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

"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)

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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 becoming victim 0001 at Ground Zero.
From a very moving biography in the November 12, 2001 issue of New York Magazine