Getting the Right Signals From Reading Material

For years I have begun each year with a reading of the inspirational quotations in the new RAND calendar.

The Santa Monica think tank is at the cutting edge, but its calendar falls back on the familiar voices of our most respected men and women, living and dead.

Looking backward, we find Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1937, when the clouds of war were gathering over Europe, admonishing us that we could not simply wait for peace.

“In a world of mutual suspicion, peace must be affirmatively reached for. It cannot just be wished for. It cannot just be waited for.”

What do you suppose he had in mind?

Richard Feynman, the late Caltech physicist, explains the constraints of scientific imagination:

“Whatever we are allowed to imagine in science must be consistent with everything else we know. . . . We can’t allow ourselves to seriously imagine things which are obviously in contradiction to the known laws of nature. . . . The problem of creating something which is new, but which is consistent with everything which has been seen before, is one of extreme difficulty.”

From her poignant diary, Anne Frank speaks to us of her unquenchable hope while her family was hiding from the Nazis:

“I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

My late friend Jake Zeitlin, the bookseller, is quoted on censorship:

“I cannot convince myself that there is anyone so wise, so universally comprehensive in his judgment, that he can be trusted with power to tell others: ‘You shall not express yourself thus, you shall not describe your own experiences; or depict the fantasies which your mind has created; or laugh at what others have set up as respectable; or question old beliefs; or contradict the dogmas of the church, of our society, of our economic system, and our political orthodoxy.”

Samuel Ullman defines youth:

“Youth is not a time of life--it is a state of mind. . . . Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over a life of ease.”

He must have been talking about my wife.

Will Rogers--everybody’s friend--draws a lesson from Roy Riegels, the UC Berkeley center who picked up a fumble in the 1929 Rose Bowl game and ran 65 yards the wrong way. A teammate tackled him at the 6-inch line; Cal’s punt was blocked for a 2-point safety, and Georgia Tech won the game 8-7.

“Everybody is picking on that poor boy that run the wrong way with that football. If I was an editorial writer . . . I would ask how many out of the hundred and ten million of the rest of us are headed the wrong way? How many out of us have even had presence of mind enough to pick up a fumble?”

A. Whitney Griswold speaks out for ideas and education:

“Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.”

Henry Beston warns against the debasement of language:

“One of the greater mischiefs which confront us today is the growing debasement of the language . . . on the one hand . . . vulgarized and on the other corrupted with a particularly odious academic jargon.”

Jan Struther applauds private opinion:

“Private opinion creates public opinion. Public opinion overflows eventually into national behavior and national behavior, as things are arranged at present, can make or mar the world. That is why private opinion, and private behavior, and private conversation are so terrifyingly important.”

Robert F. Kennedy (in 1966) foresees the crumbling of the Berlin Wall:

“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

To which I will modestly suggest that if you pick up a fumble, be sure you run the right way.