QOTD Thread

[craig]

QOTD => Quote of the day - I'll start :-). Please add as you wish.

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

-Theodore Roosevelt, via http://www.businessinsider.com/brene-brown-how-to-deal-with-fear-2013-5

[kevin7]

Those who can do it,do it. Those who can't are instructors

[ggiese]

QOTD => Quote of the day - I'll start :-). Please add as you wish.

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

-Theodore Roosevelt, via http://www.businessinsider.com/brene...th-fear-2013-5

That quote sat on my desk for years - it's now packed in a box somewhere... Thanks for reminding me!



"I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time."

- Herbert Bayard Swope

[CoventryCat86]

Yogi Berra supposedly said a lot of things but these are the one's I like the best:

"It sure gets late early out there"
"It ain't over 'til it's over"
"I'm not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did."
"You can observe a lot just by watching."
"When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

His wife asking him where he wants to be buried after he dies:

"You are from St. Louis, we live in New Jersey, and you played ball in New York. If you go before I do, where would you like me to have you buried?" - Carmen Berra (Yogi's wife)

Yogi's answer:

"Surprise me."

[Eville]

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” - Douglas Adams

[craig]

Long one, but timely given Memorial day in the USA has just past (the equivalent is Nov 11th in the Queen's realms):


Two years ago when I was the
Commander of all U.S. and Iraqi
forces, in fact, the 22nd of April 2008,
two Marine infantry battalions, 1/9
“The Walking Dead,” and 2/8 were
switching out in Ramadi. One battalion
in the closing days of their deployment
going home very soon, the other
just starting its seven-month combat
tour.
Two Marines, Corporal Jonathan Yale
and Lance Corporal Jordan Haerter, 22
and 20 years old respectively, one from
each battalion, were assuming the
watch together at the entrance gate of
an outpost that contained a makeshift
barracks housing 50 Marines.
The same broken down ramshackle
building was also home to 100 Iraqi
police, also my men and our allies in
the fight against the terrorists in
Ramadi, a city until recently the most
dangerous city on earth and owned by
Al Qaeda. Yale was a dirt poor mixed-
race kid from Virginia with a wife and
daughter, and a mother and sister who
lived with him and he supported as
well. He did this on a yearly salary of
less than $23,000. Haerter, on the
other hand, was a middle class white
kid from Long Island.
They were from two completely
different worlds. Had they not joined
the Marines they would never have met
each other, or understood that multiple
America’s exist simultaneously
depending on one’s race, education
level, economic status, and where you
might have been born. But they were
Marines, combat Marines, forged in the
same crucible of Marine training, and
because of this bond they were
brothers as close, or closer, than if
they were born of the same woman.
The mission orders they received from
the sergeant squad leader I am sure
went
something like: “Okay you two clowns,
stand this post and let no unauthorized
personnel or vehicles pass.” “You
clear?” I am also sure Yale and Haerter
then rolled their eyes and said in
unison something like: “Yes Sergeant,”
with just enough attitude that made the
point without saying the words, “No
kidding sweetheart, we know what
we’re doing.” They then relieved two
other Marines on watch and took up
their post at the entry control point of
Joint Security Station Nasser, in the
Sophia section of Ramadi, al Anbar,
Iraq.
A few minutes later a large blue truck
turned down the alley way—perhaps
60-70
yards in length—and sped its way
through the serpentine of concrete
jersey walls. The truck stopped just
short of where the two were posted
and detonated, killing them both
catastrophically. Twenty-four brick
masonry houses were damaged or
destroyed. A mosque 100 yards away
collapsed. The truck’s engine came to
rest two hundred yards away knocking
most of a house down before it
stopped.
Our explosive experts reckoned the
blast was made of 2,000 pounds of
explosives. Two died, and because
these two young infantrymen didn’t
have it in their DNA to run from
danger, they saved 150 of their Iraqi
and American brothers-in-arms.
When I read the situation report about
the incident a few hours after it
happened I
called the regimental commander for
details as something about this struck
me as
different. Marines dying or being
seriously wounded is commonplace in
combat. We expect Marines regardless
of rank or MOS to stand their ground
and do their duty, and even die in the
process, if that is what the mission
takes. But this just seemed different.
The regimental commander had just
returned from the site and he agreed,
but reported that there were no
American witnesses to the event—just
Iraqi police. I figured if there was any
chance of finding out what actually
happened and then to decorate the two
Marines to acknowledge their bravery,
I’d have to do it as a combat award
that requires two eye-witnesses and
we figured the bureaucrats back in
Washington would never buy Iraqi
statements. If it had any chance at all,
it had to come under the signature of a
general officer.
I traveled to Ramadi the next day and
spoke individually to a half-dozen Iraqi
police all of whom told the same story.
The blue truck turned down into the
alley and immediately sped up as it
made its way through the serpentine.
They all said, “We knew immediately
what was going on as soon as the two
Marines began firing.” The Iraqi police
then related that some of them also
fired, and then to a man, ran for safety
just prior to the explosion.
All survived. Many were injured …
some seriously. One of the Iraqis
elaborated and with tears welling up
said, “They’d run like any normal
man would to save his life.”
What he didn’t know until then, he
said, and what he learned that very
instant, was that Marines are not
normal. Choking past the emotion he
said, “Sir, in the name of God no sane
man would have stood there and done
what they did.”
“No sane man.”
“They saved us all.”
What we didn’t know at the time, and
only learned a couple of days later
after I
wrote a summary and submitted both
Yale and Haerter for posthumous Navy
Crosses, was that one of our security
cameras, damaged initially in the blast,
recorded some of the suicide attack. It
happened exactly as the Iraqis had
described it. It took exactly six
seconds from when the truck entered
the alley until it detonated.
You can watch the last six seconds of
their young lives. Putting myself in their
heads I supposed it took about a
second for the two Marines to
separately come to the same
conclusion about what was going on
once the truck came into their view at
the far end of the alley. Exactly no time
to talk it over, or call the sergeant to
ask what they should do. Only enough
time to take half an instant and think
about what the sergeant told them to
do only a few minutes before: “… let
no unauthorized personnel or vehicles
pass.”
The two Marines had about five
seconds left to live. It took maybe
another two seconds for them to
present their weapons, take aim, and
open up. By this time the truck was
half-way through the barriers and
gaining speed the whole time. Here,
the recording shows a number of Iraqi
police, some of whom had fired their
AKs, now scattering like the normal
and rational men they were—some
running right past the Marines. They
had three seconds left to live.
For about two seconds more, the
recording shows the Marines’ weapons
firing
non-stop…the truck’s windshield
exploding into shards of glass as their
rounds take it apart and tore in to the
body of the son-of-a-bitch who is
trying to get past them to kill their
brothers—American and Iraqi—bedded
down in the barracks totally unaware
of the fact that their lives at that
moment depended entirely on two
Marines standing their ground. If they
had been aware, they would have know
they were safe…because two Marines
stood between them and a crazed
suicide bomber.
The recording shows the truck
careening to a stop immediately in
front of the two Marines. In all of the
instantaneous violence Yale and
Haerter never hesitated. By all reports
and by the recording, they never
stepped back. They never even started
to step aside. They never even shifted
their weight. With their feet spread
should width apart, they leaned into
the danger, firing as fast as they could
work their weapons. They had only one
second left to live.
The truck explodes. The camera goes
blank. Two young men go to their
God.
Six seconds. Not enough time to think
about their families, their country, their
flag, or about their lives or their deaths,
but more than enough time for two very
brave young men to do their duty…into
eternity. That is the kind of people who
are on watch all over the world tonight
—for you.


- Lt. Gen. John Kelly
quoted in http://www.businessinsider.com/john-...-ramadi-2013-6

[craig]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kZg...e_gdata_player

(The classic Baldwin scene from Glengarry Glen Ross. NSFW. )

[craig]

“It is not the right angle
that attracts me, nor the straight line, hard
and inflexible, created by man. What
attracts me is the free and sensual curve —
the curve that I find in the mountains of my
country, in the sinuous course of its rivers,
in the body of the beloved woman.”
- Oscar Niemeyer

[craig]

“We the People... "

[dman4505]

We, the unwilling,led by the unknowing,are doing the impossible for the ungrateful.
We have done so much,for so long,with so little,we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.

[bretted432]

"If you think you know nothing, you already know more than you thought you knew."

Im very creative when smoking some nice Cohiba's: https://www.swisscubancigars.com/ind...an-cigars.html

:P

[CptnBlues63]

"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."

George S. Patton

[craig]

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.

- Nathaniel Hawthorne, in the Scarlett Letter

[craig]

A long one, but a good one;


Persecution for the expression of
opinions seems to me perfectly
logical. If you have no doubt of
your premises or your power, and
want a certain result with all your
heart, you naturally express your
wishes in law, and sweep away all
opposition. To allow opposition by
speech seems to indicate that you
think the speech impotent, as when
a man says that he has squared
the circle, or that you do not care
wholeheartedly for the result, or
that you doubt either your power or
your premises.

But when men have realized that
time has upset many fighting faiths,
they may come to believe even
more than they believe the very
foundations of their own conduct
that the ultimate good desired is
better reached by free trade in
ideas -- that the best test of truth
is the power of the thought to get
itself accepted in the competition
of the market, and that truth is the
only ground upon which their
wishes safely can be carried out.

That, at any rate, is the theory of
our Constitution. It is an
experiment, as all life is an
experiment. Every year, if not every
day, we have to wager our
salvation upon some prophecy
based upon imperfect knowledge.
While that experiment is part of our
system, I think that we should be
eternally vigilant against attempts
to check the expression of opinions
that we loathe and believe to be
fraught with death, unless they so
imminently threaten immediate
interference with the lawful and
pressing purposes of the law that
an immediate check is required to
save the country.

United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in his dissent in Abrams v.
United States, 1919. You can read the full dissent at http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/htm...0_0616_ZD.html

[craig]

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
- Thomas Edison

[craig]

I never give up, ever. - A. J. Foyt.