Our Changing World

Well, how are you feeling today? Are you what they call a charming person? I used to wonder what they meant exactly when they referred to someone as being charming. And the other day I had a long talk with, and you can be sure of this, a very charming woman. Her name is Bess Rothman. She's an expert on this business of charm. She's taught it at colleges and traveled all over the country telling me...

Thank you and hello again. Here's an interesting question for you. Do you think you're just like 95 percent of the people? Well, you'll probably answer no. Maybe you're not. One of the strangest things about human nature is that every person likes to feel he's an individual, different from every other human being on earth, and it's true. There are literally no two human beings who are exactly alik...

I close my last show by saying our rewards in life will always be in direct proportion to our contribution. This is the law that stands as the supporting structure of all economics and our personal well-being as well. The paradox is that most people either don't know about this wonderful rule or think that somehow it's for the other guy. Most people believe we ought to have speed limit signs too,...

I was reading the other day about our universe and what we know and don't know about it, about the billions and billions of stars and planets and of the millions of galaxies like our Milky Way, separated by distances so vast it takes light, which travels 186,000 miles per second, about two million years to cross these almost incomprehensible distances. We've got astronomers sitting in front of tel...

From time to time you hear somebody say, you know, those people who got in on the ground floor of the opening of the West with its gold and silver really were fortunate. All that gold laying around waiting to be bailed and carried to market. Or you'll hear them say, and what about the early discoverers of our vast oil fields? All those derricks pumping millions of dollars worth of black gold and t...

You know, the experts are forever coming up with long words meant to describe the problems that we humans are complex enough to develop. And not too long ago they came up with a dandy. They use it to describe the feeling us poor men get, particularly the man who finds a lump like a watermelon with thorns right in the pit of his stomach. The word is panophobia, and it means fear. This is the word t...

In March of 1956, an amazing thing happened to me. I was retiring from a very busy schedule and had decided to take it easy for a while, and I decided to spend some time in Arizona. Since I'd be away, the manager of one of my little businesses asked me if I would record on tape a message he could play at the next sales meeting. Well, this made sense to me, so I decided to put into a 30-minute talk...