Trusting in Time #2

A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o’clock has the whole afternoon ruined for himself already.

-Lin Yutang
The Importance of Living

People count up the faults of those who keep them waiting.

-French proverb

Punctuality if the theif of time.

-Oscar Wilde

You’re either a person who’s always on time or you’re not. (How much you’d like to be on time or how hard you try doesn’t count.) Punctuality, or the lack of the same, is a major cause of incompatability among people. What’s the big deal?

Trusting in Time #3

Just as we challenged the “bigger is better” theory in the late ‘sixties and concluded that small is O.K., it’s time to realize that faster isn’t better. Slower may be more humane.

-Jeremy Rifkin
Time Wars

We are at a point in history where, to most Americans, the value of time is reaching parity with the value of money.

-John Robinson, Director American Use of Time Project

High-speed technology has people working faster than ever before. Car phones and laptop computers let them take their work home with them. Their home lives are accelerated by microwave ovens, convenience foods, and cleaning appliances. Evenings and Sundays-once times of rest-are spent shopping, cleaning, doing errands.

What’s being lost? What should change? How will it happen?

Trusting in Time #4

[Can] a stranger from one generation say much that is helpful to members of another generation standing on a different doorstep in time? Just as a life is a particular life, so a generation lives in its own unque time.

-Bill Moyers
[commencement address]

If you were graduating from high or college, what kinds of advice would you want from someone who graduated thirty years earlier? Which things have changed the most? Are some topics nearly timeless?

Trusting in Time #7

Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make easier to do don’t need to be done.

-Andrew A. Rooney
Word for Word

People are innately intelligent… Technology can help, but it isn’t a substitute. Shakespeare saw deeply into the human character long before light bulbs.

–Christian Science Monitor