“When I was 17, I read a quote somewhere that went something like: ‘If you live each day as if it were your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.’ It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And when the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

Steve Jobs’ June 122005 commencement address at Stanford University, reprinted in National Post June 30, 2005

In my latest National Post column I say classes where students of one race only are taught material by authors of once race only by teachers of one race only is still segregation and still wrong practically and morally.

“Playwright Neil Simon once described one of his characters as so uptight he even had clenched hair.”

Mary Janigan in Maclean’s April 26, 2004

“To know how to wait is the great secret of success.”

Joseph de Maistre, quoted (among others) by https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/974934-to-know-how-to-wait-is-the-great-secret-of

“Generally speaking, the ordinary man should be content with the terrible secret that men are men – which is another way of saying that they are brothers.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Oct. 8, 1910, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 7 #5 (March 2004)

“There is no cure for birth and death, save to enjoy the interval.”

Santayana, quoted by Jon Winokur, ed. Zen to Go

“Strong reciprocators are not altruists.... They’re rejecting lowball offers because the offers violate their individual sense of what a just exchange would be. But the effect is the same as if they loved humanity… Individually irrational acts, in other words, can produce a collectively rational outcome.”

James Surowiecki The Wisdom of Crowds [regarding experiments involving the “ultimatum game”]

“When Benjamin Franklin was seven years old... he fell in love with a whistle. He was so excited about it that he went into the toy shop, piled all his coppers on the counter, and demanded the whistle without even asking its price. ‘I then came home,’ he wrote to a friend 70 years later, ‘and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle.’ When his older brothers and sisters found out that he had paid far more for his whistle than he should have paid, they gave him the horse laugh; and, as he said: ‘I cried with vexation.’... But the lesson taught Franklin was cheap in the end. ‘As I grew up,’ he said, ‘and came into the world and observed the actions of men, I thought I met with many, very many, who gave too much for the whistle.’”

Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living