Central governments have always been the greatest danger to mankind.
Do not be so quick to accept as truth what is only conjecture.
Sometimes change is necessary. Sometimes we recognize the need for it, but we don’t know how to achieve it. We misread its nature. We think it is beyond us, failing to recognize that our inability to act is a problem of our own making. Change is the solution we require, but it is not a goal that is easily reached. Identifying and disposing of what is troubling to us requires caution and understanding.
Events and circumstances sometimes conspire against us; if we insist on inflexibility for the purpose of maintaining our beliefs, we end up compromising ourselves nevertheless. We salvage one set of principles only to forsake another.
Well,” he said softly, “in this life you’re often born one thing and die another. You don’t have to accept that what you’re given when you come in is all you’ll have when you leave.
You have to trust in who and what you are. You have to trust in the dream you have been given. You have believed in it until now, haven’t you?
They became sleepwalkers in a world of half-dreams and rambling thoughts with no break in the wearing march or the never-ending, silent black trunks that came and passed in countless thousands.
The destruction of the world depends on the willingness of the people in it to harm each other in any way necessary to achieve their own ends and to further their own causes. And we got that part down pat, don’t we? We know how to hurt each other and how to think up whatever excuses we need to justify it. We’re victims and executioners both.
But Miles had always approached life differently than he, always preferring to blend in with his surroundings rather than to shape them, always preferring to make do. He just didn’t understand that there were some things in life a man simply should not accept.
We have thousands and thousands of people living homeless on the streets of our cities at the same time that we have men and women earning millions of dollars a year running companies that make products whose continued usage will ruin our health, our environment, and our values. The irony is incredible. It’s obscene.
Our problem is not one of ignorance; it is one of complacency. We are too quick to accept the life we know and not quick enough to embrace the life we only imagine. We think that events must proceed as we dictate, and that no other voice will ever have meaning but ours.
It was the nature of things, of course. Life went on. The best you could do was to hold on to the memories that were important to you, so that even if everyone else forgot, you would remember.
The highlander seemed to float through life very much the same as a cloud in an empty sky, touching nothing, leaving no trace of his passing.
Either you believed in something or you didn’t – you couldn’t have it both ways and be honest with yourself.
There was a madness in the scheme of life that men were forced to accept either with resigned fury or blunt indifference.
Life was a myriad of twists and turns that no one could unravel, a path that must be traveled to be understood.
Much of what happens to us in life is due to chance and circumstances beyond our control. Being in the right place at the right time. Discovering that others have impacted us more than we know and for reasons that are not entirely clear. But hard work matters, too. There is an old saying: The harder I work, the luckier I get.
Some decisions cannot be made in advance of the time that will demand them. We cannot always anticipate the way in which things will happen and therefore cannot anticipate what we will do. We must accept that.
If you’re a real writer, you infuse your characters with truths from your own life. The old saw is, Write What You Know. I think it equally appropriate to add. Write Who You Are. Give your readers little insights into how you think. Share your feelings and beliefs in a way that makes other question their own, thereby requiring them in some small way to reevaluate their lives. Good storytelling compels us to do this.
Truisms, my young friend, are the useless children of hindsight.