“A sense of humor. Back to Webster's Unabridged: humor is defined as ‘The mental faculty of discovering, expressing, or appreciating ludicrous or absurdly incongruous elements in ideas, situations, happenings, or acts...’ or ‘A changing and uncertain state of mind…’ The organizer searching with a free and open mind void of certainty, hating dogma, finds laughter not just a way to maintain his sanity but also a key to understanding life. Essentially, life is a tragedy; and the converse of tragedy is comedy. One can change a few lines in any Greek tragedy and it becomes a comedy, and vice versa. Knowing that contradictions are the signposts of progress he is ever on the alert for contradictions. A sense of humor helps him identify and make sense out of them. Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule. A sense of humor enables him to maintain his perspective and see himself for what he really is: a bit of dust that burns for a fleeting second. A sense of humor is incompatible with the complete acceptance of any dogma, any religious, political, or economic prescription for salvation. It synthesizes with curiosity, irreverence, and imagination. The organizer has a personal identity of his own that cannot be lost by absorption or acceptance of any kind of group discipline organization. I now begin to understand what I stated somewhat intuitively in Reveille for Radicals almost 20 years ago, that ‘the organizer in order to be part of all can be part of none.’”

Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [he’s listing the ideal elements for an organizer and I found the notion that left-wing radicals are consistently marked by a good sense of humour especially about themselves was itself so funny it was worth quoting].

“A hundred men who will are stronger than a hundred thousand who shall.”

Arthur Schopenhauer in 1919, quoted in Sven Rydenfelt A pattern for failure: socialist economies in crisis

“As the Danish folk saying goes, ‘You bake with the flour you have.’ But anyone can learn a few tools.”

Chris Voss with Tahl Raz Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if your life depended on it

“On 16 July 2018, one of the world’s best-known scientists, a man as celebrated for his polemics against religion as for his writings on evolutionary biology, sat listening to the bells of an English cathedral. ‘So much nicer than the aggressive-sounding “Allahu Akhbar”,’ Richard Dawkins tweeted. ‘Or is that just my cultural upbringing?’ The question was a perfectly appropriate one for an admirer of Darwin to ponder…. A preference for church bells over the sound of Muslims praising God does not just emerge by magic. Dawkins – agnostic, secularist and humanist that he is – absolutely has the instincts of someone brought up in a Christian civilization. Today, as the flood tide of Western power and influence ebbs, the illusions of European and American liberals risk being left stranded.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“I’m living on a broken income.”

Me re the phrase “a fixed income” during a conversation with an investment advisor Oct. 29, 2025

“Frequently personal domestic hang ups were part of the conferences [“frequent long conferences on organizational problems”]. An organizer’s working schedule is so continuous that time is meaningless; meetings and caucuses drag endlessly into the early morning hours; any schedule is marked by constant unexpected unscheduled meetings; work pursues an organizer into his or her home, so that either he is on the phone or there are people dropping in. The marriage record of organizers is with rare exception disastrous. Further, the tensions, the hours, the home situation, and the opportunities, do not argue for fidelity. Also, with rare exception, I have not known really competent organizers who were concerned about celibacy. Here and there are wives and husbands or those in love relationships who understand and are committed to the work, and are real sources of strength to the organizer.”

Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals

“Yet even amid the concert of the great powers [late 1814 in Vienna] there was evidence that it [progress] lived on as an ideal. That June, on his return from preparatory negotiations in Paris, the British Foreign Secretary had been greeted by his fellow parliamentarians with a standing ovation. Among the terms of the treaty agreed by Lord Castlereagh had been one particularly startling stipulation: that Britain and France would join in a campaign to abolish the slave trade. This, to Benjamin Lay, would have been fantastical, an impossible dream. The treaty, though, in the view of some in the British parliament, did not go nearly far enough. Castlereagh, anxious not to destabilize France’s recently restored monarchy, had agreed that French merchants should be permitted to continue trafficking slaves for a further five years. This, it had turned out, was a concession too far. Within days of the Foreign Secretary’s seemingly triumphant return from Paris, an unprecedented campaign of protest had swept Britain. Petitions on a scale never before witnessed had deluged parliament. A quarter of all those eligible to sign them had added their names. Never before had the mass of the British public committed themselves so manifestly to a single issue. It had become for them, the French Foreign Minister noted in mingled bemusement and disdain, ‘a passion carried to fanaticism, and one which the ministry is no longer at liberty to check’. Castlereagh, negotiating with his opposite numbers at Vienna, knew that his hands were tied. He had no option but to secure a treaty against the slave trade.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“To pander to those who have no stomach for straight language, and insist upon bland, non controversial sauces, is a waste of time.”

Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals