people-from-dayton

"Remaining faithful has to be the anchor. But part of what we have to be faithful to is getting the Gospel not to people of 1389 but 1989. Part of being faithful is appropriate change."

"in our American culture, we say, you make the decision as expeditiously as you can. You implement it, you publicize it, and you get it over with as quickly as possible. Well, "as quickly as possible" is not part of the Roman curial vocabulary."

"When I think about it, the mission was not a highly dangerous affair. You could do something about it if there was a problem. But, looking back, I’d say we were pretty lucky."

"Well, the whole flight took 13 hours…4 to Japan, 9 hours across the water to China. No particular or dramatic things happened. We ended up thinking about what could happen, especially after Hank, our navigator, handed me a note saying we were going to end up about 180 miles short of China. We didn’t know what to think about that. But we got to China with fuel to spare, a tailwind helped us."

"Our airplane had incendiary bombs. Our mission was to light up Tokyo."

"To the gentlemen we lost on the mission and to those who have passed away since, thank you very much and may they rest in peace."

"The only thing we could do was fly until we ran out of gas and then bail out. It was dark, and we didn’t know anything about the terrain except that it was mountainous, but that was the only alternative, unless you wanted to commit suicide. We bailed out at around 9,000 feet."

"We placed the B-25 in the middle of the deck, with about seven feet between the right wingtip and the ship’s island. The Navy had painted a white line down the deck for the left main gear and another for the nose gear. We taxied up and revved the engine. A launcher picked the appropriate time, the peak of an up movement with the water, and the carrier just dropped out from underneath the airplane. We got off a good 20 or 30 feet from the end of the deck."

"I was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio. As a young kid I used to ride my bicycle from where we lived three or four miles to McCook Field, the Army Air Corps’ first test base. I got to watch all the old-timers. They were testing air refueling, dropping a hose out of one airplane that was higher than another."

"No, we were just doing our job, part of the big picture, and happy that what we did was helpful. We couldn’t have done it without the Navy. They risked two of their carriers and quite an armada."

"The raid was designed to do two things. One was to let the Japanese people know their leaders were not being truthful by saying Japan couldn’t be bombed by air. The other was to give the Allies, and particularly the United States, a morale shot in the arm."

"The secret to productivity in so many fields -- and in origami -- is letting dead people do your work for you. Because what you can do is take your problem, and turn it into a problem that someone else has solved, and use their solutions."

"When you get math involved, problems that you solve for aesthetic value only, or to create something beautiful, turn around and turn out to have an application in the real world. And as weird and surprising as it may sound, origami may someday even save a life."

"I just have to say something. If you don’t think things are right, open your mouth."

"Three or four years ago a distinguished Frenchman, M. Hovelacque, published an article on America in the Revue de Paris in which he maintained that the essential weakness of our American civilization lay in the failure of our education to produce any equivalent of the superior man of Confucius or the καλὸς κἀγαθός of the Greeks."

"Those who are filled with concern for the lot of humanity as a whole, especially for the less fortunate portions of it, are wont nowadays to call themselves idealists. We should at least recognize that ideals in this sense are not the same as standards and that they are often indeed the opposite of standards. It would be easy to mention institutions of learning in this country that are at present engaged in breaking down standards in the name of ideals."

"The question I propose to consider is in what way one may justify the study of English on cultural and disciplinary, and not merely on sentimental or utilitarian, grounds. My own conviction is that if English is to be thus justified it must be primarily by what I am terming the discipline of ideas."

"The complaint is often heard at present that there is an increasing exodus from the difficult and disciplinary subjects and a rush into the soft subjects. One good sign is that those who stand for the difficult and disciplinary subjects, e.g., the professors of physics and the professors of the ancient classics, are coming more and more to see that they must co-operate and not work at cross-purposes, as they have done only too often in the past, if they are to make head against the drift toward softness."

"I chanced recently to be glancing over … a book on Japanese Buddhism, and I read among other things that several centuries ago there was a sect of Japanese Buddhism known as the Way of Hardships, and that shortly after there arose another sect known as the Easy Way which at once gained great popularity and tended to supplant the Way of Hardships. But the Japanese Way of Hardships is itself an easy way if one compares it with the original way of Buddha. One can follow indeed very clearly the process by which Buddhist doctrine descended gradually from the austere and almost inaccessible height on which it had been placed by its founder to the level of the prayer mill."

"Both emotional nationalism and emotional internationalism go back to Rousseau, but in his final emphasis he is an emotional nationalist; and that is because he saw that patriotic 'virtue' is a more potent intoxicant than the love of humanity. The demonstration came in the French Revolution which began as a great international movement and ended in imperialism and Napoleon Bonaparte."

"The reasons for putting humanistic truth above scientific truth are not metaphysical but very practical: the discipline that helps man to self-mastery is found to have a more important bearing on his happiness than the discipline that helps him to a mastery of physical nature. If scientific discipline is not supplemented by a truly humanistic or religious discipline the result is unethical science, and unethical science is perhaps the worst monster that has yet been turned loose on the race. Man in spite of what I have termed his stupidity, his persistent evasion of the main issue, the issue of his own happiness, will awaken sooner or later to the fearful evil he has already suffered from a science that has arrogated to itself what does not properly belong to it; and then science may be as unduly depreciated as it has, for the past century or two, been unduly magnified; so that in the long run it is in the interest of science itself to keep in its proper place, which is below both humanism and religion."

"The true dualism I take to be the contrast between two wills, one of which is felt as vital impulse (élan vital) and the other as vital control (frein vital)."

"The greatest of vices according to Buddha is the lazy yielding to the impulses of temperament (pamada); the greatest virtue (appamada) is the opposite of this, the awakening from the sloth and lethargy of the senses, the constant exercise of the active will."

"It seems to me imperative to re-establish the true dualism—that between vital impulse and vital control—and to this end to affirm the higher will first of all as a psychological fact. The individual needs, however, to go beyond this fact if he is to decide how far he is to exercise control in any particular instance with a primary view to his own happiness: in short, he needs standards. To secure standards, at least critically, he cannot afford, like the Rousseauist, to disparage the intellect."

"This higher will is felt in its relation to the impressions and impulses and expansive desires of the natural man as a will to refrain. ... The failure to exercise the will to refrain in some form or degree means spiritual anarchy. A combination such as we are getting more and more at present of spiritual anarchy with an ever-increasing material efficiency—power without wisdom, as one is tempted to put it—is not likely to work either for the happiness of the individual or for the welfare of society."

"According to Mr. Walter Lippmann, the belief the modern man has lost is "that there is an immortal essence presiding like a king over his appetites." This immortal essence of which Mr. Lippmann speaks is, judged experimentally and by its fruits, a higher will. But why leave the affirmation of such a will to the pure traditionalist? Why not affirm it first of all as a psychological fact, one of the immediate data of consciousness, a perception so primordial that, compared with it, the denial of man's moral freedom by the determinist is only a metaphysical dream? The way would thus be open for a swift flanking movement on the behaviorists and other naturalistic psychologists."

"Everything in our modern substitutes for religion—whether Baconian or Rousseauistic—will be found to converge upon the idea of service. The crucial question is whether one is safe in assuming that the immense machinery of power that has resulted from activity of the utilitarian type can be made, on anything like present lines, to serve disinterested ends; whether it will not rather minister to the egoistic aims either of national groups or of individuals."

"Rousseauist and Baconian, though often superficially at odds with one another, have co-operated in undermining, not merely religious tradition, but another tradition which in the Occident goes back finally, not to Judea, but to ancient Greece. This older tradition may be defined as humanistic. The goal of the humanist is poised and proportionate living. This he hopes to accomplish by observing the law of measure. ... Decorum is supreme for the humanist even as humility takes precedence over all other virtues in the eyes of the Christian. Traditionally the idea of decorum has been associated, often with a considerable admixture of mere formalism, with the idea of the gentleman. Humanism and religion in their various forms have at times conflicted, but have more often been in alliance with one another. As Burke says in a well-known passage: "Nothing is more certain than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things that are connected with manners and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion.""

"Equality as it is currently pursued is incompatible with true liberty; for liberty involves an inner working with reference to standards, the right subordination, in other words, of man's ordinary will to a higher will. There is an inevitable clash, in short, between equality and humility."

"When the element of conversion with reference to a standard is eliminated from life, what remains is the irresponsible quest for thrills."

"Since every man desires happiness, it is evidently no small matter whether he conceives of happiness in terms of work or of enjoyment. If he work in the full ethical sense that I have attempted to define, he is pulling back and disciplining his temperamental self with reference to some standard. In short, his temperamental self is, in an almost literal sense, undergoing conversion. The whole of life may, indeed, be summed up in the words diversion and conversion. Along which of these two main paths are most of us seeking the happiness to the pursuit of which we are dedicated by our Declaration of Independence? The author of this phrase, Thomas Jefferson, remarks of himself: "I am an Epicurean.""

"Our most urgent problem just now is how to preserve in a positive and critical form the soul of truth in the two great traditions, classical and Christian, that are crumbling as mere dogma."

"To glorify man in his natural and unmodified self is no less surely, even if less obviously, idolatry than actually to bow down before a graven image."

"What seems to me to be driving our whole civilization toward the abyss at present is a one-sided conception of liberty, a conception that is purely centrifugal, that would get rid of all outer control and then evade or deny openly the need of achieving inner control."

"When we consider carefully what many of our so-called humanists stand for, we find that they are not humanists but humanitarians."

"True democracy consists not in lowering the standard but in giving everybody, so far as possible, a chance of measuring up to the standard."

"Here's a reminder on accepting Christmas gifts from vendors: don't."

"Machines might give us more time to think but will never do our thinking for us."

"Thinking things through is hard work and it sometimes seems safer to follow the crowd. That blind adherence to such group thinking is, in the long run, far more dangerous than independently thinking things through"

"I firmly believe that any organization, in order to survive and achieve success, must have a sound set of beliefs on which it premises all its policies and actions. Next I believe that the most important single factor in corporate success is faithful adherence to those beliefs. And, finally I believe if an organization is to meet the challenge of a changing world, it must be prepared to change everything about itself except those beliefs as it moves through corporate life. Basic philosophy, spirit and drive of an organization have far more to do with its relative achievements than do technological or economic resources, organizational structure, innovation and timing..."

"Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity."

"If you stand up and be counted, from time to time you may get yourself knocked down. But remember this: A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good."

"If you can't make it better, you can laugh at it."

"If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?"

"The grass is always greener over the septic tank."

"It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else*"

"You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism."

"I remember thinking how often we look, but never see … we listen, but never hear … we exist, but never feel. We take our relationships for granted. A house is only a place. It has no life of its own. It needs human voices, activity and laughter to come alive."

"Every Sunday I’d take a 20-minute bus ride to his house in Beverley Hills for a one-hour lesson and be there for four hours [...] They had four sons, they didn’t have a daughter and I kind of fitted in as the baby of the family."

"Rufus because my diaphragm gets a workout while trying to utilize the 18 vocal sounds a mole makes. Chuckie because [...] he's an asthmatic with five personalities rolled into one—plus I have to do the voice the way [Christine Cavanaugh] did it for 10 years."