Someone's gonna control you, so it might as well be a spiritually, mentally, and physically healthy you doing the job--exercising self-control.

An excellent and frequently ignored observation. The truth is that 'adult' can be substituted for 'child' here with equal relevance.

Why am I glad I wasn't alive to get on Twain's bad side? Hehe. He kicked and still kicks a $$.

Amen. I love my public library. It's one of the many things we can still treasure in our threatened culture. It may end up being one of the last bastions of freedom given the corruption of the mainstream media and internet monitoring. While it is always best to think for oneself first, it is important to read others' ideas, if only to learn specifically why you oppose them. Otherwise, you'll unwittingly depend on others' second-hand opinions of those "well-chosen books". Learn for yourself if they are quality or tripe.

"We must learn to be free, to organize the random and detect the reflexive...". When I try to detect my thought reflexes, I'm always amazed at how thoughtless I truly am. Much of my day is spent with a limited number of habitual notions . . .If everyone behaved similarly (and I don't think I'm alone), it's pretty amazing that America came into being at all. It takes an amazing effort and sustained focus to change. Many thanks to Liberty Tree. Today's quotations are especially inspiring!

What a beautiful quotation--one of the best. However, in order to learn, we must first become humble. A learnING populace would be more alive, more varied, and more difficult to collectively manipulate. Only our individual arrogance, spawned by insecurity, stands in our way. Once we each learn to accept ourselves, humility and learning will follow!

Indeed! If I had school-age children, I'd definitely be home-schooling them. American public education truly was great once, several decades ago. It's gone terribly downhill since the early 1970s. Wish I could figure out precisely *WHY*.

Excellent quotation! If a system appears to be consistently failing, and is made even less rigorous, we have to ask, is that system perhaps succeeding brilliantly at its true aim--an aim that hadn't even occurred to us? As von Goethe said, "The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes." Wow.

Anyone who watched the Blair House Health Care Summit a few years ago, and who saw Paul Ryan lucidly and respectfully enumerate why Obamacare would be yet another unaffordable entitlement will have seen this quotation embodied. Ryan appeared to be the only rational being at that Health Care Summit. When Ryan was making his case, Obama started blinking like crazy, as though he'd been caught in a lie. It was amazing.

Herta, I agree. His articles on National Review Online are always clear, well-observed, and well-written. Like Colin Powell and Paul Ryan, Tom Sowell is way too smart to run for president. Nowadays, its seems only celebrity-seeking shallow-pates like Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin want to run, just so they can be the first female president. They don't know or care about history or proper governing.

"You must be the change you want to see in the world."--Gandhi . . . The most powerful, sincere, peaceful man WHO NEVER WON THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE . . . Reveals the value of the Nobel Pss Prize and other bogus forms of celebrity recognition.

Easier said than done. We all have some awareness of our heart's desire, and yet our insecurity, our desire to appear more than we are, our lack of acceptance of our God-given selves, drives us to "strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield". We are each at war with ourselves.

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,/ And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:/ Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;/ And live alone in the bee-loud glade./

I heard the same sorts of things, many specific examples, from a former co-worker whose wife worked for the IRS. Small-minded, bitter, evil people survive at the IRS--"people" who gave up early on their dreams and all possibility of joy--"people" who live only to make others as miserable as they've become. "Successful" IRS employees embody schadenfreude.

I once worked with a man whose wife worked for the IRS. He said pretty much the same things as today's quotation. He gave numerous examples of their evil. The IRS is nothing but a bunch of evil b-tards who long ago gave up on their childhood dreams, and who live only to make others feel bad.

Like a self-righteous buncha trust-fund flower children.

Amen. Americans have been asleep for too long. It took our current Narcissist-in-Chief to fully wake me up but, as Walter Williams says in his YouTube interview with ReasonTV, entitled, "Walter Williams: Up From the Projects", "...is (the Tea Party, etc.) enough? Or, is it too late? I'm not sure." We are staring at the bureaucratic hell described by C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters.

I've met too many "compassionate" liberals, some of whom bragged about being communists. While they held forth, all I could think of was, you're lucky to live in a country where you can criticize the government (at least for now) and not fear being executed tomorrow. I also wondered exactly how long "compassionate" liberals would remain so if their privileges were taken away and they actually had to work with their hands.

And we KNOW how pleasant and competent those government workers are whom we carry on our shoulders...their images immortalized by Patty and Selma of The Simpsons. That's right, how many of us respect government workers? And the most cunning ones, like Clinton, make millions off of their gig.

I'd like to see Edward Zehr's quotation on a T-shirt. That would solve all of my wardrobe needs. On another note: those who stigmatize people who live in trailer parks display prejudice. The converse of their view presumes that those living in fashionable areas, in big houses are, de facto, "quality people." Anyone that simplistic illustrates Zehr's quotation.

"What does not kill me, makes me stronger." - Nietzsche

James Dale Davidson is exactly right. Not only will workers be "worn down by taxes...dependent and helpless", but they will be uncreative. We've only to look at the mediocrity in contemporary visual "art", and listen to the maddening sameness of mainstream popular music to know that something is terribly wrong. We all need more time to recharge, to contemplate, to look within, but much of current life seems expressly designed to prevent us from recharging, to make us more passive, to make us give up. However, remember that this has always been the case, and the greatness of people like Rembrandt lies not in their creative output, nor in their draughtsmanship, nor in their ability to capture gesture, but in the fact that they never gave up.

Ben Franklin was talking about Obama here: "The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance".

Obama has increased the federal deficit by more than ALL other presidents combined, since the founding of the Republic. We must oust that Narcissist in 2012!!!

jim k, you are right on!!! I say, anyone or anyTHING but the Obamunist in 2012. The Obamunist MUST BE OUSTED!!!