“Speak softly and carry a big stick—you will go far.” If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble; and neither will speaking softly avail, if back of the softness there does not lie strength, power. In private life there are few things more obnoxious than the man who is always loudly boasting; and if the boaster is not prepared to back up his words his position becomes absolutely contemptible. So it is with the nation. It is both foolish and undignified to indulge in undue self-glorification, and above all, in loose-tongued denunciation of other peoples."  --Teddy Roosevelt uttered these words at the Minnesota State Fair on September 2, 1901. 

Reporter: “what are your plans for the housing bill?”

Trump: “I don’t— know. I think it’s so— unimportant by compared to— by compared to the Save America Act. the housing bill is a bill that can get approved. they worked on it long and hard. it’s very— bipartisan. that means Democrats like it. and it’s uhhhhh— maybe— even— uhhhhh, it’s, it’s probably maybe more that way, they’re getting things that I wouldn’t necessarily agree to. nobody knows more than housing in the history of the presidency, nobody, nobody, no— well like me, in housing. I made a lot of— I made a lot of money. I made a lot of money with housing.”

"What is lost when birds are lost? Above all, the creatures themselves, in their own splendour and right. And for humans — language, story, beauty, possibility, imagination, lifts of the spirit, ways of being otherwise. Birds are our place-makers, memory-keepers, calendars and clocks. They stitch the world’s parts together: earth to sky, river to woodland, mountain to sea, country to country, hemisphere to hemisphere."  --Robert Macfarlane, The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss

“It's a beautiful world, you know. And kindness is very important, I think, it seems to be forgotten quite a lot.”  --Roger Taylor  (from Queen)

"Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air."

"For what are the comprehensible terrors of a man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!"

"Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing."

"Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that."

Four from "The 74 most incredible lines in "Moby Dick" culled by Delia Cai

https://www.deezlinks.com/p/the-74-most-incredible-lines-in-moby

“Immigrant people can be stripped of almost everything, but never of their dignity, and they hold dreams that no one has the right to despise”.

“Human dignity has no passport nor loses value when crossing a border”.

--Pope Leo XIV

(Canary Islands, 11 June 2026). 

“Experience cannot be communicated without bonds of silence, concealment, distance.”  --Georges Bataille