Little Red's Big Ideas

Goal Quotes - Part One of Four

As the new decade dawns you (along with your bosses, co-workers and customers), probably have toyed with the idea of making some changes in the coming year.  So, whether you call them resolutions, goals, hopes or commitments – here is the first of four weekly sets of quotations dedicated to keeping you inspired during this goal-setting season.

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"The more intensely we feel about an idea or a goal, the more assuredly the idea, buried deep in our subconscious, will direct us along the path to its fulfillment." - Earl Nightingale

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"A goal properly set is halfway reached." - Abraham Lincoln

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"For me, goals are my road map to the life I want. They have helped me accomplish things I once thought were impossible." - Catherine Pulsifer

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"Goal setting is the core of existence that defines life." - Joanne Bonomi

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"You have to set goals that are almost out of reach. If you set a goal that is attainable without much work or thought, you are stuck with something below your true talent and potential." - Steve Garvey

"Choosing a goal and sticking to it changes everything." - Scott Reed

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"Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps." - Helmut Schmidt

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"Goals give you more than a reason to get up in the morning; they are an incentive to keep you going all day. Goals tend to tap the deeper resources and draw the best out of life." - Harvey Mackay

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"Goals give you a compass in order to direct your path through life. Goals focus your thoughts and actions on areas that have precise purpose and meaning." - Catherine Pulsifer

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"Focus on your potential instead of your limitations." - Alan Loy McGinnis

Back to School Quotes

If the ads on television this week are a fair indicator -- there's no denying it, kids... it's almost time to go back to school.  Teachers are busy preparing their classrooms, school administrators are checking and double-checking piles of paperwork and parents are scraping together the necessary funds to build a peer-worthy wardrobe for their little dudes and divas. 

So -- whether your area schools are already in session or getting ready for their incoming students I'm happy to share a list of quotes about education to help you get to the head of the class!  Enjoy and use them to spice up your emails, newsletters, website, presentation, meeting minutes and other presentations.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison. ~Victor Hugo

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.  ~Sydney J. Harris

No man who worships education has got the best out of education.... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.  ~G.K. Chesterton

The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.  ~Bill Beattie

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.  ~Albert Einstein

The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.  ~Franklin D. Roosevelt

It'll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers.  ~Author unknown, quoted in You Said a Mouthful, Ronald D. Fuchs, ed.

An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn't teach them how to make a life.  ~Author Unknown

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.  ~Attributed to both Andy McIntyre and Derek Bok

It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.  ~G.M. Trevelyan

To the uneducated, an A is just three sticks.  ~A.A. Milne

Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education.  Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization.  We must make our choice; we cannot have both.  ~Abraham Flexner

Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.  ~Edward Everett

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.  ~Ezra Pound

Education should be exercise; it has become massage.  ~Martin H. Fischer

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives. ~Robert Maynard Hutchins

Democracy - Part Three of Three

As summer comes to an end we look forward to the last long weekend of the season with the final installment of "democracy" quotes.  The others appeared just before Memorial Day and the first week of July.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

To safeguard democracy the people must have a keen sense of independence, self-respect, and their oneness.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

In true democracy every man and women is taught to think for himself or herself.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

The spirit of democracy cannot be established in the midst of terrorism, whether governmental or popular.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall -- think of it, ALWAYS.

Molly Ivins:

The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion.

Noam Chomsky:

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.

Noam Chomsky:

There are no magic answers, no miraculous methods to overcome the problems we face, just the familiar ones: honest search for understanding, education, organization, action that raises the cost of state violence for its perpetrators or that lays the basis for institutional change -- and the kind of commitment that will persist despite the temptations of disillusionment, despite many failures and only limited successes, inspired by the hope of a brighter future."

Noam Chomsky:

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.

Paulo Freire:

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

Plato:

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

Robert Coles:

Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?

Robert M. Hutchins:

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

Rosa Luxemburg:

Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.

Stuart Chase:

Democracy, as has been said of Christianity, has never really been tried.

Theodore Parker:

Democracy means not "I am as good as you are" but "You are as good as I am."

Thomas Jefferson:

I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take the power from them, but to inform them by education.

Thomas Jefferson:

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.

Thomas Jefferson:

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.

Thomas Jefferson:

I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.

Thomas Jefferson:

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

Unknown:

[C]reative ability and personal responsibility are strongest when the mind is free from supernatural belief and operates in an atmosphere of freedom and democracy.

Vince Lombardi:

Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.

Voltaire:

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

Walt Whitman:

Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between [people], and their beliefs -- in religion, literature, colleges and schools -- democracy in all public and private life....

Walt Whitman:

The purpose of democracy -- supplanting old belief in the necessary absoluteness of establish'd dynastic rulership, temporal, ecclesiastical, and scholastic, as furnishing the only security against chaos, crime, and ignorance -- is, through many transmigrations, and amid endless ridicules, arguments, and ostensible failures,
This entry continued ...

Wendell Phillips:

Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection: they have many friends and few enemies.

Will Rogers:

Elections are a good deal like marriages. There's no accounting for anyone's taste. Every time we see a bridegroom we wonder why she ever picked him, and it's the same with public officials.

William Hastie:

Democracy is not being, it is becoming. It is easily lost, but never finally won.

William J. Bennett:

America's support for human rights and democracy is our noblest export to the world.

Democracy Quotes - Part Two

As we approach Independence Day here is the second of the three part series of quotes on "Democracy."  (The first part ran just before Memorial Day and the third will run run just before Labor Day.  Enjoy and keep waving the red, white and blue.

George Orwell:

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

George Washington:

As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.

Gore Vidal:

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

H. L. Mencken:

Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.

H. L. Mencken:

As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920

H. L. Mencken:

A good politician under democracy is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

Hermann Goering:

Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. quote verified at snopes.com

Howard Winters:

Civilization is the process in which one gradually increases the number of people included in the term 'we' or 'us' and at the same time decreases those labeled 'you' or 'them' until that category has no one left in it.

Hubert H. Humphrey:

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.

Irving Kristol:

Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity.

J. William Fulbright:

In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.

Jane Addams:

We have learned to say that the good must be extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one person or any one class. But we have not yet learned to add to that statement, that unless all [people] and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having.

Jane Auer:

Voting is one of the few things where boycotting in protest clearly makes the problem worse rather than better.

Jerome Nathanson:

The price of the democratic way of life is a growing appreciation of people's differences, not merely as tolerable, but as the essence of a rich and rewarding human experience.

Jerome Nathanson:

The price of the democratic way of life is a growing appreciation of people's differences, not merely as tolerable, but as the essence of a rich and rewarding human experience.

Jesse Jackson:

In politics, an organized minority is a political majority.

John Bright:

Demand the ballot as the undeniable right of every man who is called to the poll, and take special care that the old constitutional rule and principle, by which majorities alone shall decide in Parliamentary elections, shall not be violated.

John Dewey:

The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education ... (and) the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. Now this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and except where there is adequate provision for the reconstruction of social habits and institutions by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably distributed interests. And this means a democratic society.

John F. Kennedy:

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

John Gardner:

The citizen can bring our political and governmental institutions back to life, make them responsive and accountable, and keep them honest. No one else can.

John Simon:

Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is ignorant.

Laurence J. Peter:

Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.

Lillian Hellman:

Decision by democratic majority vote is a fine form of government, but it's a stinking way to create.

Lord Acton:

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the party that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.

Lyndon B. Johnson:

We preach the virtues of democracy abroad. We must practice its duties here at home. Voting is the first duty of democracy.

Mark Twain:

Citizenship is what makes a republic -- monarchies can get along without it.

Mark Twain:

We adore titles and heredities in our hearts and ridicule them with our mouths. This is our democratic privilege.

Meg Greenfield:

Everybody's for democracy in principle. It's only in practice that the thing gives rise to stiff objections.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

To safeguard democracy the people must have a keen sense of independence, self-respect, and their oneness.

 

Olympic Quotes

I love the winter Olympics, probably because of my cold Minnesota roots.  I love cheering for my nation's athletes as they swoosh, glide, twirl and and luge their way to victory.  To help you, your staff and your customers get in the spirit of the games; use these quotes in your marketing materials, presentations and electronic communications.  During the 18 days of these Olympic Games add a quote to your outgoing voice mail message or email signature.  Better yet, remind people that your parks and recreation programs have more than likely spared countless Olympic dreams past, present and future. 

The Olympics are a wonderful metaphor for world cooperation, the kind of international competition that's wholesome and healthy, an interplay between countries that represents the best in all of us.  ~John Williams

The Olympics remain the most compelling search for excellence that exists in sport, and maybe in life itself.  ~Dawn Fraser

The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part; the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.  ~Pierre de Coubertin

For athletes, the Olympics are the ultimate test of their worth.  ~Mary Lou Retton

The Olympic games should be a matter between individual athletes and the gods. Noisy flag-waving dishonors gods and men alike.  ~Dave Beard

Super Bowl, Super Quotes

No matter which team you want to win this weekend's big game (and who doesn't love the commercials?) everyone seems to be buzzing about football.  In honor of the Superbowl XLIV I'm sharing some of my favorite football quotes.  Use them to impress your friends on Sunday and to add some yardage to upcoming marketing materials whether promoting a youth or adult football program.

Most football teams are temperamental. That's 90% temper and 10% mental.    
-Doug Plank

One accusation you can't throw at me is that I've always done my best.    
- Alan Shearer

I'd rather play in front of a full house than an empty crowd.    
- Johnny Giles

Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.    
- Vince Lombardi

Baseball is what we were, football is what we have become.    
- Mary McGrory

I learned that if you want to make it bad enough, no matter how bad it is, you can make it.    
- Gale Sayers

When in doubt, punt!    
- John Heisman

The road to Easy Street goes through the sewer.    
- John Madden

Maybe a good rule in life is never become too important to do your own laundry.    
- Barry Sanders

It's not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.    
- Archie Griffen

Pro football is like nuclear warfare. There are no winners, only survivors.    
- Frank Gifford

Football isn't a contact sport, it's a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport.    
- Duffy Daugherty

I wouldn't ever set out to hurt anyone deliberately unless it was, you know, important -like a league game or something.    
- Dick Butkus

Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.    
- Joe Theismann

Football is, after all, a wonderful way to get rid of your aggressions without going to jail for it.    
- Heywood Hale Broun

I'd catch a punt naked, in the snow, in Buffalo, for a chance to play in the NFL.    
- Steve Henderson

Football is not a game but a religion, a metaphysical island of fundamental truth in a highly verbalized, disguised society, a throwback of 30,000 generations of anthropological time.    
- ArnoldMandell

American football makes rugby look like a Tupperware party.    
- Sue Lawley

I may be dumb, but I'm not stupid.    
- Terry Bradshaw

College football is a sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture.    
- Elbert Hubbard

Let's face it, you have to have a slightly recessive gene that has a little something to do with the brain to go out on the football field and beat your head against other human beings on a daily basis.    
-Tim Green

You have to play this game like somebody just hit your mother with a two-by-four.    
-Dan Birdwell

Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.    
-George F. Will

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.    
-Erma Bombeck

If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.    
-Erma Bombeck

If you're mad at your kid, you can either raise him to be a nose tackle or send him out to play on the freeway. It's about the same.    
-Bob Golic

At the base of it was the urge, if you wanted to play football, to knock someone down, that was what the sport was all about, the will to win closely linked with contact.    
-George Plimpton

Baseball players are smarter than football players. How often do you see a baseball team penalized for too many men on the field?    
-Jim Bouton

One of the great disappointments of a football game is that the cheerleaders never seem to get injured.    
-Author Unknown

When I went to Catholic high school in Philadelphia, we just had one coach for football and basketball. He took all of us who turned out and had us run through a forest. The ones who ran into the trees were on the football team.    
-George Raveling

The reason women don't play football is because eleven of them would never wear the same outfit in public.    
-Phyllis Diller

I do not like football, which I think of as a game in which two tractors approach each other from opposite directions and collide. Besides, I have contempt for a game in which players have to wear so much equipment. Men play basketball in their underwear, which seems just right to me.    
-Anna Quindlen, Living Out Loud, 1988

Watching football is like watching pornography. There's plenty of action, and I can't take my eyes off it, but when it's over, I wonder why the hell I spent an afternoon doing it.    
-Luke Salisbury

The Rose Bowl is the only bowl I've ever seen that I didn't have to clean.    
-Erma Bombeck

There are two kinds of people in the world, Notre Dame lovers and Notre Dame haters. And, quite frankly, they're both a pain in the ass.    
-Dan Devine, former Notre Dame football coach

I like to believe that my best hits border on felonious assault.   
-Jack Tatum

He was the only man I ever saw who ran his own interference.    
-Steve Owen, about Bronko Nagurski

Trying to maintain order during a legalized gang brawl involving 80 toughs with a little whistle, a hanky and a ton of prayer.    
-Anonymous referee, explaining his job

There are several differences between a football game and a revolution. For one thing, a football game usually lasts longer and the participants wear uniforms. Also, there are usually more casualties in a football game. The object of the game is to move a ball past the other team's goal line. This counts as six points. No points are given for lacerations, contusions, or abrasions, but then no points are deducted, either. Kicking is very important in football. In fact, some of the more enthusiastic players even kick the ball, occasionally.    
-Alfred Hitchcock

Men are clinging to football on a level we aren't even aware of. For centuries, we ruled everything, and now, in the last ten minutes, there are all these incursions by women. It's our Alamo.    
-Tony Kornheiser

Speed is not your fastest, but your slowest man. No back can run faster than his interference.    
-Jock Sutherland

When it comes to football, God is prejudiced - toward big, fast kids.    
-Chuck Mills

Football players, like prostitutes, are in the business of ruining their bodies for the pleasure of strangers.    
-Merle Kessler

Speed, strength, and the inability to register pain immediately.    
-Reggie Williams, when asked his greatest strengths as a football player

The tactical difference between Association Football and Rugby with its varieties seems to be that in the former the ball is the missile, in the latter men are the missiles.    
-Alfred E. Crawley, The Book of the Ball, 1913

What about football? Is it a sport or a concussion?    
-Jim Murray, Los Angeles Times

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important.    
-Eugene J. McCarthy

I don't like to lose, and that isn't so much because it is just a football game, but because defeat means the failure to reach your objective. I don't want a football player who doesn't take defeat to heart, who laughs it off with the thought, 'Oh, well, there's another Saturday.' The trouble in American life today, in business as well as in sports, is that too many people are afraid of competition. The result is that in some circles people have come to sneer at success if it costs hard work and training and sacrifice.    
-Knute Kenneth Rockne

In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard.    
-Theodore Roosevelt

Describing an opposing team: Sure, luck means a lot in football. Not having a good quarterback is bad luck.    
- Don Shula

Goal Quotes - Part Four of Four

Well, I kept my end of the bargain and posted four sets of inspirational quotes about goals and goal-setting to help YOU stay motivated during this month of resolution-making, keeping and breaking.  I hope they helped you feel excited and inspired about reaching your goals.  If not, don't worry, there's always next year!

"Don't spend your precious time asking 'Why isn't the world a better place?' It will only be time wasted. The question to ask is 'How can I make it better?' To that there is an answer." - Leo F. Buscaglia

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"The reason so few people are successful is no one has yet found a way for someone to sit down and slide uphill." - W. Clement Stone

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"NOTHING happens without desire - not in sports, not in business, not in LIFE." - Colin Dunbar

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"Life is like riding a bike. It is impossible to maintain your balance while standing still." - Linda Brakeall

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"A goal is not the same as a desire, and this is an important distinction to make. You can have a desire you don't intend to act on. But you can't have a goal you don't intend to act on." - Tom Morris

"Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours." - Dale Carnegie

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"The poor man is not he who is without a cent, but he who is without a dream." - Harry Kemp

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"A life lived with integrity - even if it lacks the trappings of fame and fortune is a shinning star in whose light others may follow in the years to come." - Denis Waitley

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"Be careful the environment you choose for it will shape you; be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them." - W. Clement Stone

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"If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much." - Jim Rohn

 

Goal Quotes - Part Three of Four

The month is more than half over and you are making some strides towards those New Year's goals, right?  Well, whether you've discarded all hope at resolving your "issues" or are becoming a better person and professional each and every minute, I'm keeping my promise to share inspirational quotes to help with the cause.

"In achieving your goals, you may run into roadblocks. Don't let that stop you, go around, over, or under. If you are committed to your goal you will find a way." - Catherine Pulsifier

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"What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals." - Zig Zigler

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"You have to know what you want to get it." - Gertrude Stein

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"Your life is what your thoughts make it." - Marcus Aurelius

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"You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can decide how you're going to live now." - Joan Baez

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"You have to do what you love to do, not get stuck in that comfort zone of a regular job. Life is not a dress rehearsal. This is it." - Lucinda Basset

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"Look to the future, because that is where you'll spend the rest of your life." - George Burns

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"What you get by achieving your goals is as important as what you become by achieving your goals." - Henry David Thoreau

If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience." - Robert Fulghum

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"Desire is the key to motivation, but it's determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal - a commitment to excellence - that will enable you to attain the success you seek." - Mario Andretti

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"Picture yourself vividly as winning and that alone will contribute immeasurably to success. Great living starts with a picture, held in your imagination, of what you would like to do or be." - Henry Emerson Fosdick

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"If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care, and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom." Dwight D. Eisenhower

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"To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Goal Quotes - Part Two of Four

So how are you doing with those New Year's Resolutions?  It's not to late to make themk, you know.  Or, if you need to edit the ones you've already blown -- that's okay, too.  Here are the second set of inspirational quotes to help you stay on track to those better intentions.  Leave a comment at the end of this post to brag about how well you're doing keeping up with your New Year's goals.

 

"All successful people have a goal. No one can get anywhere unless he knows where he wants to go and what he wants to be or do." - Norman Vincent Peale

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"One of the amazing things we have been given as humans is the unquenchable desire to have dreams of a better life, and the ability to establish goals to live out those dreams." - Jim Rohn

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"If you try to figure out how you will get what you want you will limit yourself to what your ego or conditioned mind can do. The key to creating what you want is to turn your desire or your goal over to your subconscious which is connected to the Universal Mind or Universal Subconscious and let it bring the goal to you and you to your goal." - Dr. Robert Anthony

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"Instead of worrying about what people say of you, why not spend time trying to accomplish something they will admire." - Dale Carnegie

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"There are those who travel and those who are going somewhere. They are different and yet they are the same. The success has this over his rivals: He knows where he is going." - Mark Caine

"Life's ups and downs provide windows of opportunity to determine your values and goals. Think of using all obstacles as stepping stones to build the life you want." - Martha Sinetar

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"Goals are not only absolutely necessary to motivate us. They are essential to really keep us alive." - Bill Copeland

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"The tragedy of life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goals to reach." - Benjamin Mays

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"To achieve happiness, we should make certain that we are never without an important goal." - Ralph Waldo Emereson

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"Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success." - Vincent van Gogh

"The most important thing about goals is having one." - Geoffry F. Abert

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"You can't reach your goals without occasionally taking some long shots." - Unknown

By the People, For the People - Presidents' Day Quotes

Those who work for some form of government are often judged and misjudged by those who work in other forms of government.  Just the word "government" has, sadly come to mean everything from corruption and scandal to inefficiency and crisis.  Here, to help you remember, that government can be more than an institution, are quotes from some of the world's most prolific leaders. 

Aristotle:

All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.

Barry Goldwater:

Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed.

Bella Abzug:

If we get a government that reflects more of what this country is really about, we can turn the century -- and the economy -- around.

David E. Lilienthal:

Centralization at the national capital or within a business undertaking always glorifies the importance of pieces of paper. This dims the sense of reality.

Edward R. Murrow:

Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.

Edward R. Murrow:

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.

Elie Wiesel:

It may well be that our means are fairly limited and our possibilities restricted when it comes to applying pressure on our government. But is this a reason to do nothing? Despair is nor an answer. Neither is resignation. Resignation only leads to indifference, which is not merely a sin but a punishment

Eugene McCarthy:

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.

George Bernard Shaw:

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

George Jean Nathan:

Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.

George Matthew Adams:

There are high spots in all of our lives and most of them have come about through encouragement from someone else. I don't care how great, how famous or successful a man or woman may be, each hungers for applause.

H. L. Mencken:

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.

H. L. Mencken:

As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920

Hubert H. Humphrey:

It was once said that the moral test of Government is how that Government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.

James Madison:

A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.

Jane Auer:

It may be true that the government that governs best governs least. Unfortunately, the same is also true of the government that governs worst.

John Adams:

Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially for the lower classes of people, are so extremely wise and useful that to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.

John F. Kennedy:

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

John Gardner:

The citizen can bring our political and governmental institutions back to life, make them responsive and accountable, and keep them honest. No one else can.

John Ruskin:

Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.

Mark Twain:

The government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.

Noam Chomsky:

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

P. J. O'Rourke:

If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.

Paul Martin:

For years governments have been promising more than they can deliver, and delivering more than they can afford.

Paul Ricoeur:

To put it in a few words, the true malice of man appears only in the state and in the church, as institutions of gathering together, of recapitulation, of totalization.

Robert Coles:

Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?

Thich Nhat Hanh:

You who are journalists, writers, citizens, you have the right and duty to say to those you have elected that they must practice mindfulness, calm and deep listening, and loving speech. This is universal thing, taught by all religions.

Thomas Jefferson:

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Thomas Jefferson:

I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take the power from them, but to inform them by education.

Thomas Jefferson:

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

Thomas Jefferson:

No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.

Thomas Jefferson:

A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned -- this is the sum of good government.