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Napolean? Heinlein? (Possibly.) (On MALICE.)

Posted by :James Howden On : November 27, 2009
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Category: He Said/She Said

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OTHERS? Certainly.

“Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.”

(This particular phrasing is what I’ve seen as coming from Napolean Bonaparte. Robert Heinlein used something similar in a 1940s sci-fi novel. Somebody allegedly called Hanlon is given most modern versions of this quote, and it’s known as “Hanlon’s Razor”, as the famous “Occam’s Razor” is an aid to clear scientific thinking. Some people think Hanlon is/was Heinlein. In any case, it’s a useful antidote to the sloppy assumption that everybody hates you.

Joseph Sheppherd (on power & knowledge)

Posted by :James Howden On : November 20, 2009
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Category: He Said/She Said

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“’Knowledge is power’, [parents] tell their children without pausing to consider how this attitude affects the whole of society….From childhood they are taught to believe that power is the ability to impose one’s will on someone else; however, in the absence of knowing what is important in life, one’s will becomes one’s whim. In reality, power becomes merely the ability to inconvenience someone else…”

Joseph Sheppherd, writer and anthropologist, speaking of Cameroon’s Ntumu tribe and its ways of wisdom, cited in Heather Cardin’s Mind, Heart & Spirit: Educators Speak

 

Piet Hein (three “grooks”)

Posted by :James Howden On : November 18, 2009
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This Danish scientist, inventor and WW2 resistance hero had an odd sideline as the writer of quirky, deep little poems in English. I love ’em.

Here’s one:

I’d like to know

what this whole show

is all about

before it’s out.

Here’s another, called “Living”.

Living is

a thing you do

now or never

which do you?

(In case you missed it, there is a simple, and simply terrifying challenge in that last three-syllable line.)

Here’s the first he wrote, a simple poem about loss, published under a pseudonym in 1940. It passed the Nazi censors, but later began to appear all over Copenhagen as the Danes knew exactly what he was saying:

CONSOLATION GROOK

Losing one glove is certainly painful,
but nothing compared to the pain,
of losing one, throwing away the other,
and finding the first one again.

(Glove 1? Freedom. Glove 2? Dignity, patriotism, pride…)

PIET HEIN (1905-1996) was a friend of Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr. 

 

Nathan Miller (like we’ll listen to *him*)

Posted by :James Howden On : November 5, 2007
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“Conversation in North America has become a competitive exercise in which the first one to draw a breath is declared the listener.”   Nathan Miller might be the onetime state senator from Virginia, or a number of other people. As Mr. Hill said of a tacked-on, apropos-of-not-much-except-I-liked-it quotation in one of my high school essays, “This is the evil of Bartlett’s.” Or in this case, the now long-forgotten Internet discovery of this witty bit from who knows whom.

Bill McKibben (art & worship)

Posted by :James Howden On : August 7, 2007
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Category: At First Glance, He Said/She Said

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“Art, like religion, is one of the ways we digest what is happening to us, make the sense out of it that proceeds to action….Therefore it falls to those of us alive now to watch and record its flora, its fauna, its rains, its snow, its ice, its peoples. To document the buzzing, glorious, cruel, mysterious planet we were born onto, before in our carelessness we leave it far less sweet.”          Bill McKibben (American author of environmental and lifestyle warnings and pleas, cross-country Vermont snowman)

Shining Lamps of India (small deeds)

Posted by :James Howden On : May 14, 2007
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“Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”

This gorgeous paradox comes from Mahatma Gandhi. I have proven it true.

“We can do no great deeds. We may do only small deeds with great love.”

This parallel thought is supposedly Mother Teresa; this may be true.

“Do I really believe that my work is crucial to the planet’s survival? Of course not. But it’s as important to me as catching that mouse is to the hawk circling outside my window. He’s hungry. He needs a kill. So do I.”

The writer Steven Pressfield is not from India, but he echoes the subcontinental heroes above in The War of Art, p. 66.

Helen Keller (on humility in work)

Posted by :James Howden On : May 7, 2007
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Category: He Said/She Said

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“I long to accomplish great and noble tasks, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pulses of each honest worker.”

Helen Keller‘s quote reminds me of the banner on the weekly Haldimand Press from back home: “Small service is true service.” It comes from a wee poem William Wordsworth wrote in 1834:

SMALL service is true service while it lasts:

Of humblest Friends, bright Creature! scorn not one:

The Daisy, by the shadow that it casts,

Protects the lingering dew-drop from the Sun.

A.A. Cooper (Seven Deadly Virtues)

Posted by :James Howden On : March 7, 2007
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The Seven Deadly Sins:

Truth, if it becomes a weapon against persons.

Beauty, if it becomes vanity.

Love, if it becomes possessive.

Loyalty, if it becomes blind, careless trust.

Tolerance, if it becomes indifference.

Self-confidence, if it becomes arrogance.

Faith, if it becomes self-righteous.

                                    Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1801-1885, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury: politician, reformer, philanthropist,

Howard Thurman (on freedom)

Posted by :James Howden On : March 7, 2007
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“There is…confusion as to the meaning of personal freedom. For some it means to function without limitations at any point, to be able to do what one wants to do and without hindrance. This is the fantasy of many minds, particularly those that are young. For others, personal freedom is to be let alone, to be protected against any force that may move into the life with a swift and decisive imperative. For still others, it means to be limited in one’s power over others only by one’s own strength, energy, and perseverance.

“…[These definitions] lack the precious ingredient, the core of discipline and inner structure without which personal freedom is a delusion. At the very centre, personal freedom is a discipline of the mind and of the emotions.”

Howard Thurman (1899-1981) , African American scholar, writer and pastor, from his book A Strange Freedom

Anne Hines (on religion and perspective)

Posted by :James Howden On : February 26, 2007
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Category: He Said/She Said

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“When I meet God, whatever that is – whatever *I* am – I feel we will laugh about the things I thought were important, and cry over the things I didn’t see as important.”

Anne Hines, writer and United Church of Canada pastor-in-training. She added — I believe this was from a radio interview — “My current goal is to graduate while there still is religion!” There’s a darkly pregnant joke.