"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and
finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us.  "He is full of
murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by
their ignorance the hard way."
-- Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle"

"In twenty years we're gonna wake up in a tidal wave of crap."
  -- Tori Amos, Yahoo Online Chat, April 13, 1998

"Odd.  At birth we are bald, feeble, and toothless; and we spend the
 rest of our lives to return to such a state, the defining distinction
 being that as babies we are hailed as 'cute' and at our deaths we are
 are labeled 'pitiful.'  Odd, that."
 - Ryan Christopher, Memoirs, 1973.

Only the naive or the scurrilous believe the Third Wave claim
that 'information is power'.  Power is power, and information
is particularly useful to those who are already powerful.
	-- Philip Bereano

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
 persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore, all
 progress depends on the unreasonable man."
                                - George Bernard Shaw

Sit peacefully in a church and think of church history: witchburning
perhaps, or child abuse, genocide, the amassing of disgusting wealth,
the repression of women, inquisitions, castrating child choir singers,
the denial of Santa Claus and the support of fascists in power.
                                - Kaz Cooke, The Little Book of Stress

"The truck lurched down the rutted road and I turned on the windshield
 wipers.  They smeared the raindrops across the windshield and turned
 everything into an Impressionist blur.  "La Rue de Dump," by Claude
 Monet.  I lurched to where the pavement began, but still I didn't speed
 up.  I was thinking and the faster one drove, the less clearly one
 thought.  It was one of the things that was wrong with our society.
 Smoother roads, faster cars, dumber people."
                                - from the novel _Bloodlines_, by Gerry Boyle


X-Sender: bluesky@rcia.com
Cross contamination of athelete's foot to the larnyx is an occupational
hazard in American journalism.

"We in the academic world like to think we are bathing the country in
 logic and right reason, when all you have to do is stop at a service
 station or read a newspaper to find out otherwise.  There is a spine of
 goofiness in America that has never been deterred by literacy.  It's
 not that we are in a genetic slump but that literacy, the educative
 system, barely scratches the surface of ordinary consciousness."
 - the character Professor Michael, from the novel Dalva by Jim Harrison

" Learning is important for both people and organizations. But the real
challenge today is unlearning, which is much harder. Each of us has a
"mental model" that we've used over the years to make sense of the world.
But the new world of business behaves differently from the world in which
we grew up.
   Before any of us can learn new things we have to make our current
assumptions explicit and find ways to challenge them. This is no academic
exercise, and it doesn't come naturally.
   In fact, the harder you fight to hold on to specific assumptions, the
more likely there's gold in le go of them."
                Fast Company

"Men who can succeed in deceiving no one else, will succeed
 at last in deceiving themselves." 
 - Anthony Trollope, in _Miss MacKenzie_

"Mistakes are the price we pay for a full life."
 - Sophia Loren

Word of Honor is not something to be given easily or taken for granted.  It is
the only thing we as individuals have that we can always give, and if we do
not keep our word, then we have no honor.  And, to have no honor we might as
well have no heart, for we must not have a conscience.
(Unknown)