“I am at our home in Morningside Country Club in Rancho Mirage.... swimming in my great pool. I keep it heated to an insanely high temperature.... I love swimming in it at night. I lie on my back and... watch the moon rise over the hedges. I look at the stars.... it is super pleasant and what did I ever do to deserve it? Who on earth deserves to live like this? I can imagine the prisoners at Auschwitz watching the same stars as they were worked to death and froze to death. I picture the Union soldiers lying wounded before Marye’s Heights in Fredericksburg and dying of loss of blood and exposure and seeing the same stars (although maybe it was raining that night). And the Americans freezing at Bastogne as they held off the Nazis on Christmas Day and seeing the same stars. And here am I swimming in a heated pool watching the stars. It is incredible.... I hope we appreciate it.”
”Ben Stein’s Diary” in The American Spectator March 2006
“In the end, it is important to remember that we cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.”
Max De Pree quoted by Jeff Hayden on Inc. online (www.inc.com/jeff-haden/top-350-inspiring-motivational-quotes-to-tweet-and-share.html)
“James J. Hill’s phrase ‘the cost of high living’...”
Robert H. Wiebe, Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement.
“the only way to enjoy even a weed is to feel unworthy even of a weed.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Eric Scheske in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 #1 (September 2000)
“Indeed, it would be paradoxical if the end were amusement; if we toiled and suffered all our lives long to amuse ourselves. For we choose practically everything for the sake of something else, except happiness, because it is the end. To spend effort and toil for the sake of amusement seems silly and unduly childish; but, on the other hand the maxim of Anacharsis, ‘Play to work harder,’ seems to be on the right lines, because amusement is a form of relaxation, and people need relaxation because they cannot exert themselves continuously.”
Aristotle Ethics
“Who am I that the children of men should have shaped and carved for me four extra wooden legs besides the two that were given me by the gods?”
G.K. Chesterton, “On Being Moved,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
“And now, as we birds say, nests before eggs.”
The Raven in C.S. Lewis The Horse and His Boy
“What’s the point of being a hedonist if you’re not having a good time?”
Lily Tomlin’s "The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe" show, quoted in The New Republic Oct. 7, 1991