Be what you are. And improve yourself every chance you
get. Perpetual progress, self transformation, practical
optimism: these are more than just words, they are a way
of life. We can all win. Lets do it.
- Spike


"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the
opportunity in every difficulty."
-	Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)


FUDGE: Fear, Uncerntainty, Doubt Greatly Exaggerated
Mike Linksvayer <ml@gondwanaland.com>


Admiral James T. Kirk: I don't believe in a no-win scenario.


Pessimism is a very easy way out when you're considering what life
really is, because pessimism is a short view of life. If you look at
what is happening around us today and what has happened just since you
were born, you can't help but feel that life is a terrible complexity
of problems and illnesses of one sort or another. But if you look
back a few thousand years, you realize that we have advanced
fantastically from the day the first amoeba crawled out of the slime
and made its adventure on land. If you take a long view, I do not see
how you can be pessimistic about the future of man or the future of
the world. You can take the short view and think that everything is a
mess, that life is a cheat and a deceit, and of course you feel
miserable. And I become very much amused by some of the colleagues,
particularly in the study of literature, who say the pessimistic, the
tragic view, is the only true key to life -- which I think is just
self-indulgent nonsense. It's very much easier to be tragic than it is
to be comic. I have known people who embrace the tragic view of life,
and it is a cop-out. They simply feel rotten about everything, and
that is terribly easy. And if you try to see things a little more
evenly, it's surprising what complexities of comedy and ambiguity and
irony appear in it. And that, I think,is what is vital to a
novelist. Just writing tragic novels is rather easy.
Robertson Davies


"Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you beleive
that the future can be better, it's unlikely you will step up and take
responsibility for making it so."

"If you assume that there is no hope, you guarrantee that there will be no
hope."