Famous Quotes

I never cease to be amazed at the impact of the words others can have on us. I was reading Dear Abby this morning, and I swear that woman has no brains. A mother wrote in about having caught her own son and some of his friends smoking pot in their high school. She turned them all in and everyone (including her son) got suspended for smoking pot on school grounds. Apparently now the other parents are mad at her, so she was asking Dear Abby if she'd done the wrong thing. This columnist tells her that she did, indeed jump the gun. She offered that perhaps the mother could have individually approached the parents of the teens involved.

Just to check my thinking, I read this to my wife and she immediately cried out in agreement with me. This columnist knows absolutely nothing about parenting teens and is offering pretty poor advice. So what's the problem? Well, I see that with her few words applied through the media, she can influence the thinking of thousands or even millions of people. And she's influencing it with flawed wisdom! What a travesty of communications this is.

Ironically, in the same newspaper, I noticed a reference to a web site, http://www.quotationspage.com. It's really not much more than a glorified blog site (and the most current postings are actually found on the blog that's linked from it). I browsed through some and of course found a couple of horrible ones. But the overwhelming majority seemed to be very worthwhile. It got me to wondering if there isn't something inherent in society that causes us to better retain words that have real hard value and just ignore other words and let them fade. Could it be that something inherent in human nature helps us fight against the forces of ignorance? One can only hope!

By the way, here are a couple of quotes I ran across this morning that I thought were pretty remarkable.

"Do not believe that he (or she) who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His (or her) life has much difficulty. Were it otherwise, he (or she) would never have been able to find those words." - Ranier Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

"When we are angry or depressed in our creativity, we have misplaced our power. We have allowed someone else to determine our worth --- and then we are angry at being undervalued!" - Julia Cameron, The Vein of Gold