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Previously-Posted Spooky Quotations
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Quotations Posted After Hooker's Firing:
"In every business, there are employees who are the first point of contact
with the customers (attendants at airport gates, receptionists at doctors'
offices, bank tellers, executive assistants). Those people can come across
either as agents or as gatekeepers. An agent makes things happen for
others. A gatekeeper sets up barriers to keep people out. We're looking
for agents, and our staff members are responsible for monitoring their own
performance: In that transaction, did I present myself as an agent or a
gatekeeper? In the world of hospitality, there's rarely anything in between."
Danny Meyer,
Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business
(HarperCollins, 2006); quoted by Peter Blomberg at Library Garden
"For change to be successful it must be continuous, regular, and almost
imperceptible. Successful change is not the old school variety of change
that comes every few years and is accompanied by massive upheavals,
frightened staff, and upset customers. Successful change is constant
change, and constant change cannot be discontinuous or fractured. Constant
change is fluid; it’s evolutionary, not revolutionary."
Michael Casey
“Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into
practice with courageous impatience."
Admiral Hyman Rickover, quoted by Michael Porter
“Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. Those who remember
the past are condemned to watch other people repeat it.”
George Needham
"The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth
outweighs the world."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow."
Aesop (c. 550 B.C.)
"It is the obligation of a head librarian...to be unmistakably a
librarian, to be a person who is recognizable by his acts and words
as one whose business is books, who can answer questions about books,
who will take a stand on issues involving books...."
Lawrence Clark Powell (1957)
"It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace
if no forum for their presentation is provided or available."
Thomas Mann (1875-1955)
Spooky Quotations Posted During the Hooker Era:
"A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to
recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing
respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he
can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the
lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in
satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying to others and to
yourself."
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), The Brothers Karamazov
"Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the
same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen....If the government becomes a
lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it
invites anarchy."
Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941), Olmstead v. United States, 1928
"Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the
opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike,
and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune."
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago
"Cultivate a fine-grained hatred for the barbaric world your nemesis
wishes to bring into being. Feel it seething around you, menacing you,
as you wonder why you should care."
Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflictions (Norton, 2002)
"The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger
and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at
all costs to hear everyone's account of it, is a theory which has
been justified on the whole by experiment, but which remains a very
daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really one of the
great discoveries of the modern time."
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against
forgetting."
Milan Kundera
"A man must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes to
be sure of finding nothing still more disgusting before the day is
over."
Chamfort
"What dull barbarians are not proud of their dullness and barbarism?"
Thackeray
"Honesty pays, but it doesn't seem to pay enough to suit some people."
F.M. Hubbard
"Secrecy is the badge of fraud."
Sir John Chadwick (British judge), 1990
"He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth
makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers."
Charles Peguy
"Incompetents invariably make trouble for people other than themselves."
Larry McMurtry
"Involvement in administration does not increase knowledge of a
library's contents or zeal to serve its users."
Lawrence Clark Powell, Wilson Library Bulletin, 1970
"You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do."
Henry Ford
"There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is
done with a solemn face."
G.L. Lichtenberg (1742-1789)
"There is nothing more fearful than ignorance in action."
Goethe
"The bridge of a sinking ship, one feels, is scarcely the ideal place
from which to deliver a lecture on the technique of keeping afloat."
Kenneth Tynan
"[What] a wonderful method ['reorganizing'] can be for creating the
illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and
demoralization."
Titus Petronius
"Reason cannot prevail where reason cannot penetrate."
Peter Quennell
"Usually, terrible things done with the excuse that progress requires them
are not really progress at all, but just terrible things."
Russell Baker
"In the case of highly complex realities...ignorance, if not bliss, is at least cheap."
Kenneth Boulding
"Take books out of libraries, and they won't need libraries for what's left. Curled-up
films in cans, spools of wire and wheels of tape, shining disks and glassy slides -- all
the so-called nonbook material has its place in the modern library, yes, but not in the
center."
Lawrence Clark Powell, Books in My Baggage (1960)
"There is a long list of people for whom one should never go to work—crooks, racists,
liars—but the most dangerous of the lot are those who are in over their heads. Anyone
who feels inadequate to a position of authority will inevitably: (a) trust the wrong
people for advice; (b) betray you at the drop of a name; (c) mess up the whole
enterprise and throw everyone into unemployment. Such people may not mean to do
any of those things, but they are driven, night and day, by a fear of exposure. They
know they are inept; you know that they are inept; they know that you know it."
Roger Rosenblatt, Rules for Aging (Harcourt, 2000)
"It seems that, once introduced into public life, evil easily perpetuates itself, whereas
good is always difficult, rare, and fragile."
Tzvetan Todorov
"Vituperation...redresses some of the forces of deference which bolster the conceit of
the second-rate; it also prevents the first-rate from going mad with conceit."
Auberon Waugh
"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with
fools."
Herbert Spengler
"Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get. Where there
is no ventilation, fresh air is declared to be unwholesome."
George Bernard Shaw
"He that fears you present will hate you absent."
Thomas Fuller
"The trouble with half-truths...is the other half."
Kenneth Boulding
"There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong."
H.L. Mencken
"Every great thing perishes if its heirs are petty."
Oswald Spengler
"There is no right way to do a wrong thing."
Leaves of Gold
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