“There is the love of knowing without
the love of learning; the beclouding here
leads to dissipation of mind.”
— Confucius, Analects (bk. II, ch. XV)

“Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” — Ferris Bueller, in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”

I’ve always been told the third time’s a charm, and I’ve always wondered why this is so.

Under English law, anyone who survived three hanging attempts was to be set free (with a lifetime supply of turtlenecks, I hope). This adage stems from John “Babbacombe” Lee, a sailor who was convicted of murder in 1885 and survived three execution attempts. His sentence was commuted, and subsequently he became known as The Man They Couldn’t Hang. He died finally in the 1940s.

In 1974 Henry Kissinger said, “As a professor, I tended to think of history as run by impersonal forces. But when you see it in practice, you see the difference personalities make.”