January 8: Wednesday

Just quotes today - and a photo.

Quotes

"Arguably the biggest threat to our national security today is our division and inability to cooperate. We don’t want to think we are already in our day after, but the assumption we can survive as a country while mired in our political wars is a dangerous complacency." (A.B. Stoddard, The Day My Father Scared America)

"Don’t preach and hope for ownership; implement mechanisms that actually give ownership. Eliminating the tickler did that for us. Eliminating top-down monitoring systems will do it for you. I’m not talking about eliminating data collection and measuring processes that simply report conditions without judgment. Those are important as they “make the invisible visible.” What you want to avoid are the systems whereby senior personnel are determining what junior personnel should be doing." (L. David Marquet and Stephen R. Covey, Turn the Ship Around!)

"One of the weakest links in the chain is the lack of resiliency built into homes. Building codes represent the minimum legal requirements for house construction and do not take extremes into consideration." (Plant News, As Climate Changes, the Way We Build Homes Must Change Too - PLANT)

"The novelist Thomas Mann noted in his diary on March 27, 1933, two months after Hitler had become German chancellor, that he had witnessed a revolution of a kind never seen before, “without underlying ideas, against ideas, against everything nobler, better, decent, against freedom, truth and justice." The “common scum" had taken power, “accompanied by vast rejoicing on the part of the masses." (Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism)

"Sometimes the best lesson learned on the battlefield was that of modesty, but modesty was not yet a virtue in Tenth Corps—audacity for audacity’s sake was." (David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter)