Class Motto Quotes

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Live and let live” was the famous Viennese motto, which today still seems to me to be more humane than all the categorical imperatives, and it maintained itself throughout all classes.
Stefan Zweig (The World of Yesterday)
The most realistic distinction between the investor and the speculator is found in their attitude toward stock-market movements. The speculator’s primary interest lies in anticipating and profiting from market fluctuations. The investor’s primary interest lies in acquiring and holding suitable securities at suitable prices. Market movements are important to him in a practical sense, because they alternately create low price levels at which he would be wise to buy and high price levels at which he certainly should refrain from buying and probably would be wise to sell. It is far from certain that the typical investor should regularly hold off buying until low market levels appear, because this may involve a long wait, very likely the loss of income, and the possible missing of investment opportunities. On the whole it may be better for the investor to do his stock buying whenever he has money to put in stocks, except when the general market level is much higher than can be justified by well-established standards of value. If he wants to be shrewd he can look for the ever-present bargain opportunities in individual securities. Aside from forecasting the movements of the general market, much effort and ability are directed on Wall Street toward selecting stocks or industrial groups that in matter of price will “do better” than the rest over a fairly short period in the future. Logical as this endeavor may seem, we do not believe it is suited to the needs or temperament of the true investor—particularly since he would be competing with a large number of stock-market traders and first-class financial analysts who are trying to do the same thing. As in all other activities that emphasize price movements first and underlying values second, the work of many intelligent minds constantly engaged in this field tends to be self-neutralizing and self-defeating over the years. The investor with a portfolio of sound stocks should expect their prices to fluctuate and should neither be concerned by sizable declines nor become excited by sizable advances. He should always remember that market quotations are there for his convenience, either to be taken advantage of or to be ignored. He should never buy a stock because it has gone up or sell one because it has gone down. He would not be far wrong if this motto read more simply: “Never buy a stock immediately after a substantial rise or sell one immediately after a substantial drop.” An
Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
Curiously enough, it seems that at times the spiritual side prevails, and then the materialistic side—in wave-like motions following each other. ...At one time the full flood of materialistic ideas prevails, and everything in this life—prosperity, the education which procures more pleasures, more food—will become glorious at first and then that will degrade and degenerate. Along with the prosperity will rise to white heat all the inborn jealousies and hatreds of the human race. Competition and merciless cruelty will be the watchword of the day. To quote a very commonplace and not very elegant English proverb, "Everyone for himself, and the devil take the hindmost", becomes the motto of the day. Then people think that the whole scheme of life is a failure. And the world would be destroyed had not spirituality come to the rescue and lent a helping hand to the sinking world. Then the world gets new hope and finds a new basis for a new building, and another wave of spirituality comes, which in time again declines. As a rule, spirituality brings a class of men who lay exclusive claim to the special powers of the world. The immediate effect of this is a reaction towards materialism, which opens the door to scores of exclusive claims, until the time comes when not only all the spiritual powers of the race, but all its material powers and privileges are centered in the hands of a very few; and these few, standing on the necks of the masses of the people, want to rule them. Then society has to help itself, and materialism comes to the rescue.
Vivekananda (The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Volume 3)
Oh, don’t talk to me about your socialists, I’ve got no patience with them,” she cried. “It only means that another lot of lazy loafers will make a good thing out of the working classes. My motto is, leave me alone; I don’t want anyone interfering with me; I’ll make the best of a bad job, and the devil take the hindmost.
W. Somerset Maugham (Collected Works of W. Somerset Maugham)
Darwin is associated, in the popular imagination, with bloody zero-sum competition, with Tennyson’s “nature, red in tooth and claw”—with the motto “survival of the fittest.” But this wasn’t actually his phrase. It was coined by a philosopher and sociologist named Herbert Spencer and his fellow “social Darwinists,” who were promoters of white and upper-class supremacy. For Darwin, says Keltner, “survival of the kindest” would have been a better moniker. Darwin was a gentle and melancholic soul, a doting husband and adoring father of ten, deeply in love with nature from earliest childhood. His father had wanted him to be a doctor, but when at age sixteen he witnessed his first surgery, performed in those days without anesthesia, he was so horrified that for the rest of his life he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. He retreated to the woodlands and studied beetles instead. Later, he described his encounter with a Brazilian forest as “a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future & more quiet pleasure will arise.
Susan Cain (Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole)
When I think about it, I have to say that by 1919 even the Hitler Youth had almost been formed. For example, in our school class we had started a club called the Rennbund Altpreussen (Old Prussia Athletics Club), and took as its motto “Anti-Spartacus, for Sport and Politics.” The politics consisted in occasionally beating up a few unfortunates, who were in favor of the revolution, on the way to school. Sports were the main occupation. We organized athletics championships in the school grounds or public stadia. These gave us the pleasurable sensation of being decidedly anti-Spartacist. We felt very important and patriotic, and ran races for the fatherland. What was that, if not an embryonic Hitler Youth? In truth, certain characteristics later added by Hitler’s personal idiosyncrasies were lacking, anti-Semitism for one. Our Jewish schoolmates ran with the same anti-Spartacist and patriotic zeal as everyone else. Indeed, our best runner was Jewish. I can testify that they did nothing to undermine national unity. During
Sebastian Haffner (Defying Hitler: A Memoir)
Imagine a soldier who believes killing another human being is wrong, kills his first human being in war when he has never killed before. Worse still, imagine this same soldier has his enemy in his sites and the enemy appears defenseless. Here, he might be allowed the luxury to have that moment with himself to debate whether he should pull the trigger or not. But on another day he may not have that luxury. Imagine further, a soldier is in this situation because his father was a soldier, and his grandfather was a soldier, and he is trying to please them but, unlike them, he doesn’t believe killing people in war is right, yet there he is on the battlefield anyway where ‘killed or be killed’ leads the list in the army’s operation manual. So, he pulls the trigger anyway even though he’s categorically against killing another human being. And maybe this is the first time he’s compromised on such a high principle and he continues killing other people as long as he’s in the war and each time it becomes easier and easier until his principle, his absolute truth, is a motto not to live by, but one that is just a topic of conversation in a philosophy class or a backyard barbecue. War has changed him. From Messages From a Grandfather, by Robert Gately
Robert Gately
Egalitarianism among foragers is concerned primarily with preventing a single individual or coalition from dominating (and thereby making life miserable for) the rest of the group. This leads foragers to be vigilant for early warning signs of people who position themselves above others. This includes dominating or bullying individuals (outside the household ot immediate family), bragging, seeking authority too eagerly, ganging up with other members of the group, and otherwise attempting to control others' behavior. Foragers would readily support the motto fo the early American general Christopher Gadsden: "Don't tread on me." Many of the norms that were common among our forager ancestors are by now deeply embedded in human nature. But these aren't our only norms. Most societies also teach their children norms specific to their society. This ability of societies to adopt different norms is part of what has let humans spread across the Earth, by adopting norms better suited to each local environment. This "cultural flexibility" also enabled our ancestors to implement the huge behavior changes required to turn hunters and gatherers into farmers and herders, roughly 10,000 years ago. Farmers have norms supporting marriage, war, and property, as well as rough treatment of animals, lower classes, and slaves. To help enforce these new norms, farmers also had stronger norms of social conformity, as well as stronger religions with moralizing gods.
Kevin Simler (The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life)
In the end, Putin won with the aid of Americans who had turned on their own values. The news media assisted greatly by elevating stolen innocuous emails from an insecure party server to a national crisis in which the victims were treated suspiciously. To Trump supporters it validated everything they ever suspected about Hillary Clinton—she hid emails, which meant she was a liar. No matter that Trump voters elected a man who openly embraced white supremacy, rejected diversity, abhorred global engagement, ignored his own corruption, and enlisted his own family and staff as royalty to be worshipped. Trump voters saw these traits as perks. They viewed nepotism, largess, and excess as virtues of a business and political shark. If he vocally stood against virtually all gains America had made in equality and global economic expansion since 1964 and it got him elected, then all the better that he hold those positions. By all means necessary was Trump’s apparent motto for the 2016 election. Russian intelligence lived by that motto too. The spies of the Red Square were shameless enough but the real scandal was that Team Trump saw nothing wrong with it. Trump voters had blindly elected him despite knowing that Russia had intervened in the electoral process. They cared not that Trump’s own surprising level of slavish devotion to Putin was suspicious. It. Did. Not. Matter. Trump had created a cult of personality in the white lower class so that they worshipped his every word and challenged the veracity of anything negative said against him. This worked out well for Putin. For the
Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West)
This is not a hypothetical example. In the middle of the nineteenth century Karl Marx reached brilliant economic insights. Based on these insights he predicted an increasingly violent conflict between the proletariat and the capitalists, ending with the inevitable victory of the former and the collapse of the capitalist system. Marx was certain that the revolution would start in countries that spearheaded the Industrial Revolution – such as Britain, France and the USA – and spread to the rest of the world. Marx forgot that capitalists know how to read. At first only a handful of disciples took Marx seriously and read his writings. But as these socialist firebrands gained adherents and power, the capitalists became alarmed. They too perused Das Kapital, adopting many of the tools and insights of Marxist analysis. In the twentieth century everybody from street urchins to presidents embraced a Marxist approach to economics and history. Even diehard capitalists who vehemently resisted the Marxist prognosis still made use of the Marxist diagnosis. When the CIA analysed the situation in Vietnam or Chile in the 1960s, it divided society into classes. When Nixon or Thatcher looked at the globe, they asked themselves who controls the vital means of production. From 1989 to 1991 George Bush oversaw the demise of the Evil Empire of communism, only to be defeated in the 1992 elections by Bill Clinton. Clinton’s winning campaign strategy was summarised in the motto: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ Marx could not have said it better. As people adopted the Marxist diagnosis, they changed their behaviour accordingly. Capitalists in countries such as Britain and France strove to better the lot of the workers, strengthen their national consciousness and integrate them into the political system. Consequently when workers began voting in elections and Labour gained power in one country after another, the capitalists could still sleep soundly in their beds. As a result, Marx’s predictions came to naught. Communist revolutions never engulfed the leading industrial powers such as Britain, France and the USA, and the dictatorship of the proletariat was consigned to the dustbin of history. This is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
Mooney was the class bully, a boy who had already failed two grades by the time he landed in mine. He was fat, sweaty and loud, and all the kids were scared of him. With good reason. If Mooney wanted something he took it, and woe to the child who tried to stop him. But Mooney was also crafty and sly. He never retaliated when an adult was near, preferring to ambush his prey when he could catch them off-guard, knowing it would be his word against the victims if the kid were stupid enough to tell. Sitting next to him was torture. I always carried extra pencils because I knew Mooney would confiscate the one I was using. And I considered myself lucky that pencils were all he’d taken so far. At least, I was lucky until the week before our midterm tests. Because the weather was nasty that Monday, our recess was taken in the gym. I was sitting on the bleachers taking a breather, watching Jenna chase Hugh in a game of tag, when Mooney confronted me. “You’re gonna let me copy off your paper when we take our tests next week,” he said. “If you don’t, I’ll stomp you into the ground.” He swaggered off, secure in the thought that I’d comply with his demand. I watched him in shock. Cheat? He wanted me to cheat on the tests? The Judge would disown me. I would never be able to look my grandfather in the eye again. There was no way I could let Mooney copy, even knowing he would kill me when it was over. Death before dishonor was my family motto.
Katherine Allred (The Sweet Gum Tree)
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Furniture & Cabinetmaking
But are challenge and love enough? Not quite. All great teachers teach students how to reach the high standards. Collins and Esquith didn’t hand their students a reading list and wish them bon voyage. Collins’s students read and discussed every line of Macbeth in class. Esquith spent hours planning what chapters they would read in class. “I know which child will handle the challenge of the most difficult paragraphs, and carefully plan a passage for the shy youngster … who will begin his journey as a good reader. Nothing is left to chance.… It takes enormous energy, but to be in a room with young minds who hang on every word of a classic book and beg for more if I stop makes all the planning worthwhile.” What are they teaching the students en route? To love learning. To eventually learn and think for themselves. And to work hard on the fundamentals. Esquith’s class often met before school, after school, and on school vacations to master the fundamentals of English and math, especially as the work got harder. His motto: “There are no shortcuts.” Collins echoes that idea as she tells her class, “There is no magic here. Mrs. Collins is no miracle worker. I do not walk on water, I do not part the sea. I just love children and work harder than a lot of people, and so will you.” DeLay expected a lot from her students, but she, too, guided them there. Most students are intimidated by the idea of talent, and it keeps them in a fixed mindset. But DeLay demystified talent. One student was sure he couldn’t play a piece as fast as Itzhak Perlman. So she didn’t let him see the metronome until he had achieved it. “I know so surely that if he had been handling that metronome, as he approached that number he would have said to himself, I can never do this as fast as Itzhak Perlman, and he would have stopped himself.” Another student was intimidated by the beautiful sound made by talented violinists. “We were working on my sound, and there was this one note I played, and Miss DeLay stopped me and said, ‘Now that is a beautiful sound.’ ” She then explained how every note has to have a beautiful beginning, middle, and end, leading into the next note. And he thought, “Wow! If I can do it there, I can do it everywhere.” Suddenly the beautiful sound of Perlman made sense and was not just an overwhelming concept. When students don’t know how to do something and others do, the gap seems unbridgeable. Some educators try to reassure their students that they’re just fine as they are. Growth-minded teachers tell students the truth and then give them the tools to close the gap. As Marva Collins said to a boy who was clowning around in class, “You are in sixth grade and your reading score is 1.1. I don’t hide your scores in a folder. I tell them to you so you know what you have to do. Now your clowning days are over.” Then they got down to work.
Carol S. Dweck (Mindset: The New Psychology of Success)
Horst Schulze, cofounder and past president of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, shares the origin of the Motto: “I started in the hotel business when I was 14 years old as a busboy. When my mother took me to the hotel to work for the first time, she said, ’We could never go to this hotel. This is only for important people. For important, fine people. So you’re lucky. Behave yourself. Wash your hands.’ She was a typical mother. I went to the hotel and the general manager talked to my mother and me for 15 minutes and told us we could never be like the guests who came to his hotel. ’So don’t ever get jealous. This is for Ladies and Gentlemen—very important people.’ “By the time I started working in the restaurant, I knew the guests were very important. But a few months later I realized that the maître d’ I watched every day was just as important because every guest was proud when he talked to them. Why? Because he was a first-class professional. He was somebody special—because of the excellence he created for the guests. So when I went to hotel school about a year and a half later, the teacher asked me to write a story describing what I felt about the business. And I wrote about the maître d’ at my hotel. I titled it, ’Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen.’ I wrote we could be excellent like he was. . .absolute excellence. When you walked into a room, you knew he was there. In any moment all of us who serve can be Ladies and Gentlemen, just like the guests. I think it’s a powerful thing that shouldn’t be missed by the wonderful people in this industry. They should understand that.
Joseph A. Michelli (The New Gold Standard: 5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company)
Teachers greatly influence how students perceive and approach struggle in the mathematics classroom. Even young students can learn to value struggle as an expected and natural part of learning, as demonstrated by the class motto of one first-grade math class: If you are not struggling, you are not learning. Teachers must accept that struggle is important to students' learning of mathematics, convey this message to students, and provide time for them to try to work through their uncertainties. Unfortunately, this may not be enough, since some students will still simply shut down in the face of frustration, proclaim, 'I don't know,' and give up. Dweck (2006) has shown that students with a fixed mindset--that is, those who believe that intelligence (especially math ability) is an innate trait--are more likely to give up when they encounter difficulties because they believe that learning mathematics should come naturally. By contrast, students with a growth mindset--that is, those who believe that intelligence can be developed through effort--are likely to persevere through a struggle because they see challenging work as an opportunity to learn and grow.
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All)
Our team is young, but on the rise. Holly’s motto for them is “Same heart, same pride, same fight,” which I love. The kids, who include my last recruiting class, tell me they want to represent everything Tennessee has ever been about: hard work, defense, rebounding, and doing all the little things right.
Pat Summitt (Sum It Up: A Thousand and Ninety-Eight Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective)
That’s not a very admirable motto, Gerald, or a very farsighted policy either,’ Adam snapped. ‘But we shall discuss the mill later. In the meantime, I would like to point out that you’ve a lot to learn about human nature and the workers, my boy. They’ve been treated abominably in the past. More reform has to come, and I hope it does so without too much bloodshed.’ ‘You’d better not let your friends in the wool trade hear you talking like that, or they’ll castigate you as a traitor to your class, sir,’ Gerald responded.
Barbara Taylor Bradford (A Woman of Substance (Emma Harte Saga #1))
The habituation of workers to the assembly line was thus perhaps made easier by another innovation of the early twentieth century: consumer debt. As Jackson Lears has argued, through the installment plan previously unthinkable acquisitions became thinkable, and more than thinkable: it became normal to carry debt. 11 The display of a new car bought on installment became a sign that one was trustworthy. In a wholesale transformation of the old Puritan moralism, expressed by Benjamin Franklin (admittedly no Puritan) with the motto “Be frugal and free,” the early twentieth century saw the moral legitimation of spending. One symptom Lears points to is a 1907 book with the immodest title The New Basis of Civilization, by Simon Nelson Patten, in which the moral valence of debt and spending is reversed, and the multiplication of wants becomes not a sign of dangerous corruption but part of the civilizing process.
Matthew B. Crawford (Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work)
When the doctor was done, Hitler leaped onto a long table positioned smack in the middle of the crowd. His oratorical style was provocative, his language colloquial and at times coarse. He hollered insults at politicians, capitalists, and Jews. He castigated the Reich finance minister for supporting the Treaty of Versailles, a humiliating concession to the victors of the war that would bring Germans to their knees, he warned, unless they fought back. “Our motto is only struggle!” Hitler cried. The beer-hall crowd, a fizzy mix of working-class and middle-class men, erupted—some cheering, some jeering. His controversial speeches fueled attendance at future meetings of the German Workers’ Party, which grew to 3,300 members by the end of 1921, at which point it had a new name, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, nicknamed the Nazi Party. It also had a new chairman, Hitler, who gave himself a new title: Führer (Leader).
Rebecca Donner (All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler)
His personal motto, which he was glad to repeat at any time, for any reason, was a bit of Yoda-like egalitarianism: “Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.
Sam Anderson (Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis)
Its character would be familiar to any reader of Werner Sombart or Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. True black Kultur rejects all white bourgeois standards, since “the values of that class are in themselves anti-humanist” and racist; in fact, any black person who adopts “American middle class standards and values” ceases to be black.34 It rejects liberalism with its mealymouthed belief in compromise and interracial unity, and it rejects capitalism, looking instead to build a community based “on free people, not free enterprise.” Black Power also reflected the Garveyite perspective that blackness could be a vehicle for mass mobilization and the destruction of a decadent white civilization. Carmichael urged blacks to “create new values” in Heidegger’s sense. Like his counterparts in the German revolution on the Right, Carmichael saw his own era as “a time of dynamism” in which new forms of authority and power must be substituted for old. The rise of the Black Power movement would sweep away the “outmoded structures and institutions” of the past, Carmichael predicted, including racism. Its motto would be “Modernization, not moderation.”35
Arthur Herman (The Idea of Decline in Western History)
Old people vote. You know who votes in the swing states where this election will be fought? Really old people. Instead of high-profile videos with Cardi B (no disrespect to Cardi, who famously once threatened to dog-walk the egregious Tomi Lahren), maybe focus on registering and reaching more of those old-fart voters in counties in swing states. If your celebrity and music-industry friends want to flood social media with GOTV messages, let them. It makes them feel important and it’s the cheapest outsourcing you can get. Just don’t build your models on the idea that you’re going to spike young voter turnout beyond 20 percent. The problem with chasing the youth vote is threefold: First, they’re unlikely to be registered. You have to devote a lot of work to going out, grabbing them, registering them, educating them, and motivating them to go out and vote. If they were established but less active voters, you’d have voter history and other data to work with. There are lower-effort, lower-cost ways to make this work. Second, they’re not conditioned to vote; that November morning is much more likely to involve regret at not finishing a paper than missing a vote. Third, and finally, a meaningful fraction of the national youth vote overall is located in California. Its gigantic population skews the number, and since the Golden State’s Electoral College outcome is never in doubt, it doesn’t matter. What’s our motto, kids? “The Electoral College is the only game in town.” This year, the Democrats have been racing to win the Free Shit election with young voters by promising to make college “free” (a word that makes any economic conservative lower their glasses, put down the brandy snifter, and arch an eyebrow) and to forgive $1.53 trillion gazillion dollars of student loan debt. Set aside that the rising price of college is what happens to everything subsidized or guaranteed by the government.17 Set aside that those subsidies cause college costs to wildly exceed the rate of inflation across the board, and that it sucks to have $200k in student loan debt for your degree in Intersectional Yodeling. Set aside that the college loan system is run by predatory asswipes. The big miss here is a massive policy disconnect—a student-loan jubilee would be a massive subsidy to white, upper-middle-class people in their mid-thirties to late forties. I’m not saying Democrats shouldn’t try to appeal to young voters on some level, but I want them to have a realistic expectation about just how hard it is to move those numbers in sufficient volume in the key Electoral College states. When I asked one of the smartest electoral modeling brains in the business about this issue, he flooded me with an inbox of spreadsheets and data points. But the key answer he gave me was this: “The EC states in play are mostly old as fuck. If your models assume young voter magic, you’re gonna have a bad day.
Rick Wilson (Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves)
Jàroslav Hasek, classe ’83, cittadino di Praga e della bettola, del bordello e un po’ della galera. Professione? Diciamo più di una: commesso in drogheria, impiegato in banca, direttore della rivista “Il mondo degli animali”, e poi animatore del famoso Istituto cinologico, e poi chiaroveggente patentato, e scrittore, attore, revisore generale, e poi improvvisatore, e poi fondatore di un partito (“Partito del progresso moderato nel quadro della legge”), e poi soldato, da quando a Sarajevo hanno accoppato quel povero Francesco Ferdinando e ci hanno ordinato di pensare: "Che bellezza sarà quando potrò crepare al fronte per Sua Maestà l’imperatore e la sua famigliola!”. Patriota absburgico? Non tanto. Soldato coraggioso? Sì, purché s’intenda per coraggio quel che serve a salvare la pelle e a rimediare un boccale di birra e un po’ di sgnappa. Sposato? Padre di famiglia? Sì, ma coniuge volubile e riottoso, legato alla bottiglia molto più che alla moglie e a tutto il parentado. Padre distratto, ho dimenticato una volta il mio Risa all’osteria e un’altra volta mi sarei giocato, dicono, a carte la sua carrozzella. Chi sono i miei amici? Sono amico dei birrai, di chi beve, dei nottambuli, dei balordi, dei guitti, degli acrobati, dei bastardi, dei semplici, dei tangheri, degli idioti geniali e degli zingari, di chi è puttana o figlia di puttana, degli artisti e di quelli che non hanno arte né parte, di chi sa suonare ma anche di chi è sempre suonato, di tutti quelli che fanno un mestiere non compreso tra le corporazioni e son soci della dissociazione. Il mio club? Per il momento è quello numeroso e schifato ma immortale dei disertori e dei voltagabbana che si fregia del motto sacrosanto: “Dopo di me il diluvio universale! ”.
Gilberto Forti (Il piccolo almanacco di Radetzky)