John Teets

"The past is never where you think you left it." — Katherine Anne Porter 📷🌱

"Wait until the mud settles, and the water will be clear." — Lao-Tze 📷🌱

"Is it so bad to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood." — Ralph Waldo Emerson 📷🌱

"To be playful and serious at the same time is possible, and it defines the ideal mental condition." — John Dewey

"To make our way, we must have firm resolve, persistence, tenacity. We must gear ourselves to work hard all the way. We can never let up." — Ralph Bunche 📷🌱

"What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy? " — Ursula K. Le Guin 📷🌱

“Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up all the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.” — Horace Mann 📷🌱

One of our local venues is hosting an appearance by a guy I admired for years but was fired very publicly for serious workplace harassment. Is there a ticket discount using the promotion code #metoo?

"The man who has millions will want everything he can lay his hands on and then raises voice against the poor devil who wants 10 cents more a day." — Samuel Gompers 📷🌱

"When we are dancing with the angels, the question we'll be asked: What did we do to make sure we kept our democracy intact? Did we stand on the sidelines and say nothing?" — Elijah Cummings 📷🌱

"Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful." — Friedrich Nietzsche 📷🌱

"Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you." — Alex Hailey 📷🌱

"No man is rich enough to buy back his past." —Oscar Wilde 📷🌱

"I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell." — Richard P. Feynman 📷🌱

"Combinations of wickedness would overwhelm the world by the advantage that licentious principles afford, did not those who have long practiced perfidy grow faithless to each other." — Samuel Johnson cc: Guilfoyle, K.; DJT; DJTjr 📷🌱

"Treat your body like a data center. Consume as much water, art and literature as possible. Upset local municipalities with your existence." — @meidotwav.bluesky.social

For National Coming-Out Day: “Being gay is a natural, normal, beautiful variation on being human. Period. ... Be outraged, offended, angry and intolerant of any discussion or any one who describes you as unequal, undeserving or unnatural for being just as you are.” — Larry Kramer 🌈

"From everything that man builds, nothing in my eyes is better and more valuable than bridges. Belonging to everyone and equal to everyone, built where most human needs are crossing, and they do not serve for anything secret or bad." —Ivo Andric 📷🌱

"The American fascist wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way... to poison the channels of public information, to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power." — U.S. VP Henry A. Wallace 📷🌱

"We have so far to go to realize our human potential for compassion, altruism and love.... Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?" — Jane Goodall 📷🌱

"There are two possible outcomes: If the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery." – Enrico Fermi 📷🌱

In our world of big names, our true heroes tend to be anonymous, people who can be admired for something more substantial than their well-knownness: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at a lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized job." — Daniel J. Boorstin 📷🌱

"We call ourselves 'intelligent,' yet the humblest fungus can decompose waste and build soil, a tree can harness solar energy and a wetland can purify water — all without toxic byproducts. True intelligence is learning from these systems, not bulldozing them." — Tangwa Abilu 📷🌱

"The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.” — George Santayana 📷🌱

"Curiosity is the opposite of ignorance." — Peter Sokolowski (I'd say it's the antidote, but that's just a quibble.) 🌱👍

'If we listen from the mind of silence, every birdsong and every whispering of the pine branches in the wind will speak to us." — Thich Nhat Hanh 📷🌱

"When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully or just completely, the correct response to death's perfect punctuation mark is a smile." — Julie Burchill 📷🌱

"If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing." — John Brunner 📷🌱

"Truth is not violated only by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence." – Henri Frédéric Amiel 📷🌱

"You have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plum crazy." — Ken Kesey 📷🌱

“Ignorance does not make you fireproof when the world is burning." ― Nelou Keramati 📷🌱

"I make a point to appreciate all the little things in my life. I go out and smell the air after a good, hard rain. I hold the little treasures that somebody special gave me. It helps remind me that there are so many great, glorious pieces of good in the world." — Dolly Parton (Happy 9/25!) 📷🌱

"Ah! what a divine religion might be found out if charity were really made the principle of it instead of faith." – Percy Bysshe Shelley 📷🌱

“It is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying, ‘We’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying.’ ” — Sen. Ted Cruz 📷🌱

"Learning is acquired by reading books; but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading humanity, and studying all the various editions of it." — Lord Chesterfield 📷🌱

"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness...." — John Keats Autumn starts at 8:05 pm tomorrow. 📷🌱

"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant." — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 📷🌱

"Soon silence will have passed into legend. We have turned our backs on silence. Day after day we invent machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation." — Jean Arp 📷🌱

"Extended empires are like expanded gold, exchanging solid strength for feeble splendor." —Samuel Johnson 📷🌱

"Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions we make are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of." — C. S. Lewis 📷🌱

"Nationalism trumpets its country's virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, 'the greatest,' but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is." — Sydney J. Harris 📷🌱

"Anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end." — Barack Obama 📷🌱

"I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means -- except by getting off his back." — Leo Tolstoy 🌱📷

"You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty." — Jessica Mitford 🌱📷

"Whenever A attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon B, A is most likely a scoundrel" —H.L. Mencken 🌱📷

"In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold." — John Leonard 🌱📷

"The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is." — Winston Churchill 🌱📷

“I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction” — John Steinbeck 🌱📷