Maybe this year, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives not looking for flaws, but looking for potential.
the object of a new year is not that we should have a new year, but rather that we should have a new soul.
Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
This bright new year is given me
Under current law, on January 1, 2013, there's going to be a massive fiscal cliff of large spending cuts and tax increases.
We get to see it! January 1st, 2000! We get to see... all those fundamentalist preachers having to do their backpedaling when the Armageddon doesn't occur.
We spend January 1st walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives...not looking for flaws, but for potential.
The answer is hard work. What are you doing on Christmas Eve? Are you riding your bike? January 1st - are you riding your bike?
In Chicago 3,000 people have been shot since January 1st. We're not going to let that happen. Our inner cities are almost at an all-time low, run by the Democrats for sometimes more than a hundred years, chain unbroken.
You look at the inner cities and you see bad education, no jobs, no safety. You walk to the grocery store with your child and you get shot. You walk outside to look and see what's happening, and you get shot. In Chicago 3,000 people have been shot since January 1st. I am not going to let that happen.
The cosmic calendar compresses the local history of the universe into a single year. If the universe began on January 1st it was not until May that the Milky Way formed. Other planetary systems may have appeared in June, July and August, but our Sun and Earth not until mid-September. Life arose soon after. We humans appear on the cosmic calendar so recently that our recorded history occupies only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st.
There is this expectation that as January 1st dawns, we're going to do it differently. Moreover, there's this kind of pressure, that even if I've been trying to be different for a while, January 1st, from here on in - I have to be different. There's a cultural expectation, there's a personal expectation. I think it's worth just taking pause for a minute and talking about that.
In Chicago, they've had thousands of shootings, thousands since January 1st [2016]. Is this a war-torn country? What are we doing? And we have to stop the violence.
or simply:
