Mamacita says:

1.  Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.  –engraved over the Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC

2.  A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.  –Albert Schweitzer

3.  We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.  –Edwin Markham

4.  Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.  –John Wesley

5.  That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong.  –William J. H. Boetcker:

6.  Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.  –Susan B. Anthony

7.  We are all in the same boat in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.  –G. K. Chesterton

8.  Lack of loyalty is one of the major causes of failure in every walk of life. –Napoleon Hill

9.  Loyalty cannot be blueprinted. It cannot be produced on an assembly line. In fact, it cannot be manufactured at all, for its origin is the human heart-the center of self-respect and human dignity. It is a force which leaps into being only when conditions are exactly right for it-and it is a force very sensitive to betrayal.  –Maurice Franks

10.  You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.  –Gandhi

11.  Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if he or she were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness, and understanding you can muster, and do so with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again. –Og Mandino

12.  If you haven’t any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.  –Bob Hope

13.  Caring is a reflex. Someone slips, your arm goes out. A car is in the ditch, you join the others and push…You live, you help.  –Ram Dass

14.  You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.  –Samuel Butler

15.  Kindness is for all times in all situations — not just when it suits you.  –Audray Landrum

16.  Giving of ourselves is the way we change the world at the end of our fingertips.  –Richard F. Schubert

17.  The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Always be satisfied with your opinions. –Elbert Hubbard

18.  If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows that he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.   –Francis Bacon

19.  Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. –Leo Buscaglia

20.  Do good and care not to whom.  –Italian Proverb

21.  He who sees a need and waits to be asked for help is as unkind as if he had refused it. –Dante

22.  There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.  –Elie Wiesel

23.  If you judge people, you have no time to love them.  –Mother Teresa

24.  One of the striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.  –Mark Twain

25.  Remember there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.  –Scott Adams

26.  Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for kindness.  –Seneca, philosopher (4 BC)

27.  Where there is yet shame, there may in time be virtue.  –Samuel Johnson

28.  No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.  –Montaigne

29.  A sleeping child gives me the impression of a traveler in a very far country.  –Emerson

30.  It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.  –George Santayana

31.  Sanity is a small price to pay for happiness.  –Marabeth Madsen

32.  Many of the insights of the saint stem from his experience as a sinner.  –Eric Hoffer

33.  Science is a collection of successful recipes.  –Paul Valery

34.  Self-control is the quality that distinguishes the fittest to survive.  –George Bernard Shaw

35.  What grace is to the body, good sense is to the mind.  –La Rouchefoucauld

36.  Look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it.  Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.  –Jacob A. Riis.

37.  Most quarrels are inevitable at the time, incredible afterwards.  –E.M. Forster

38.  Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.  –Samuel Johnson

39. If you can’t say just what you mean, in words and all otehr efforts at pricise meaning, then sing it.  –Bernard Berenson

40.  “Healing,” Papa would tell me, “is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing Nature.”  –W.H. Auden

41.  Don’t be humble.  You’re not that great.  –Golda Meir

42.  We do not want churches because they will teach us to quarrel about God.  –Chief Joseph

43.  It’s been swell, but the swelling’s gone down.  –Tank Girl

44.  He not only overflowed with learning, but stood in the slop.  –Sydney Smith

45.  It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly.  When every day is a step in the unknown – as for children – the days are long with gathering of experience.  –Henry Ryecroft

46.  There’s a time for departure even when there’s not certain place to go.  –Tennessee Williams

47  Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.  –Antoine de Saint-Exupery

48.  The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation.  –Pearl S. Buck

49.  Though we speak with the tongues of men and angels, and give our bodies to be burned, if we are irritable or hard to live with, it all counts for nothing.  –Unknown

50.  The devil can cite scripture for his purpose.  –Shakespeare

I hope you all had a wonderful, joyous Christmas.

Now, be thinking seriously about your New Year’s Resolutions, for I shall expect to see them posted in a few days.  Let’s assume we all want World Peace, and get on with the real stuff, shall we?

I like to re-read Hans Christian Anderson after Christmas.  The Little Match Girl used to make me sob out loud, almost uncontrollably will always bring tears to my eyes, and it’s because of The Fir Tree that the sight of a discarded evergreen tree, after Christmas, makes my heart ache.  I really do believe that people who toss their Christmas tree on the roadside, to finish dying in full view of travelers, are fiends.  At the very least, those people are litterbugs, and litterbugs are a kind of fiend at any time of the year.  A tree lot after Christmas breaks my heart, too.  There is something about the few unchosen pines that never had a chance to be a Christmas tree for a few days before dying, that makes me sad beyond words.  Christmas tree lots used to give them away on Christmas Eve; don’t they do that any more?  They should.

I ventured to the shops this afternoon and bought some gift wrap and wired ribbon for next year.  I know, I know.  Wrapping paper isn’t “green,” but in my family, we love to make the outside of our packages as full of love and attention as the inside.  Besides, some of the boxes and papers and ribbons have been re-appearing for several Christmases now, so it’s not as though we were filling a dumpster or anything.  We use and re-use our pretty furbelows.  It’s part of the fun!

If I tell you that I’ve already made a few purchases for NEXT Christmas, will you still love me?  What’s that?  You won’t?  Um, well, then, I haven’t.

51.  Live long and prosper. –Mr. Spock  (not the polio Spock – the logical Spock.)

Ahhh, logical.