Today's Words of Wisdom - August 21, 2015

Today is the birthday of the following people:

Joe Strummer (1952 – 2002):

“And so now I'd like to say - people can change anything they want to. And that means everything in the world. People are running about following their little tracks - I am one of them. But we've all got to stop just following our own little mouse trail. People can do anything - this is something that I'm beginning to learn. People are out there doing bad things to each other. That's because they've been dehumanised. It's time to take the humanity back into the center of the ring and follow that for a time. Greed, it ain't going anywhere. They should have that in a big billboard across Times Square. Without people you're nothing. That's my spiel.”

and

"You have the right not to be killed, unless it was done by a policeman or an aristocrat."

and

"The toughest thing is facing yourself. Being honest with yourself, that's much tougher than beating someone up. That's what I call tough."

Robert Stone (1937 - 2015):

“That's the great thing about literature -- it makes the world less lonely.”

M.M. Kaye (1908 – 2004):

“Common sense will nearly always stand you in better stead than a slavish adherence to the conventions.”

Jonathan Schell (1943 – 2014):

"At present most of us do nothing. We look away. We remain calm. We are silent. We take refuge in the hope that the holocaust won’t happen, and turn back to our individual concerns. We deny the truth that is all around us. Indifferent to the future of our kind, we grow indifferent to one another. We drift apart. We grow cold. We drowse our way to the end of the world. But if once we shook off our lethargy and fatigue and began to act, the climate would change. Just as inertia produces despair—a despair often so deep it does not know itself as despair—arousal and action would give us access to hope, and life would start to mend: not just life in its entirety but daily life, every individual life. At that point we would begin to withdraw from our role as both the victims and the perpetrators. …

We would no longer be the destroyers of mankind, but rather, a gateway through which the future generations would enter the world. Then the passion and will that we need to save ourselves would flood into our lives. The walls of indifference, inertia, and coldness that now isolate each of us from others, and all of us from the past and future generations, would melt, like snow in spring. …"