If something is my right, then it ought to be another’s.

A person stands a much better chance of  winning the lottery than of finding a quick and easy path that bestows wisdom upon the traveler.

Instant gratification, and the culture that promotes it, forsakes the harder, longer path toward the unpromised gift of wisdom for the easier, quicker path of indulgence – of body, mind, and spirit; too much of everything.

Gratification is not gratitude, and information is not wisdom.

If Glenn Beck says the government wants to tax your breathing under the guise of global warming legislation, that doesn’t mean it’s true. If Sarah Palin tells us that health care reform is an evil plot, it’s more a reflection of Sarah than it is health care reform.

Reason dismisses such foolishness for what it is, ignorance swallows it whole.

The reputation Toyota had earned as a trusted global car-maker took decades to build, but mere weeks to lose. Their most valuable asset too easily squandered and perhaps never fully recovered. There’s a lesson in there for all of us.

When former vice president Dick Cheney parades his support for torture in front of the world, he abdicates all moral authority along with the principals of freedom and liberty he professes to defend. It isn’t about those he would torture, justice is their due. It is about those that would forsake principal for security – in the process abandoning both.

Dick Cheney is a sad, little man.

Vengeance is a self-fulfilling prophesy, feeding on its own cycle of hate and retribution. Victory over the insidious pull of a false sense of satisfaction from violence and oppression requires dogged determination, an adherence to the higher ideals conceived in the trial of our own oppression.

Believing that a company is too big to fail, while  the education of the coming generation falters, is an aristocracy of government-by-corporation that cannot last.

There is no evidence or incontrovertible proof available to those who choose to cling to irrational prejudice and fear. Like giving medicine to the dead, rational thought and objective observation come too late.

It is not the relative difficulty or ease, but the caliber of people with which we associate, that shapes the course of our lives.

Lost in a sea of semantics, twisted interpretations of law, and descriptions of medieval-sounding methods of punishment revealed in recently released Bush-era memos justifying torture is, in truth, a betrayal of the very principles that founded a nation.

Let the terrorist deal in terror. America stands or falls on how it abides by a higher standard.