Now personally, I cannot abide 'Thought for the Day' and usually turn the radio off in a fit of righteous(can an athiest be righteous?) pique at the sentimental twaddle that is often peddled, or worse the frighteningly doctrinaire delivered in the same cosy format.
But this is magnificent and true, though not particularly comforting to those silly fools like me who still believe that good things will happen to you because you have done a good deed today.
Ecclesiastes 9:11
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
George Orwell in one of his greatest essays wrote a pastiche of this to show how degraded the English language had become and it went something like this
"Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena comples the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerabl element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."
Believe me George things have got far, far worse than you could have imagined. Your pastiche would be a model of brevity for the sort of nonsense sent out by the DFES and even lacks the nauseating 'Lets all be positive now' spin that most contemporary writing from schools and business comes marinated in.
