There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts.

Socialism: Any government that is capable of giving you everything you need is also powerful enough to take away everything you have.

He who worries about calamities suffers them twice over.

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little course, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice. Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.

There’s a fine line between being indifferent with the state of things and using Reddit to express your every displeasure with all facets of life. In between is the discontentment you can use to light a fire under your productivity.

The key is to focus on the discontent with things that you can actually change. Get riled up about your programming environment and submit a patch. Become annoyed with how the text flows on your company homepage and rewrite it. Feel guilty about the UI of a common action in your application and redesign it.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
— Reinhold Niebuhr

When you find people who embrace this idea, you’ll usually find people with exactly the pointed drive that gives them the power to Get Things Done. Hire them.

Grant to Congress and the Courts the power to define the rights of conscience, and the limit beyond which faith shall not be carried into action, and religious liberty is practically at an end. The battles for spiritual freedom, which have been so nobly fought in generations past, and which have been gained by the sacrifice of so much precious blood, will, so far as we are concerned, have been fought in vain.

You cannot by reasoning correct a man of ill opinion which by reasoning he never acquired.

Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.