More Good Quotes 2018

"But with art comes empathy. It allows us to look through someone else’s eyes and know their strivings and struggles. It expands the moral imagination and makes it impossible to accept the dehumanization of others. When we are without art, we are a diminished people — myopic, unlearned and cruel."
--Dave Eggers, New York Times, 29 June 2018

"The most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error."
--Frank Herbert, Dune

"Coach Lombardi preached that most games are won by only a few specific plays.  Since no one knew which plays was going to win the game, each player had to give 100 percent on every play."
--Vince Lombardi, Jr., in The Lombardi Rules

“The result of bad communication is a disconnection between strategy and execution.”
--Chuck Martin, former vice president, IBM

Impact of Home Appliances in Morrison's Paradise

In Paradise by Toni Morrison, there is a paragraph that connects the prosperity of a small town with impact of home appliances.

     The garden battles – won, lost, still at bay – were mostly over.  They had raged for ten years, having begun suddenly in 1963, when there was time.  The women who were in their twenties when Ruby was founded, in 1950, watched for thirteen years an increase in bounty that had never entered their dreams.  They bought soft toilet paper, used washcloths instead of rags, soap for the face alone or diapers only.  In every Rudy household appliances pumped, hummed, sucked, purred, whispered and flowed.  And there was time:  fifteen minutes when no firewood needed tending in a kitchen stove; one whole hour when no sheets or overalls needed slapping or scrubbing on a washboard; ten minutes gained becuase no rug needed to be beaten, no curtains pinned on a stretcher; two hours because food lasted and therefore could be picked or purchased in greater quantity.  Their husbands and sons, tickled to death and no less proud than the women, translated a five-time markup, a price per pound, bale, or live weight, into Kelvinators as well as John Deere; into Philco as well as Body by Fisher.  The white porcelain layered over steel, the belts, valves and Bakelite parts gave them deep satisfaction,  The humming, throbbing and softly purring gave the women time.  


Toni Morrison, Paradise (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1998) p. 93.

Humility and Leadership: Goldman on Popovich

In a National Public Radio interview, sports journalist Tom Goldman reflected on the recent interactions that professional basketball coach Gregg Popovich had with a player.  By better connecting with the unhappy player, Popovich realized that he was over-coaching the player.

“Here's the best coach in the NBA, one of the best in all of major pro sports, willing to be honest, self-aware and humble. A sports story that reminds us what good leadership can be."

Link to NPR interview:
https://www.npr.org/2018/01/13/577833727/saturday-sports-north-korea-at-the-winter-olympics

Good Quotes 2018

"One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience. There are always areas of vast silence in any culture, and part of an artist’s job is to go into those areas and come back from the silence with something to say. It’s one reason why we read poetry, because poets can give us the words we need. When we read good poetry, we often say, ‘Yeah, that’s it. That’s how I feel.’
--Ursula K. Le Guin

“The duty of a leader is to create an organization where it is easy to practice kindness.”
– Kim Cameron

"Moments, ideas, a single poem in a collection — a work of genius, no matter how individually wrought — is never the product of a single individual. We should stop thinking of genius as an attribute and instead start to think of it as a condition, a circumstance."
--Yuval Sharon, essay at Los Angeles Review of Books website

“That experience of touching down in a totally foreign place is like having a blank canvas: You begin with nothing, but stroke by stroke you build a life. This process requires everything great art requires — risk-tasking, hope, a great deal of imagination, all the qualities that are the building blocks of art.”
-- Edwidge Danticat

"The Internet and the connection economy turn the economics of mass on its head.  It's now cheaper and more efficient to make edgy, amazing products for the weird edge cases (who are listening and talking and who care) than it is to push yet another average product onto the already overloaded average people in the middle of the curve."
--Seth Godin, The Icarus Deception

"Childhood dreams are not kicked awake by nightmares of abuse."
--Maya Angelou, "A Brave and Startling Truth"

"It is well to fly towards the light, even where there may be some fluttering and bruising of wings against the windowpanes, is it not?"
--Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the Challenge of Happiness, in a letter to Robert Browning

"In an age when the meaning of words are squeezed into the speaker's mold, marble values such as integrity can be pulverized overnight."
--John Maxwell, Developing the Leader Within You

“Champions don’t do extraordinary things, they do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.”
--Tony Dungy, as found in The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

"Nobody hiding in the school bathroom/Or home alone/Pulling open the drawer/Where the pills are kept."
--Marie Howe, "Singularity"