A Quote by John Stuart Mill
If I have accomplished anything, I owe it, among other fortunate circumstances, to the fact that through the early training bestowed on me by my father, I started, I may fairly say, with an advantage of a quarter of a century over my contemporaries.
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I have started to say
"A quarter of a century"
Or "thirty years back"
About my own life.
I suppose I'm led to do so by the fact of what happened to my contemporaries - people whom I've admired, people who I thought were ten times better than me when I was in my twenties and early thirties. I may have been right.
I'll just say, you know, over the course of the last quarter century I've learned a lot.
I have been interested in the 12th century since my 20s when it was very fashionable to say of anybody with whom you disagreed, which was basically anybody over the age of 30, "One of the great minds of the 12th century", and one day I thought, "I don't know anything about the 12 century." So I started buying books, reading about it, and I discovered it was a period of great flowering, it was a Renaissance before what we think is the Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance of the 16th century.
After I retired, I spent a quarter of a century in the business, and when I retired and a new regime took over, Vince McMahon Jr. and that, and in the beginning I went back to help out. I color commentated with him, but then I started to see things that were disturbing to me.
Through certain humors or passions, and from temper merely, a man may be completely miserable, let his outward circumstances be ever so fortunate.
When I had dinner with a friend or a loved one and one of you pays for the check and the other says, "I owe you next time." I like to think that we're eternally even - that they don't owe me anything or I don't owe them anything if you have a connection with somebody or a love with somebody. I like to think that there's no debt to pay. You love each other and you're happy to pay for dinner every time.
In the last quarter of the 20th century, Britons have been understandably obsessed with the problem of having too little power in the world. In the third quarter of the 18th century, by contrast, their forebears were perplexed by the problem of having acquired too much power too quickly over too many people.
We have a Marlboro Man Theory of leadership and change, especially in America, but in fact anything great that's accomplished is accomplished by many hands.
My father started growing very quiet as Alzheimer's started claiming more of him. The early stages of Alzheimer's are the hardest because that person is aware that they're losing awareness. And I think that that's why my father started growing more and more quiet. I think he felt, 'I don't want to say something wrong.' That's my sense of it.
My father discovered that our family had made long-case clocks in Warwickshire in the early 18th century. He managed to track down a fine example through an English antiquarian and horologist and gifted it to me for my 30th birthday.
All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures. Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the form. Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours of fullnessess and concavities, through hollows and over peaks - feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and hand and eye. This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and the hollow, the thrust and the contour.
I understand now my father really thought he was doing me good. Education means a lot to Palestinians. We’ve become some of the most educated people in the world through our diaspora. We’ve had to be. When you ain’t got land, your degree may be your only solid ground. May father felt (feels) that being a doctor would give me security. How can I explain that I’m not safe from anything if I don’t write?
My relationships with both my mother and father are good. We spent several difficult years hashing over the problems and the past, and worked out a fairly solid middle ground. I wouldn't say my relationship with either of them - they're no longer together - is exactly typical, but that would be difficult after all we went through.
Any fact facing us, however difficult, even seemingly hopeless, is not so important as our attitude toward that fact. How you think about a fact may defeat you before you ever do anything about it. You may permit a fact to overwhelm you mentally before you deal with it actually. On the other hand, a confident and optimistic thought pattern can overcome or modify the fact altogether.
Among identical twins who have the exact same genes, one may die early of a heart attack and the other may live a long, healthy life - depending on their lifestyle and what they eat.
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