Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard." (Interview with NEH chairman Bruce Cole, Humanities, July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4)
History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.
Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.
Nothing ever invented provides such sustenance, such infinite reward for time spent, as a good book.
If you get down about the state of American culture, just remember there are still more public libraries in this country than there are McDonalds.
Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives. - John Adams
You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.
When a friend of Abigail and John Adams was killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail's response was to write a letter to her husband and include these words, "My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.
No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read." (The Course of Human Events, NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities 2003)
The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know...do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough.
You've got to marinate your head, in that time and culture. You've got to become them." (Speaking about researching, and reading, and immersing yourself in History)
I think that we need history as much as we need bread or water or love.
You have overburdened your argument with ostentatious erudition." Spoken by Abigail Adams
Only those who [do] nothing [make] no mistakes.
If I were giving a young man advice as to how he might succeed in life, I would say to him, pick out a good father and mother, and begin life in Ohio. WILBUR WRIGHT
How can we know who we are and where we are going if we don't know anything about where we have come from and what we have been through, the courage shown, the costs paid, to be where we are?
The great thing about the arts is that you can only learn to do it by doing it.
Nobody ever lived in the past.
All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others.
No bird soars in a calm. WILBUR WRIGHT
The source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think....Let us dare to read, think, speak, write.
It was a day and age that saw no reason why one could not learn whatever was required - learn vitally anything - by the close study of books.
Curiosity is what separates us from the cabbages. It's accelerative. The more we know, the more we want to know.
The past after all is only another name for someone else's present.
I lament the want of a liberal education. I feel the mist of ignorance to surround me - Nathanael Greene
We learn much by tribulation, and by adversity our hearts are made better.
Remove yourself, sir!
We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the earth. But we were wrong. . .
The best dividends on the labor invested have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.” Signed Wilbur and Orville Wright, March 12, 1906.
A leader must look and act the part.
In truth, the situation was worse than they realized, and no one perceived this as clearly as Washington. Seeing things as they were, and not as he would wish them to be, was one of his salient strengths.
Indeed, bribery, favoritism, and corruption in a great variety of forms were rampant not only in politics, but in all levels of society.
There are no people on earth in whom a spirit of enthusiastic zeal is so readily kindled, and burns so remarkably, as Americans
As the Sword was the last resort for the preservation of our liberties, so it ought to be the first thing laid aside when those liberties are firmly established
I feel that as much as I enjoy loafing, there is something higher for which to live.
Vivez joyeux” was the old saying. “Live joyfully.
A man who will steal for me will steal from me." Theodore Roosevelt, dismissing on the spot one of his best cowhands who was about to claim for his boss an unmarked animal.
The only way to compose myself and collect my thoughts," he wrote in his diary,"is to set down at my table, place my diary before me, and take my pen into my hand.
Because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished.
Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots,” and
Honesty, sincerity, and openness, I esteem essential marks of a good mind,
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.
Those for whom things came easily usually made less of an effort, not more.
Adams was both a devout Christian and an independent thinker, and he saw no conflict in that.
Marinate your mind
Patience which I assure you requires more force of character than does action.
The study of history is an antidote to the hubris of the present – the idea that everything we have, everything we do and everything we think is the ultimate, the best.
It is in Paris that the beating of Europe’s heart is felt. Paris is the city of cities." - Victor Hugo
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He loved politics in large part exactly because it meant time spent with men like Cactus Jack Garner(who would be remembered for observing that the vice presidency was not worth a pitcher of warm piss).
Make business first, pleasure afterward, and that guarded. All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others. He made a point of treating
The clock would be simple if you destroyed all the wheels . . . but it would not tell the time of day.” On
I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern.” Their
In an exhibition wherein paintings of nudes were commonplace, that of Madame Gautreau in her black evening dress was considered scandalously erotic. -from The Greater Journey
A veteran artist counsels a less experienced one to start a painting using colors in the middle range so that the painter can move to more extreme colors as the work progresses.
Morality only is eternal. All the rest is balloon and bubble from the cradle to the grave.
Lord, grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest I am hard to turn,
Measurements "are never enough. The artist's eye and desire to breathe life into the subject must be the deciding factors.
We cannot insure success, but we can deserve it.
We believed in a good God, a bad Devil, and a hot Hell, and more than anything else we believed that same God did not intend man should ever fly.
Let no girl, no gun, no cards, no flutes, no violins, no dress, no tobacco, no laziness decoy you from your books.
Lord Chatham, the King of Prussia, nay, Alexander the Great, never gained more in one campaign than the noble lord has lost-he has lost a whole continent.
