Share Your Current Top Two Go-To Quotes That Inform Your Choices

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear. Thomas Sowell

Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat. Jesse Ventura

(Sorry. Jesse said that years ago and I still laugh at it. I love Thomas Sowell - he has a way to communicate to simple people despite his brilliance, which can be rare.)
 
If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
- Samuel Clemens

It is a truism that any sect, cult, or religion will legislate it's Creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
- Robert Heinlein
 
It pays to be nice to the people you meet on the way up, for they are the same people you meet on the way down.
–Walter Winchell

It's called WORK for a reason.......
What it takes that most people aren't willing to give is HARD WORK. Work on yourself, work on your life and working while you are at work.
 
“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it."
- A.A. Milne Winnie The Pooh

"I was gratified to be be able to answer promptly and I did. I said I didn't know."
- Mark Twain Tales From The Mississippi

I used to hang these two outside my anonymous corporate cube back when such things still existed. Two big messages: don't waste everyone's time when you really don't know what you're doing, and keep working hard but keep your eyes open too so you recognize when there's an opportunity to improve things.
 
It's kind of fun to do the impossible. -- Walt Disney

Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be beautiful or believe to be useful. -- William Morris
 
I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now
Bob Dylan
The more things change, the more things remain the same
I read it from Malcolm Forbes when I was in college (I think he had a book of quotes), but he apparently got it from a French writer named Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr.
I always think of the latter quote when I hear people from my generation start up a "back in my day..." or "this generation is..." criticism as if our generations were always attentive, never procrastinated, always diligent, never distracted, and had the best music/movies/tv shows, or never heard the same thing from prior generations about our youthful culture.
 
“For what can be more noble than to slay oneself? Not literally. Not with a blade in the guts. But to extinguish the selfish self within, that part which looks only to its own preservation, to save its own skin. That, I saw, was the victory you Spartans had gained over yourselves. That was the glue. It was what you had learned and it made me stay, to learn it too.”
― Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire

There are so many beautiful lines in that book.
 
When in Charge, Take Charge.
Related: Someone is ALWAYS in charge.

How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg? Four. Saying that a tail is a leg doesn't make it a leg.
-Abraham Lincoln

“Work Relentlessly, Accomplish Much, Remain in the Background, and Be More Than You Seem, ”
-School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) motto for staff officers; von Schlieffen.
 
But now old friends are acting strange
They shake their heads, they say I've changed
Well something's lost, but something's gained
In living every day
Joni Mitchell, Both Sides Now

If it ain’t happened by midnight, it ain’t worth staying up for.
My father to me as a teen—he was of the early to bed, early to rise mindset
 
A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part. - the refrigerator of my youth

Nothing good ever happens after 2:00am - my RA in college
Nothing good ever happens after 1:00am - my mom
Nothing good ever happens after 6:00pm - my boss in 2004
 
StPaulDad said:
A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part. - the refrigerator of my youth

Nothing good ever happens after 2:00am - my RA in college
Nothing good ever happens after 1:00am - my mom
Nothing good ever happens after 6:00pm - my boss in 2004
Click to expand...
This made me laugh. Heading to my first command, advice from senior officers: “No phone call after 2200 is a good one.”
 
StPaulDad said:
A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part. - the refrigerator of my youth

Nothing good ever happens after 2:00am - my RA in college
Nothing good ever happens after 1:00am - my mom
Nothing good ever happens after 6:00pm - my boss in 2004
Click to expand...
This made me laugh. When referring to my husband when he was a single young man, and his two best friends, my father-in-law always said, "one is one, two is half, three is S*$t." He wasn't wrong, they got into all kinds of messes when the three of them were together.
 
Capt MJ said:
This made me laugh. Heading to my first command, advice from senior officers: “No phone call after 2200 is a good one.”
Click to expand...
“No phone call after 2200 is a good one.” This was the second thing said to all newly reported sailors by my first LPO after “Welcome aboard.”
 
From another post I made -

"It takes a whole lot of "attaboys" to make up for one "aw ****" --not sure where I heard it first, but probably from one of my skippers.

Or course, there is the five basic responses learned first day in the Navy , "Yes sir, No Sir, Aye Aye Sir, I'll find out Sir, and No Excuse Sir." (Of course, substitute Maa'm when appropriate, getting that wrong can be fatal). You can usually get through anything by selecting and using the correct response from among those. (And then there is the saltier, 6th basic response I learned in my squadron "I f##ked up Sir"- If ever in the midst of a good butt chewing, using that response immediately disarms the chewer as all they can do at that point is agree with you !)
 
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