True terror is to wake up one morning and discover
    that your high school class is running the country.

            Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

 

 

 

 

 

Bending history

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself;
but each of us can work to change a small portion of events,
and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

        Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, speech in South Africa, June 1966

Confidence

Confidence is 10 percent hard work 

        and 90 percent delusion.

                Tina Fey, Vogue

 

 

 

 

 

Wonder

We all woke up this morning and we had with it
the amazing return of our conscious mind.
We recovered minds with a complete sense of self
and a complete sense of our own existence —
yet we hardly ever pause to consider this wonder.

    Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

 

 

 

 

 

Watch out for this

Never underestimate the power
        of stupid people in large groups.

                        Anonymous

 

 

 

 

The most important thing

The thing is to understand myself,
to see what God really wishes me to do:
the thing is to find a truth which is true for me,
to find the idea for which I can live and die. …
I certainly do not deny that I still recognize an imperative of knowledge
and that through it one can work upon men,
but it must be taken up into my life,
and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing.

     Søren Kierkegaard, letter to Peter Wilhelm Lund 1835

 

 

 

 

 

Language games played in bars

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.
• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.
• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”
• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.
• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.
• A question mark walks into a bar?
• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.
• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."
• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.
• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.
• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.
• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.
• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.
• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.
• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.
• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.
• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned a man with a glass eye named Ralph.
• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
• A dyslexic walks into a bra.
• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.
• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.
• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
• A synonym strolls into a tavern. 

             These and more can be found not in bars, but all over the internet