Stout Wisdom

Life is too short to have anything come out of your mouth that isn’t true.

“There seems to be an inverse relationship between written instruments of freedom, such as a Charter, and freedom itself. It’s as if freedom were too fragile to be put into words: If you write down your rights and freedoms, you lose them.”

“I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of a national emergency – even if I’m in a cabinet meeting.”

A generation is a group of people who share a basic outlook on life shaped by their common age location in history, their common ‘generational setting…’ ‘Youth,’ on the other hand…

“Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.”

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Not too long ago, people walked with their heads up, looking at the water, the sky, the sand and at one another, talking. Now they often walk with their heads down, typing…

The truth is like a lizard; it leaves its tail in your hands and runs away; it knows that it will shortly grow another one.

Once politics was about only a few things; today, it is about nearly everything.

A sense of humor is incompatible with the complete acceptance of any dogma, any religious, political, or economic prescriptions for salvation.

The gospel is an embodied announcement about this world: it is good, and we’re home, and the word took on flesh and moved into the neighborhood. Heaven and earth are, in fact, coming together. We’re home. Soil is good, and so is wine, and sex, and music, and muscle, and arranging things, and building things, and getting hungry people the food they need, and jobs that empower people to make better lives for themselves.

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

If it’s a-sagging, a-bagging, or a-dragging, I’m gonna get it sucked, tucked, or plucked…God didn’t make plastic surgeons so they can starve.

David Lean wouldn’t be allowed to make movies today, John Ford would be forced to turn John Wayne into a 30-something failure-to-launch hipster whose big moment is missing the toilet in the vomit scene in Hangover Ten. Our movie culture has descended into immaturity, deep and inhuman violence, a pervasive and flattened sexuality. It is an embarrassment.

Washington is the place where one never writes if one can call, never calls if one can speak, never speaks if one can nod, and never nods if one can wink.