Sincere enthusiasm is the only orator who always persuades. It is like an art the rules of which never fail; the simplest man with enthusiasm persuades better than the most eloquent with none.
La Rochefoucauld, Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales, (1665, 1678), 411th maxim.
Life is a thin narrowness of taken-for-granted, a plank over a canyon in a fog. There is something under our feet, the taken-for-granted. A table is a table, food is food, we are we — because we don’t question these things. And science is the enemy because it is the questioner. Faith saves our souls alive by giving us a universe of the taken-for-granted.
Rose Wilder Lane, journal entry (1923), as quoted in The Ghost in the Little House, ch. 7, by William V. Holtz (1993).
Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.
Václav Havel, Letter to the downthrown Czechoslovak Communist Party chairman Alexander Dubček (August 1969), as translated in Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 5: The Politics of Hope, p. 115.
On March 28, 1936, Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa was born. This recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature ran, in 1990, for the presidency of Peru, but lost to Alberto Fujimori. His novels include La casa verde (The Green House), La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World), La fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat), and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which was filmed as Tune in Tomorrow.
On the same date in 1970, Vince Vaughn, American actor, producer, and screenwriter, was born. Vaughn is one of a small minority of non-left-leaning Hollywood stars; his ideas on politics and economic policy were greatly influenced by Ron Paul.
The world cares very little what you or I know, but it does care a great deal about what you or I do.
Booker T. Washington, Address to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Boston, Massachusetts (30 July 1903), printed in “Account of the Boston Riot,” Boston Globe (July 31, 1903).
“There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.”