Useful advice for this (or any) blog:

“You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you tell at dinner.  This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes to learn. When in short, you have only your emotions to sell.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Once upon a time, we had leaders who transcended partisanship and self-interest:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower

On the drawbacks of being a smart person in America:

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’ ” — Isaac Asimov

With respect to marriage equality:

“You are asked now to stand, not on a question of politics, not on a question of religion, not on a question of gay or straight.  You are asked now to stand, on a question of…love.  All you need do is stand, and let the tiny ember of love meet its own fate.  You don’t have to help it, you don’t have it applaud it, you don’t have to fight for it.  Just don’t put it out.  Just don’t extinguish it.  Because while it may at first look like that love is between two people you don’t know and you don’t understand and maybe you don’t even want to know… it is, in fact, the ember of your love, for your fellow person.” — Keith Olbermann

Lastly, on the simultaneous privilege and responsibility of being human:

“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us, ‘The Universe’, a part limited in time and space.  He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” — Albert Einstein

It’s easy to write an intelligent-sounding blog when you use other smart people’s words.