Mark Stehlik

"Age is a number; old (or young) is an attitude."
– me

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

"...there has never been a better time to be a geek with a dream."
– 9/19/2011 New York magazine article on Silicon Valley startups

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

"Always do right; this will gratify some people and astonish the rest."
– Mark Twain

"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."
– George Bernard Shaw

"Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass; it's about learning to dance in the rain!"
– Vivian Greene

"There is no limit to what a man can achieve as long as he doesn't care who gets the credit for it."
– attributed to Charles Edward Montague (and others)

"I am convinced that...we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.
We must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing-oriented' society to a 'person-oriented' society."
– Martin Luther King, Jr. (probably true now more than ever...)

"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

"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 for 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

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!

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

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

"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

"...to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it..."
– something to aspire to from Ted Kennedy's eulogy for his brother, Bobby

"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)

"Good days, bad days, but never a boring day on this job. You do what God has called you to do. You show up, you put one foot in front of the other, and you do your job, which is a mystery and a surprise. You have no idea...what God is calling you to. But he needs you, so keep going. Keep supporting each other. Be kind to each other. Love each other. Work together. You love the job. We all do. What a blessing that is."
– Fr. Mychal Judge, FDNY chaplain, rededicating a Bronx firehouse on 9/10/01,
24 hours before perishing at Ground Zero.
From a very moving biography in the November 12, 2001 issue of New York Magazine

Of particular relevance as my parents approach their eighties...
"The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don't want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don't want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender when he couldn't, someone who understood that the damage is greatest if all you do is fight to the bitter end."
– From "Letting Go: What should medicine do when it can't save your life?",
an excellent article by Atul Gawande, M.D. in The New Yorker, August 2, 2010

And now for my political side...

"If you're not TOTALLY APPALLED, you're not paying attention!"
– bumper sticker (another wonderful motto for these past four eight years [to be clear, the years in question are 2000-2008])

"When will we again have a President who says, Don't judge me by what I do for those who have much but for what I can do for those who have little?"
– William vanden Heuvel speaking about F.D.R. in The New Yorker, August 15 & 22, 2011

"The trouble with so much of the conservative critique of Obama's foreign policy is that it cares less about outcomes than about the assertion of America's power and the affirmation of its glory. In the case of Libya, Obama led from a place of no glory and, in the eyes of his critics, no results could ever vindicate such a strategy. Yet a calculated modesty can augment a nation's true influence. Obama would not be the first statesman to realize that it can be easier to win if you don't need to trumpet your victory."
– David Remnick editorial, The New Yorker, September 5, 2011

"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 [Bush or Kerry] 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

"A gangly Illinois politician whom 'the base' would today label a RINO—a Republican in Name Only—once pointed out that you can fool some of the people all of the time. We now know how many 'some' is: twenty-seven per cent. That's the proportion of Americans who, according to CNN, cling to the belief that George W. Bush has done a good job. The wonder is that this number is still in the double digits, given the comprehensively disastrous record. During the eight years of the second President Bush, the unemployment rate went from 4.2 per cent to 7.2 per cent and climbing; consumer confidence dropped to an all-time low; a budget surplus of two hundred billion dollars became a deficit of that plus a trillion; more than a million families fell into poverty; the ranks of those without health insurance rose by six million; and the fruits of the nation's economic growth went almost entirely to the rich, while family incomes in the middle and below declined. What role the Bush Administration's downgrading of terrorism as a foreign-policy priority played in the success of the 9/11 attacks cannot be known, but there is no doubting its responsibility for the launching and mismanagement of the unprovoked war in Iraq, with all its attendant suffering; for allowing the justified war in Afghanistan to slide to the edge of defeat; and for the vertiginous worldwide decline of America's influence, prestige, power, and moral standing."
– editorial, The New Yorker, January 19, 2009

"The familiar arguments against the death penalty apply to cases like his [Moussaoui's], some with special force. Whether or not the prospect of lethal injection deters ordinary murder—a questionable proposition at best—it is perverse to imagine that it can deter the sort of murder of which faith-based ritual suicide is an integral part. And any execution, whatever the crime it is intended to punish, degrades the society that decrees it and demoralizes the particular government employees who are assigned to carry it out. A criminal may deserve to die, may deserve even to die in terror and agony; but no civil servant deserves to be made to participate in the premeditated killing of another person, however wicked...
The trial and punishment of any international terrorist occurs in a global political context that darkens another of the stains on capital punishment: the company it keeps. In 2005, according to Amnesty International, ninety-four percent of all known executions took place in four countries. One, China, is a Communist Party dictatorship. Two others, Iran and Saudi Arabia, are Islamist autocracies. The fourth is the United States."
– editorial, The New Yorker, May 15, 2006