by chance. It must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.�? – Abigail Adams

“Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education.�? – Chuang-Tzu

“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.�? – John Powell

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.�? – William Butler Yeats

“We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.�? – Marcel Proust

“Some people drink from the fountain of knowledge, others just gargle.�? – Robert Anthony

“Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify.�? – Ambrose Bierce

“I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.�? – Franklin Pierce Adams

“The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.�? – Mark Twain

“It is an axiom in political science that unless a people are educated and enlightened it is idle to expect the continuance of civil liberty or the capacity for self-government.�? – Texas Declaration of Independence

“A mind without instruction can no more bear fruit than can a field, however fertile, without cultivation.�? – Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.�? – Albert Einstein

“All things are difficult before they are easy.�? – Thomas Fuller

“No one has yet fully realized the wealth of sympathy, kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.�? – Emma Goldman

“Don’t worry that children never listen to you. Worry that they are always watching you.�? – Robert Fulghum

“I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma.�? – Eartha Kitt

But Think for Yourself

“Great minds think for themselves.�? – Immanuel Kant

“So long as men praise you, you can only be sure that you are not yet on your own true path but on someone else’s.�? – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.�? – Mark Twain

“A free society is a place where it’s safe to be unpopular.�? – Adlai Stevenson

“It isn’t the questions that get us into trouble; it’s the answers.�? – Tom Brokaw

“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.�? – George Orwell

“The opposite of bravery is not cowardice, but conformity.�? – Robert Anthony

“I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.�? – Eleanor Roosevelt

“Wisdom doesn’t automatically come with old age. Nothing does — except wrinkles. It’s true, some wines improve with age. But only if the grapes were good in the first place.�? – Abigail van Buren (Pauline Esther Friedman)

“Some folks are wise and some are otherwise.�? – Tobias Smollett

“The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.�? – H.L. Mencken

“During my eighty-seven years I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.�? – Bernard Baruch

“Wisdom is perishable. Unlike information or knowledge, it cannot be stored in a computer or recorded in a book. It expires with each passing generation. “– Sid Taylor

“True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise man doubteth often, and changeth his mind; the fool is obstinate, and doubteth not; he knoweth all things but his own ignorance.�? – Akhenaton

“Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.�? – André Gide

“For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of ‘brainwashing under freedom’ to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments.�? – Noam Chomsky

“The very first lesson that we have a right to demand that logic shall teach us is how to make our ideas clear; and a most important one it is, depreciated only by minds who stand in need of it.�? – Charles Sanders Peirce

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.�? – F. Scott Fitzgerald

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.�? – Aristotle

“I never learned from a man who agreed with me.�? – Robert A. Heinlein

“It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot, irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.�? – J. Bronowski

“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.�? – George Bernard Shaw

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.�? – Oscar Wilde (Yes, I get the irony.)

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on ‘I am not too sure.’“ – H.L.Mencken

“If a man will begin in certainties he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties.�? – Sir Francis Bacon

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.�? – Voltaire

“If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.�? – Voltaire

“The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.�? – Richard Francis Burton

“Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.�? – Thomas Jefferson

“The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, firm enough, fixed enough for it.�? – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.�? – Arthur C. Clarke

If your beliefs can not withstand scrutiny, they probably need it.

(because…)

“It is always easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.�? – Alfred Adler (and nothing good will come from that.)

“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.�? – Winston Churchill

“Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.�? – George Santayana

“It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.�? – Carl Gustav Jung

“We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.�? – Anais Nin

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last you create what you will.�? – George Bernard Shaw

“The great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful theory by an ugly fact.�? – Thomas Huxley

“Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts�? – Daniel Patrick Moynihan

“The lack of objectivity, as far as foreign nations are concerned, is notorious. From one day to another, another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one’s own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard – every action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals which they serve.�? – Erich Fromm

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.�? – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

“Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem.�? – John Galsworthy (Pragmatism increases in direct proportion to one’s closeness to the problem.)

“In youth we feel richer for every new illusion; in maturer years, for every one we lose.�? – Anne Sophie Swetchine

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.�? – Philip K. Dick

“Reason is the cause of the falsification of the evidence of the senses.�? – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.�? – Matthew 15:14

And Always Take Responsibility for Yourself

“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.�?- George Bernard Shaw

“It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.�? – e.e. cummings

“An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.�? – Mohandas Gandhi

“Ninety-nine percent of all failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.�? – George Washington Carver

“Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you is determinism; the way you play it is free will.�? – Jawaharlal Nehru

“Life is not holding a good hand. Life is playing a poor hand well.�? – Danish Proverb

“A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.�? – Albert Einstein

“There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.�? – R. Buckminster Fuller

“We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice – that is, until we have stopped saying ‘It got lost,’ and say, ‘I lost it.’�? – Sydney J. Harris

“That excuse — ‘I didn’t know any better’ — might work when you are seven years-old, but not when you are the President of the United States.�? – Etan Thomas

“You can make mistakes, but you aren’t a failure until you start blaming others for those mistakes.�? – John Wooden

“When you blame others, you give up your power to change.�? – Douglas Adams

“In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.�? – Robert Green Ingersoll

Hmmmm…

“Normal is a cycle on a washing machine.�? – Emmy Lou Harris

“A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.�? – Dave Barry

“[If] you look around the table and can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you.�? – Paul Newman

“When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.�? – Dave Barry (And it might be this guy…)

“To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals – that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.�? – Honore de Balzac

“The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.�? – W. Somerset Maugham (The preceding advice should be followed with extreme caution as it may have been offered sarcastically by both the author and the author. See next.)

�?Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.�? – Aldous Huxley (or less subtly put…)

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.�? – Abraham Lincoln

“Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent.�? – Dionysius the Elder (Before you get too worked up, the point here is to think before you speak.)

‘Blessed is the man who, having nothing to stay, abstains from giving us worthy evidence of the fact.�? – George Eliot (Once more, with feeling!)

“Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself.�? – James Stephens

“One should not aim at being possible to understand but at being impossible to misunderstand.�? – John Humphrys

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.�? – Leonardo Da Vinci

“Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.�? – Jimi Hendrix

“Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.�? – Hal Borland

“Forever is composed of nows.�? – Emily Dickinson

“Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose.�? – Garrison Keillor

�?Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason�? – Jerry Seinfeld

“It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.�? – H.L. Mencken

“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.�? – Jane Austen

“The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions. “ – Oliver Wendell Holmes

“It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.�? – H.L. Mencken

“I used to have an open mind but my brains kept falling out.�? – Stephen Wright

A Bonus: For All the Budding Bureaucrats

“A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.�? – Dean Acheson

“In looking for people to hire, look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence and energy. And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.�? – Warren Buffet

“In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.�? – Laurence J. Peter

“After all is said and done, a lot more will have been said than done.�? – Unknown

The Hairy Reasoner