"Official" Thread Deep Thoughts - Memes, videos, essays, quotes that are motivational, thought provoking, or especially inspiring. (Not for jokes or politics!)

no4mk1t said:
"At least once every human being should have to run for his life, to teach him that milk does not come from the supermarket, that safety does not come from the policeman, and that news is not something that happens to other people."

Robert Heinlein
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Sheer profundity. There’s nothing more enlightening than somebody trying to kill you. And you face the reality that the only way out is to kill them first.
 
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A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.
Friedrich Nietzsche

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!
Friedrich Nietzsche

Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.
Friedrich Nietzsche

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.
Friedrich Nietzsche

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
Friedrich Nietzsche

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Only sick music makes money today.
Friedrich Nietzsche

When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.
Friedrich Nietzsche
 

Words From a Wise Bird​

Many years ago Jeff published a nifty collection of historical thoughts in a little orange booklet called "Quoth The Raven--Seventeen Points to Ponder." That highly sought after booklet is unfortunately long out of print but the quotes it contained are fairly well known in the public domain. I have compiled them again for your enjoyment along with Jeff's comments about them.

About The Raven​

For genealogical reasons Jeff's totem is the raven, and he doesn't see him as ominous beast but rather a wise bird.

To the shamanic cultures of the northern areas of Europe and Asia, and on into the Americas, the raven was viewed generally as a positive character. With the coming of Christianity to Europe and the British Isles, the raven was soon cast into the negative, where for many he remains today. In the process of converting the native peoples of Europe to Christianity, the traveling monks and other proselytizers had to overturn the old beliefs and symbols, casting those which had been seen as positive into the negative. Of course the invasion of the Vikings didn't help either.

Edgar Allen Poe thought of the raven as the omen of misfortune and death, but that thought derives from the historical memory of those unfortunates folks who were victims of the Viking expansion of 795-1066AD and their attacks on early Christian communities in and around England. The raven symbol came to be associated with the pillaging of the Vikings, because of its frequently being painted upon the sails of the Viking long boats. You can well imagine looking out to sea and seeing a huge black raven approaching you, seen well before details of the ship could be made out, and the resulting terror which that ship brought to those on shore.

In Norse mythology Odin was the primary god, and his familiars were the two ravens Hugin and Munin, who brought him news of both earth and heaven. The Germans referred to him as Wotan and thus in German the raven may be referred to as Wotansvogel--God's bird.

To the Celts, the raven has been associated with the goddesses Nantosuelta, Rhiannon, Epona, and the Morrigan. Ravens were/are said to guard the tomb of king/folk hero Bran—the tomb is said to lie under the White Tower at the Tower of London, where to this day a dozen ravens are kept, tended by the royal Ravenmaster.

In the native cultures of North America, raven was seen as a bringer of magic and a mystical courier, representing the Void—from whence all existence came forth—which is home to the Great Mystery. Various myths have raven creating day and night, the tides, bringing fire and light to mankind and stealing/giving us the sun and moon and the stars to guide at night.

Those of us associated with Orange Gunsite definitely have positive feelings about the raven. As Jeff has written: "As the bringer of the word we think of him as the collector of traditional wisdom—ignorance or rejection of which betide corruption."

My thanks to Ric Wyckoff for much of this information on the raven.

"Quoth The Raven--Seventeen Points to Ponder."

​

"Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die; and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life. Both life and death are parts of the same great Adventure." -- Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt was the most "American" president as well as the most quotable. His idealism causes the cynic to blush.

​
"Happiness may never be sensibly pursued as an end in itself, because happiness is the by-product of achievement." -- Northcote Parkinson (paraphrase)

C. Northcote Parkinson makes this point in "Left Luggage," a witty and devastating rebuttal of the socialists. This sentence should be over the doors of every school in the land.

​
"This is the law: The purpose of fighting is to win. There is no possible victory in defense. The sword is more important than the shield and skill is more important than either. The final weapon is the brain. All else is supplemental." -- John Steinbeck

Steinbeck is not usually thought of as a student of combat, but he was hard at work at it near the end of his career, and his insights in this discipline are perhaps his best.

​
"Never give in. Never, never, never, never! Never yield in any way, great or small, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force and the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy...." -- Winston Churchill

Churchill--"the greatest man of the twentieth century and the greatest Englishman of all time"--seems to have spoken in quotations. Most of what he ever said or wrote is worth repeating and this quote is immortal.

How Did You Die
by
Edmund Vance Cooke

Did you tackle the trouble that came your way
With a resolute heart and cheerful?
Or hide your face from the light of day
With a craven soul and fearful?
Oh, a trouble's a ton, or a trouble's an ounce,
Or trouble is what you make it.
And it isn't the fact that you're hurt that counts,
But only how did you take it?

You are beaten to earth? Well, well, what's that?
Come up with a smiling face.
It's nothing against you to fall down flat,
But to lie there–that's the disgrace.
The harder you're thrown, why the harder you bounce;
Be proud of your blackened eye.
It isn't the fact that your licked that counts;
Its how did you fight and why?

And though you be done to death, what then?
If you battled the best you could;
If you played your part in the world of men,
Why the Critic will call it good.
Death comes with a crawl, or comes with a pounce,
And whether he's slow or spry,
It isn't the fact that you're dead that counts,
But only how did you die?
Cooke's small poem has such power that it usually stuns the reader. If he did nothing else, these words would justify his life.

​
"Are we at last brought to such humility and debase degradation, that we Americans can not be trusted with arms for our own defense?" -- Patrick Henry, 1788

Governor henry here disarms the disarmer--once and for all, we would like to think.

If
by
Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are loosing theirs and blaming you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowances for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired of waiting,
Or being lied about, not deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor too wise;
If you can dream–and not make dreams your master;
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same:
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And loose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breath a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings–not lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And–which is more–you'll be a Man, my son!
Kipling's mighty statement ought to be memorized by every young man of consequence before leaving his parents' hearth. It is interesting that it was written to honor Cecil John Rhodes who was indeed "a man" but whose small nation has been abandoned by larger nations with lower standards.

​
"Verloren ist nur, wer sich selbst aufgibt." ("A man has only lost when he admits it to himself.") -- Hans-Ulrich Rudel

Rudel was the greatest individual warrior in history. He autographed his books and pictures with the above.

​
"The sickness of the late twentieth century is cowardice. Anger is the only cure for cowardice--anger strong enough to overcome fear." -- Eric Hoffer

Eric Hoffer, the stevedore philosopher, was an unsettling social critic. The truth expressed here came as a shock to the Aquarians.

​
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing he cares about more than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." -- John Stuart Mill

Mill, who defined liberty, here puts it to the poltroon. He and Hoffer are two very different people who reached similar conclusions.

Invictus
by
William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced or cried out loud.
Under the bludgeoninings of chance
My head is bloody but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.
Henley was a hopeless invalid. As such he is a permanent reproach to the healthy coward.

​
"If you are not making anyone mad, you are not getting anything done." -- Paul McNicol

McNicol was a colonel of marines. That says it all.

​
"An armed society is a polite society." -- Robert Heinlein

Heinlein's fantasy-philosophy is unfashionably popular, and his gift for the pungent phrase is the envy of lesser authors. Here he makes a very significant but much overlooked point.

​
"Let your gun be your constant companion on your walks." -- Thomas Jefferson

President Jefferson is sometimes considered to be the patron of the American left. This is one of his ideas that they have swept under the rug.

​
"No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full." -- Sulla--"Felix" (Lucius Cornelius Sulla)

"Sulla the Happy." "Sulla the Fortunate." He was held by the Romans to be the man who did everything right--who really "got his act together." We can see why.

​
"Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence.... From the hour the Pilgrims landed, to the present day, events, occurrences, and tendencies prove that to insure peace, security, and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable.... The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference–they deserve a place of honor with all that's good...." - George Washington

"First in war. First in peace. And first in the hearts of his countrymen." No such man could be a hoplophobe.

​
"To live is to strive.

"Nothing good may be had without effort.

"The goals of life are three:
To understand.
To Accomplish.
To appreciate.

"We cannot know, but we can seek knowledge.
We cannot win but we can fight.
We can, on the other hand, wonder and delight in life, in the world, and in joy.

"Our time is not measured in days but rather in events. Each is his own judge, and no one cares but himself. Therefore, "This above all–to thine own self be true.""

The philosophy of Jeff Cooper's life.
 
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.
George Orwell

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
George Orwell

One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark, its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time, one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase - some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse - into the dustbin where it belongs.
George Orwell

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.
George Orwell

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
George Orwell

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power... Power is not a means; it is an end...not power over things, but over men...In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement...There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother... Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.
George Orwell

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
George Orwell

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
George Orwell
 
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
H. L. Mencken

A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
H. L. Mencken

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
H. L. Mencken

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
H. L. Mencken

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
H. L. Mencken

All government, of course, is against liberty.
H. L. Mencken

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
H. L. Mencken

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.
H. L. Mencken

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
H. L. Mencken

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
H. L. Mencken

Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.
H. L. Mencken

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
H. L. Mencken

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
H. L. Mencken

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
H. L. Mencken

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
H. L. Mencken

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
H. L. Mencken

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
H. L. Mencken

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
H. L. Mencken

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
H. L. Mencken

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
H. L. Mencken

If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse - as a man shoots himself.
H. L. Mencken

Imagine the Creator as a stand up comedian - and at once the world becomes explicable.
H. L. Mencken

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
H. L. Mencken

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
H. L. Mencken

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
H. L. Mencken

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
H. L. Mencken

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
H. L. Mencken

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
H. L. Mencken

Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill.
H. L. Mencken

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
H. L. Mencken

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?
H. L. Mencken

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
H. L. Mencken

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
H. L. Mencken

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
H. L. Mencken

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable...
H. L. Mencken

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
H. L. Mencken

The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
H. L. Mencken

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H. L. Mencken

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.
H. L. Mencken

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
H. L. Mencken
 
A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained in arms, is the best most natural defense of a free country.
James Madison

Democracy is the most vile form of government... democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention: have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property: and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.
James Madison

Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government.
James Madison

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
James Madison

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.
James Madison

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
James Madison

The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.
James Madison

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.
James Madison
 
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
Thomas Jefferson

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
Thomas Jefferson

Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
Thomas Jefferson

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

Thomas Jefferson

Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.
Thomas Jefferson

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
Thomas Jefferson

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a monied aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.
Thomas Jefferson

I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.
Thomas Jefferson

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
Thomas Jefferson

If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?
Thomas Jefferson

In truth, politeness is artificial good humor, it covers the natural want of it, and ends by rendering habitual a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue.
Thomas Jefferson
Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation [of power] first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.
Thomas Jefferson

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
Thomas Jefferson

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
Thomas Jefferson

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.
Thomas Jefferson

The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless... From the conclusion of this [Revolutionary] war we shall be going down hill. It will not be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will be heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.
Thomas Jefferson

To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Thomas Jefferson
 
The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.
Theodore Roosevelt

The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
Theodore Roosevelt

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer "Present" or "Not guilty."
Theodore Roosevelt

The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.
Theodore Roosevelt

Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.
Theodore Roosevelt

Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.
Theodore Roosevelt

Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you've got to start young.
Theodore Roosevelt

In a moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.
Theodore Roosevelt

If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month.
Theodore Roosevelt

If there is not the war, you don't get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don't get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.
Theodore Roosevelt

Appraisals are where you get together with your team leader and agree what an outstanding member of the team you are, how much your contribution has been valued, what massive potential you have and, in recognition of all this, would you mind having your salary halved.
Theodore Roosevelt
 

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