Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men

"The Laws of Nature have no pity." -- Robert A. Heinlein

Lion Peak, New Zealand
Top 10 Greatest Speeches

The Greek philosopher Plato, author of the Socratic dialogues.

Best Line: "The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows."

------
Patrick Henry
Best Line: "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! — I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

----
Frederick Douglass
Best Line: "Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future."

--------
Abraham Lincoln
Best Line: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

---
Susan B. Anthony
Best Line: "It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people — women as well as men."

----
Winston Churchill
Best Line: "You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy."

----
John F. Kennedy
Best Line: "My fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country."

---
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Best Line: "We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy."
---
Lyndon B. Johnson
Best Line: "There is no moral issue. It is wrong — deadly wrong — to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights. I have not the slightest doubt what will be your answer."


---
Ronald Reagan
Best Line: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"


-----
Indra Nooyi's mantras for success


CAT 2008: Tips to boost your vocab


The Better Sex Diet



7 Sex-Boosting Foods



America's best country inns and hotels


48 Ways to Be Nice and Improve the World Around You
http://www.realsimple.com/realsimple/package/0,21861,1734800-1134948,00.html?xid=weeklynew

s

Meal balancer


India's most admired entrepreneurs

----------------------------------------------------

Oprah Winfrey
She didn't create the talk-show format. But the compassion and intimacy she put into it have created a new way for us to talk to one another
====================================
Waving the flags of Brazil and the U.S., Pele is carried off the field by players of both teams at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., on Oct. 1, 1977 after his final game. Pele played for both teams in the exhibition — the New York Cosmos and Santos, his former team in Brazil


Pelé
He dominated soccer for two decades with a passion matched only by that of his fans throughout the world
====================



Mohandas Gandhi
In an age of empire and military might, he proved that the powerless had power and that force of arms would not forever prevail against force of spirit
The Mahatma, the Great Soul, endures in the best part of our minds, where our ideals are kept: the embodiment of human rights and the creed of nonviolence. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is something else, an eccentric of complex, contradictory and exhausting character most of us hardly know. It is fashionable at this fin de siecle to use the man to tear down the hero, to expose human pathologies at the expense of larger-than-life achievements. No myth raking can rob Gandhi of his moral force or diminish the remarkable importance of this scrawny little man. For the 20th century — and surely for the ones to follow — it is the towering myth of the Mahatma that matters.

Consciously or not, every oppressed people or group with a cause has practiced what Gandhi preached. Sixties kids like me were his disciples when we went South in the Freedom Summer to sit in for civil rights and when we paraded through the streets of America to stop the war in Vietnam. Our passionate commitment, nonviolent activism, willingness to accept punishment for civil disobedience were lessons he taught. Martin Luther King Jr. learned them; so did Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, Aung San Suu Kyi, the unknown Chinese who defied the tanks in 1989 and the environmental marchers in Seattle a few weeks ago.

It may be that this most Indian of leaders, revered as Bapuji, or Father of the Nation, means more now to the world at large. Foreigners don't have to wrestle with the confusion Indians feel today as they judge whether their nation has kept faith with his vision. For the rest of us, his image offers something much simpler — a shining set of ideals to emulate. Individual freedom. Political liberty. Social justice. Nonviolent protest. Passive resistance. Religious tolerance. His work and his spirit awakened the 20th century to ideas that serve as a moral beacon for all epochs.

Half a century after his death, most of us know little of Gandhi's real history or how the Mahatma in our minds came to be. Hundreds of biographies uncritically canonize him. Winston Churchill scorned him as a half-naked fakir stirring up sedition. His generation knew him as a radical political agitator; ours shrugs off a holy man with romantic notions of a pure, pre-industrial life. There is no either-or. The saint and the politician inhabited the same slender frame, each nourishing the other. His struggle for a nation's rights was one and the same with his struggle for individual salvation.

The flesh-and-blood Gandhi was a most unlikely saint. Just conjure up his portrait: a skinny, bent figure, nut brown and naked except for a white loincloth, cheap spectacles perched on his nose, frail hand grasping a tall bamboo staff. This was one of the century's great revolutionaries? Yet this strange figure swayed millions with his hypnotic spell. His garb was the perfect uniform for the kind of revolutionary he was, wielding weapons of prayer and nonviolence more powerful than guns.

Saints are hard to live with, and this one's personal habits were decidedly odd. Mondays were "days of silence," when he refused to speak. A devoted vegetarian, he indulged in faddish dietetic experiments that sometimes came near to killing him. He eschewed all spices as a discipline of the senses. He napped every day with a mud poultice on abdomen and brow. He was so insistent on absolute regularity in his daily regimen that he safety-pinned a watch to his homespun dhoti, synchronized with the clock at his ashram. He scheduled his bowel movements for 20 minutes morning and afternoon. "The bathroom is a temple," he said, and anyone was welcome to chat with him there. He had a cleansing enema every night.
(TIME)
=============================
TIME Person of the Century:
Albert Einstein
He was the pre-eminent scientist in a century dominated by science. The touchstones of the era — the Bomb, the Big Bang, quantum physics and electronics — all bear his imprint

----------------------------------
50 Greatest Quotes on Men
Before success comes in any man’s life, he’s sure to meet with much temporary defeat and, perhaps some failures. When defeat overtakes a man, the easiest and the most logical thing to do is to quit. That’s exactly what the majority of men do. ~ Napoleon Hill

1. I never liked the men I loved and never loved the men I liked. ~ Fanny Brice
2. You can tell the strength of a nation by the women behind its men. ~ Benjamin Disraeli
3. Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power. ~ George Bernard Shaw
4. When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart’s the last part moves, her last, the tongue. ~ Benjamin Franklin
5. Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever. ~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld
6. If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see. ~ Henry David Thoreau
7. All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone. ~ Blaise Pascal
8. The world judge of men by their ability in their profession, and we judge of ourselves by the same test: for it is on that on which our success in life depends. ~ William Hazlitt
9. All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his. ~ Oscar Wilde
10. God made woman beautiful and foolish; beautiful, that man might love her; and foolish, that she might love him. ~ Unknown
11. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot. ~ Oscar Wilde
12. It’s not the men in my life that counts, it’s the life in my men. ~ Mae West
13. A man may conquer a million men in battle but one who conquers himself is, indeed, the greatest of conquerors. ~ Buddha
14. Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place. ~ Billy Crystal
15. Men play the game; women know the score. ~ Roger Woddis
16. Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most times he will pick himself up and carry on. ~ Winston Churchill
17. There are some sluggish men who are improved by drinking; as there are fruits that are not good until they are rotten. ~ Samuel Johnson
18. When a man points a finger at someone else, he should remember that four of his fingers are pointing at himself. ~ Louis Nizer
19. Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
20. Few men have been admired of their familiars. ~ Michel de Montaigne
21. Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men. ~ Kin Hubbard
22. If it’s true that men are such beasts, this must account for the fact that most women are animal lovers. ~ Doris Day
23. All men [are] of one metal, but not in one mold. ~ John Lyly
24. Men are like steel. When they lose their temper, they lose their worth. ~ Chuck Norris
25. Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters. ~ Victor Hugo
26. Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against. ~ Thomas Carlyle
27. Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other? ~ George Eliot
28. A child, from the time he can think, should think about all he sees, should suffer for all who cannot live with honesty, should work so that all men can be honest, and should be honest himself. ~ Jose Marti
29. The greatest truths are the simplest, and so are the greatest men. ~ Julius Charles Hare
30. Men are so willing to respect anything that bores them. ~ Marilyn Moroe
31. There are more men ennobled by study than by nature. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero
32. Young men preen. Old men scheme. ~ Mason Cooley
33. If you want anything said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman. ~ Margaret Thatcher
34. A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age. ~ Robert Frost
35. Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world. ~ Samuel Johnson
36. Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
37. The desire of excessive power caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge caused men to fall. ~ Francis Bacon
38. Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in excellence; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves. ~ Aristotle
39. Men should be like Kleenex, soft, strong and disposable. ~ Cher
40. There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves. ~ Will Rogers
41. Priests are not men of the world; it is not intended that they should be; and a University training is the one best adapted to prevent their becoming so. ~ Samuel Butler
42. Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, for wise men say it is the wisest course. ~ William Shakespeare
43. Men are only as great as they are kind. ~ Elbert Hubbard
44. Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn’t seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh
45. Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change. ~ Confucius
46. In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high. ~ Henry David Thoreau
47. It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
48. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. ~ Frederick Douglass
49. Violent men have not been known in history to die to a man. They die up to a point. ~ Mohandas Gandhi
50. Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I know there are way too many quotes on men to simply include in a post. If you got some time and have any quotes on men, please take a moment and share with the rest of us.

Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild. ~ Immanuel Kant