The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What's that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating...



...and you finish off as an orgasm.
~ George Carlin

Old age ain't no place for sissies.
~ Henry Louis Mencken

"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life."
~Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

Man behove to take heed of maidens: for they be tender of complexion; small, pliant and fair of disposition of body, shamefast, fearful and merry. Touching outward disposition they be well nurtured, demure and soft of speech, and well aware of what they say: and delicate in their apparel. And for a woman is more meeker than a man, she weepeth sooner. And is more envious, and more laughing, and loving, and the malice of the soul is more in a woman than in a man. And she is of feeble kind, and she maketh more lesings (sic), and is more shamefast, and more slow in working and in moving than is a man.~Batholomaeus Anglicus (Born before 1203-1272), Franciscan monk, De proprietatibus rerum ("On the Properties of Things"), dated at 1240, an early forerunner of the encyclopedia

"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places."
~Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Every man's memory is his private literature.~Aldous Huxley

The past is always tense, the future perfect.
~Zadie Smith



********

News story: Mammoth find in eastern Siberia raises 'clone hope'

"All we need for cloning is one living Mammoth cell, which means it can reproduce autonomously. Then it will be no problem for us to multiply them to tens of thousands of cells. We are counting on our region's permafrost to have kept some cells alive, but after so many thousands of years it is unlikely."
~Professor Semyon Grigoryev, spokesman for North-East Federal University (NEFU)



I think it would be wonderful to have mammoths once again walked the face of the Earth.

...

 

Almost every man wastes part of his life in attempts to display qualities which he does not possess, and to gain applause which he cannot keep.~Samuel Johnson, The Rambler (1750)

Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.
~ Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

"We got Albertans to think as Canadians. We didn't think of ourselves as just provincial, we thought of ourselves nationally and we contributed nationally - not just in public life and in government but we contributed in a multitude of other ways - the arts and culture and sports, in writing and business and science. All of those were contributions by Albertans into Canada."
~(Former Premier) Peter Lougheed (1928-2012)



Every once in a great long while there comes along a politician who is truly a class act; Peter Lougheed was one of those.

Ron
...

 

Every two [or four] years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country - and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.~Charles Krauthammer

They are never alone who are accompanied by noble thoughts.
-- Philip Sidney: (1554-1586) English courtier, statesman.

"Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago."
~Warren Buffett (1930- )

Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast, and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live.~Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations

Everything is sweetened by risk.
-- Alexander Smith: (1830-1867) Scottish poet.

As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly.
~ Samuel Johnson

"Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars and to change the world."
~Harriet Tubman (1820-1913)

Harriet Tubman, circa 1868

Photo by H.B. Lindsley
Courtesy the Library of Congress

...

 

In this business, fame lasts for a second. You can be blown up and be blown down. People keep losing interest in faces because new ones come along every single second. I'm one at the moment. Tomorrow I won't be. That's cool. I'm not saying that when it does end, I'll be like, 'Yay! It's ending.' But I'll move on and do something else because that's what has to be done. It's about survival. If you're sad about it, then you're in the wrong job.~Keira Knightley, actress

"It is a sound principle of finance, and a still sounder principle of government, that those who have the duty of expending the revenue of a country should also be saddled with the responsibility of levying and providing it."
~Wilfrid Laurier (1841-1919)

Why should we have enough memory to retain even the smallest details of what happened to us, while we do not have enough to remember how many times we have told them to the same person?~Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), Maxims [1678], Maxim 313