“there are two different ways of writing history: one is to persuade men to virtue and the other is to compel men to truth.” ― Robert Graves, "I, Claudius: from the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius" Yesterday was the anniversary of Roman Emperor Claudius I's death in 54 A.D. Like many of his family, his death did not occur naturally - he was poisoned, likely by his wife - setting the stage for his great-nephew, Nero, to become Emperor in his place. I've always loved the writing of Robert Graves (Gods, Graves, and Scholars…

“It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.” -- Robert H Goddard Robert H Goddard was born on October 5, 1882. He is now considered one of the fathers of modern rocketry, but, during his lifetime, his significant contributions to physics and engineering were underappreciated, even though his work was foundational for the successful use of rockets for space exploration, weapons, and atmospheric research. In fact, his interest in rocket development was considered unsuitable for a physicist of the time.

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?”  -- Mahatma Gandhi Thursday, October 2, is the anniversary of Mohandas K Gandhi’s birth in 1869. Sadly, this question still needs to be asked. Perhaps it's one that we should never stop asking if we want to build a more peaceful world. Pax. Image from

"We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person."   -- W Somerset Maugham On September 29, 1991, after 9 years of shared living expenses, my significant other and I officially made it legal. Our children will be very pleased to see that we are much better at remembering than we'd been. Being retired helps since we have fewer other things needing our attention. Happy 34th, Bill! It's still hard to believe that we've been out of New York, and are settled in Arizona, for five years.

“You were born with potential. You were born with goodness and trust. You were born with ideals and dreams. You were born with greatness. You were born with wings. You are not meant for crawling, so don't. You have wings. Learn to use them and fly.” With everything going on the past week or so, I'm re-sharing these words of Rumi's as a reminder that we all have the ability to rise beyond the despair. Pax. Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

"We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward. In times of tragedy, of war, of necessity, people do amazing things. The human capacity for survival and renewal is awesome." -- Isabel Allende I was planning to stay away from the subject of what happened on September 11, 2001, but, with everything else going on in the US, this proved to be too difficult. This post is largely take from my September 11, 2015 commemorative post, with several adjustments. Because time does change some things, while some things seem to never change.

Given that September 6th was the anniversary of his birth, a repeat of my 2016 birthday post for John Dalton seemed appropriate. Dalton, the man who named the atom, had the wonderful tendency to follow the results of his experiments wherever they took him. This, in turn, led to many valuable discoveries. The one thing he could not envision was that there could possibly be something at the subatomic level. And I find this quote of his to be a reminder that science is never static and is always progressing, even after a conclusion has been reached.

In honor of yesterday's Labor Day holiday in the US, I'm reposting my very first quote post from 2014, with minor changes. "The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all people under its jurisdiction the best possible life."  -- Frances Perkins France Perkins is probably not a name most of us recognize. Few Cabinet members, excluding Hamilton and Franklin (& they are remembered primarily not as Cabinet members), can be named by most of us while they are still in office - never mind decades, or centuries, later.

"If I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up." In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus's treatise on the absurd, Camus wrote about the conflict between what man wants from the universe - order and meaning - and what the universe is - chaos -, which is what he referred to as "the absurd".

"Having heard all of this you may choose to look the other way but you can never again say that you did not know."  -- William Wilberforce, 1791 William Wilberforce was born August 24, 1759. Born into a family with wealth and connections, and a close friend of Pitt the Younger, he became politically active at 21, and he became an Evangelical Christian ten years later. That conversion brought him to the forefront of several social reform movements during his long political career (he retired in 1825). Those reforms included eliminating vice, and supporting the RSPCA, but most notably, he used his position in Parliament to push for the abolition of the slave trade.

"You may ask — you are bound to ask me now: What, then, is in your opinion the value of natural science? I answer: Its scope, aim and value is the same as that of any other branch of human knowledge. Nay, none of them alone, only the union of all of them, has any scope or value at all, and that is simply enough described: it is to obey the command of the Delphic deity: gnothi seauton... get to know yourself!" - Erwin Schrödinger, Science and Humanism, 1951…

“No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.”  -- Albert Camus On this date in 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan, followed three days later with the dropping a different type of atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki. The devastation in Hiroshima killed at least 70,000 people instantly, with the blast subsequent blast in Nagasaki killing another 35,000 people. The ultimate toll was nearly a quarter of a million million people, mostly civilian, leaving a decades-long legacy of horror and illness, as the long-term dangers of radiation exposure became apparent.

"I have been trying to point out that in our lives chance may have an astonishing influence and, if I may offer advice to the young laboratory worker, it would be this—never neglect an extraordinary appearance or happening. It may be—usually is, in fact—a false alarm that leads to nothing, but may on the other hand be the clue provided by fate to lead you to some important advance." -- Alexander Fleming Good advice - and not just for young laboratory workers. Chance does indeed play a large role in our lives, and in the paths we find ourselves on.

"For I dipt into the Future, far as human eye could see; saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be." - Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Locksley Hall", 1842 Today is the 67th anniversary of the legislation that created NASA. On July 29, 1958, the United States Congress passed legislation that authorized the formation of a civilian agency to coordinate the US's space activities. This agency - the National Aeronautics and Space Administration - has, in spite of many obstacles and profoundly tragic setbacks, propelled us forward in areas as far-ranging as weather-forecasting and defense, global (and stellar) communications, navigation systems, and space exploration.

"We talk about "mere matters of words" in a tone which implies that we regard words as things beneath the notice of a serious-minded person. This is a most unfortunate attitude. For the fact is that words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study. The old idea that words possess magical powers is false; but its falsity is the distortion of a very important truth. Words do have a magical effect — but not in the way that magicians supposed, and not on the objects they were trying to influence.

“When you organize extraordinary missions, you attract people of extraordinary talent who might not have been inspired by or attracted to the goal of saving the world from cancer or hunger or pestilence.”  — Neil DeGrasse Tyson Today is the 56th anniversary of the 1969 manned lunar landing by Apollo 11 - Michael Collins remained on the command module while Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landed the Eagle on the Sea of Tranquility on the lunar surface, and Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the lunar surface.

It's been a couple of years since I last shared this Erich Heller quote & the associated post, but it seemed like a good time to dust it off. Always a favorite of mine, I had it pinned to my cubicle wall for several years as a reminder to check my own biases before reacting to things (a task I still often fail at). “Be careful how you interpret  the world: it is like that” — Erich Heller Erich Heller was an essayist, and German scholar, who was best known for his writings on the literature of Nietzsche, Thomas Mann and Kafka.

"The new Government . . . will require a Purification from our Vices, and an Augmentation of our Virtues or they will be no Blessings. The People will have unbounded Power. And the People are extreamly addicted to Corruption and Venality, as well as the Great.—I am not without Apprehensions from this Quarter." - John Adams, letter to Abigail, July 3, 1776 I came across this thought from John Adam's while reading a book on the tremendous impact that the 18th century education in Roman philosophers and statesmen had upon our first four Presidents (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison).

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

"Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it." -- Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, 1922 And yet we continue to try, anyway. Hermann Hesse, German poet and writer, was born on July 2, 1877. He was the winner of the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature.  Hesse's fiction was largely concerned with man's search for spirituality - and his true self.

“Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.” -- Thich Nhat Hanh, 1990 Simplistic, perhaps, but I'm just leaving this here this week. As bad as things are going right now, we have to have hope in order to keep moving forward. Pax. Monsoon clouds, June 26, 2022.

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

“If those in charge of our society – politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television – can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.” I've shared these words of Howard Zinn's before, along with the Weapons of Mass Communication image, but it bears repeating once again as we grapple with increasingly divisive interpretations of the facts. The Wall Street Journal once had a wonderful tool that looked at 'typical' liberal vs conservative Facebook feeds.

"The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped." - Hubert H Humphrey, at the dedication of the Hubert H. Humphrey Building, November 1, 1977 Hubert Horatio Humphrey, the 38th Vice-President of the United States, was born this day in 1911. Humphrey, who passed away in 1978, was also the Democratic Party's presidential nominee in 1968, and long serving senator from his home state of Minnesota.

Today is Memorial Day here in the US. The Memorial Day weekend has become a sales, beach, and barbecue extravaganza that kicks off the unofficial summer season. Memorial Day was established immediately after the US Civil War, and was originally called Decoration Day. The purpose, then as now, was to honor our war dead  - and up until the time of World War I, the southern US states did not use that designated date to honor their own (Confederate) Civil War dead - they chose their own dates (& some of them still do have dates set aside to honor their fallen Confederate soldiers).