Dwight Eisenhower

"Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

"You don't lead by hitting people over the head - that's assault, not leadership."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

"I tell this story to illustrate the truth of the statement I heard long ago in the Army: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of "emergency" is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a speech to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference in Washington, D.C. (November 14, 1957)

"If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower, at the Fourth Annual Republican Women's National Conference on March 6, 1956

"I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."

-Abraham Lincoln

Woody Guthrie 100th Birthday

“Life has got a habit of not standing hitched. You got to ride it like you find it. You got to change with it. If a day goes by that don't change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like trying to milk a dead cow.”

-Woody Guthrie

"I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood.

I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.

And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think you've not any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow."

-Woody Guthrie

Mark Twain and Tesla

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is really a large matter — it's the difference between a lightning bug and the lightning."

-Mark Twain

Bob Dylan: Chessmaster?

"In ceremonies of the horsemen,

Even the pawn must hold a grudge."

"Socrates, practise music!"

For where art is concerned, that despotic logician now and then had the feeling of a gap, of an emptiness, of a partial reproach, of a duty he had perhaps neglected. As he explains to his friends in prison, one and the same dream apparition often came to him, always with the same words, “Socrates, practice music!”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

Tesla

“I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success... Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.”
-Nikola Tesla

The practical success of an idea, irrespective of its inherent merit, is dependent on the attitude of the contemporaries. If timely it is quickly adopted; if not, it is apt to fare like a sprout lured out of the ground by warm sunshine, only to be injured and retarded in its growth by the succeeding frost.”
-Nikola Tesla

The spread of civilisation may be likened to a fire; First, a feeble spark, next a flickering flame, then a mighty blaze, ever increasing in speed and power.”
-Nikola Tesla


"If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.
I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.”
-Nikola Tesla


“My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get a new idea, I start at once building it up in my imagination, and make improvements and operate the device in my mind. When I have gone so far as to embody everything in my invention, every possible improvement I can think of, and when I see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form the final product of my brain.”
-Nikola Tesla

Frederick Douglass on struggle and progress

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.

It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake."

-Frederick Douglass

Practice without theory - Da Vinci

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast. 

– Leonardo da Vinci

Long for the sea...

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." 

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Wading the River

A man on foot, with his clothes in a bundle, coming to a stream which he must ford, made elaborate preparations by stripping off his garments, adding them to his bundle, and tying all to the top of a stick, which enabled him to raise the bundle high over his head to keep them dry during the crossing. He then fearlessly waded in and carefully made his way across the rippling stream, and found it in no place up to his ankles.

-Abraham Lincoln

Edgar Allan Poe

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.
-Edgar Allan Poe

Robert Frost

Words exist in the mouth not in books. You can't fix them and you don't want to fix them. You want them to adapt their sounds to persons and places and times. You want them to change and be different.

...Take, for instance, the expression 'oh.' The American poets use it in practicallly one tone, that of gradeur: 'Oh Soul!' 'Oh Hills!' 'Oh Anything!'That's the way they go. But think of what 'oh' is really capable: the 'oh' of scorn, the 'oh' of amusement, the 'oh' of surp[rise, the 'oh' of doubt- and there are many more."

- Robert Frost