If there was anything I learned from John the Baptist, it was that the sooner you confess a mistake, the quicker you can get on to making new and better mistakes.
The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.
...Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done--so I do it. And it makes me happy when I do it well.
Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science now accomplishes for all men.
A popular perception that political news is boring is no minor issue; for when news fails to harness the curiosity and attention of a mass audience through its presentational techniques, a society becomes dangerously unable to grapple with its own dilemmas and therefore to marshal the popular will to change and improve itself.
Politics is not just about power and money games, politics can be about the improvement of people's lives, about lessening human suffering in our world and bringing about more peace and more justice. -Paul Wellstone (Minnesota Senator, Al Franken predecessor)
I made a pleasant discovery. You work hard at something eight hours a day, you get better. Not a lot better necessarily, but a little better, and that's just fine, because improving at golf, or anything else probably, is just a matter of making an endless series of tiny improvements.
The people who had been recognized for making original contributions shared many more stories that started negatively but surged upward: they struggled early and triumphed later. Despite being confronted with more negative events, they reported greater satisfaction with their lives and a stronger sense of purpose.