Husband, Friend, Student, Liberal

You cannot waste a single night. What you ignore is priceless to me.

Time is the essence here. As young people, you have a different sense of time than people who are older. The longest year in your life was probably when you were fifteen waiting to get your license. And, as you grow older, a year is like six months, then three months, then one month. And then it’s over. I mean you’re seventy years old, and you’ve lived a fairly good life and raised your kids, and you have some money in the bank for the children and grandchildren. Your grandchild comes and sits on your knee and says, “Grandparent, what did you do with your life?”… And you’re thinking, How am I going to answer this? You’re thinking… what are you going to say? I developed an advertising campaign for Geritol? I built up a chain of manicure storefront shops? I represented mergers and acquisitions to make investment bankers and golden-parachute-laden executives richer than the dreams of avarice? And, then, in the mergers and acquisitions, all kinds of workers were laid off? How am I going to answer that question?

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.