User:Piewalker

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Contents

[edit] My Wikipedia Article Contributions


[edit] Research

  • Continuing Education; CME and ACPE accredited manuscripts:
Assisted Living Consult: Special Supplement. Caring for Residents with Dementia in Assisted Living. January/February 2006 Supplement [1] (ghost edited entire supplement; penned the last article with minor edits; penned learning assessment).
  • Lin PJ. Overview of Dementia.
  • Leifer BP. Mild Cognitive Impairment and the Diagnosis of Dementia: Implications for the Healthcare Provider.
  • Gray KF. Practical Approaches to Managing Agitation and Psychosis.
  • Wolf-Klein GP. End-of-Life Care in Alzheimer’s Disease.
  • Doody, RS. Future Strategies for the Prevention and Treatment of Alzheimer’s. (ghost in full; author recommended minor edits)
  • Margolis J, Barron JJ, Grochulski WD. Health Care Resources and Costs for Treating Peripheral Artery Disease in a Managed Care Population: Results From Analysis of Administrative Claims Data. J Manag Care Pharm. 2005;11(9):727-34. (manuscript acknowledged)
  • Bullano MF, Willey VJ, Hauch O, Wygant G, Spyropoulos AC, Hoffman L. Longitudinal evaluation of health plan cost per venous thromboembolism or bleed event in patients with a prior venous thromboembolism event during hospitalization. J Manag Care Pharm. 2005;11(8):663-73. (manuscript acknowledged)
  • Willey VJ, Bullano MF, Hauch O, Reynolds M, Wygant G, Hoffman L, Mayzell G, Spyropoulos AC. Management patterns and outcomes of patients with venous thromboembolism in the usual community practice setting. Clin Ther. 2004 Jul;26(7):1149-59. (manuscript acknowledged)
  • Barron JJ, Al-Zakwani I, Iarocci T. Quality of care and attributable healthcare costs in diabetic hypertensive patients initiated on calcium antagonist therapy. Clin Drug Invest. 2004. 24(11):641-649. (manuscript acknowledged)
  • Barron JJ, Grochulski WD, Merchant S, Spooner JJ, Waugh WJ, Keating KN. Treatment Costs Associated With commonly used branded antibiotics for the management of acute sinusitis, chronic bronchitis and pneumonia. J Applied Res. 2004. 4(1)24-36. (manuscript acknowledged)
  • Barron JJ, Boudreaux MY, Yang W, Groesbeck M, McKenzie RS, Mody SH. Dosing distribution patterns and associated costs of erythropoietic agents in elderly anemic patients with predialysis chronic kidney disease (pCKD). Poster 56 presented Friday, November 11, 2005 at the 36th annual meeting of the American Society for Consultant Pharmacists. http://www.ascp.com/education/postersandpapersam05.cfm (authorship and created poster)
  • Barron JJ, Mody SH, Boudreaux MY, Yang W, Groesbeck M, McKenzie RS. Dosing distribution patterns and associated costs of erythropoietic agents in anemic patients with cancer receiving chemotherapy. Poster P394E presented Tuesday, December 6, 2005 at the 40th annual meeting of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. (authorship and created poster)
  • Barron JJ, Mody SH, Boudreaux MY, Yang W, Groesbeck JM, McKenzie RS. Dosing distribution patterns and associated costs of erythropoietic agents in patients with pre-dialysis chronic kidney disease from three large managed care organizations. Poster PRR8 presented October 5-8, 2005,at Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy's 2005 Educational Conference in Nashville, TN. Abstract appears in J Manag Care Pharm. 2005;11(7):601. (authorship and created poster)

[edit] Who am I?

Matt Groesbeck. I'm a medical writer currently living on the East Coast slaving away for pharma and academia, whatever those things are. But I'm certainly not confined to the boiling cauldron of burnt stew that technical writing sometimes becomes. Finding pleasure in exertions of all types of writing, I've tried to flex at least one of my literary nuts in everything from journalism to creative writing.

I'm male and single, due to my Y chromosome and personality, respectively.

[edit] Philosophy

I believe in good and evil. I also believe every intelligent being knows the difference between the two. I believe in the Universe that is presented to my senses. I believe in humanity who inhabits it. I believe in you.

I believe we do what we can. The strong do what they will and the weak do what they must. I believe in diplomacy and International Relations. I consider myself mildly leaning to liberal international interventionism in the absence of a global central enforcement mechanism. I believe in ice cream. I believe in corduroy evening wear. I believe in quiet moments, bereft of frantic psychosis. I also believe those moments sustain us perfectly through bad news and the holy-crap-the-world-has-gone-to-hell-in-a-handcart moments.

Watch out, I believe in some other things, too. In his television program and subsequent book "Cosmos", Carl Sagan probed the tantalizing hypothetical database entries of an Encyclopedia Galactica, a master pandect/compendium containing the total accumulation of all the knowledge of the known sentient species of our galaxy. Perhaps in this master database, as Sagan posits, resides the profiles of hundreds of thousands of civilizations waiting to be discovered. The database names of these entries I find revealing. One civilization calls themselves collectively "We who became one"; another "We who survived." Finally, "Humanity." We can learn a great deal from what we call ourselves.

  • human - c.1250, from M.Fr. humain "of or belonging to man," from L. humanus, probably related to homo (gen. hominis) "man," and to humus "earth," on notion of "earthly beings," as opposed to the gods (cf. Heb. Adam "man," from adamah "ground"). Cognate with O.Lith. zmuo (acc. zmuni) "man, male person."

Learning is a joy to me, and Wikipedia works to achieve this end. I'm positively energized to live in an epoch of human history where the quest for knowledge is, as Sagan wrote, generally prized. Wikipedia champions this notion.

I think mankind's greatest accomplishments and failures are both political and personal, galactic-esque in range and kitchen-tableish in domain. We live in a vast global village, an arena that will remain forever unknown unless we look in the rear-view mirror and keep our eyes on the road. With the careful cultivation of disciplined thought, I believe we can ride on the wings of understanding and knowledge that soars into the realm of the previously unimaginable, perhaps bringing us closer to that seemingly elusive understanding of ourselves.

I find meaning in communicating perceptions of the world because I suppose I'm arrogant enough to think I see it clearly. Wikipedia is an outlet for that arrogance, yet has sufficient filters and controls to tailor, channel and peer-review the cavalier or mundane into something rich, balanced, fair, intelligent and meaningful...something good enough to share and pass on in the ever altruistic efforts of paying it forward.

And, well, I believe in you.

Disclaimer: I don't believe everything in the news.

[edit] Hobbies

For fun I build computers. I play ice hockey and chess. I enjoy rollerblading, running, basketball and just playing catch. Thinking is a favorite past time (as ex-girlfriends will tell you). I adore film. I relish the Internet, multiplayer games (all PC games...current favorites are Halo: Combat Evolved, Homeworld 2, Star Wars Republic Commando, Star Wars Rebellion, FarCry, and the old Unreal Tournament), not to mention all the continuously updated sources of information, literature and creativity, including news sites such as MSNBC and CNN, Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic,CG Channel, CNet, Slashdot, Project Gutenberg and, of course, Wikipedia.

[edit] Vita/Profile

I began my writing career as an intern for a public relations firm in Salt Lake City while working retail pharmacy, then penned news, features and sports stories for The Daily Utah Chronicle, the independent student newspaper at the University of Utah. I then freelanced for various event magazines before and after graduating from the U [2] in 2003, and shortly thereafter thought it was high time I write what was really on my mind, writing creative fiction and personal essays at the United Kingdom's own Friends of the Heroes. All the while I penned my own column dubbed "Chutes and Ladders" at Long and Short Reports from 2001 to 2003, poring my creative and technical energies into company valuations and general industry trend analyses. In 2003, I snagged a medical writing opportunity for a health outcomes research company in 2003 to 2005. In those trenches, I developed peer-review manuscripts, abstracts, presentations, and poster deliverables for any small/mid/large pharma company you can name. Side effects? Self-learned graphic design (Adobe Creative Suite), layout/typography, publication strategy, vendor selection and management, and intranet development.

Present day: I work as writer for a research institute at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. Also, en route to earn a Master of Public Health (MPH) from Drexel University at the end of 2006. Drexel is one of only 37 accredited schools of Public Health among hundreds in the U.S.[3] Among other things, I'm familiar with the nuances of retrospective claims data analysis, mining the tumbling asteroid-scape of biomedical literature and databases (let's just say I prefer open access), parsing the theories of health behavior change (community and individual), biostatistics, epidemiology, community health assessment, program evaluation, and health management and leadership.

[edit] Favorite Authors

[edit] Favorite Quotes

[edit] On War

  • "A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt...If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake." -Thomas Jefferson, 1798, after the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts
  • Our fallen heroes: "[W]e cannot dedicate — we cannot consecrate — we cannot hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here." - Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, 1863.
  • "In a full nuclear exchange, in the paroxysm of thermonuclear war, the equivalent of a million Hiroshima bombs would be dropped all over the world. At the Hiroshima death rate of some hundred thousand people killed per equivalent thirteen-kiloton weapon, this would be enough to kill a hundred billion people. But there were less than five billion people on the planet in the late twentieth century." -Carl Sagan, Cosmos, Who speaks for Earth?
  • “Every minute, hundreds of bombs and shells are exploding,” said Fadril al-Badrani, a resident who lives in the center of Fallujah, said after nightfall Monday. “The north of the city is in flames. I can also see fire and smoke ... Fallujah has become like hell.” -NBC, MSNBC and news services; Updated: 9:33 a.m. ET Nov. 9, 2004
  • "My nerves are in perfect order," Owen wrote his mother. "I came out again in order to help these boys; directly, by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can." -Wilfred Owen, 1918
  • After the Scott Peterson Death penalty verdict, the mother of Laci Peterson: "There are no winners in a case like this. We are families who are suffering horrendous losses," Sharon Rocha wrote in a statement posted this week on the family's Web site. "People tell me, 'Now you can have some closure.' There is no closure. We are only turning the page and beginning the next chapter in our book of life," she wrote. "Closure will only occur for me when I complete my book of life, when I die."
  • "'There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom. The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world,' he said. Bush did admit that 'freedom, by its nature, must be chosen,' and he promised 'America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling.' For the most part, Bush’s address was free of any doubt or skepticism. It was instead a prose hymn to human freedom, as loftily idealistic as any of Woodrow Wilson’s high-flown rhetoric." -Tom Curry quoting George W. Bush at the inauguration address for his second term, MSNBC.com, Updated: 8:20 p.m. ET Jan. 20, 2005
  • In his inaugural address last month, President Bush did not mention North Korea by name. But he said U.S. efforts have lit "a fire in the minds of men...It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world," he said.
  • Bush also used Saturday's address to celebrate Easter and remember military members overseas. "Easter is the victory of light over darkness," Bush said. "In this season of renewal, we remember that hope leads us closer to truth, and that in the end, even death itself will be defeated. That is the promise of Easter morning." President Bush addressing the Minnesota school shootings where a boy shot to death five fellow students, a teacher and a security guard. CNN reporting, "Bush praises fallen security guard", Saturday, March 26, 2005 Posted: 11:21 AM EST (1621 GMT)
  • "Look, Kim Jong Il is a dangerous person. He's a man who starves his people. He's got huge concentration camps. And, as David accurately noted, there is concern about his capacity to deliver a nuclear weapon. We don't know if he can or not, but I think it's best, when you're dealing with a tyrant like Kim Jong Il, to assume he can...One of the reasons why I thought it was important to have a missile defense system is for precisely the reason that you brought up: Perhaps Kim Jong Il has got the capacity to launch a weapon; wouldn't it be nice to be able to shoot it down?" CNN reporting from a transcript of the President's news conference Thursday, April 28, 2005 Posted: 11:04 PM EDT (0304 GMT).
  • "Ladies and gentlemen, we are so privileged to be citizens of this great republic. I was reminded of that time and again when I was in my former job as secretary of defense. I traveled a lot, and when I came home, my plane would land at Andrews Air Force Base and I'd return to the Pentagon by helicopter. When you make that trip from Andrews to the Pentagon and you look down on the city of Washington, one of the first things you see is the Capitol, where are the great debates that have shaped 200 years of American history have taken place. You fly down along the Mall and see the monument to George Washington, a structure as grand as the man himself. To the north is the White House, where John Adams once prayed that none but honest and wise men may ever rule under this roof. Next, you see the memorial to Thomas Jefferson, our third president and the author of our Declaration of Independence. Then you fly over the memorial to Abraham Lincoln, this greatest of presidents, the man who saved the Union. And then you cross the Potomac on approach to the Pentagon. And just before you settle down on the landing pad, you look out upon Arlington National Cemetery, its gentle slopes and crosses row on row. I never once made that trip without being reminded of how enormously fortunate we all are to be Americans and what a... (INTERRUPTED BY APPLAUSE) . . I never made that trip without being reminded of how enormously fortunate we are to be Americans and what a terrible price thousands have paid so that all of us and millions more around the world might live in freedom." -Richard B. Cheney address accepting the GOP nomination for vice president, August 2, 2000[4]
  • "Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages." -Samuel Johnson, writer, 1758

[edit] Clever

  • "Just as I was getting used to today, along came yesterday." -Author unknown
  • "A lawyer's stock and trade is his advice and time." -Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President. "Then you fly over the memorial to Abraham Lincoln, this greatest of presidents, the man who saved the Union." -Vice President Dick Cheney
  • "We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true." Robert Wilensky, speech at a 1996 conference
  • The world has broken into pieces and you and I are not on the same piece. -Piewalker
  • "In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice." Richard Bach - Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
  • "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die." -Mel Brooks
  • "The musical blows the dust off your soul." -Mel Brooks, from the PBS six-parter Broadway: The American Musical about the uniquely American art form.
  • "We're all weird. We just pretend to be normal." -Andrea Bolingbroke
  • "Cheerleaders are dancers that have gone retarded." -from the stupid film Bring It On
  • But you dreamt of me? Why? I'm just an online fantasy. An apparition. A vapor. Afternoon mist floating in the setting summer sun. A quiet ghost. But I'm only a hallucination of yours. A walking illusion. The black hole of truth. The antithesis of emotional respite. I am nothing. I'm nothing to you. This is just an exercise in mental calisthenics. These are things you'd say in your perfect reality. -Piewalker
  • "If tears made you pretty, I'd be beautiful. I'm self destructive. I hide behind a smile. Everyone goes away in the end. No one understands me..." -Author unknown

[edit] On Science

  • "An active field of science is like an immense anthill; the individual almost vanishes into the mass of minds tumbling over each other, carrying information from place to place, passing it around at the speed of light." -Lewis Thomas (1913-1994) in The Lives of a Cell
  • "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" -T.S. Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock,' The Complete Poems and Plays (1930), 96.
  • "What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." -Herbert Alexander Simon, economist and Nobel laureate (1916-2001)
  • "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." -Carl Sagan
  • "The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." -Carl Sagan
  • "The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." -Carl Sagan
  • "If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?" -Carl Sagan
  • "The power of imagination makes us infinite." -John Muir

[edit] On Writing and the Media

  • "Enlighten the people generally and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of a new day." -Thomas Jefferson. "In the spirit of Jefferson’s belief in universal education, the Library of Congress celebrates, preserves and makes available the ideas, the creativity and the intellectual heritage of its collections in its published books and calendars. Our hope is that through our publishing program, we can make our vast collections accessible to the American public." [5]
  • "Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half." -Gore Vidal, author and dramatist
  • "Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost. To the sacrifice of time, labor, fortune, a public servant must count upon adding that of peace of mind and even reputation...It is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nations of its benefits than is done by such abandoned prostitution to falsehood." -Thomas Jefferson, 3rd U.S. president (1743-1826)
  • "Yes, I think people should be allowed to criticize me all they want. And they do. The freedom of people to express themselves must be protected. The right for people to express themselves in the public square is a freedom." -President George W. Bush, 2006
  • "True literature is life translated into letters." -Ferenc Molnar, playwright, 1929
  • "Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life." - Giorgos Seferis (1900-1971), poet, writer, ambassador, Nobel laureate
  • On writer envy: "He writes so well he makes me feel like putting my quill back in my goose." -Fred Allen, comedian (1894-1956)
  • "This pen moved the more readily on the page whenever it explored my quicksilver days as a newspaperman east or west, or in between. The newspaper was my first love, and, come to think of it, my last. I smelled the ink of the press room when I was a printer's devil, and have found no other scent as stimulating except in the heart of a blue-spruce grove, or occasionally in that of a lady." -Gene Fowler, newspaperman, 1961
  • "Each news story, I thought, had enlightening footnotes and marginal comments. Sometimes they were scrawled by the Devil's hand, or at other time by Gabriel's. These points of reference were of little use to the newspapers. News is history shot on the wing. The huntsmen from the Fourth Estate seek to bag only the peacock or the eagle of the swifting day." -Gene Fowler, newspaperman, 1961
  • "And above all, never forget that the pen is mightier than the plow-share. By this I mean that writing, all in all, is a hell of a lot more fun than farming. For one thing, writers seldom, if ever, have to get up at five o'clock in the morning and shovel manure. As far as I am concerned, that gives them the edge right there." -Willa Cather, Pulitzer Prize-writer, 1873-1947
  • "The First Amendment is the cornerstone of our democratic society. Unfortunately, young people don't live it enough. It becomes like the granite monument in the park we never visit." -Sandy Woodcock, director, Newspaper Association of America Foundation, 2005, responding to survey finding that U.S. high school students know or care little about the First Amendment.
  • "Books are doors that lead out into the street...You learn from them, educate yourself, travel, dream, imagine, live other lives, multiply your own life a thousand times. Where can you get more for your money? They also keep all sorts of bad things at bay: ghosts, loneliness, shit like that. Sometimes I wonder how you people that don't read figure out how to live like yourselves." -Arturo Pérez-Reverte, writer, 2002
  • "[I]n bed with a book, the spell of television feels remote compared to the journey into the page. To be in a book. To slip into the crease where two pages meet, to live in the place where your eyes alight upon the words to ignite a world of smoke and peril, colour and serene delight. That is a journey no one can end with the change of a channel. Enduring magic." -Ann-Marie MacDonald, author, The Way the Crow Flies (2003)
  • From the Understatement Department: "The impact of television on our culture is . . . indescribable. There's a certain sense in which it is nearly as important as the invention of printing." -Carl Sandburg, poet, 1955
  • "We are losing our ability to manage ideas, to contemplate, to think. We are in a constant race to be the first with the obvious. We are becoming a nation of electronic voyeurs whose capacity for dialogue is a fading memory." -Ted Koppel, anchor, "Nightline," 1986
  • "A newspaper is a device unable to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization." -George Bernard Shaw, writer (1856-1950)
  • "As loyal as I am to newspapers, I confess it's not even essential that the ink-on-paper medium survives. What matters is that journalism survive, that the craft of speaking truth to power with factual care not be snuffed out." -Chris Satullo, editorial-page editor, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 2004
  • "The day of the printed word is far from ended. Swift as is the delivery of the radio bulletin, graphic as is television's eyewitness picture, the task of adding meaning and clarity remains urgent. People cannot and need not absorb meanings at the speed of light." -Erwin Canham, former Christian Science Monitor editor in a speech reported in the New York Times, 1958
  • "There is one sacred rule of journalism. The writer must not invent. The legend on the [journalist's] license must read: NONE OF THIS WAS MADE UP." -John Hersey (1914-1993), writer and author of Hiroshima, 1946
  • On PR: "Wooing the press...is an exercise roughly akin to picnicking with a tiger. You might enjoy the meal, but the tiger always eats last." -Maureen Dowd, columnist, 1994
  • "The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off." -Gloria Steinem, feminist and activist, 2005
  • "Writing is a hellish task, best snuck up on, whacked on the head, robbed and left for dead." -Ann-Marie MacDonald, author, The Way the Crow Flies, 2003
  • "A writer is someone willing to betray the people he loves in order to impress people he's never met." –Ron Nyswaner
  • "Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts." –William Strunk, Jr.
  • "I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail." –James A. Michener
  • "Someone told me that there are two kinds of writers. There's the ones who write until they can't find a word, and then they sit around for two days until they get the right word. And, there's the kind who will leave a blank and go back and fill it in. I leave a blank. I will sometimes write a page or two and make a note, 'Better stuff than this.'" –John Sayles
  • "The same afternoon Zucker presented the fall schedule to advertisers at Radio City Music Hall, Grant Tinker was four blocks away at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. He was getting a prestigious Peabody award for his career running NBC and, before that, building MTM Enterprises, the legendary home of such series as "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "The Bob Newhart Show" and "Hill Street Blues." Receiving his medallion during the annual Peabody luncheon, Tinker, famously modest, called himself "a guy of no distinct or specific skills (who) always needed a lot of help." "And I've always had a lot of help," he added. "You know: really heavy lifters." That is his legacy: Recruiting the best creative people, and letting them do what they do best. Article by Frazier Moore Associated Press, Monday, June 6, 2005 Posted: 2:52 PM EDT (1852 GMT)
  • "When you're rewriting, you have to respect the writer who broke the page. If it wasn't for that, you wouldn't be doing those rewrites. A blank page, that's the toughest thing in the world." –Bob Brummer
  • "You really don't fully understand your own script until about two weeks after the movie opens." –David Koepp
  • "I'm not really that clever, so when I find something that is really apparent to me, I concentrate and fixate on it." –Eduardo Sanchez
  • “The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.” -John Cheever, writer, 1912-1982
  • "Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes, Art is knowing which ones to keep." –Scott Adams
  • "The tantalising vision of an unmade masterpiece." -Nick Dawson, Empire, excerpt from his review of the documentary Lost in La Mancha

[edit] The Human Condition

  • “The three most important things in life are to be kind, to be kind, to be kind.” -Henry James
  • “Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.” -Author unknown. This is an unverified quote often attributed to Philo of Alexandria or Plato. If anyone finds the source and citation, please e-mail me.
  • “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” -Aesop
  • "When once the wife of Philo was asked in an assembly of many women why she alone of all her sex did not wear any golden ornaments, she replied: "The virtue of a husband is a sufficient ornament for his wife." SER. CXXIII. From fragments of Philo's writings extracted from The Parallels of John of Damascus
  • "Hell is empty. The devils are all here." -Shakespeare, The Tempest
  • "For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love." -Carl Sagan
  • "I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star." -Carl Sagan
  • "I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students." -Carl Sagan
  • "One other possible title has occurred to me: Till We Have Faces. My heroine says in one passage, ‘How can the gods meet us face to face till we have faces?’ -CS Lewis, February 29, 1956 [cited at Hooper, Companion (see IX) 252]
  • "How can they (i.e. the gods) meet us face to face till we have faces? The idea was that a human being must become real before it can expect to receive any message from the superhuman; that is, it must be speaking with its own voice (not one of its borrowed voices), expressing its actual desires (not what it imagines that it desires), being for good or ill itself, not any mask, veil, or persona." -CS Lewis in a letter to Dorothea Conybeare [cited at Constance Babington Smith, Letters to a Sister from Rose Macaulay (1964) 261; also at Hooper, Companion (see IX) 252]
  • "It is the ferment of ideas, the clash of disagreeing judgments, the privilege of the individual to develop his own thoughts and shape his own character that makes progress possible." -Calvin Coolidge, 30th U.S. president, 1925
  • "Einstein to his dying day rejected quantum mechanics as ultimate truth, saying in a letter to Max Born in 1924, "The theory yields much but it hardly brings us closer to the Old One's secrets. I, in any case, am convinced that he does not play dice."" -Albert Einstein, 1879-1955, quote and description from The Next Einstein? Applicants Welcome by Dennis Overbye, published in the New York Times March 1, 2005
  • "There is nothing in the world more powerful than an idea. No weapon can destroy it; no power can conquer it, except the power of another idea." -Albert Einstein, 1879-1955
  • "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." -Mark Twain
  • "Grief only streaks their hairs with silver, but has never greyed their hopes." -Herbert Kaufman, The Winning Fight
  • "They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself." –Andy Warhol
  • "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world... Until the evil man finds evil unmistakably present in his existence, in the form of pain, he is enclosed in illusion... No doubt Pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul." -C.S. Lewis, p.81 and 83 from The Problem Of Pain
  • "The murky waters of fear boil up from the mud of selfishness." -Wayne Brickey, Making Sense of Suffering
  • "They are the architects of greatness. Their vision lies within their souls. They never see the mirages of Fact, but peer beyond the veils and mists of doubt and pierce the walls of unborn Time...They are the Argonauts, the seekers of the priceless fleece---the Truth...In lace of stone their spires stab the Old World's skies and with their golden crosses kiss the sun." -Herbert Kaufman, The Winning Fight (book c.1910) from the essay "The Dreamers"
  • "The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him." -Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You
  • "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." -Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)
  • "You can't be in a place where you're trying to justify the nature of the violence. The anthropological argument is that violence in film ritualizes it -- by putting in on the stage it's out of ordinary life. But in the end, you can't lie to your kids. You have to try to create a framework where witnessing real, unstructured violence illuminated your child's understanding of the human condition." –David Self
  • "I have this thing I call the 'trickle up' theory, which is, you find some small microcosm that represents the thing you are really interested in on a human level, and you try to hit people in their hearts and their emotions, and then you hope it will trickle up and they'll think about it with their heads." -Naomi Foner
  • "Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come." -Chinese proverb
  • "I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. -Willa Cather (1873-1947), O Pioneers 1913
  • "Do not be afraid to go out on a limb ... That's where the fruit is." -Anonymous
  • "Trees stand with us and the rest of Earth's lifeforms on the brink of this eternity and the next, our collective gazes shooting forward into the ether of time and our memories of each other reaching back. The arrow of time points both ways. The trees point up." -Me
  • "If you seek strength and majesty and patience, welcome the company of trees." -Hal Borland, Beyond Your Doorstep
  • "What a noble gift to man are the forests! What a debt of gratitude and admiration we owe for their utility and their beauty!" -Susan Fenimore Copper
  • "Too many people simply give up too easily. You have to keep the desire to forge ahead, and you have to be able to take the bruises of unsuccess. Success is just one long street fight." –Milton Berle
  • “That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, an indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.” -Edward Abbey, author, 1927-1989
  • "Far better it is to dare mighty things, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those who neither enjoy much or suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat." -Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States (1901–1909)
  • "One time, when I was little, I lost a quarter in my front yard. Then a few months later, after the snow melted, I found that quarter. Some things you never forget." -Author Unknown
  • "Marriage provides shelter for the child who enters mortality innocent and helpless. Marriage ensures security and happiness for parents as well." —President Boyd K. Packer, Ensign, Nov. 1986, 18
  • "Children are the past, the present, and the future all blended into one. They are consummately precious. Every time a child is born, the world is renewed in innocence. " —President Boyd K. Packer, Ensign, May 2002, 8
  • For jealousy is the rage of a man: therefore he will not spare in the day of vengeance. Proverbs 6: 34
  • "He who honors the Lord, the Lord honors." -My Dad
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