Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882) American essayist, philosopher, poet.

C. S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis (1898 - 1963) was an Irish writer and scholar. Lewis’s works are diverse and include medieval literature, literary criticism, radio broadcasts, and fiction relating to the fight between good and evil. Author of The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy.

Author: Lao Tzu (4th or 6th century BC) Philosopher of ancient China and central figure in Taoism.

“As we know, There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know. There are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things We do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

-Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Donald Rumsfeld (born July 9, 1932) is a United States businessman, politician, the 13th Secretary of Defense under President Gerald Ford from 1975 to 1977, and the 21st Secretary of Defense under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2006. He is both the youngest (43 years old) and the oldest (68 years old) person to have held the position, as well as the only person to have held the position for two non-consecutive terms, and the second longest serving. Rumsfeld is also one of the most controversial defense secretaries in US history.

Adlai Ewing Stevenson II (1900 - 1965) American politician, noted for his intellectual demeanor and advocacy of liberal causes in the Democratic Party.

Attributed to Henry Ford (1863 - 1947)

Henry Ford was the founder of the Ford Motor Company and father of modern assembly lines used in mass production. His introduction of the Model T automobile revolutionized transportation and American industry. He was a prolific inventor and was awarded 161 U.S. patents. He is credited with “Fordism”, that is, the mass production of large numbers of inexpensive automobiles using the assembly line which would finish a car in 98 minutes, coupled with high wages for his workers—notably the $5.00 a day pay scale adopted in 1914. Ford, though poorly educated, had a global vision, with consumerism as the key to peace. His intense commitment to lowering costs resulted in many technical and business innovations, including a franchise system that put a dealership in every city in North America, and in major cities on six continents.

Louis V Gerstner, Jr.
Former CEO, IBM

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England’s national poet. His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.

Robert Anson Heinlein (1907 - 1988) American novelist and science fiction writer. Often called “the dean of science fiction writers”, he is one of the most popular, influential, and controversial authors of “hard science fiction”.

Paraphrased Winston Churchill

Tim Maher-DeTroyer

Ashleigh Brilliant (Ashley Brilliant)

Warren Buffett (1930 - ) American investor, businessman and philanthropist.

He is regarded as one of the world’s greatest stock market investors, and is the largest shareholder and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. With an estimated net worth of around US$62 billion, he was ranked by Forbes as the richest person in the world as of March 5, 2008.

Buffett is noted for his adherence to the value investing philosophy and for his personal frugality despite his immense wealth. His 2006 annual salary is about $100,000, which is on the low side of senior executive remuneration in other comparable companies, and when he spent $9.7 million of Berkshire’s funds on a business jet in 1989, he jokingly named it “The Indefensible” because of his past criticisms of such purchases by other CEOs. He lives in the same house in the central Dundee neighborhood of Omaha that he bought in 1958 for $31,500, today valued at around $700,000.

Jeff Davidson

Author Unknown

Sir Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727) English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, alchemist, inventor and natural philosopher. He is often regarded as the most influential scientist in history and is best known for discovering the Laws of Gravity.

Dr. Wayne Dyer (1940 -) American author and lecturer. His 1976 book Your Erroneous Zones has sold over 30 million copies and is one of the best-selling books of all time. It is said to have “brought humanistic ideas to the masses”

Andre Gide (1869 - 1951) - French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide’s career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.

Author Unknown

Author Unknown

Brainy Thought 2008

Longevity, like intelligence or good looks, is largely a matter of heredity: choose your parents with care.

Author: Edward Paul Abbey

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832) German writer of poetry, drama, literature, theology, humanism, and science.

Helen Keller (1880 - 1968) American author, activist and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to graduate from college.

Original Author: Upton Sinclair
More recently used by Al Gore (born 1948) in the documentary movie “An Inconvenient Truth” 2006.

Al Gore was forty-fifth vice president of the United States, serving from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. Gore was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which was shared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, headed by Rajendra K. Pachauri (Delhi, India). The award was given “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change” on October 12, 2007.

An Inconvenient Truth documents the evidence for anthropogenic global warming and warns of the consequences of people not making immediate changes to their behavior. In late July, it surpassed Bowling for Columbine as the third-highest-grossing documentary in U.S. history

Dr. Wayne Dyer (born 1940) Popular American author and lecturer.

Dyer spent much of his adolescence in an orphanage. He has a Doctorate of Education in counseling, and was a guidance counselor in Detroit at the high school level and a professor of counselor education at St. John’s University in New York.

Author: Carl August Sandburg (1878 - 1967) American poet, historian, novelist, journalist, biographer, and autobiographer. During the course of his career, Sandburg won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln: The War Years) and one for his collection The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg.

Brian Tracy

Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970). British philosopher, historian, logician, mathematician, advocate for social reform, pacifist, and prominent rationalist.

“See one, do one, teach one.”

Authors Unknown.

Edward Morgan Forster (1879 - 1970) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist.
He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society.

Author Unknown

Sir Winston Churchill

Sir Winston Churchill (30 November 1874 - 24 January 1965) was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. A noted statesman, orator and strategist, Churchill was also an officer in the British Army. He has been studied to a unique extent as part of modern British and world history. A prolific author, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 for his own historical writings.

Author Unknown.

“Life’s battles don’t always go
To the stronger or faster man,
But soon or late the man who wins
Is the man WHO THINKS HE CAN!”

Author Unknown

George Bernard Shaw

Irish dramatist, literary critic, and socialist. During his career Shaw wrote more than sixty plays. He was uniquely honoured by being awarded both a Nobel Prize (1925) for his contribution to literature and an Oscar (1938) for Pygmalion. He was a strong advocate for socialism and women’s rights, a vegetarian and teetotaller, and a harsh critic of formal education.

Author Unknown.

Louis Pasteur (1822 - 1895) was a French chemist best known for his remarkable breakthroughs in microbiology. His experiments confirmed the germ theory of disease, also reducing mortality from puerperal fever (childbed), and he created the first vaccine for rabies. He is best known to the general public for showing how to stop milk and wine from going sour - this process came to be called pasteurization.

Bill Bryson, OBE (1951 - ) is a best-selling American-born author of humorous books on travel, as well as books on the English language and on scientific subjects (A Short History of Nearly Everything). He has lived for most of his adult life in England.

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) (real name Samuel Langhorne Clemens), was an American humorist, satirist, writer, and lecturer. Twain is most noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which has since been called the Great American Novel, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Famous Quote, author unknown

Mother Teresa, (1910 - 1997), was an Albanian Roman Catholic nun who founded the Missionaries of Charity and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her humanitarian work.

For over forty years, she ministered to the needs of the poor, sick, orphaned, and dying of Calcutta (Kolkata). As her religious order grew she expanded her ministry to other countries. By the 1970s she had become internationally famed as a humanitarian and advocate for the poor and helpless, due in part to a documentary, and book Something Beautiful for God by Malcolm Muggeridge

“Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.”
Brainy Quotes from Mother Teresa

“My life has been greatly influenced by many books which I have never read.”
Brainy Quotes by: Ashleigh Brilliant (Ashley Brilliant)

“I am irrevocably committed to being permanently indecisive.”
Brainy Quotes by: Ashleigh Brilliant (Ashley Brilliant)

“I have you, you have me. At least one of us is lucky.”
Brainy Quotes by: Ashleigh Brilliant (Ashley Brilliant)

“Some of my troubles are so familiar, I know them by their first names.”
Brainy Quotes by: Ashleigh Brilliant (Ashley Brilliant)

Elwyn Brooks White (1899 - 1985) American essayist, author, humorist, poet and literary stylist.

Miyamoto Musashi (1584 - 1645) also known as Shinmen Takezo, Miyamoto Bennosuke, or by his Buddhist name Niten Doraku, was a famous Japanese samurai.

Miyamoto Musashi is considered by many to have been one of the most skilled swordsmen in history. Musashi, as he is often simply known, became legendary through his outstanding swordsmanship in numerous duels, even from a very young age. He is the founder of the Hyoho Niten Ichi-ryu or Niten-ryu style of swordsmanship and wrote The Book of Five Rings, a book on strategy, tactics, and philosophy that is still studied today.

Henry Ford

Henry Ford

Author Unknown

Attributed to Henry Ford (1863 - 1947)

Henry Ford was the founder of the Ford Motor Company and father of modern assembly lines used in mass production. His introduction of the Model T automobile revolutionized transportation and American industry. He was a prolific inventor and was awarded 161 U.S. patents. He is credited with “Fordism”, that is, the mass production of large numbers of inexpensive automobiles using the assembly line which would finish a car in 98 minutes, coupled with high wages for his workers notably the $5.00 a day pay scale adopted in 1914. Ford, though poorly educated, had a global vision, with consumerism as the key to peace. His intense commitment to lowering costs resulted in many technical and business innovations, including a franchise system that put a dealership in every city in North America, and in major cities on six continents.

William Ernest Henley (1849 - 1903). An English poet, critic and editor.