FOUR MINDS AND SOME READING AND THINKING FOR US ALL

John Adams:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.



John D. Rockefeller:
I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.


John W. Gardner:
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.



Mark Twain:
All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.   1908, notebook


Here we have a few of my best friends gathered to share some of their thoughts.


John Adams, in my mind, could easily replace Thomas Jefferson or Teddy Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore. There is no adequate national memorial to Adams because people just do not know what he did or endured for our country. He was a great servant to our nation, a romantic man who wrote grand, sweet  letters to his wife, Abigail (also an intellect) and, when not negotiating with the European heads of state or the Dutch to finance the newly independent and broke United States, he worked on his farm, making the best composted manure, an endeavor that will make a philosopher out of any individual. He loathed the necessity for war, did most of the literary work for George Washington and was our second president. I encourage you to MEET him through biographies and reading his correspondence.


John D. Rockefeller made money. He had money and capitalized on what he had made. He was not the ideal person, but what he said was that he worked and admired work. Getting things done was the mark of his life. Pleasure for the sake of pleasure was ruinous, in his opinion.


John W. Garner wrote the first serious book I ever read, except the Boy Scout manual and the Bible. The title of his book was: Excellence: Can We Be Equal And Excellent Too? That is still a fair question. Our thought process and our plumbing ought to be the best. If we are each and all excelling at what we do, everyone is equal. I have that book and I bet you can find a copy. You'll be better and smarter for reading it.


Mark Twain could cut things right to the chase. We have each and every one bought the pretty basket of berries and found the bottom half rotten. That is part of the learning experience. It does not make all the berries bad and it makes us wiser about future berry purchases.

We have learned to check our food if we use the drive-through windows at fast-food restaurants or we just learn to enjoy getting someone else's order. Some of us go inside to get our food to prevent disappointments and dining disasters.

Let's bring these great minds and others into our own. There is some information on them in the Wiki world. Some is available in the Library of Congress. Some is available in real books in real libraries.

Broaden your familiarity with these thinkers and doers and deepen your thought process as you go. MEET (as Epictetus would have us do, 1st post here) the minds of these people and respond. I am eager to hear what you have to say.  (c) Tim  http://www.timjohnsonphoto.com/