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When I make up my mind, I act. If I speak, what I say, I will do. If the hail rattles, let the flowers be crushed. The oak of the forest will lift up its head to the sky and storm, towering and unscathed.

Osceola

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Osceola. Quoted in Florida's Past: People and Events That Shaped the State, written by Gene Burnett. Vol. 1, Pineapple Press, 1996, ch. 31. Originally a statement during treaty negotiations during the Second Seminole War. 1836, FL, USA.

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One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and holds fast to the days, as to fortune or fame.

Willa Cather

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Cather, Willa. Willa Cather in Europe: Her Own Story of the First Journey. Alfred A. Knopf, 1956, ch. 13. Originally a notebook entry in Le Lavandou. 10 Sept. 1902.

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Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress.

Neil Postman

Amusing Ourselves to Death

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Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Viking Penguin/Methuen Publishing, 1985, ch. 11.

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No power in society, no hardship in your condition can depress you, keep you down, in knowledge, power, virtue, influence, but by your own consent.

William Ellery Channing

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Channing, William Ellery. "Self Culture." Franklin Lecture. Sept. 1838, Boston, MA, USA.

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The North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are, for they live in colder climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction... They move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche.

Samuel Houston

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Houston, Samuel. Speech warning the people of Texas against secession. 19 Apr. 1861, Unnamed hotel window, Galveston, TX, USA.

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Houston, Samuel. Quoted in Sam Houston, written by James L. Haley. University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.

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An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: "There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important." This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.

William James

The Will to Believe

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James, William. "The Importance of Individuals." The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897.

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A general association of nations must be formed... For the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.

Woodrow Wilson

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Wilson, Woodrow. "The Fourteen Points." Congress meeting. 8 Jan. 1918, US Capitol Building, Washington, DC, USA. Address.

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Wilson, Woodrow. "The Fourteen Points." Woodrow Wilson: Essential Writings and Speeches of the Scholar-President, edited by Mario R. DiNunzio. NYU Press, 2006.

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The more money an American accumulates the less interesting he himself becomes.

Gore Vidal

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Vidal, Gore. "H. Hughes." The New York Review of Books, 20 Apr. 1972.

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And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this.

Jonathan Franzen

The Corrections

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Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.

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Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base.

George S. Patton

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Patton, George Smith. Address to the troops. 5 June 1944, England, UK.

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Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism-victimless collecting, as it were... In a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.

Susan Sontag

Melancholy Objects

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Sontag, Susan. "Melancholy Objects." The New York Review of Books, 18 Apr. 1974.

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The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere.

William Cullen Bryant

The Death of the Flowers

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Bryant, William Cullen. "The Death of the Flowers." Poems. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1839, st. 1.

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No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.

Ellen Glasgow

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Glasgow, Ellen. Address in New York. Modern Language Association meeting. 1936, New York, NY, USA.

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A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.

Michael Kinsley

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Kinsley, Michael. The Guardian. 14 Jan. 1992.

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It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.

Chuck Palahniuk

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Palahniuk, Chuck. Diary. Doubleday, 2003.

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We're a nation of community, of thousands and tens of thousands of ethnic, religious, social, business, labor union, neighborhood, regional and other organizations, all of them varied, voluntary, and unique... A brillant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.

George H.W. Bush

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Bush, George H. W. Acceptance address at the Republican National Convention. Republican National Convention. 18 Aug. 1988, New Orleans, LA, USA.

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Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

John Dewey

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Dewey, John. "The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action." 1928–1929, Edinburgh, Scotland.

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We're eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.

Dean Rusk

On the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 24th, 1962.

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Rusk, Dean. Quoted in "In Time of Crisis." Written by Stewart Alsop and Charles Bartlett. The Saturday Evening Post, 8 Dec. 1962. Originally spoken during a private conversation with McGeorge Bundy. ExComm meeting. 14 Oct. 1962, Cabinet Room, West Wing, The White House, Washington, DC, USA.

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They will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices are vices aped from white men or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion-not laziness: evasion: of what white men had set them to, not for their aggrandizement or even comfort but his own.

William Faulkner

Faulkner on black Americans.

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Faulkner, William. "The Bear." Go Down, Moses. Random House, 1942, pt. 4.

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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent.

Joan Didion

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Didion, Joan. "Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power." Vogue, 1 Aug. 1961.

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Didion, Joan. "On Self-Respect." Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968.

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