#d

Someone asked me...how it felt and I was reminded of a story that a fellow townsman of ours used to tell--Abraham Lincoln. They asked him how he felt once after an unsuccessful election. He said he felt like a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark. He said that he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh. ↗

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

#lincoln #losing #elections

Elections determine who is in power, but they do not determine how power is used. ↗

— Paul Collier

#elections #power #elections

Every four years we go through the same cycle of hope and disillusionment. ↗

— Sheri Holman

#election #elections

Believe in angels? Then believe in vampires. Believe in me. There are worse things on earth. ↗

— Anne Rice

#devil

Son, the greatest trick the Devil pulled was convincing the world there was only one of him. ↗

— David Wong

#evil #trick #devil

I should like to know which is worse: to be ravished a hundred times by pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgarians, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fe, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley -- in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered -- or simply to sit here and do nothing?' That is a hard question,' said Candide. ↗

— Voltaire

#voltaire #misery

Nobody's perfect. We're all just one step up from the beasts and one step down from the angels. ↗

— Jeannette Walls

#beasts #mankind #perfection #mankind

In the end, the number of prayers we say may contribute to our happiness, but the number of prayers we answer may be of even greater importance. ↗

— Dieter F. Uchtdorf

#happiness #prayer #service #service

Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is took weak and fuddled to shake off. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#humanity #nothing #screwtape #soul #ambition

People in the West like to shoot things. When they first got to the West they shot buffalo. Once there were 70 million buffalo on the plains and then the people of the West started blasting away at them. Buffalo are just cows with big heads. If you've ever looked a cow in the face and seen the unutterable depths of trust and stupidity that lie within, you will be able to guess how difficult it must have been for people in the West to track down buffalo and shoot them to pieces. By 1895, there were only 800 buffalo left, mostly in zoos and touring Wild West shows. With no buffalo left to kill, Westerners started shooting Indians. Between 1850 and 1890 they reduced the number of Indians in America from two million to 90,000. Nowadays, thank goodness, both have made a recovery. Today there are 30,000 buffalo and 300,000 Indiands, and of course you are not allowed to shoot either, so all the Westerners have left to shoot at are road signs and each other, both of which they do rather a lot. There you have a capsule history of the West. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#buffalo #indians #the-west #wild-west #recovery