Sunday, April 10, 2016 – Qualified or Not
In America, anyone can become president. That’s the problem. ~ George Carlin
Black people have been qualified to be president for hundreds of years. George Washington Carver could have been president. I could go on with a list of black men that were qualified to be the president of the United States. So the Obama victory is progress for white people. ~ Chris Rock
Most often, qualifications are defined by the credentials of the person who last held the job. If that is to continue to be the litmus test, white males will continue to be the top choice on any list, if the interviewer is also a white male. ~ Madeleine M. Kunin
There are people who tell you to shut up because you’re just a celebrity, but pundits, talking heads, they’re every bit the celebrity and a lot of them aren’t any more qualified than the average man on the street. ~ Kevin Bacon
What was I qualified to do to make a living? Nothing. You don’t need qualifications as an actor or a politician. And I didn’t want to be a politician. ~ James Garner
Our demand for good looks, expressed in the biting comments that ensue when public figures fall short of perfection, puts enormous pressures on these individuals and may screen out the otherwise qualified. If video killed the radio star, it may also be doing away with the homely politician. ~ Virginia Postrel
I like to stick with music I know I can play. I love classical, but I don’t think I could ever play it. I’m just not qualified. ~ Willie Nelson
Don’t be afraid to make things up. Never fear being exposed as a fraud. Experts make things up all the time. They’re qualified to. ~ Stephen Colbert
The companion of an evening and the companion for life require very different qualifications. ~ Samuel Richardson
People who reach the top of the tree are only those who haven’t got the qualifications to detain them at the bottom. ~ Peter Ustinov
I don’t say ‘Tis impossible for an impudent man not to rise in the world, but a moderate merit with a large share of impudence is more probable to be advanced than the greatest qualifications without it. ~ Mary Wortley Montagu
President Bush said that if illegal immigrants want citizenship, they’d have to do three things: pay taxes, hold meaningful jobs, and learn English. Bush doesn’t meet those qualifications. ~ P. J. O’Rourke
At the heart of personality is the need to feel a sense of being lovable without having to qualify for that acceptance. ~ Paul Tournier
If you go to Heaven without being naturally qualified for it, you will not enjoy yourself there. ~ George Bernard Shaw
I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect. ~ Henry James
No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades – that of government. ~ Socrates
Men are qualified for civil liberties in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites: in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity. ~ Edmund Burke
Thus no member of the commonwealth can have a hereditary privilege as against his fellow-subjects; and no one can hand down to his descendants the privileges attached to the rank he occupies in the commonwealth, nor act as if he were qualified as a ruler by birth and forcibly prevent others from reaching the higher levels of the hierarchy through their own merit. He may hand down everything else, so long as it is material and not pertaining to his person, for it may be acquired and disposed of as property and may over a series of generations create considerable inequalities in wealth among the members of the commonwealth. But he may not prevent his subordinates from raising themselves to his own level if they are able and entitled to do so by their talent, industry and good fortune. If this were not so, he would be allowed to practice coercion without himself being subject to coercive counter-measures from others, and would thus be more than their fellow-subject. ~ Immanuel Kant
In the school of political projectors, I was but ill entertained, the professors appearing, in my judgment, wholly out of their senses; which is a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favorites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity, and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities, and eminent services, of instructing princes to know their true interest, by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employment persons qualified to exercise them; with many other wild impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive; and confirmed in me the old observation, that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some philosophers have not maintained for truth. ~ Jonathan Swift
What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honorable, than that of teaching? ~ Harriet Martineau
Just Above Sunset 