These are some good quotes I’ve seen over the past weeks. You may have seen them come by on twitter.  I decided to do this, so I won’t have to go through my twitter for these quotes. Maybe I will add my thoughts, such as the last two.

“Do you have advice for songwriters like me?”
“Enjoy music: treat her like the incredible gift that she is! …and write honestly. Pain, joy, anger, love, fear- don’t dumb your feelings down; express them in your art. Be Brave.” – Jon Foreman

“At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.” – Søren Kierkegaard

“He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.” -  Harold Wilson

“Too many people are thinking of security… They seem to be more afraid of life than death.” -James F. Bymes

“The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but deliverance from fear.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The last two hit me quite hard, since this came up in one of the classes we had about technological security. In the Western world a trend exists that instills fear to the society in response to danger (whether it be terrorism, “foreign danger”, local criminality, etc). Okay.

Let’s change the perspective shall we.What about the people who don’t have that privilege and practically live in danger day by day? Try to think of a country like that. For them, that is life.

My mother repeatedly tells me how blessed I am that I was born in this country and that I didn’t need to worry about anything. Then I think of a young couple who had escaped narrowly from dying in a camp and being beheaded with their family next to a railtrack, somewhere accross the globe nearly 70 years ago.

Then along come the pampered generations that have enough to cater to their needs. In my mind I figuratively reside on neither a hill or a valley, just a flat… flat, constant, static, and perhaps neverending uncrooked paper. It’s not very exciting or heartbreaking. When dark clouds arise from the horizon, we only want more, more and more until every single asset and being has a security chip installed.