What a week!  Classes began, and with no textbooks in sight.  Already I’ve had a phone call from a student who “forgot to set her alarm and didn’t wake up until ten thirty.”  She figured that since it was the first week, the class would be dismissed early, so she didn’t want to waste a shower and the gas to come in late.  On the bright side, it was easy to figure out her percentage on the QUIZ WE HAD THAT DAY.

A quiz on the first day of class?  Welcome to college, students.

And already it’s Saturday, so here we go with the words of many people who knew how to say it much better than I ever could.

1.  I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.  –Anais Nin

2.  Perhaps too much of everything is as bad as too little.  –Edna Ferber

3.  More has been screwed up on the battlefield and misunderstood in the Pentagon because of a lack of understanding of the English language than any other single factor.  –John W. Vessey, Jr.

4.  Seagull manager:  A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps over everything and then leaves.  -Anon.

5.  Morality is moral only when it is voluntary.  –Lincoln Steffans

6.  How a minority, reaching majority, seizing authority, hates a minority.  –Leonard Harman Robbins

7.  So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.  –Peter Drucker

8.  The less of routine, the more of life.  –Bronson Alcott

9.  The wisest mind has something yet to learn.  –George Santayana

10.  Too many people are ready to carry the stool when there is a piano to be moved.  –Anon.

11.  God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.  –Jewish proverb

12.  Believe in miracles, but don’t depend on them.  –H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

13.  Minds are like parachutes.  They only function when they are open.  –Thomas Robert Dewar

14.  I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.  –O.W. Holmes

15.  Lack of something to feel important about is almost the greatest tragedy a man may have.  –Arthur Ernest Morgan

16.  The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.  –John Dewey

17.  We do not aim to correct the man we hang; we correct and warn others by him.  –Montaigne

18.  If you keep your mouth shut, you will never put your foot in it.  –Austin O’Malley

19.  I regard that man as lost, who has lost his sense of shame.  –Plautus

20.  A good man who goes wrong is just a bad man who has been found out.  –Bob Edwards

21.  I don’t say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.  –Orson Welles

22.  The average man, who does not know what to do with this life, wants another one which shall last forever.  –Anatole France

23.  You grow up the day you have the first real laugh – at yourself.  –Ethel Barrymore

24.  If every man worked at that for which nature fitted him, the cows will be well-tended.  –Jean Pierre Claris de Florian

25.  There is nothing final about a mistake, except its being taken as final.  –Phyllis Bottome

26.  All the education young men receive will be in vain if they do not learn good manners.  –Gandhi

27.  God’s men are better than the devil’s men, and they ought to act as though they were.  –Henry Ward Beecher

28.  Music, of all the liberal arts, has the greatest influence over the passions, and is that to which the legislator ought to give the greatest encouragement.  –Napoleon I

29.  A man never sees all that his mother has been to him ’till it’s too late to let her know that he sees it.  –William Dean Howells

30.  Money never made a fool of anybody; it only shows ’em up.  –Kin Hubbard

31.  A mob is the scum that rises upmost when the nation boils.  –John Dryden

32.  Tomorrow is the most important thing in life.  Comes into us at midnight very clean.  It’s perfect when it arrives and puts itself in our hands.  It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.  –John Wayne

33.  I got a simple rule about everybody:  If you don’t treat me right, shame on you.  –Louis Armstrong

34.  There is a mighty big difference between good sound reasons, and reasons that sound good.  –Burton Hillis

35.  It’s never too late, in fiction or in life, to revise.  –Nancy Thayer

36.  I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.  –W. Somerset Maugham

37.  You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a “realist,” he is preparing to do something he is secretly ashamed of doing.  –Sydney Harris

38.  I have sometimes dreamt that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their awards – their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble – the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward.  We have nothing to give them here.  They have loved reading.”  –Virginia Woolf

39.  We can not swing up on a rope that is attached only to our own belt.  –William Ernest Hocking

40.  Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought.  –Albert Szent-Gyorgi

41.  Television is the best gauge we have of our decay.  –John Stevenson

42.  Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier.  –Mother Teresa

43.  If the word “quit” is part of your vocabulary, then the word “finish” is likely not.  –Brian G. Jett

44.  The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do.  The hard part is doing it.  –General Schwartzkopf

45.  Living on Earth is pensive, but it does include a free trip around the sun.  –Anon.

46.  We would often be sorry if our wishes were granted.  –Aesop

47.  Look!  Look!  If you look really hard at things, you’ll forget you’re going to die.  –Montgomery Clift

48.  Deliver me, oh Lord, from that evil man, myself.  –Thomas Brooks

49.  Every decision is like murder, and our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves that never will be.  –Rene Dubois

50.  Many a man has decided to stay alive not because of the will to live, but because of the determination not to give assorted surviving bastards the satisfaction of his death.  –Brendan Francis

I’m still giggling over the thought of Palin being the Vice President.  Dudes, he’s a lumberjack, and how long has it been since we’ve been able to add, “. . . and he’s okay!” to anybody in recent government?

But seriously?  Sometimes, people who’ve been in an elected office for too long become jaded bullies with an inflated sense of entitlement.  A breath of fresh air might be just what this country needs.  Give the newbie a chance.