Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts that
Heaven has bestowed upon men; no treasures that the earth holds buried or the
sea conceals can compare with it; for freedom, as for honor, life may and should
be ventured.
Cervantes, Don
Quixote
Part II, Chapter 58
If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we
are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading
good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to all
- except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives
and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and
controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security,
as well as our liberty.
John
F. Kennedy
October 29, 1960
Freedom is a very good horse to ride; - but to ride somewhere.
You seem to think that you have only got to get on the back of your horse Freedom,
and ride away as hard as you can, to be sure of coming to the right destination.
Matthew Arnold
I come from a country that raises corn and cockleburs
and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me.
I'm from Missouri. You've got to show me.
Congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver, 1899
The
book (an academic study of The Declaration of Independence - originally published
in 1922) is now republished from the original plates because Mr. Alfred Knopf,
finding it out of print, was willing to take the risk involved in making it available
to the public. He may have thought that just now, when political freedom,
already lost in many countries, is everywhere threatened, the readers of books
would be more than ordinarily interested in the political principles of the Declaration
of Independence.
Carl Becker,
Ithaca, New York,
September
14, 1941
All human beings are endowed
with virtually unlimited imaginations and with seriously limited capabilities.
Vincent Ostrom, Indiana University
The first advice I'm going to give my successor is to
watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men
their opinions on military matters were worth a damn."
John F. Kennedy, Reflecting on the Bay of Pigs
Writing
on obscenity, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said of the subject,
"I shall not today attempt to further define the kind of materials I understand
to be embraced within that shorthand definition; and perhaps I could never succeed
in doing so... but I know it when I see it."
Former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart
The Brethren - pg 194
"In a
country like ours, no public institution, or the people who operate it, can be
above public debate."
Warren
E. Burger,
Circuit Court
of Appeals Judge, to Ohio Judicial Conference on September 4, 1968 -
nine months before being named Chief
Justice of the United States
"My faith in the
Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total, and I am not going to sit
here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction
of the Constitution."
Representative
Barbara Jordan (1936 - 1996) (R)
Speaking at the House Judiciary Watergate Impeachment Hearings, 1974
Known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert... Senator Claude Pepper was reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law and has a sister who was once a Thespian in Greenwich Village. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper, before his marriage, practiced celibacy.
Florida Senator George Smathers attacking his opponent Claude Pepper in the
1950 senatorial race.
“It is my firm belief that the past is the greatest teacher we have. It is the source of a great deal of our stability as a country. It propels us in the right direction, and it provides each individual with a surprisingly powerful emotional resonance from which we can begin to judge where we as individuals go.”
Ken Burns,
Lewis and Clark
– The Journey of the Corps of Discovery
© The American Lives Film Project, Inc. 1997
"Senator
Humphrey, I been praying about you… you're a good man, and you know what's right.
The trouble is, you're afraid to do what you know is right."
Fannie
Lou Hamer, 20th child of Mississippi sharecroppers, a civil rights worker, a beating
victim for trying to register to vote, and vociferous member of the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party, speaking to VP nominee Hubert Humphrey at the 1964 Democratic
National Convention.
"I have not thought that we were ready for American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. What I have been trying to do… was to get the boys in Vietnam to do their own fighting with our advice and with our equipment. That is the course we are following."
Stephen Ambrose, D-Day - June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World
War II, (Simon & Schuster,
New York, 1994), 425 - 426.
"Hopefully, I am
giving them the gem of inspiration by being their professor. What I try
to impress on my students is a need for a vision of the future of this country."
Barbara Jordan, Former Congresswoman
(1936 - 1996) (R)
The most important
thing that Mo Battle taught me was that chess was a game of consequences.
He said that, just as in life, there are consequences for every move you make
in chess. "Don't make a move without first weighing the potential consequences
because if you don't you have no control over the outcome." I'd never looked
at life like that. I had seldom weighed the consequences of anything until
after I'd done it. I'd do something crazy and then brace myself for the
outcome, whatever it happened to be. I had no control over the outcome and
no control over my life. When I thought about it, that was a helluva stupid
way to live.
Nathan McCall
Makes Me Wanna Holler ( pg.
148)
I have a strong belief
that novelists have a great deal to teach historians about plotting, about character
drawing, about other things, especially the concern about learning to be a good
writer, which many historians don’t bother to do.
Author and Civil War Historian, Shelby Foote
We do not act rightly because we have
virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Aristotle
Twenty
years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you did not do than
by the ones you did do.
So throw off the bowlines,
Sail away from the safe harbor,
Catch
the trade winds in your sails,
Explore, Dream,
Discover!
Anonymous
One man can make a difference and each
of us should try.
Robert F.
Kennedy
Ask not what your country can
do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
John F. Kennedy, January 20, 1961
I
went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential
facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when
I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Henry David Thoreau
Quotation from Walden
I am enthusiastic
over humanity's extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuities. If
you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough
to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But
this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form
of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops
in accepting yesterday's fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means
for solving a given problem.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
Every
so often the dog has to battle the bear just so he can call himself a dog again.
William Faulkner
For
better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered
by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer
much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat...
Life is worth nothing without action.
Theodore Roosevelt
“The Road Not Taken”
- by Robert Frost
Then took the
other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the
better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted
wear:
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And
both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step
had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another
day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I
shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages
and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood,
and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN
Most
of what I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I
learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate - school
mountain, but there is the sand pile at Sunday School. These are the things
I learned:
Share everything.
Play
fair.
Don't hit people.
Put
things back where you found them.
Clean up your
own mess.
Don't take things that aren't yours.
Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash
your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm
cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live
a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance
and play and work every day some.
Take
a nap every afternoon.
When you go out into the
world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
Be
aware of wonder.
Robert Fulghum
All
I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten
Ivy
Books, Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright
1986, 1988 by Robert L. Fulghum
Work
like you don't need the money.
Love like you've never been hurt.
Dance like
nobody's watching.
Satchel Paige
Jeff was the kind of guy you love to hate.
He was always in a good mood and always had something positive to say. When
someone would ask him how he was doing, he would reply, "If I were any better,
I would be twins!"
He was a unique manager because he had several waiters who had followed him around from restaurant to restaurant. The reason the waiters followed Jeff was because of his attitude. He was a natural motivator. If an employee was having a bad day, Jeff was there telling the employee how to look on the positive side of the situation.
Seeing this style really made me curious, so one day I went up to Jeff and asked him, "I don't get it! You can't be a positive person all of the time. How do you do it?"
Jeff replied, "Each morning I wake up and say to myself, Jeff, you have two choices today. You can choose to be in a good mood or you can choose to be in a bad mood.' I choose to be in a good mood. Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or I can choose to learn from it. I choose to learn from it.
Every time someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept their complaining or I can point out the positive side of life. I choose the positive side of life."
"Yeah, right, it's not that easy," I protested.
"Yes, it is," Jeff said. "Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice. You choose how you react to situations. You choose how people will affect your mood. You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. The bottom line: It's your choice how you live life."
I reflected on what Jeff said.
Soon thereafter, I left the restaurant industry to start my own business. We lost touch, but often thought about him when I made a choice about life instead of reacting to it.
Several years later, I heard that Jeff did something you are never supposed to do in a restaurant business: he left the back door open one morning and was held up at gunpoint by three armed robbers. While trying to open the safe, his hand, shaking from nervousness, slipped off the combination. The robbers panicked and shot him.
Luckily, Jeff was found relatively quickly and rushed to the local trauma center. After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, Jeff was released from the hospital with fragments of the bullets still in his body.
I saw Jeff about six months after the accident. When I asked him how he was, he said, "If I were any better, I'd be twins. Wanna see my scars?" I declined to see his wounds, but did ask him what had gone through his mind as the robbery took place.
"The first thing that went through my mind was that I should have locked the back door," Jeff replied. "Then, as lay on the floor, I remembered that I had two choices: I could choose to live, or I could choose to die. I chose to live.
"Weren't you scared? Did you lose consciousness?" I asked.
Jeff continued, "The paramedics were great. They kept telling me I was going to be fine. But when they wheeled me into the emergency room and I saw the expressions on the faces of the doctors and nurses, I got really scared. In their eyes, I read, 'He's a dead man.' I knew I needed to take action."
"What did you do?" I asked.
"Well, there was a big, burly nurse shouting questions at me," said Jeff. "She asked if I was allergic to anything. Yes, I replied. The doctors and nurses stopped working as they waited for my reply. I took a deep breath and yelled, 'Bullets!' Over their laughter, I told them, 'I am choosing to live. Operate on me as if I am alive, not dead.'"
Jeff lived thanks to the skill of his doctors, but also because of his amazing attitude. I learned from him that every day we have the choice to live fully. Attitude, after all, is everything.
You have 2 choices now:
1. Save or delete this mail from your mail box, or
2. Forward it to people you care about.
Hope you will choose No. 2.
Work like you don't need the money
Love like you've never been hurt
Dance like nobody's watching
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I'm pleased God made my
skin black; I wish He'd made it thicker.
Curt Flood, circa 1954
"I have a dream my four
little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by
the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a
dream today!"
Martin Luther
King Jr.
August 28, 1963
"It may be true that that the law cannot
make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty
important."
Martin Luther
King Jr.
"To tolerate anti-Semitism is to cooperate with the evils of prejudice and bigotry that Martin Luther King, Jr., fought against. In a speech he delivered one month before he was assassinated, my husband said, 'For the black man to struggle for justice and then turn around and be anti-Semitic is not only a very irrational course, but it is a very immoral course, and wherever we have seen anti-Semitism we have condemned it with all our might.'"
I have come to
believe two things that might seem contradictory: Some of our worst childhood
fears were true - the establishment is teeming with racism. Yet I also believe
whites are as befuddled about race as we are, and they're as scared of us as we
are of them. Many of them are seeking solutions, just like us.
Nathan McCall
Makes Me
Wanna Holler (402)
Our too-young
and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid,
insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil,
the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is freightened of fact,
of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning
those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those whom it cannot understand,
of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped
cloak of righteousness.
Richard
Wright
Black Boy
(321)
Black Boy (American Hunger) A Record
of Childhood and Youth, Richard Wright; Harper Collins, New York, Copyright
1944.
How did I deal with
racism? I beat it. I said, 'I am not going to carry this burden of
racism. I'm going to destroy your stereotype. I'm proud to be black.
You carry this burden of racism, because I'm not going to.'
Colin Powell
General, U.S.
Army, Retired
Chairman, Joint
Chiefs of Staff
We are now in a period
where society is going to have to grow up and face the kinds of flaws that people
have, who may in fact be important people... Young people are often cynical
because every historical figure in America wasn’t a perfect person. For
example, Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, so his writing of the Declaration of Independence
doesn’t mean anything. When I would talk to black kids who were so irritated
by the various flaws they found in certain white historical figures, and they’d
say, “we want to reject all that and find something that’s pure and real,” I would
ask them, “had they ever heard of William Shockley,” and the answer would invariably
be no. And I said, “you know William Shockley is an arch, died in the neck,
redneck, racist, scumbag dog of the sort you’re talking about. He also is
one of the three guys who got the Nobel prize for inventing the transistor.”
And I said, “I truly do wish you would reject him and his product - because then
we wouldn’t have to put up with them God damn boom boxes.”
Author
and former teacher, Stanley Crouch (The All-American Skin Game, or Decoy
of Race) Quote from C-Span broadcast, Sept. 1, 1997, 6:30 PM
The people who never do anything
wrong
Are the people who never do anything.
If you're not the lead dog, the view never
changes.
Lewis Grizzard
Without enemies, nations can't exist.
William S. Burroughs
Wherever I found religion in my life I found strife, the attempt of one individual or group to rule another in the name of God. The naked will to power seemed always to walk in the wake of a hymn.
Intellectually I know that America is no
better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other
country.
Sinclair Lewis
Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates; every Athenian
assembly would still have been a mob.
James Madison - Federalist 58
"As a human being, he was a miserable person - a bully, sadist, lout, and egoist… His lapses from civilized conduct were deliberate and usually intended to subordinate someone else to do his will. He did disgusting things because he realized that other people had to pretend that they did not mind. It was his method of bending them to his desires."
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I'm so fast, that when I turn out the light at night, I'm in bed before it's dark.
(To put this quote in context, Satchel Paige was playing in the Negro Baseball Leagues and in those times, the light switch for a hotel room was near the door - one switch for the room - you had to walk across the room to get into bed.. As Satchel told the story, the switch was defective and sparked when the lights were turned off - hence the true statement -he was so fast, he was in bed before it was dark.)Satchel Paige