When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people becomes an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.
-- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death...four decades ago prophesied an apocalypse of moral idiocy in the age of mass media
Courage is knowing it might hurt, and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same. And that's why life is hard.
We usually think of resilience as the ability to recover from an adverse experience and pick up our lives where we left off…. But there are times when adversity permanently changes our reality and we can’t go back to the way things were…. Resilience then becomes the work of coming through the adversity. -- Alice Updike Scannell
People are always looking for happiness at some future time and in some new thing, or some new set of circumstances, in possession of which they some day expect to find themselves. But the fact is, if happiness is not found now, where we are, and as we are, there is little chance of it ever being found. There is a great deal more happiness around us day by day than we have the sense or the power to seek and find.
-- Thomas Mitchell
Prior 4 Observations (from Others).