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"Thanks, FRiends. Some days I need that."

Well, here's more. From one old sergeant to another, these are from my personal motivation file:

"Activate yourself to duty by remembering your position, who you are, and what you have obliged yourself to be." - Thomas à Kempis

"The liberal society has no use for its legions, as its prophets have long proclaimed. Except that in this world are tigers, tigers kept at bay only by legions ready to compete to the death with them." - T.R. Fehrenbach

"Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man." - Ecclesiastes 12:13.

"Be not diverted from your duty by any idle reflections the silly world may make upon you, for their censures are not in your power, and consequently should not be any part of your concern." - Epictetus

"The test of character is not 'hanging in there' when the light at the end of the tunnel is expected, but performance of duty and persistence of example when the situation rules out the possibility of the light ever coming." - Vice Admiral James Stockdale, USN

"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." - President Theodore Roosevelt

"Success is never final; failure is never fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts." - Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill

"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." - George Orwell

"Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they made a difference. The Marines don't have that problem." - President Ronald Reagan

Personally, I always remember LCpl Jeffrey Nashton, a Marine who was nearly killed in the Beirut embassy bombing that also nearly killed my own best friend. Lying in a hospital bed in Weisbaden, West Germany, terribly wounded, blind, deaf, and with so many tubes running in and out of his body that people thought he looked more like a machine than a Marine, Nashton was visited by Marine Commandant General Paul X. Kelley, who was there to award LCpl Nashton the Purple Heart. Nashton felt the four stars on Kelley's shoulder with his fingers, realized it was the Commandant, and then motioned for a piece of paper and pen. With them he wrote a two-word note for Kelley that will live forever: "Semper Fi."