Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. — Napoleon Bonaparte
EppsNet Archive: Napoleon Bonaparte
You Can Get Away From Envy
I am earning, let us say, a salary sufficient for my needs. I should be content, but I hear that some one else who I believe to be in no way my superior is earning a salary twice as great as mine. Instantly, if I am of an envious disposition, the satisfactions to be derived from what I have grow dim, and I begin to be eaten up by a sense of injustice. . . . The man who has double my salary is doubtless tortured by the thought that some one else in turn has twice as much as he has, and so it goes on. If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon. But Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I dare say, envied Hercules, who never existed. You can therefore not get away from envy by means of success alone, for there will always be… Read more →
Serious People Don’t Ski
Five men, including three prominent Long Beach community and business leaders, were killed and one person seriously injured Wednesday when their Salt Lake City-bound plane crashed along a runway at Long Beach Airport and burst into flames. The group of six were on their way to ski in Park City, Utah, friends said. — Los Angeles Times I think we’ve covered this before but there are certain key indicators in life that you are not a serious person and one of those indicators is that you take ski trips. And it’s a key indicator squared if you’re a grown man and you take ski trips with other grown men. Did Napoleon take ski vacations with his buddies? No, he didn’t. Did Winston Churchill take ski vacations? Did Einstein take ski vacations? Did Jesus take ski vacations? So on the bright side, it’s not like promising lives have been cut short… Read more →
High School Confidential
I ask my boy how school’s going this year, his senior year in high school. “It’s okay,” he says. “I don’t enjoy it that much but I do it anyway.” When we get to the subject of his English teacher, he says, “He’s fine, other than he’s got a Napoleon complex and spends the entire class talking about himself. I know everything about him and I’ve learned nothing about poetry. “He has a two-year-old daughter and another daughter six months old. He coaches a cross-country team. He considers himself the greatest runner of all time. We don’t know what pain is because he has a messed-up knee and he runs on it anyway. “He thinks Mr. Plette [the AP History teacher] is soft because Mr. Plette give higher grades than he does but don’t tell Plette he said that because Plette’s his boy. “He’s a San Francisco Giants fan. He’s… Read more →
Don’t Send a Community Organizer to Do a President’s Job
My fellow Americans — I’m angry. Not just because the southern coastline of our nation — including Louisiana, which I purchased from Napoleon in the sweetest deal of 1803 — is being destroyed. Read these pathetic remarks from our president, Barack Obama: The president also implied that anti-big government types such as tea party activists were being hypocritical on the issue. “Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying ‘do something’ are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much,” Obama said. “Some of the same people who are saying the president needs to show leadership and solve this problem are some of the same folks who, just a few months ago, were saying this guy is trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government that is going to restrict our… Read more →