A Sabbath of Quotes
Sabbath means a day of rest. Sabbath means a time to reflect. Sabbath can also mean I sit back and quote other people and think it makes sense.

So we start with H. L. Mencken, twentieth-century journalist, satirist, social critic, cynic, and freethinker. I found this appropriate two days after the first of half a zillion debates we will have to endure between now and the next elections:

"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right."

Now there is no rhyme or reason to this series of quotes this time around. Other than the fact that they all struck me as neat and worthy of pondering. So here's one from actress Mae West. This is one not to forget!

"You're never too old to become younger."

Granville Hicks was an American Marxist novelist, literary critic, educator, and editor. With the FCC and others in the past few years, this one is a good definition.

"A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to."

Comedienne and actress Lily Tomlin speaks such wisdom that you know there must be something in it that we should remember. I can't say I've ever worried about this, but just in case I should...

"Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world."

Next, I turn to the remarkable sci-fi and science writer, Ray Bradbury:

"We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?"

Well, to fulfill that last quote, I will bother us all with an extended quote from writer/journalist David Halberstam who we lost in an auto accident last week. This one is from his great book, The Best and the Brightest, about the Vietnam War. Will we ever learn the lessons of that war?

Lyndon Johnson had lost it all, and so had the rest of them; they had, for all their brilliance and hubris and sense of themselves, been unwilling to look to and learn from the past. . . . He and the men around him wanted to be defined as being strong and tough; but strength and toughness and courage were exterior qualities which would be demonstrated by going to a clean and hopefully antiseptic war with a small nation, rather than the interior and more lonely kind of strength and courage of telling the truth to America (about an unwinnable war) and perhaps incurring a great deal of domestic political risk…

--Sources: Quote of the Day, The Moderate Voice