#TwoCentsOnTuesday

If we truly love people, we will desire for them far more than it is within our power to give them, and this will lead us to prayer.

I can do almost anything, but I can’t do everything. So some of the most important decisions I have to make are what things to do, when to do them, what not to do, and — perhaps most important of all — when to do nothing.

When we know our own strength, we shall the better know what to undertake with hopes of success; and when we have well surveyed the powers of our own minds, and made some estimate what we may expect from them, we shall not be inclined either to sit still, and not set our thoughts on work at all, in despair of knowing anything; nor on the other side, question everything, and disclaim all knowledge, because some things are not to be understood.

Today, of Americans officially designated as ‘poor’, 99 per cent have electricity, running water, flush toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 per cent have a television, 88 per cent a telephone, 71 per cent a car and 70 per cent air conditioning. Cornelius Vanderbilt had none of these.

It is clear that the old left-versus-right duality, or dichotomy, the lens through which we have been asked to view American politics, is really dead—or rather, we can see that it is a distraction. Many ordinary citizens these days say that they don’t see much difference between the two major political parties or the positions of what seem more and more these days to be the candidates subject to coronation by the special interests. The understanding that we are in a time in which the real conflicts are not conservative versus liberal, but the many against the few, is becoming far more widespread.

Punditry is an industry built on confirmation bias. Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann, Glenn Beck and Arianna Huffing-ton, Rachel Maddow and Ann Coulter—these people provide fuel for beliefs, they pre-filter the world to match existing worldviews. If their filter is like your filter, you love them. If it isn’t, you hate them. You watch them not for information, but for confirmation.

Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

We learn through pain that some of the things we thought were castles turn out to be prisons, and we desperately want out, but even though we built them, we can’t find the door.

Legislation, the deliberate making of law, has justly been described as among all inventions of man the one fraught with the gravest consequences, more far-reaching in its effects even than fire and gun-powder. Unlike law itself, which has never been ‘invented’ in the same sense, the invention of legislation came relatively late in the history of mankind. It gave into the hands of men an instrument of great power which they needed to achieve some good, but which they have not yet learned so to control that it may not produce great evil.

Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods.