Norwegian Motivational Quotes

A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do, but what he should do.

An unfair society is a society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit

You try too hard to make life fit your way of doing things. If you don't want to spend time in an insane asylum, you have to open up a little more and let yourself go with life's natural flow.

IN BERLIN, JOSEPH GOEBBELS contemplated the motivation behind Churchill’s broadcast, and its potential effect. He kept careful watch on the evolving relationship between America and Britain, weighing how his propagandists might best influence the outcome. “The battle over intervention or non-intervention continues to rage in the USA,” he wrote in his diary on Monday, April 28, the day after the broadcast. The outcome was hard to predict. “We are active to the best of our ability, but we can scarcely make ourselves heard against the deafening Jew-chorus. In London they are placing all their last hopes in the USA. If something does not happen soon, then London is faced with annihilation.” Goebbels sensed mounting anxiety. “Their great fear is of a knock-out blow during the next weeks and months. We shall do our best to justify these fears.” He instructed his operatives on how best to use Churchill’s own broadcast to discredit him. They were to mock him for saying that after he visited bombed areas, he came back to London “not merely reassured but even refreshed.” In particular, they were to seize on how Churchill had described the forces he had transferred from Egypt to Greece to confront the German invasion. Churchill had said: “It happened that the divisions available and best suited to this task were from New Zealand and Australia, and that only about half the troops who took part in this dangerous expedition came from the Mother Country.” Goebbels leapt on this with glee. “Indeed, it so happened! It invariably ‘so happens’ that the British are in the rear; it always so happens that they are in retreat. It so happened that the British had no share in the casualties. It so happened that the greatest sacrifices during the offensive in the West were made by the French, the Belgians and the Dutch. It so happened that the Norwegians had to provide cover for the British flooding back from Norway.

Now only 20 percent of Norwegian prisoners are arrested in the two years after their release. In contrast, a recent Bureau of Justice Statistics report found that 44 percent of American state prisoners were arrested at least once in the first year after their release. Høidal attributes the Norwegian turnaround directly to the change in officers’ responsibilities. Each officer is designated as the “contact officer” for three inmates. The officer is assigned responsibility for these three inmates for the duration of their incarceration. “They’re like a coach, motivator, role model,” Høidal says of the contact officers. And “like a nurse when you’re in the hospital,” they are familiar with your case; they’re the person to whom you reach out first when you need something, whether that something is help in beginning a job, or classes in the prison, or finding housing or work in the community for the future.

To build a domestic energy industry, the Norwegian government created a partially private company that is run by wealthy oil industry executives. This company is publicly traded, operates on the profit motive, and deposits its surplus revenues into a trillion-dollar wealth fund that mostly invests abroad, including in the largest of American corporations. . . . [U]nlike in Venezuela, where the government used taxes on oil to fund social programs, the Norwegians use their sovereign wealth to accumulate more capital and cut taxes. Which of the two sounds more socialist to you?