This must never happen again.

This [the Holocaust] must never happen again. ... Be vigilant about your rights. Care about the rights and human dignity of others.
...
When the rights of any group, no matter how small, no matter how marginal, are violated, your liberty, your freedom is put at risk. Let there never be a day when we cast about in horror and have to ask the question, "How did it ever come to this?"
- Thomas Childers, Ph.D., Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania, in the closing remarks of his six-hour Teaching Company lecture series A History of Hitler’s Empire

Listening to Professor Childers on my iPod as I walked on the beach and drove around town, I was struck by the similarities between the early days of Hitler's rise to power in the 1920's and today's small but vocal minority of Americans calling for Muslims, Mexicans, Gays, and others to be treated as less than fully American, less than fully worthy human beings.

Let us all be fully vigilant.

Further reading: A common denominator of all religions is that they have the power to bring out the best and the worst in people. - Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Edward R. Murrow: Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences

Dwight D. Eisenhower: How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?

Oscar Wilde quote: Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

The Wisdom of Anne Frank

Anne Frank (1929- 1945) was a Jewish girl who was caught up in the Second World War. From 1942 until 1944 she was in hiding in Amsterdam. During that time she wrote in a diary that was found and published after her death. In 1944, she was captured by the Nazis and taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died of typhus seven months later.

These quotes are from Anne Frank's diary, which she began writing on her 13th birthday:

I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.

I don't think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

No one has ever become poor by giving.

Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.

Whoever is happy will make others happy, too.