Line of the Week 6

This passage comes to you from Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope.

"And yet I find myself returning again and again to my mother's simple principle—'How would that make you feel?'—as a guidepost for my politics.
"It's not a question we ask ourselves enough, I think; as a country, we seem to be suffering from an empathy deficit. We wouldn't tolerate schools that don't teach, that are chronically underfunded and understaffed and underinspired, if we thought that the children in them were like our children. It's hard to imagine the CEO of a company giving himself a multimillion-dollar bonus while cutting health-care for his workers if he thought they were in some way equals. And it's safe to assume that those in power would think longer and harder about launching a war if they envisioned their own sons and daughters in harm's way
"I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current policies in favor of those people who are struggling in this society. After all, if they are like us, then their struggles are our own. If we fail to help, we diminish ourselves."

Line of the Week 5

This week's installment is some sage advice from a sign at an elementary school near Penobscot, ME. Here it is:

"Choose to be a Tigger, not an Eeyore."

Line of the Week 4

Sorry for the delay. Here's your line for a week ago (one of August 7th's Quotes of the Day):

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." - Charles Mackay

Line of the Week 3

This line comes from Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens in his dissenting opinion in reference to the case Bush v. Gore:

"[The majority opinion] can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land … Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."

Line of the Week 2

Yesterday (Friday) was my birthday. Since then I've been in a photographic mood, as I now call an amazing Nikon D60 my own. This line comes from Step Across This Line, a collection of short stories, speeches and articles by Salman Rushdie. This particular story, about his being photographed by Avedon, is called "On Being Photographed."

"What the photographer gained, the subject lost; cameras, like fear, ate the soul.
"If you believe the language—and the language never lies, though liars often have the sweetest tongues—then the camera is a weapon: a photograph is a shot, and a session is a shoot, and a portrait may therefore be the trophy the hunter brings home from his shikar. A stuffed head for his wall."

Line of the Week

I'm not sure if this will be a regular feature on the blog, Nonetheless, I wanted to post this, as it makes some very interesting—and very real—observations on the American political scene, although it's about Communism.

"In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird."
-George Orwell, 1984