Not Everything, No

"There are some roads which we must not follow, some enemy troops we must not fight, some cities we must not attack, some grounds we must not contest, even some orders from the ruler which we must not obey."

Sun Tzu

Look Out

"Think of the different things that may be noticed in the course of a country walk. One man may be interested in the birds, another in vegetation, another in geology, yet another in the agriculture, and so on. Any one of these things is interesting if it interests you, and, other things being equal, the man who is interested in any one of them is a man better adapted to the world than the man who is not interested."

Bertrand Russell

History is a Pendulum

"Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the highly educated young men and women of [x] results from the combination of comfort with powerlessness. Powerlessness makes people feel that nothing is worth doing, and comfort makes the painfulness of this feeling just endurable. Throughout [y] the university student can hope for more influence upon public opinion than he can have in [x], but he has much less opportunity than in [x] of securing a substantial income. Being neither powerless nor comfortable, he comes a reformer or a revolutionary, not a cynic. The happiness of the reformer or revolutionary depends upon the course of public affairs, but probably even while he is being executed he enjoys more real happiness than is possible for the comfortable cynic."

Bertrand Russell

The above was written in 1930 comparing educated youths of the West and East - sociopolitically, the malaise of the West and purposefulness of the East. Almost 80 years on, this paragraph has struck me as somewhat the reverse, at least to the world that I understand now. Interesting, isn't it.