By DEN MCLAUGHLIN

dmclaughlin@tnonline.comA belated Merry Christmas to one and all.I'm not one for making New Year resolutions, and keeping them, but as we head into a new year here are some quotes from well-known, and not so well-known persons on new year resolutions.Jay Leno: Now there are more overweight people in America than average-weight people. So overweight people are now average...which means, you have met your New Year's resolution.Bill Vaughan: An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.Oprah Winfrey: Cheers to a New Year and another chance for us to get it right.Brooks Atkinson: Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.James Agate: New Year's resolution. To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.Joey Adams: May all your troubles last as long as your New Year's resolutions!Leonard Bernstein: From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.P.J. O'Rourke: The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you're married to.Eric Zorn: Making resolutions is a cleansing ritual of self assessment and repentance that demands personal honesty and, ultimately, reinforces humility. Breaking them is part of the cycle.Charles Lamb: New Year's Day is every man's birthday.Oscar Wilde: Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.Judith Crist: Happiness is too many things these days for anyone to wish it on anyone lightly. So let's just wish each other a bile-less New Year and leave it at that.G.K. Chesterton: The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose, new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards. Unless a man be born again, he shall by no means enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.A finally two from Mark Twain:New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions.New Year's Day...now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.