Moral Vitues:

  1. Courage in the face of fear
  2. Temperance in the face of pleasure and pain
  3. Liberality with wealth and possessions
  4. Magnificence with great wealth and possessions
  5. Magnanimity with great honors
  6. Proper ambition with normal honors
  7. Truthfulness with self-expression
  8. Wittiness in conversation
  9. Friendliness in social conduct
  10. Modesty in the face of shame or shamelessness
  11. Righteous indignation in the face of injury

Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.


John Stuart Mill differentiated liberty from freedom in that freedom is primarily, if not exclusively, the ability to do as one wills and what one has the power to do; whereas liberty concerns the absence of arbitrary restraints and takes into account the rights of all involved. As such, the exercise of liberty is subject to capability and limited to the rights of others.


To have liberty is to be liberated from something; to be free is to be self-determining, autonomous. Freedom can or cannot exist within a state of liberty: one can be liberated yet unfree, or free yet enslaved.


What struck me was how, like in all of these clips, he starts out looking like he isn’t involved. Dude is just scanning the scene just loitering. Then he’s in the perfect position and has 3 absolutely otherworldly touches. I’m out of superlatives for him.


Off the ball he moves slower than everyone else so that his explosion to get into the action catches them totally off guard and wrong footed.


Sound is produced by a mechanical means. Sound travels in waves and exists only within a medium. Light also travels in a wavelike manner but light has electric and magnetic properties and accordingly it is an electromagnetic wave. Sound travels at 343 m/s in air and light travels through all mediums at almost 300M m/s. Light travels 1M times faster than sound.


Sound is also classified by wavelength, but keep in mind that sound is produced by mechanical means. Sound does not have the electrical and magnetic fields that visible light does.


Mặc dù những anh hùng này rất tháo vát và tài giỏi, nhưng họ thường dại dột, là thảm hoạ tại toà án, mạo hiểm mạng sống của những người đi theo họ vì những chuyện nhỏ nhặt và cư xử ngạo mạn theo cách trẻ con. Trong thời cổ điển, mọi người coi các anh hùng có lòng tự trọng cao nhất và tầm quan trọng cao nhất, giải thích sự nổi bật của họ trong văn học sử thi.


Số phận, hay định mệnh, đóng một vai trò to lớn trong những câu chuyện về những anh hùng cổ điển. Ý nghĩa anh hùng của người anh hùng cổ điển bắt nguồn từ các cuộc chinh phạt chiến trường, một hành động nguy hiểm vốn có.


Kissinger said of Ford at his funeral, “According to an ancient tradition, God preserves humanity despite its many transgressions because at any one period there exist 10 just individuals who, without being aware of their role, redeem mankind.”


I learned from the example of my father that the manner in which one endures what must be endured is more important than the thing that must be endured.


Always remember that the future comes one day at a time.


People say, If the Congress were more representative of the people it would be better. I say the Congress is too damn representative. It’s just as stupid as the people are; just as uneducated, just as dumb, just as selfish.


No people in history have ever survived who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies.


Brains are no substitute for judgment.


The great corrupter of public men is the ego — corrupter because distracter. Wealth, sensuality, power cannot hold a candle to it. Looking in the mirror distracts one’s attention from the problem.


You can’t argue with a river, it is going to flow. You can dam it up, but it to useful purposes, deflect it, but you can’t argue with it.


I have almost invariably found that charm is used as a substitute for intelligence in persons of both sexes. Thus, I have always been and will remain wary of it.


With a nation, as with a boxer, one of the greatest assurances of safety is to add reach to power.


Greatness is a quality of character and is not the result of circumstances.


The trouble with a free market economy is that it requires so many policemen to make it work.


Time spent in the advertising business seems to create a permanent deformity like the Chinese habit of foot-binding.


The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.


The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.


Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old only by deserting their ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul. Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear and despair; these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust. Whatever your years, there is in every being’s heart the love of wonder, the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing childlike appetite for what next, and the joy and the game of life.


Youth is not entirely a time of life; it is a state of mind. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old by deserting their ideals. You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubts; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.


Like blackmail, it lays the basis for new and successively greater demands until, as in blackmail, violence becomes the only other alternative.


Rules are mostly made to be broken and are too often for the lazy to hide behind.


I had learned one of the bitter lessons of life: never try to regain the past, the fire will have become ashes.


Some coaches recommend establishing specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bounded objectives.


Before an individual can set out to achieve a goal, they must first decide on what their desired end-state will be.


To have a vision means to imagine a world that does not yet exist and intends to inspire people to make it a reality. A vision statement must be written in infinite terms and is not changeable, once decided it is locked. A mission is time bound, contains a specific goal and purpose for the task, and can be altered or changed based on near real-time conditions of the business.


Strategy includes processes of formulation and implementation; strategic planning helps coordinate both. However, strategic planning is analytical in nature (i.e., it involves “finding the dots”); strategy formation itself involves synthesis (i.e., “connecting the dots”) via strategic thinking.


Erroneous thinking:

  • Black and white thinking
  • Catastrophization
  • Cognitive bias
  • Cognitive distortion
  • Emotional reasoning
  • Exaggeration
  • Fallacies
  • Groupthink
  • Linguistic error
  • Magical thinking

A heuristic technique is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, short-term goal or approximation. Heuristics can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision.

Examples that employ heuristics include using trial and error, a rule of thumb or an educate guess.


Heuristics are the strategies derived from previous experiences with similar problems.


In addition to the history of ideas, Kissinger was as much interested in statesmen and statesmanship — and the role of the individual in managing and mitigating trends in international relations. The test of a statesman, argued Kissinger, was “his ability to recognize the relationship of forces and to make this knowledge serve his ends.”


What was more, Germans had also learned the wrong lessons from him. “They remembered the wars that had achieved their unity” but forgot “the patient preparation that had made them possible and the moderation that had secured their fruits.” German nationalism, he wrote, “unleavened by liberalism turned chauvinistic.” The exclusion of the liberals was also damaging. Liberalism without responsibility “grew sterile.”


The unification of Germany caused Realpolitik to turn in on itself, accomplishing the opposite of what it was meant to achieve.


The challenge of statesmanship was “to define the component of both power and morality and strike a balance between them.” This was not a one-time effort but required “constant recalibration.” It was as much an artistic and philosophical as a political enterprise and demanded a willingness to manage nuance and to live with ambiguity. The practitioners of the art must learn to put the attainable in the service of the ultimate and accept the element of compromise inherent in the endeavor. Bismarck defined statesmanship as the art of the possible.


In fact, realism had taken on the form of an ideology in its own right, just as it had done in Bismarck’s Germany:

The irony of Kennan’s thought was that his influence in government arose from his advocacy of what today’s debate would define as realism, while his admirers outside government were on the whole motivated by what they took to be his idealistic objections to the prevalent, essentially realistic policy.


Wisdom, sapience, or sagacity is the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense and insight. Wisdom is associated with attributes such as unbiased judgment, compassion, experiential self-knowledge, self-transcendence and non-attachment, and virtues such as ethics and benevolence.


Psycanics defines wisdom as the ability to foresee the consequences of action.


Writing systems are not themselves human languages; they are means of rendering a language into a form that can be reconstructed by other humans separated by time and / or space.


Along with argumentation, description, and exposition, narration, broadly defined, is one of four rhetorical modes of discourse. More narrowly defined, it is the fiction-writing mode in which the narrator communicates directly to the reader.


Evidence strongly suggested that humans in all cultures come to cast their own identity in some sort of narrative form. We are inveterate storytellers.