Stuff From Smart People ...

These days I spend many, many hours researching stuff. And it reminds me that sometimes (well, usually actually) other much more talented people than I think up much more interesting stuff than I do. But I have my own special talent in appreciating such wit. And with the advent of The Blog, I can share it ... so, a few little nuggets I discovered in the past few days ...

From someone at work, talking to another someone about that someone's love life:
"I am not going to facilitate a transcontinental voyage of the heart."

From Peggy Noonan, in the Wall Street Journal:
"The young are told, 'Be true to yourself.' But so many of them have no idea, really, what that means. If they don't know who they are, what are they being true to? They're told, 'The key is to hold firm to your ideals.' But what if no one bothered, really, to teach them ideals?"

From Justice Scalia (of course I had to include some bit of law this week):
"Giving 'bear Arms' its idiomatic meaning would cause the protected right to consist of the right to be a soldier or to wage war -- an absurdity ... Worse still, the phrase 'keep and bear Arms' would be incoherent. The word 'Arms' would have two different meanings at once: 'weapons' (as the object of 'keep') and (as the object of 'bear') one-half of an idiom. It would be rather like saying 'He filled and kicked the bucket' to mean 'He filled the bucket and died.' Grotesque."

And I saved the best for last (and believe me, this will show up again here ... likely on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November). This comes from President Truman in 1948:
"It is not the hand that signs the laws that holds the destiny of America. It is the hand that casts the ballot." (As Congressman Cannon learned this week...)