Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.
-- Laurens Van der Post

Well, I think this is self-explanatory, but if you need a good example just look objectively at any war. All sides present in every war ever fought have always been convinced that they are right. Needless to say, at least one of them has always been wrong. Of course, people generally decide right and wrong in these cases by "who has the most/biggest/best weapons/armies", which can lead certain martially successful countries to have an overinflated sense of their own rightness...

America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
- Evan Esar

Sad, isn't it? I'm not even sure it's true anymore. I think some athletes earn more per week than the average professor makes in a year. And professors are the elite of the teaching world. People who teach our children are horribly underpaid and under-respected. Teaching is largely thought of as the profession of people who "can't get real jobs", because there's not much incentive for people to become teachers.

Welcome to Quote du Jour. This used to be a mailing list run by script from my website, but my domain was trashed by a hacker with a botnet, so I'm resurrecting the list as a blog. The Atom feed (similar to RSS) will emulate a "broadcast" mailing list pretty well. In addition, I'll be hand-selecting quotes, and possibly commenting on them (because I know I sometimes take a quote out of context, on purpose). Enjoy the blog!