Thoughts for November 2015

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  1.  "The world is full of fools; and he who would not wish to see one, must not only shut himself up alone, but must also break his mirror." ~ Nicolas Boileau

"Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l'admire." = "A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him." ~ Nicolas Boileau

"A man said to the universe: 'Sir I exist!' 'However,' replied the universe, 'the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.'" ~ Stephen Crane

"An illness is like a journey into a far country; it sifts all one's experience and removes it to a point so remote that it appears like a vision." ~ Sholem Asch

"Every dawn renews the Beginning, and to behold the earth struggling out of the formless void, out of the night, is to witness the act of creation." ~ Sholem Asch

  2.  "Courage! I have shown it for years; think you I shall lose it at the moment when my sufferings are to end?" ~ Marie Antoinette

"America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality." ~ Warren G. Harding, Speech in Boston, MA (24 May 1920)

"There is something inherently wrong, something out of accord with the ideals of representative democracy, when one portion of our citizenship turns its activities to private gain amid defensive war while another is fighting, sacrificing, or dying for national preservation." ~ Warren G. Harding, Inaugural address (4 March 1921).

"By the theory of our Government majorities rule, but this right is not an arbitrary or unlimited one. It is a right to be exercised in subordination to the Constitution and in conformity to it. One great object of the Constitution was to restrain majorities from oppressing minorities or encroaching upon their just rights. Minorities have a right to appeal to the Constitution as a shield against such oppression." ~ James K. Polk, Inaugural Address (4 March 1845)

  3.  "I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it always." ~ Andre Malraux

"Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love, and of thought, which, in the course of centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved." ~ Andre Malraux

  4.  "On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does." ~ Will Rogers

"Too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they don't want, to impress people they don't like." ~ Will Rogers

We are here just for a spell and then pass on. So get a few laughs and do the best you can. Live your life so that whenever you lose it, you are ahead." ~ Will Rogers

"There is one rule that works in every calamity. Be it pestilence, war, or famine, the rich get richer and poor get poorer. The poor even help arrange it." ~ Will Rogers

  5.  "Make no man your idol; for the best man must have faults, and his faults will usually become yours in addition to your own. This is as true in art as an morals." ~ Washington Allston

"Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to benumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals." ~ Ida Tarbell

"Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs." ~ Will Durant

"There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won." ~ Will Durant, 'The Story of Civilization'

  6.  "In spite of all the training you get and precautions you take to keep yourself alive, it's largely a matter of luck that decided whether or not you get killed. It doesn't make any difference who you are, how tough you are, how nice a guy you might be, or how much you may know, if you happen to be at a certain spot at a certain time, you get it." ~ James Jones (author of "From Here to Eternity"), Letter to his brother Jeff from Guadalcanal (28 Jan 1943)

"I'm an American, and always will be. I happen to love that big, awkward, sprawling country very much — and its big, awkward, sprawling people. Anyway, I don't like politics; and I don't make "political gestures," as you call it. I don't even believe in politics. To me, politics is like one of those annoying, and potentially dangerous (but generally just painful) chronic diseases that you just have to put up with in your life if you happen to have contracted it." ~ James Jones, 'The Paris Review' interview (1958)

"Good sense travels on the well-worn paths; genius, never. And that is why the crowd, not altogether without reason, is so ready to treat great men as lunatics." ~ Cesare Lombroso, 'The Man of Genius' (1891)

  7.  "The legacy we leave is not just in our possessions, but in the quality of our lives. The greatest waste in all of our earth, which cannot be recycled or reclaimed, is our waste of the time that God has given us each day." ~ Billy Graham

"I'm somewhat horrified because I don't think the young people today even know what history is. Some of them don't' even study History at school anymore or Geography and they don't know where one place is from another." ~ Joan Sutherland

"Humanity, surely, needs practical men who make the best of their work for the sake of their own interests, without forgetting the general interest. But it also needs dreamers, for whom the unselfish following of a purpose is so imperative that it becomes impossible for them to devote much attention to their own material benefit. No doubt it could be said that these idealists do not deserve riches since they do not have the desire for them. It seems, however, that a society well organized ought to assure to these workers the means for efficient labor, in a life from which material care is excluded so that this life may be freely devoted to the service of scientific research." ~ Marie Curie, 'Pierre Curie' (1923)

"The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of a murderer is blind: and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness." ~ Albert Camus

  8.  "People often say, with pride, 'I'm not interested in politics.' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.' ... If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics." ~ Martha Gellhorn, "White Into Black" in 'Granta' (January 1984)

"After a lifetime of war-watching, I see war as an endemic human disease, and governments are the carriers." ~ Martha Gellhorn, 'The Face of War' (1959)

"All wars are sacred to those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn't make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight?" ~ Margaret Mitchell, 'Gone With the Wind' (1936)

  9.  "Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us - and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along." ~ Carl Sagan

"The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true." ~ Carl Sagan

"What, then, is taste, but those internal powers, active and strong, and feelingly alive to each fine impulse? a discerning sense of decent and sublime, with quick disgust from things deformed, or disarranged, or gross in species? This, nor gems, nor stores of gold, nor purple state, nor culture, can bestow, but God alone when first his sacred hand imprints the secret bias of the soul." ~ Mark Akenside

10.  "Courage is a moral quality; it is not a chance gift of nature like an aptitude for games. It is a cold choice between two alternatives." ~ Charles Wilson, 1st Baron Moran, 'The Anatomy of Courage' (1967)

"Hope, like the gleaming taper's light,
Adorns and cheers our way;
And still, as darker grows the night,
Emits a brighter ray."
~ Oliver Goldsmith, 'The Captivity'

"I was ever of the opinion, that the honest man who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population." ~ Oliver Goldsmith

11.  "The salvation of the common people of every race and of every land from war or servitude must be established on solid foundations and must be guarded by the readiness of all men and women to die rather than submit to tyranny." ~ Winston Churchill, Speech at Zurich University (19 Sep 1946)

"There are three ways that men get what they want; by planning, by working, and by praying. Any great military operation takes careful planning, or thinking. Then you must have well-trained troops to carry it out: that's working. But between the plan and the operation there is always an unknown. That unknown spells defeat or victory, success or failure. It is the reaction of the actors to the ordeal when it actually comes. Some people call that getting the breaks; I call it God. God has His part, or margin in everything, That's where prayer comes in." ~ George S. Patton

"Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains that victory." ~ George S. Patton, 'Cavalry Journal' (1933)

"There is a great deal of talk about loyalty from the bottom to the top. Loyalty from the top down is even more necessary and much less prevalent. One of the most frequently noted characteristics of great men who have remained great is loyalty to their subordinates." ~ George S. Patton, 'War As I Knew It'

"Power always has to be kept in check; power exercised in secret, especially under the cloak of national security, is doubly dangerous." ~ William Proxmire

12.  "What a terrible time this is to be a Christian. The churches have failed and betrayed us, and the ministry preaches hate and murder. If there is a sane and reasoning voice in the Christian church today it is sadly silent." ~ Auguste Rodin (1840-1917)

"There is a continual exchange of ideas between all minds of a generation. Journalists, popular novelists, illustrators, and cartoonists adapt the truths discovered by the powerful intellects for the multitude. It is like a spiritual flood, like a gush that pours into multiple cascades until it forms the great moving sheet of water that stands for the mentality of a period." ~ Auguste Rodin (1840-1917)

"And therefore you must know that you can forfeit the grace and help of God by your willful sinning or negligence, though you cannot, without grace, turn to God. If you will not do what you can, it is just with God to deny you that grace by which you might do more." ~ Richard Baxter, 'A Call to the Unconverted to Turn and Live,' Preface (1658)

"As the fire doth mount upwards, and the needle that is touched with the loadstone still turneth to the north, so the converted soul is inclined to God. Nothing else can satisfy him, nor can he find any content and rest but in his love. In a word, all that are converted do esteem and love God better than all the world; and the heavenly felicity is dearer to them than their fleshly prosperity." ~ Richard Baxter, 'A Call to the Unconverted to Turn and Live,' Sermon I (1658)

13.  "There is no unmixed good in human affairs; the best principles, if pushed to excess, degenerate into fatal vices. Generosity is nearly allied to extravagance; charity itself may lead to ruin; the sternness of justice is but one step removed from the severity of oppression. It is the same in the political world; the tranquillity of despotism resembles the stagnation of the Dead Sea; the fever of innovation the tempests of the ocean. It would seem as if, at particular periods, from causes inscrutable to human wisdom, a universal frenzy seizes mankind; reason, experience, prudence, are alike blinded; and the very classes who are to perish in the storm are the first to raise its fury." ~ Archibald Alison (1757-1839)

"The constitutional right of free speech has been declared to be the same in peace and war. In peace, too, men may differ widely as to what loyalty to our country demands, and an intolerant majority, swayed by passion or by fear, may be prone in the future, as it has been in the past, to stamp as disloyal opinions with which it disagrees." ~ Louis Brandeis

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." ~ Louis Brandeis, 'Olmstead v. United States' (1928)

14.  "Peace is not a relationship of nations. It is a condition of mind brought about by a serenity of soul. Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is also a state of mind. Lasting peace can come only to peaceful people." ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

"The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation and the preservation of vested interests." ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

"No country or people who are slaves to dogma and dogmatic mentality can progress, and unhappily our country and people have become extraordinarily dogmatic and little-minded." ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

15.  "Not even the apparently enlightened principle of the 'greatest good for the greatest number' can excuse indifference to individual suffering. There is no test for progress other than its impact on the individual." ~ Aneurin Bevan, 'In Place of Fear' (1952)

"It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. It is too easy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end." ~ Felix Frankfurter, 'Davis v. United States', 328 U.S. 582, 597 (1946)

"Without a free press there can be no free society. That is axiomatic. However, freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society. The scope and nature of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press are to be viewed and applied in that light." ~ Felix Frankfurter, 'The New York Times' (28 Nov 1954)

16.  "There is a law which decrees that two objects may not occupy the same place at the same time — result: two people cannot see things from the same point of view, and the slightest difference in angle changes the thing seen." ~ Mildred Aldrich

"There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It's not one man's job. It's not one person's job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail — the bravery, even, of the lions." ~ Chinua Achebe, Paris Review interview (Winter 1994)

"The invention of IQ did a great disservice to creativity in education. Individuality, personality, originality, are too precious to be meddled with by amateur psychiatrists whose patterns for a 'wholesome personality' are inevitably their own." ~ Joel Henry Hildebrand

"Is there really someone who, searching for a group of wise and sensitive people to regulate him for his own good, would choose that group of people who constitute the membership of both houses of Congress?" ~ Robert Nozick

17.  "The United States has broken the second rule of war. That is: don't go fighting with your land army on the mainland in Asia. Rule One is, don't march on Moscow. I developed those two rules myself." ~ Bernard Montgomery, Interview, 2 July 1968

"Religion can get on with any sort of astronomy, geology, biology, physics. But it cannot get on with a purposeless and meaningless universe. If the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends, money, fame, art, science, and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center. Hence the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless, spirit of modern man." ~ Walter Terence Stace, 'Man Against Darkness' (1948)

18.  "The road to success is not to be run upon by seven leagued boots. Step by step, little by little, bit by bit - that is the way to wealth, that is the way to wisdom, that is the way to glory." ~ Charles Buxton (1823-1871)

"A miser grows rich by seeming poor; an extravagant man grows poor by seeming rich." ~ William Shenstone (1714-1763)

"I have been through the depths of poverty and sickness. When people ask me what has kept me going through the troubles that come to all of us, I always reply: 'I stood yesterday. I can stand today. And I will not permit myself to think about what might happen tomorrow.'" ~ Dorothy Dix, (1861-1951)

"In all the world there are no people so piteous and forlorn as those who are forced to eat the bitter bread of dependence in their old age, and find how steep are the stairs of another man's house." ~ Dorothy Dix, 'Every-Day Help for Every-Day People' (1926)

19.  "It is legitimate to have one's own point of view and political philosophy. But there are people who make anger, rather than a deeply held belief, the basis of their actions. They do not seem to mind harming society as a whole in the pursuit of their immediate objective. No society can survive if it yields to the demands of frenzy, whether of the few or the many." ~ Indira Gandhi, 'Freedom Is the Starting Point' (1976)

"Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained." ~ James A. Garfield

"I am an advocate of paper money, but that paper money must represent what it professes on its face. I do not wish to hold in my hands the printed lies of the government." ~ James A. Garfield

"Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile." ~ Billy Sunday

"All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource." ~ Peter Drucker

20.  "The best compliment to a child or a friend is the feeling you give him that he has been set free to make his own inquiries, to come to conclusions that are right for him, whether or not they coincide with your own." ~ Alistair Cooke

"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." ~ Nadine Gordimer, 'Censorship and its Aftermath' lecture (June 1990)

"It is not the conscious changes made in their lives by men and women — a new job, a new town, a divorce — which really shape them, like the chapter headings in a biography, but a long, slow mutation of emotion, hidden, all-penetrative; something by which they may be so taken up that the practical outward changes of their lives in the world, noted with surprise, scandal or envy by others, pass almost unnoticed by themselves. This gives a shifting quality to the whole surface of life; decisions made with reason and the tongue may never be made valid by the heart." ~ Nadine Gordimer, 'The Lying Days' (1953)

21.  "Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day." ~ Voltaire

Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives, and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time." ~ Voltaire

"All men would then be necessarily equal, if they were without needs. It is the poverty connected with our species which subordinates one man to another. It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence." ~ Voltaire, "Equality" in 'A Philosophical Dictionary' (1764)

"A multitude of laws in a country is like a great number of physicians, a sign of weakness and malady." ~ Voltaire

22.  "Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first." ~ Charles de Gaulle

"Friendship is the joy, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring all right out as they are, chaff and grain together, confident that a faithful, friendly hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of comfort, blow the rest away." ~ George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

"Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact." ~ George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), 'Impressions of Theophrastus Such' (1879)

"Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat." ~ George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), 'Scenes of Clerical Life' (1857)

23.  "Quemad viejos leños, leed viejos libros, bebed viejos vinos, tened viejos amigos." = "Burn old wood, read old books, drink old wines, have old friends. Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appeared to be best in these four things." ~ Alfonso X of Castile (1221-1284)

"Los que dejan al rey errar a sabiendas, merecen pena como traidores." = "Those who knowingly allow the King to err deserve the same punishment as traitors." ~ Alfonso X of Castile (1221-1284)

"I always considered an idle Life, as a real evil, but, a life of such hurry, such constant hurry, leaves us scarcely a moment for reflection or for the discharge of any other then the most immediate and pressing concerns." ~ Edward Rutledge (1749-1800)

"I have never believed that actual disruption of the Union can occur without blood; and if, through the madness of Northern Abolitionists, that dire calamity must come, the fighting will not be along Mason's and Dixon's line merely. It [will] be within our own borders, in our own streets, between the two classes of citizens to whom I have referred." ~ Franklin Pierce, Letter to Jefferson Davis (6 January 1860)

24.  "There are men — now in power in this country — who do not respect dissent, who cannot cope with turmoil, and who believe that the people of America are ready to support repression as long as it is done with a quiet voice and a business suit." ~ John Lindsay

"Government can't do anything for you except in proportion as it can do something to you." ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

"Time is the most terrible, the most discouraging, the most unconquerable of all obstacles, and one that may exist when no other does." ~ Marie Bashkirtseff (1878)

"The most tyrannical of governments are those which make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts." ~ Baruch Spinoza

"The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak." ~ Baruch Spinoza

25.  "The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: decide what you want." ~ Ben Stein

"Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams.Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in,but with what it is still possible for you to do." ~ Pope John XXIII

"We're mortal - which is to say, we're ignorant, stupid, and sinful - but those are only handicaps. Our pride is that nevertheless, now and then, we do our best. A few times we succeed. What more dare we ask for?" ~ Poul Anderson, 'Ensign Flandry' (1966)

"Keep on thinking. Keep your thinking close to the ground, where it belongs. Don’t ever trade your liberty for another man’s offer to do your thinking and make your mistakes for you." ~ Poul Anderson, 'Brain Wave' (1954)

26.  "Better to trust the man who is frequently in error than the one who is never in doubt." ~ Eric Sevareid

"The bigger the information media, the less courage and freedom they allow. Bigness means weakness." ~ Eric Sevareid

"Education by the State is a contradiction in terms. Intellectual development is only possible to those who have seen through society." ~ Celia Green, 'The Decline and Fall of Science' (1976)

"It is easier to make people appear equally stupid than to make them equally clever, so teaching methods are adopted which make it practically impossible for anyone to learn anything." ~ Celia Green, 'Letters from Exile: Observations on a Culture in Decline' (2004)

27.  "All the lessons of history in four sentences: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars." ~ Charles A. Beard (1874-1948)

"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence." ~ Charles A. Beard (1874-1948)

"In every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, and no matter what parents, the potentiality of the race is born again." ~ James Agee, 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men' (1941)

28.  "If my life is fruitless, it doesn't matter who praises me, and if my life is fruitful, it doesn't matter who criticizes me." ~ John Bunyan (1628-1688)

"The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose." ~ William Blake (1757-1827)

"In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them." ~ Brooks Atkinson (1894-1984)

"People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know." ~ Brooks Atkinson (1894-1984)

"Anyone of my generation who trusts government probably has an I.Q. that would make a good golf score." ~ Rita Mae Brown (b. 1944)

29.  "Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important." ~ C. S. Lewis

I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him." ~ C. S. Lewis

If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will ... then we may take it it is worth paying." ~ C. S. Lewis, 'Mere Christianity' (1952)

"A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in." ~ C. S. Lewis, 'Mere Christianity' (1952)

"Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young." ~ Mary Schmich, (1 June 1997)

30.   "We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder censorship, we call it concern for commercial viability." ~ David Mamet

"The problem is when you try to impose today's standards on people living back then. It's the politically correct thing to do, but it was a different era, a different country then." ~ Dick Clark

"Most Americans have never seen the ignorance, degradation, hunger, sickness, and futility in which many other Americans live. Until a problem reaches their doorsteps, they're not going to understand. They won't become involved in economic or political change until something brings the seriousness of the situation home to them." ~ Shirley Chisholm, 'Unbought and Unbossed' (1970)

"Congress seems drugged and inert most of the time. Even when the problems it ignores build up to crises and erupt in strikes, riots, and demonstrations, it has not moved. Its idea of meeting a problem is to hold hearings or, in extreme cases, to appoint a commission." ~ Shirley Chisholm, 'Unbought and Unbossed' (1970)

"Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race." ~ Jacques Barzun