True, true.

Roy Edroso is "throwing a meme" (duck!) and invites us all to join him in the warm, soothing muck.

The theme is quotes. We all have favorites, but I'm going to pitch this high and inside. I would like to know what your truest quotes are. Let me explain. Some quotes you like because they're poetic or amusing or charming. They sound good to you. Some, though, stick with you because they really reflect your beliefs, and have done so through whatever life experiences you've had.

The true-quotes become obvious when you think about them in that light. You realize that these little scraps of mental paper have become your watchwords, the identifying labels on your ego. To name them is not always a pleasing thing, I have found, because those labels usually floated onto your ego long ago and only stuck because you never cared to brush them off. They have the persistence of habits, and most habits are bad. So they sting to note. But that sting is what makes this such an elevating enterprise!

Okay, I'm game, though I'll probably update this post about thirty times through the day as they occur to me.

"Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." - Abraham Lincoln

"To disagree with three-fourths of the [American] public is one of the first requisites of sanity." - Oscar Wilde, who actually said it about the British public.

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." - H.L. Mencken

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." - Edmund Burke

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons." - Bertrand Russell

"Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels." - Samuel Johnson

"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." - George Bernard Shaw

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell

"When ideas fail, words come in very handy." - Goethe