I think I'll put this one on my business card... (2007-03-14)
"I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong."
- Frederick Douglass"

Learning, living, struggle and progress (2005-04-08)
I am almost finished with my second year of law school -- I have done okay in school but have failed utterly in my quixotic quest to continue writing. So, in the spirit of tilting at windmills, I am trying to start again. Partly, this is because I am about to go work at a big firm for the summer and I have misgivings about getting used to the chichi lunches and expensive office casual wear this will entail. So, in the spirit of keeping it real, here's a quote for the day (borrowed from Howard Zinn's Voices of a People's History of the United States):

"If there is no struggle...there is no progress....This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both."

- Frederick Douglass, abolitionist, author, orator, social reformer

Why I must keep writing... (2003-07-07)
I am heading to law school in less than two months, and so am tapering off my freelance writing. But I'm determined to keep updating my blog. A quote from today's WordSpy explains why:

"The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition--in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.
--James Joyce, Irish novelist and short-story writer, _Why I Write_, 1946

I'll be thirty this fall. Best keep writing, yes.

On manners and what matters (2003-05-28)
This one's from the Wordspy list today.

An obsession with polite or correct public language is a sign that communication is in decline. It means that the process and exercise of power have replaced debate as a public value. The citizen's job is to be rude -- to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt. Politics, philosophy, writing, the arts--none of these, and certainly not science and economics, can serve the common weal if they are swathed in politeness. In everything which affects public affairs, breeding is for fools.

-John Ralston Saul from The Doubter's Companion, 1994

Kudos from Keillor (2002-10-18)
"Writers are some of the most important people in America today, doing the most crucial work, bearing a heavy responsibility as the last exemplars of American entrepreneurship and cussedness. It takes brains to write, and you can't fake it. Anybody who can turn out a good story is probably smarter than half the corporation executives in America and a good deal more honest." - Garrison Keillor

Mandela borrowed these lines -- and they're good (2002-06-02)
"Our worst fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our Light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be."

- Marianne Williamson in her book "A Return to Love", famously quoted by Nelson Mandella in his 1994 Inaugural Speech

Corny but true (2002-05-15)
"In a chaotic world, friendship is the most elegant, the most lasting way to be useful. We are, each of us, a living testament to our friends’ compassion and tolerance, humor and wisdom, patience and grit. Friendship, not technology, is the only thing capable of showing us the enormity of the world." - Steven Dietz

A question of content (2002-04-15)
"What about the feeling that it's all been done? Not in the techie department, of course...but in those areas occupied by what platform proprietors call "content providers." What a phrase! Could anything register devastation of the spirit more completely than that little generic? ... Not since we landed on the moon and found nothing has our cultural unconscious encountered so traumatic a void."

- From 'Culture as Anesthetic' by Thomas Zengotita

Words of wisdom from Ursula (2002-04-03)
"A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper."

-Ursula K. Le Guin