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Summary. We all have favorite quotes and here are some of mine. I will add to this page as I find new quotes or remember an old one. We need to be careful, though, when we deal with quotations. First, we need to avoid a "bumper sticker" approach to things. Life is too complicated to be reduced to a few sound bites, quotes, and whatever will fit on to a bumper sticker. Second, we need to recognize that quotes were made in context and we must be careful to apply a quote in the same context from which it came. Finally, if we are going to quote, we need to get it right. So, with all that philosophy dispensed, let's get on with it. Listed below are some of the quotes that I like. "Leap and the net will appear." " The best things in life are not things." "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional." "Freedom's just another word "Tell the truth. There is less to remember." "The question is not if we should be extremists, "As night does not come at once, neither does "The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice." "The naming of cats is a difficult matter, "Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines --
you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes it
aware of who it is that is having the experience. That is not always comfortable,
but it is always invigorating." "There is but one race, the human race, and we are all made in God's
image." "He was a hard-headed man, "The finger that points to the moon "But let justice roll on like a river, "Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees."
"What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each
other?" ". . . Oh, my children, where air (are) we going on this mighty river of
earth, a-borning, "And I've been walking 'round with memories way too long . . . " "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; "If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to
live." "You can check out any time you want -- "War is at best barbarism. . . . Its glory is all moonshine. It is
only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded
who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell." "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it."
"In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up
because I wasn't a Communist. "Our chiefs are killed. . . . The old men are all dead. . . . The
little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them have run away to the
hills and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are, perhaps freezing
to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can
find. Maybe I can find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. My heart
is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever."
"He chewed his tobacco for a time, quietly retrospective, reliving in the
company of men now dust with the dust for which they had, unwittingly perhaps,
fought, those gallant, pinch-bellied days into which few who now trod that earth
and drew breath, could enter with him." and some of us came back from there; and that's all except the details. " Praxiteles Swan, Captain, Confederate States Army. (Note: "Praxiteles Swan, Captain, CSA," is a fictional character in a book titled Lone Star Preacher: Being a Chronicle of the Acts of Praxiteles Swan, M.E. Church South Sometime Captain, 5th Texas Regiment Confederate States Provisional Army by Colonel John W. Thomason, Jr., USMC, a veteran of the First World War, and grandson of Captain Thomas J. Goree, a member of Confederate General James Longstreet's staff.)
"Call me Ishmael." . . . ". . . then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago. . . . "Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan."
“A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”
". . . , whatever you did for the least of these brothers of mine, you did
for me." "And the three men I admire the most -- the Father, Son, and the
Holy Ghost -- "Why's the rich man busy dancin' "Do or do not, there is no try." "Buzzards got to eat, same as the worms." "Wanderers are not always lost."
"He has told you, O man, what is good; "In This Universe The Night was Falling, The Shadows were
lengthening "There's a black man dead for no reason. Now the man
responsible for it is dead. Let the dead bury the dead this time Mr. Finch. I
never heard tell it was against the law for any citizen to do his utmost to
prevent a crime from being committed, which is exactly what he did. But maybe
you'll tell me it's my duty to tell the town all about it and not to hush it up.
Well you know what'll happen then? All the ladies in Maycomb including my wife
will be knocking on his door bringing angel food cakes. To my way of thinking,
taking the one man who's done you and this town a big service and dragging him
with his shy ways into the limelight - to me that's a sin... it's a sin. And I'm
not about to have it on my head. I may not be much Mr. Finch, but I'm still
sheriff of Maycomb County and Bob Ewell fell on his knife. Good night sir. " From To Kill A Mockingbird "I remember when my daddy gave me that gun. He told me that I
should never point it at anything in the house; and that he'd rather I'd shoot
at tin cans in the backyard. But he said that sooner or later he supposed the
temptation to go after birds would be too much, and that I could shoot all the
blue jays I wanted - if I could hit 'em; but to remember it was a sin to kill a
mockingbird. Well, I reckon because mockingbirds don't do anything but make
music for us to enjoy. They don't eat people's gardens, don't nest in the
corncrib, they don't do one thing but just sing their hearts out for us. " "Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter
morning more than twenty years ago." "And when that happens, I know it. A message saying so merely
confirms a piece of news some secret vein had already received, severing from me
an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose like a kite on a broken
string. That is why, walking across a school campus on this particular December
morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts,
a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven. "
" Instructions had been given; and when the head of each division column comes
opposite our group, our bugle sounds the signal and instantly our whole line
from right to left, regiment by regiment in succession, gives the soldiers
salutation, from the "order arms" to the old "carry" -- the marching salute.
Gordon at the head of the column, riding with heavy spirit and. downcast face,
catches the sound of shifting arms, looks up, and, taking the meaning, wheels
superbly, making with himself and his horse one uplifted figure, with profound
salutation as he drops the point of his sword to the boot toe; then facing to
his own command, gives word for his successive brigades to pass us with the same
position of the manual -- honor answering honor. On our part not a sound of
trumpet more, nor roll of drum; not a cheer, nor word nor whisper of
vain-glorying, nor motion of man standing again at the order, but an awed
stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead! "
"I don't know the answer to nothing, not a blessed thing. I don't know why I
wandered out to this part of Texas drunk and you took me in and pitied me and
helped me to straighten out, marry me. Why? Why did that happen? Is there a
reason that happened? And Sonny's Daddy died in a war. My daughter killed in an
automobile accident. Why? You see I don't trust happiness. I never did. I never
will."
"We're all travelers in this world - from sweet grass to the packin' house - birth till death - we travel between the eternities. " -- Prentice Ritter, Robert Duval's character in the TV series "Broken Trail"
April 12 was the appointed day for the formal surrender of the last and largest component of the Army of Northern Virginia, the infantry. Before leaving Appomattox, U.S. Grant appointed General Joshua Chamberlain of Maine to receive the surrender on behalf of the Union army giving him instruction that "the ceremony to be as simple as possible, and that nothing should be done to humiliate the manhood of the Southern soldiers". Chamberlain, one of the many heroes of Gettysburg, received a battlefield promotion to General at Petersburg in June 1864 after receiving a wound that was thought to be fatal. It did indeed prove so, but not until 1914 when he suffered an infection related to the wound and was treated by the same doctor who had saved his life fifty years before . To conduct the Confederate surrender Lee selected General John B Gordon of Georgia, one of his best division commanders (and later to be Senator and Governor in Georgia, along with possibly being one of the leaders of the newly-formed Klu Klux Klan). The final ceremony began at 6 A.M. and it took nearly ten hours for all the Confederates to march by and stack arms. General Joshua Chamberlain, in his memoirs titled The Passing of the Armies, describes the scene: It was now the morning of the 12th of April . . .
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