NO on 8!...and some inspiration

My new Ma and Pa-in-law were on NPR today speaking out as Mormons to vote NO on Proposition 8. They make me feel like there are still some good people left in the world. I'm sure the podcast will become available later today if you'd like to hear it. It was on http://www.scpr.org/ under the segment "Day to Day."

In honor of these wonderful people and their wonderful cause, I'd like to share these quotes with you:

"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." --Theodore Roosevelt (Paris speech at the Sorbonne, 1910)

Or this one:

"Thomas Merton wrote, "There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues." There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won't have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus." --Annie Dillard, from "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"

Or this one:

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion....
It is harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude." --Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

Or how about these?:

"Ever since there have been men, man has given himself over to too little joy. That alone, my brothers, is our original sin. I should believe only in a God who understood how to dance." --Henri Matisse

"Come now!...Were everything clear, all would seem to you vain. Your boredom would populate a shadowless universe with an impassive life made up of unleavened souls. But a measure of disquiet is a divine gift. The hope which, in your eyes, shines on a dark threshold does not have its basis in an overly certain world. --Marcel Proust, "By Way of Sainte-Beuve"

And lastly:

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing."
--Edmund Burke