The Better Chancery Practice Blog

“The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent upon it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.”  —  Galileo Galilei

“Go outside. Don’t tell anyone and don’t bring your phone. Start walking and keep walking until you no longer know the road like the palm of your hand, because we walk the same roads day in and day out, to the bus and back home, and we cease to see. We walk in our sleep and teach our muscles to work without thinking and I dare you to walk where you have not yet walked and I dare you to notice. Don’t try to get anything out of it because you won’t. Don’t try to make use of it because you can’t. And that’s the point.”  —  Charlotte Eriksson

“Nature poets can’t walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany.”  —  Christian Wiman

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”  —  Hannah Arendt

“In short, I suspect totalitarianism to be the retribution that befalls all peoples who give free rein to extremists and extremism, who forget the golden rule of political life, which is that ideas are never good except in moderation, and that anything carried to its logical conclusion becomes a menacing caricature of itself.”  — George Kennan

“A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore the government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit , and incurring the horrors of war and long oppressions of enormous public debt. . . . If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost.”  —  Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Taylor, 1798

“It doesn’t matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.”  —  Anne Sexton

“To become a father is not hard; to be a father is.”  —  William Busch

“One day he was repairing the light fixture in the bathroom. He asked me to hold one of his hands and to grip the faucet of the bathtub with my other hand. I did this. Then he licked the index finger of his free hand and stuck it in the socket where the light bulb had been. As the electricity passed through him and into me and through me and was grounded in the faucet of the bathtub, my father kept saying, ‘Pal, I won’t hurt you. I won’t hurt you.’ If I had let go of the faucet both of us would have died. If I had let go of his hand, he would have died.”  —  James Alan McPherson

“The mother is the supreme parent.”  —  Havelock Ellis

“A mother is not a person to lean on but a person to make leaning unnecessary.”  —  Dorothy C. Fisher

“What the mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin.”  —  Henry Ward Beecher

“It is not possible to found a lasting power upon injustice, perjury, and treachery.”  —  Demosthenes

“There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”  —  Lord Acton

“The public, therefore, among a democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence. In the United States the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own. Everybody there adopts great numbers of theories, on philosophy, morals, and politics, without inquiry, upon public trust; and if we examine it very closely, it will be perceived that religion itself holds sway there much less as a doctrine of revelation than as a commonly received opinion.”  —  Alexis de Tocqueville