Brack: Picking the right quote is fun, daily challenge

Just about every business day for the last two decades, the morning has started with picking out an interesting quote for a daily news service sent to South Carolina businesses.

The quote, called a “thought for the day,” is a way to ease a subscriber into the news morning, offering a pithy thought, amusing comment or a wry notion somehow related to the morning headlines.

It might be from Belgian surreal artist Rene Magritte: “We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world.”

Or something about etiquette from Judith Martin, also known as Miss Manners: “We are born charming, fresh and spontaneous and must be civilized before we are fit to participate in society.”

More often than not, the quote is an attempt to get a pre-coffee chuckle through comments from past humorists such as Mark Twain and Will Rogers or more modern-day cynics like Steven Wright, George Carlin and Robin Williams.

Twain: “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”
Rogers: “Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.”
Wright: “Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.”

Through the years, we’ve offered more than 5,000 of these morning thoughts. We try not to repeat ourselves, but there’s no way to remember what quote was shared back in 2007 or 2014. If it looks fresh to us on a given morning, we figure it will look fresh to a reader.

Daily headlines often influence the morning search. While it’s not common to grab a quote from a story or opinion in the day’s news, it happens. More common is to search for a quote with the word “idiot” or “lessons” when someone in headlines has said something particularly idiotic or people need a reminder about lessons from history.

After an election, readers might have seen this quote by John Adams, the nation’s second president: “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.”

Or Thomas Jefferson, the founding father who followed as president, “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”

Finding a good quote is often made easier by websites like Brainyquote or The Quotations Page, where searches can be done by subject or author — or by relying on a site’s picks for motivational quotes, random quotes or quotes of the day. The risk with using these sites is that they often lead to travels down various rabbit holes in search of the perfect thing. This can be a big time-waster in a business that relies on speed, morning deadlines and relevance. But quote sites are good reminders for common sayings that readers might not have heard in awhile, such as:

Thorstein Veblen: “Invention is the mother of necessity.”
Oscar Wilde: “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made.”
Frank Lloyd Wright: “Turn the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.”

Sometimes, we try to find a good quote with South Carolina roots from past silver-tongued leaders:

The late U.S. Sen. Fritz Hollings: “I don’t want to rust out. I’d rather wear out.”
Past U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond: “I don’t think it’s a question of age as much as it’s a question of what kind of shape you’re in.”
Former Gov. Carroll A. Campbell Jr.: “I’ve often told my children that if they really want to expand their horizons, they’ll begin at the library.”

Pondering a daily morning quote from a religious or secular source is a fun way to ease into a day. Try it. It should help your sleepy brain to start firing on all cylinders.

Andy Brack is editor and publisher of Statehouse Report and the Charleston City Paper. Have a comment? Send to: feedback@charlestoncitypaper.com.