OK, so in going through old docs, I found a small document called “MISC.TXT” and had to see what I’d left in such an odd little file. What I found was a transcript of a bunch of material from some of my earliest journals (started in my middle teens). In fact, some of the material in those journals, including at least a few of the items that follows, were first jotted on school book covers or clipped for my bulletin boards and later transcribed at least twice.

Anyway, if you really want to know a few of the things I thought were pellucid utterances that got at the heart of reality in my angsty teen years, here you go. I spared you the bad poem from the top of the page. You’re welcome.

If we will not die for freedom, we will die of slavery.

The hour of departure has arrived,
and we go our ways–
I to die,
and you to live.
Which is better, God only knows.The Apology of Socrates

The duty of government is to defend the freedom of all of its citizens by
enforcing justice.

There is a limit, however, at which tolerance ceases to be a virtue.Edmund Burke

Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
for loan oft loses both itself and friend.Shakespeare: Pollonius’ advice to Laertes; Hamlet

Depression is the hangover after a pity party.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can.Emerson

The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a
favored few booted and spurred, by the grace of God.Jefferson

Equal and exact justice to all men … freedom of religion, freedom of the
press, freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus; and trial
by juries impartially selected– these form the bright constellation which has
gone before us.Jefferson

Yes, the un-cited ones are what I believe to by my own original apothegms. I shall probably rest uneasy in my grave, one day, until at least one of these has been popularly attributed to Churchill, Lincoln, Disraeli, la Rochefoucauld, or Talleyrand.