Ashikian Consulting Quotes & Sayings

One Saturday morning last May, I joined the presidential motorcade as it slipped out of the southern gate of the White House. A mostly white crowd had assembled. As the motorcade drove by, people cheered, held up their smartphones to record the procession, and waved American flags. To be within feet of the president seemed like the thrill of their lives. I was astounded. An old euphoria, which I could not immediately place, gathered up in me. And then I remembered, it was what I felt through much of 2008, as I watched Barack Obama's star shoot across the political sky. I had never seen so many white people cheer on a black man who was neither an athlete nor an entertainer. And it seemed that they loved him for this, and I thought in those days, which now feel so long ago, that they might then love me, too, and love my wife, and love my child, and love us all in the manner that the God they so fervently cited had commanded. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Our imagination so magnifies this present existence, by the power of continual reflection on it, and so attenuates eternity, by not thinking of it at all, that we reduce an eternity to nothingness, and expand a mere nothing to an eternity; and this habit is so inveterately rooted in us that all the force of reason cannot induce us to lay it aside. — Blaise Pascal

The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do ... Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how. — Donald Barthelme

You're best when you're not in charge. The ego locks the muse. — Robin Williams

Every patriot believes his country better than any other country ... In its active manifestation-it is fond of killing-patriotism would be well enough if it were simply defensive, but it is also aggressive ... Patriotism deliberately and with folly aforethought subordinates the interests of a whole to the interests of a part ... Patriotism is fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave and blind as a stone. — Ambrose Bierce

The African continent has always been more queer than generally acknowledged. — Chantal Zabus

One never knows if anything's a good idea. You just make a choice and go with the flow and see what happens. You only get one day's worth of grace, so why not spend it extravagantly. — Wm. Paul Young