On knowing when to quit and hit the road
Bill Moyers is quitting NOW after the US November elections. VP Guingona may be able to relate with Moyers's farewell open letter:

You don't want to quit altogether. You keep thinking of those lines from Tennyson's "Ulysses": How dull it is to pause, to make an end/ to rust unburnished, not to shine in use.

But slowing down is not quitting. And you also think about the legendary black pitcher Satchel Paige, who spent most of his career in what was then called the Negro Baseball League. By the time the racial barriers were relaxed, he was, as baseball measures the life span, an old man. That didn't stop him from doing the one thing he knew how to do well – he just kept on pitching, and pitching, and pitching.

When a reporter asked him, "How old are you?" He replied: "How old would you be if you didn't know how old you was?" One day, though, he found out, and even Satchel Paige handed the ball to a younger man and left the mound for good. Knowing when is the trick; timing is what counts.

Timing is what counts. Those who quit fast, died young are the people who loom large in the historical imagination: Jesus Christ, Alexander the Great, Evita Peron, Martin Luther King Jr, Cesare Borgia, Che Guevara. Emilio Aguinaldo arguably faded in Philippine history not so much because he betrayed Bonifacio but because he grew old and never died young, as all good historical figures should do. The astute Mahathir Mohamad understands this cardinal rule: if you want to secure a page in history better quit fast lest people get bored with you.