human paradox

"Let us have the hero of Lincoln at least as an aspiration for others who want to be leaders of America—to think that he was perfect helps us to strive for perfection."
- Mario Cuomo on the fallible Abraham Lincoln

Ranking of U.S. Presidents here.

geotic

"90% of life is how you respond to what's happened; not what's happened."
- Bill Clinton

Intimacy & Competence

London, 1938

According to Sigmund Freud, the things at which we must be good are love and work.

old mathematician adage

"We must know. We will know."
- David Hilbert [1862-1943]

old political adage

"Show me where my people are going so I can lead them there."

depending upon how you define art

"60% of the world's most important works of art are located in Italy. Half of those are in Florence."
- Graham McPherson "Suggs" [born 1961]

country bumpkin*

Paul Cézanne, La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, 1885-1895

"He was my one and only master ... he was the father of us all."
- Pablo Picasso [1881-1973] on Paul Cézanne [1839-1906] who painted the land that gave birth to him.

* because he laid paint by the trowel load

down and out and jocular

cooking classes in Venice

http://www.enricarocca.com/english/veniceclasses.html

16 miles

According to Marco Polo, Kublai Khan walled off 16 miles of parkland at his summer estate Xanadu.

Terribilità

Fear and awe.

world war II slogan

A place to stay in London

http://www.asterhouse.com

4077

"One doesn't have a sense of humor. It has you."
- Larry Gelbart [1928-2009]

dictum

"Despair is a sin against the imagination."
- Proverb of an Inuit community acquainted with alcoholism and suicide.

why the sphinx has a human head

Power under control.

40 inspirational speeches in 2 minutes

charities

guidestar.org is the leading online clearinghouse for information on non-profit groups.

analytical, persuasive

"I cannot fiddle, but I can make a great state from a little city."
- Themistocles [c.514-449 C.E.]

warmth

"Ideas come to me in droves."

- America's first architect Bejamin LaTrobe, who declared bankruptcy twice, and burned his furniture for warmth, and proved that even if one is brilliant and hardworking, one can fail.

unnaturalist

"What good man would prefer a country covered with forest and ranged by a few thousand savages for our extensive republic studded with cities and towns and prosperous farms embellished with all the improvements art can devise or industry execute."
- President Andrew Jackson, 1830

nonprecocity

"You don't get a sense of drawing until you're nine to eleven years old."
- Pablo Picasso

being human

"Predicting and affecting the behavior of others is what it means to be human."
- Cornelia Bargmann, Rockefeller University

reality

"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."
- Reinhold Niebuhr [1892-1971]

vinyl

Jeff Bridges' [born 1949] collection of bad album covers here.

birth of the modern novel

Miguel de Cervantes' 17th century Don Quixote aims to change a world he does not like and cannot understand.

Salvador Dali image source here.

spy plane footage

http://www.wimp.com/breathtakingfootage

voyage

Gottlieb Mittelberger, a musician, traveling from Germany to America around 1750, wrote about his voyage:

During the journey the ship is full of pitiful signs of distress—smells, fumes, horrors, vomiting, various kinds of sea sickness, fever, dysentery, headaches, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth-rot, and similar afflictions, all of them caused by the age and the high salted state of the food, especially of the meat, as well as by the very bad filthy water ... Add to all that a shortage of food, hunger, thirst, frost, heat, dampness, fear misery, vexation, and lamentation as well as other troubles ... On board our ship, on a day on which we had a great storm, a woman about to give birth and unable to deliver under the circumstances, was pushed through one of the portholes into the sea ...

Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, pp.42-43

eject!

copycat

"The best ads motivate us to imitate the behaviour of others."
- Tim Taylor

overwhelmed

According to Dr. Atul Gawande [born 1965], physicians must be familiar with:

• 13k diagnoses
• 4k medical procedures
• 6k drugs

disabled

"Strength through adversity."

- World War II veteran Senator [R] Bob Dole [born 1923]

eject!

civilization

What they undertook to do
They brought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass.
- William Butler Yeats [1865-1939]

Image source here.

words

"The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference between a sin and a symptom."
- Malcolm Gladwell [born 1963], What the Dog Saw, p.242