Alexander Graham Bell on opportunity

When one door closes, another opens.  But we often look so long and so regretfully at the closed door that we cannot see the one that has opened for us.

~ Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell
1940

Aubrey McClendon on becoming a grandfather

A baby is God’s opinion that life should go on.

~ Aubrey McClendon (spoken after he became a grandfather)

Katniss Everdeen on centralized systems

It must be a fragile system if it can be brought down by just a few berries.

~ Katniss Everdeen, visit from President Snow in Catching Fire

Butler Shaffer on the decline of Western Civilization

What I was saying – and what I have been saying for many decades – is that Western Civilization should be spoken of in the past tense; that its life-affirming conditions have been destroyed by the content of our thinking.  I have written elsewhere that civilizations are created by individuals; they are destroyed by collectives.

~ Butler Shaffer, "'The Death of Western Civilization' - Continued," LewRockwell.com Blog, November 14, 2015

Yogi Berra on the value of going to funerals

You should always go to other people's funerals. Otherwise they won't come to yours.

~ Yogi Berra

(Baseball legend Yogi Berra died September 22nd at the age of 90.)

Lew Rockwell on the religion of environmentalism

Like socialism, environmentalism combines an atheistic religion with virulent statism. But it ups the ante. Marxism at least professed a concern with human beings; environmentalism harks back to a godless, manless, and mindless Garden of Eden.

~ Lew Rockwell, An Anti-environmentalist Manifesto, 1990

Alexis de Tocqueville on the destiny of two great powers: America and Russia (1840)

Today, two great nations of the earth seem to be advancing toward the same destination from different starting points: the Russians and the Anglo-Americans.

Both have grown unobserved and, while men's attention has been preoccupied elsewhere, they have climbed up into the leading rank of nations and the world has learned of both their birth and their greatness at almost the same moment.

All other nations appear to have reached almost the upper limits of their natural development and have nothing left to do except preserve what they have, whereas these two nations are growing: all the others have either halted or are advancing by a great exertion of effort, whereas these two progress rapidly and comfortably on a seemingly unending course as far as we can see.

Americans struggle against obstacles placed there by nature; Russians are in conflict with men.  The former fight the wilderness and barbarity; the latter, civilization with all its weaponry: thus, American victories are achieved with the plowshare, Russia's with the soldier's sword.

To achieve their aim, the former rely upon self-interest and allow free scope to the unguided strength and common sense of individuals.

The latter focus the whole power of society upon a single man.

The former deploy freedom as their main mode of action; the latter, slavish obedience.

The point of departure is different, their paths are diverse, but each of them seems destined by some secret providential design to hold in their hands the fate of half the world at some date in the future.

~ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1840