Quotes of the day

All great spirituality is subversive ...  We have the audacity to stand in the middle of the world and weep over the false idols of culture, the power, the money, the sex, the fashion.--Don Miller

I’m a firm believer that I can only lead others to the extent that I can lead myself. To that end, I’m constantly challenged to wrangle my thoughts and emotions and drive them to produce purposeful results.--Geoff Webb

Derek Jeter is wildly overrated. And Derek Jeter is wildly underrated. Perhaps no player has ever been so effusively praised for great defense with so little evidence of great defense to show. Twice, perhaps three times, he should have won the MVP Award and did not. ... There's a reason for this, I think. Jeter -- like Rose -- has been inescapable. If you are a baseball fan, you must have an opinion about him. His game is out there. His baseball soul is exposed. You can like him or dislike him, admire him or object to him, but you cannot ignore him.--Joe Posnanski

I can solve the deficit in 5 minutes. .. If debt exceeds a % of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.--Warren Buffett, on CNBC this morning

Both [Colin] Farrell and Bullseye were Irishmen with terrified eyes brought to America by rich men thanks to lethal skills and an equally lethal inability to control them.  ... his is the rare Hollywood fairy tale told in reverse. We began with the boring prince. Here before us, at last, is the far more interesting frog.--Andy Greenwald

Explanations of how Greece got in this mess typically focus on profligate public spending. But its fiscal woes are also due to a simple fact: tax evasion is the national pastime.--James Suroweicki

... soccer fans can now rest assured that women are less likely than men to fake on-field injuries, according to a new study by researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center published in the July issue of the journal Research in Sports Medicine.--Science Daily

Doing good stats means exercising a pathological interest in the story that might have been missed. Doing politics can seem to mean a near pathological interest in telling us why your story was right all along.--Michael Blastland