ITEM: “I was always an unbeliever, raised without religion….And I always tried to suppress nationalistic ardor…as something pernicious and unjust,” Sigmund Freud wrote in 1926. But when publication of his shocking views on human sexuality in the 1890’s led to his ostracism by Viennese society, Freud joined the Vienna lodge of B’nai Brith, the international Jewish fraternal order, to find people who would “receive me with friendliness.” Despite his rejection of Jewish religious and ethnic particularism, he told the members in a speech written for the seventieth-birthday celebration of the lodge, “there remained enough other things to make the attraction of Judaism and Jews irresistible – many dark emotional forces, all the more potent for being so hard to grasp in word, as well as the clear consciousness of an inner identity, the intimacy that comes from the same psychic structure.” –Charles Silberman
“To say the right thing at the right time, keep still most of the time.” John W. Roper Those who get in trouble most often are those cannot seem to keep still, remain silent. Life teaches many lessons. Among the best lessons of life is one my father taught me at an early age was, “If you have nothing nice to say, say nothing.” The contributions we make to life via our mouth are many and varied. Most of the time, I reckon, they are not contributions at all, but things that diminish the richness of life.
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