Rare Gems

Quotes of the Day are often hit or miss. My Google landing page is compiled mostly of daily quotes, one of which is always illuminating (Einstein quotes), another serving a more sardonically humorous purpose (Bushisms collected over his trying eight year tenure); beyond that it's a lottery of various daily quotes provided through an algorithm I've no comprehension of. You might get one that's serviceable and you might get one that's downright inapplicable to anything and moreover one in which you think either you could have written or said twenty times better or is plain and simply wrong - the aphorism failed, perhaps unable to stand time's grueling decathlon. Once in a while, a spectacular tulip - or two, if I'm lucky - rises out of the thatch-work of bitter, mossy weeds, finding its way out through a zigzagged crack in the pavement; a surprising quote touches me in an unexpected way. 

"I loathe the expression "What makes him tick." It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm." Thurber

And...

"The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution." Hannah Arendt, German author and political theorist

Both of these, I feel, besides coming from two authors and minds I enjoy and deeply respect, retain a sense of relevancy and insight into today's world, our politics and ethos, our progressive leaders, and our humanity, or occasional lack thereof.