Mark Stehlik

"The people who get things done get more things to do."
– me

"Hell is full of the talented; heaven is full of the energetic."
– Archbishop Fulton Sheen

"If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much room!"
– Dodge truck commercial

"Education is not about the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire!"
– William Butler Yeats

"The mediocre teacher tells.
The good teacher explains.
The superior teacher demonstrates.
The great teacher inspires."
– William A. Ward

"Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion."
– Georg Friedrich Hegel

"Find your passion first, job second."
– AT&T print advertisement

"How is it that someone as a great a curmudgeon as you manages to simultaneously be a ray of sunshine on a gloomy Pittsburgh day?"
– Katie Wilson, CS alum ('04)

"To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded."
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Me (to Herb Simon, as we walk toward each other on campus on a Saturday afternoon):
"Herb, what are you doing on campus? Today's not a work day."
Herb (to me): "If you love what you do, every day's a work day."
What a wonderful motto!

"If you're not TOTALLY APPALLED, you're not paying attention!
– bumper sticker (another wonderful motto for these past 4 years)

"It is in the nature of gambling that the gamble[r] may lose. The dice have now been well and truly rolled, and they have come up snake eyes. The war's sole real gain—the overthrow of the murderous Saddam Hussein regime—is mocked by the chaos and suffering that have overwhelmed millions of Iraqis, whose country is again a republic of fear. The concrete losses are horrific: nearly three thousand American and "coalition" troops killed; thousands more maimed; scores of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead; a third of a trillion [italics mine] dollars burned through. So are the less tangible ones: the unprecedented levels of anti-Americanism throughout the Muslim world and Europe; the self-inflicted loss of America's moral prestige; the neglect of real nuclear dangers, in Iran and North Korea, while chimeras were chased in Iraq. The neoconservative project of a friendly, democratic Middle East, with Israel and Palestine living side by side in peace, is worse than a charred ruin—it is a flaming inferno...
At the end of the week, after British authorities foiled what was evidently a large-scale plot to destroy trans-atlantic airliners and murder thousands of passengers, President Bush called the plot 'a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom.' But the war in Iraq is wholly irrelevant to the means chosen by the London terrorists, and the means that thwarted them—dogged police work, lawful surveillance, international cooperation—are precisely those which have been gratuitously starved or stymied on account of the material, political, and human resources that have been, and continue to be, wasted in Iraq. Why not change the game to one that relies less on gambling and bluff and more on wisdom, planning, and (in every sense) intelligence?"
– editorial, The New Yorker, August 21, 2006

"What followed was a drama of redemptive, liberating settlement on one side and catastrophic dispossession on the other—all of it taking place on a patch of desert land too small for easy division and too imbued with historical and holy claims for rational negotiation. For the Jews in Palestine, Zionism was a movement of national liberation after untold suffering; for the Arabs, Zionism was an intolerable assault by the colonial West against sacred ground and Islam itself. Even now, more than a century later, politicians and scholars alike quickly betray prejudices, passions, and allegiances in the details they select when relating the saga that led to the U.N. Partition Plan, on November 29, 1947, and the war that began just hours later.
– the best one-paragraph summary of the Israel-Palestine conflict I've come across
from David Remnick's review of Benny Morris's new book, "1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War",
The New Yorker, May 5, 2008

"The damage visited upon America, and upon America's standing in the world, by the Bush Administration's reckless mis-handling of the public trust will not easily be undone....
Pollsters like to ask voters which candidate they'd most like to have a beer with, and on that metric Bush always wins. We prefer to ask which candidate is better suited to the governance of our nation."
– editorial, The New Yorker, November 1, 2004

"We look at people like Jack Pidgeon or the public school teacher who stretched the envelope for 30 years as exceptions, as anachronisms, because only the toughest can make a life of it. And that's the key. Teaching's not a job, it's a life. It's a commitment of life to nurture life. It should not be so much funded as held sacred. The fact that we count it as an expense or that we have to run it like a business is a disgrace."
– David Conrad, writing on the occasion of Jack Pidgeon's retirement as Headmaster of the Kiski School,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 25, 2002