Clippings 4 - Eternal loop

By imputing none of his miseries to himself he continued to act upon the same principles and to follow the same path; was never made wiser by his sufferings, nor preserved by one misfortune from falling into another. He proceeded throughout his life to tread the same steps on the same circle; always applauding his past conduct, or at least forgetting it, to amuse himself with phantoms of happiness which were dancing before him, and willingly turned his eye from the light of reason, when it would have discovered the illusion and shewn him, what he never wanted to see, his real state.
Samuel Johnson's biography of Richard Savage

The man replied by talking about his childhood, his Islamic education. He had learned about the Jews from the Koran.
A Somali taxi driver in Seattle

In the past, they said: "Under no circumstances will we accept a state, unless it includes all of Palestine, because Palestine is a land of Islamic endowment." Fine. This doesn’t work. I can say: "We demand all of the land," and you will applaud me. This doesn’t work. This doesn’t work. This doesn’t work. There is a reality – either you acknowledge it, or you will get crushed...
Mahmoud Abbas

Clippings 2

To judge rightly of the present we must oppose it to the past; for all judgement is comparative, and of the future nothing can be known.
The History of Rasselas, Samuel Johnson

It's certainly got the old man's lessons, the ones you thought were so full of hooey. Remember when he told you, "Stick to it until it's done"? What did he know?

And then there was: "Get along with your boss. He's your boss because he's earned it." What a crock.

And then, "Don't whine, don't make excuses, just do the job." Boy, that one was a bummer. What was he, a Republican or something?

And finally, worst of all, the one nobody wants to hear, it hurts so much: "Work like hell." I hate that one.
'Pursuit of Happyness': An Uphill Climb That's an Exhilarating Breath of Fresh Air, Stephen Hunter

If you go to an Island Parliament in the Caribbean, if you go the parliament in Grenada, they’ve got their miniature Hansard, they’ve got their mace, they’ve got their wigs, and that is the kind of thing that Tony Blair wanted to abolish from the House of Commons at Westminster. The difference is that in Grenada, and St Kitts and St Lucia, they understand that all that stuff is what connects them to peaceful constitutional evolution across the centuries, and in that sense it is the difference between them and Cuba or Haiti, or these basket case states. They understand it but Tony Blair and Gordon Brown don’t, and David Cameron doesn’t.
Mark Steyn at the New Culture Forum