Nostalgia

"Nostalgia is less a longing for a past we once lived than for a future we once dreamed of."

More Miscellany

 "Far from knowing history, you wonder if politicians today even suspect that anyone is taking notes."

"If the human race is good at anything, it is good at surviving people giving up on it." 

"A wake-up moment in one's intellectual life is realizing that no impartial third party has ever sided with you."

"There is nothing like really getting to know people to reduce your need for their approval."

Saving The World

 "I am not against people wanting to save the world, but I suspect that if the world is to be saved, it will be saved by people with a smaller objective."

"If I could save a life by enduring a pinprick, I would. But if I could save a billion lives by enduring a billion pinpricks, I would not. It is my duty to do what I reasonably can to help another, but it is not my duty to single-handedly save the world, for if it were, what would be your duty?"

Life Is...

 "Life is a collection of moments you might have appreciated more if you had only known they were moments."

"Life is a series of stages, each preparation for the one before."

"Life is a series of things you do for the first time and the last time, the difference being that you know when it's the first time."

What Skeptic Has Not...

 What skeptic has not, in the dark of despair

Or the shadow of anguish and grief,

Sent out from his heart a questing prayer

To the God of his disbelief?

From The Miscellany Drawer

  "The most certain measure of a dumbed-down population is that nobody is asking dumb questions."

"If I were awarding an all-time prize for human ingenuity, it would go to the person who, unable to command anyone's respect or gratitude or love, invented the concept of loyalty." 

Ever wonder what an atheist says the ten or twenty times each day when everyone else says, "Thank God!"

"The central fallacy in parenting is that it's a teaching experience when, in fact, it's a learning experience.  We are asked as parents to absorb each lesson quickly enough to convert it, real-time, into advice and counsel." 

A Trail You Blaze

 "One key to succeeding is to get it out of your head that there's always going to be clear evidence that you are."