Our Changing World

When I was a kid, back during the depression of the 30s, I used to wonder how human beings could let themselves get in such a fix. Here were people who were broke, but there was still as much money as there'd been a few years before. We were living in ugly and inadequate homes, yet there were lovely homes for sale. We didn't have enough food half the time, yet it was being grown in abundance all o...

The great William James, in his Principles of Psychology, defined genius as little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way. In his essay on habit, he referred to habit as the flywheel of society. It's what keeps us doing what we've been doing in the past. It makes us fear change, regardless of the present condition of our lives. And the genius, as defined by Dr. James, seems to be...

In all the range of things human beings do, I think one of the most interesting is marriage. Why do people marry the people they marry? A human personality is interesting because it's the only one of its kind on earth. No two people are exactly alike in the way they think and talk and do things, and according to the experts, we marry the person who has, or is, what we haven't got and wish we had,...

You'll have to excuse me, I've got a cold today. You know we're always trying to come up with new and better ways to motivate young people to give a little more care and attention to the intelligent planning of their lives, and we've hit on something that works pretty well. If you've got youngsters old enough to understand what you're talking about, here's a little illustration you might try, mayb...

These days we hear a lot about big business and how big it's getting. There's nothing wrong with big business, and one of the most interesting things about it is that every business, no matter how big it might be today, started small. One of the largest corporations in the United States was started with about $30,000 of borrowed money, and after 10 years of operation only had $6,000 in its account...

Way back in history, from the earliest times, people have been making their living and securing for themselves a modicum of fame by proposing that they can tell other people's fortunes. History tells us that even kings used to regulate their lives by the so-called wisdom of these canny opportunists. In ancient Rome, so-called wizards used to inspect the livers of freshly killed chickens looking fo...

In the long history of amazing technological developments, I guess one of the most wonderful and truly amazing is a thing called television. There was a time when I made my living by this wondrous medium, but I don't pretend to understand it. How they can send a moving picture invisibly through the air and through brick walls and steel and have it come out in a box in your living room is something...

Some wise man once said that men don't always need educating as much as they need reminding, and every once in a while we're sharply brought up and reminded of a great truth, the truth being that the best things in life are free. I think each one of us, down deep inside, knows the truth of this. Naturally, we need money with which to live and to provide against emergencies and for our future, our...

There's no doubt that advertising has done a lot of good for all of us, even though we grumble about it now and then. The other day I was flying into Chicago from Omaha and read a very interesting ad which appeared in the Chicago Tribune. It was written as a fable or fairy tale, but it packed a great message, and I'm sure a lot of people benefited from it. Let me read it to you. The title is, The...

When I was about 12 years old, I made a discovery that has saved my neck and has turned what could have been a fairly boring existence into a pretty exciting affair. It may sound as though I stumbled onto a goldmine, and in a way I suppose I did, but what really happened was that I discovered books. That's right. It suddenly dawned upon me that reading a book could be the most exciting and interes...

Of all the words in all the languages of the world, what would you say is the most important word when it comes to this business of living successfully? Well, according to the experts, the word is attitude, and it's a fact that it is this word, or rather what we mean by this word, that will determine more than any other single thing what happens to us. My dictionary defines the word attitude as a...

Every century some kind of major and totally unexpected disaster seems to hit in some area of the world. One of the most terrible disasters the world has ever known struck in August of 1883. At that time there was a large island, a volcanic island I might add, in the Strait of Sunda, about halfway between Sumatra and Java. When the volcano on this island decided to erupt it blew the whole island o...

When we read of poverty and unemployment, we often wonder how these ugly statistics can persist to mar an otherwise healthy and affluent society. One of the causes can be found in an area that has received far too little publicity. Did you know that there are 10 million adults in this country over the age of 25 who are completely or functionally illiterate? Adult men and women who can neither read...

I had the good fortune to be raised near a harbor. As a kid, I used to spend hours down in the docks watching the ships loading and unloading. They'd bring in cargoes from all the distant and romantic ports all over the world. I used to stand there with a faraway look in my eyes, envying those sailors who were so fortunate. They traveled over the distant horizon to places I could only imagine or r...

Modern medical research has found that the old adage, "sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me," is all wrong. Psychosomatic studies have found that man is hurt far more by names than he is by all the sticks and stones of life. Today, scientists are in agreement that the old biblical admonition is correct when it says, "He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty, a...

You know, everything in nature has two sides, a good and a bad, depending upon the point of view. The rain that waters and fertilizes the crops also brings devastating floods. The fire that warms our homes and cooks our meals can cause widespread havoc when out of control. Think for a moment about the good and the bad sides of memory. It's believed that our subconscious minds remember everything t...

Hello again. I'm going to ask you a very tricky question; however, it's important that you try to answer it the moment I ask it. I'm going to ask you a question that everyone should have given a lot of thought to and can answer immediately and in one sentence, but I might add that it's a question only a few people out of a thousand can answer. At any rate, get ready, and let's see how well you do....

Hello. Some time ago I read a story that had a very profound effect on me. With my customary brilliant memory, I can recall neither the name of the book nor the author. Maybe you'll recognize it. Anyway, it was about a young man who was to be hanged for committing some crime. This was way back, the early days. The young man didn't sleep at all during his last night on earth, and dawn found him sta...

Hello. Do you know what your most valuable tool is when it comes to getting along with other people and getting what you want from life? Well, it's the most obvious thing in the world, and I suppose one of the most overlooked. It's your ability to use your language. It's a strange and unfortunate thing, but the great majority of folks have just about the same vocabulary as adults as they had in th...

Have you ever thought you might like to become a writer? Here's something a lot of people could do and very successfully, but not very many will and you know why? It's because becoming successful as a writer is just about the hardest work in the world. Outside of writing my own radio programs, I've never done too much of it. I tried to hire writers for my radio programs one time, but it just never...

I suppose criminal psychology is one of the world's most interesting subjects and, at times, certainly the most terrifying. There's hardly a day goes by when the paper doesn't report some strange, senseless, twisted crime. But the most interesting of all, because of its sheer waste of talent and time, is the story of the Confidence Man. For example, there's a really interesting book published in 1...

Some years ago, a man came into my office whom I've never forgotten, and for whom I've never stopped being sorry. I've often thought that there must be thousands of people in the same boat. My secretary had given him an appointment, and he started right off on the wrong foot by arriving 15 minutes late. He then told me a long, sad story. As I remembered, it went something like this. Mr. Nightingal...

I received a telephone call the other day that really set me to thinking. I was working in my study, and as usual, the phone interrupted my work. I think I was reading the sports page at the time. And a charming female voice asked, Is this Mr. Nightingale? And I said, Yes. And then she said, Mr. Nightingale, Mr. Spelvin can speak to you now. I thought, Well, isn't that nice. This Mr. Spelvin must...

Hello again. To my mind, one of the most interesting Americans who lived around the turn of the century was a man by the name of Russell Herman Conwell. He was born in 1843 and lived until 1925. He was a lawyer for about 15 years, then became a clergyman. But one day a young man came to him at the church and told him he wanted to get a college education but was in such a fix financially that he ju...

Many years ago, when I was on the air in Chicago, I got a letter from a woman with a problem that must come to someone every day in a week in every town in the country. She wrote that she and her husband were thinking of going into the motel business in Florida, and she wanted my opinion on whether or not I thought the motel business was a good business to go into. She went on to say that her husb...