Sometime back in 2019 I made a post that I continually updated with quotes I came across that I liked or thought were interesting. Last year, I made a similar post for 2021. In keeping with the tradition, here is the log for 2022! (Updated December 2022)
“When the time came for the flyby on that perfect summer day in August, the test pilot, Alvin M. “Tex” Johnston, with Jim Ganner as copilot and Bell Whitehead as engineer, rolled the plane as it passed over the Gold Cup course with two hundred thousand people watching. The big 707 was not inverted for long, but the effect was stunning. Allen called Johnston to his office the next day and asked, ‘What did you think you were doing yesterday?’ Tex replied, ‘Selling the airplane.’”
“We have to be constantly jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”
“Notice when you’re happy, and know when you’ve got enough.”
“But about my Uncle Alex, who is up in Heaven now. One of the things he found objectionable about human beings was that they so rarely noticed it when they were happy. He himself did his best to acknowledge it when times were sweet. We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’”
“The members of your graduating class are not sleepy, are not listless, are not apathetic. They are simply performing the experiment of doing without hate. Hate is the missing vitamin or mineral or whatever in their diet, they have sensed correctly that hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide. This a very exciting thing they are doing, and I wish them well.”
“‘I knew you were,’ I said. ‘Somehow I think the other kids’ll grow out of it. But I don’t think we will, Ralph. I think we’ll keep waiting.’”
“‘We all have passions,’ he told the students sitting before him on the floor. ‘You don’t get to choose them, they pick you. But you have to be alert to them. You have to be looking for them. And when you find your passion, it’s a fantastic gift for you because it gives you direction. It gives you a purpose. You can have a job. You can have a career. Or you can have a calling.’”
“We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, ‘Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.’”
“All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren’t noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.”
“Another difference is that we are above it, and it is uniformly bright. No misty days, no towering thunderheads; all that is below, and superbright in the unfiltered sunlight, which spreads cheeriness over the whole scene below. No doom, no gloom, only optimism. This is a better world than the one down there. Fantastic!”
“My good friend, fellow jogger, and occasional cynic Jack Whitelaw says that a strong heart merely serves to prolong the agony of terminal cancer patients, a theory I try not to think about as I puff around the track.”
“Villains on a cosmic scale are where you find them, and the imagination has found some majestic ones indeed, including exploding suns and invading Martians. Real life, in recent years, has found some actual villains that would have seemed most imaginary not too long ago, as, for instance, nuclear bombs and melting icecaps.”
“The only secrets worth protecting were in the minds of the very scientists the authorities wanted to exclude.”
“This was my idea of a Fermi Question: Turn every experience into a question. Can you analyze it? If not, you’ll learn something. If you can, you’ll also learn something.”
“We need to build in a tolerance for people who will throw their careers in front of a runaway train. And when they do, we need bosses who will say, ‘I’ve got your back.’”
“You don’t have to work all the time but you should think all the time.”