Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us: what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal. --Albert Pike

Stop being afraid of what could go wrong, and focus on what could go right!

"Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing...after they have exhausted all other possibilities." ~ Winston Churchill.

“…to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”
~Nelson Mandela

"No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow." - Alice Walker

Our job is to teach the students we have. Not the ones we would like to have. Not the ones we used to have. Those we have right now. All of them. __Dr. Kevin Maxwell.

If your understanding of the Divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology ~Karen Armstrong

If your picture of God is ugly, the more religious you become, the more dangerous you become to yourself and everyone else around you. --Herb Montgomery

 "Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." - Rainer Maria Rilke

Ambrose Redmoon:
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.

It is the people who subtly promote their violent tendencies and
their need for war (war supports the economy to some degree) by
HIDING behind sport, patriotism, the Second Amendment, and the fear
of crime, Communism, Muslim terrorists, etc. that disgust me. There
is a difference between young people who genuinely enjoy hunting or
target practice and who respect guns... and those who see war as an
athletic event, or those who have a desire to kill for revenge or
whatever. I don't know any WWII, Korea, or Vietnam veterans who ever
voiced pleasure at the sight of young people wearing military-
related images on clothing - or even actually military surplus
clothing, for that matter. REAL military veterans, at least in my
and my parents' generations, usually don't like to see war
glorified.
As for the idea that as long as a kid is reading anything, it's
okay - - how sick is that? "Reading" magazines, for instance, that
concentrate on images of women being bound, gagged, tortured, and
killed are okay, right? --- because pictures don't actually kill,
after all. Absurd.
Any good parent would monitor what their child reads and so would a
school. A balance of ideas promoted in reading material is likely
not harmful; too much fantasy might be something to watch for; ideas
that target and scapegoat a certain group or individual are probably
NOT healthy; the effects of years and years of viewing hard c &re p
* ^ n have been studied but it doesn't take reading research to know
that these guys usually have performance issues with real women.
What kids at certain impressionable ages or with certain mental
faculties and/or emotional states read DOES matter.
I do understand and agree with those who say that recent mass
murders have caused some schools to go overboard and react stupidly,
but school officials typically ARE stupid. That isn't anything new. I
That is irrelevent to the issue of the boy with the so-
called "Marines" tshirt...I still object to a student wearing an
image of crossed rifles or any other image that promotes war and
violence, the subjugation or devaluation of women or any other
group, and so on. I would NOT object to the wearing of an official
U.S. Military emblem...but I would object to a student saying he
can't wait until he gets out of school so he can join the military
and go kill gooks or whoever.
The simplistic argument that guns don't kill, people do, is actually
the point: since people kill, guns should not be so available
to people.---unknown author

“Recently I’ve learned that you can’t wait around for life to be good for you, you have to make it good for yourself with the resources that you have. That’s why you could own the whole entire world but if you don’t have the drive and urge to make your life special then you own absolutely nothing in the end.”--unknown