Quotes by American Authors - Page 217

Any jackass can kick down a barn but it takes a good carpenter to build one.
Sam Rayburn
Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Out of the best and most productive years of each man's life he should carve a segment in which he puts his private career aside to serve his community and his country and thereby serve his children his neighbours his fellow men and the cause of freedom.
David Lilienthal
In esse I am nothing in posse I am everything.
John Adams
That's one small step for a man one giant leap for mankind.
Neil Armstrong
I'm a slow walker but I never walk back.
Abraham Lincoln
If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears however measured or far away.
Henry David Thoreau
The only way round is through.
Robert Frost
About all some men accomplish in life is to send a son to Harvard.
Edgar Watson Howe
Do what you can with what you have where you are.
Theodore Roosevelt
Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.
Mark Twain
Back of every achievement is a proud wife and a surprised mother-in-law.
Brooks Hays
Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
Robert F. Kennedy
I think knowing what you cannot do is more important than knowing what you can do.
Lucille Ball
It's pretty hard to be efficient without being obnoxious.
Kin Hubbard
The biggest things are always the easiest to do because there is no competition.
William Van Home
He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.
Henry David Thoreau
I am surprised nothing has been made of the fact that astronaut Neil Armstrong carried no sidearms when he landed on the moon.
Justice Arthur Goldberg
You commit a sin of omission if you do not utilize all the power that is within you. All men have claims on man and to the man with special talents this is a very special claim. It is required that a man take part in the actions and clashes of his time than the peril of being judged not to have lived at all.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.
Georgia O'Keeffe
The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion 20 years later.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned but give him a little metal a few chemicals some wire and 20 or 30 billion dollars and vroom! There he is up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.
Russell Baker
Nothing is too small to know and nothing too big to attempt.
William Van Horne
Men achieve a certain greatness unawares when working to another aim.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Faith moves mountains but you have to keep pushing while you are praying.
Mason Cooley
Although the world is full of suffering it is full also of the overcoming of it.
Helen Keller
The city's all brightnessand shadow, deckle-edged, bluer than air-there's no help anywhere-you no longer know how to listen.
Ralph Angel
It seemed to him he had waited an age for some stir of the great grim hush; the life of the town was itself under a spell--so unnaturally, up and down the whole prospect of known and rather ugly objects, the blankness and the silence lasted. Had they ever, he asked himself, the hard-faced houses, which had begun to look livid in the dim dawn, had they ever spoken so little to any need of his spirit? Great builded voids, great crowded stillnesses put on, often, in the heart of cities, for the small hours, a sort of sinister mask, and it was of this large collective negation that Brydon presently became conscious--all the more that the break of day was, almost incredibly, now at hand, proving to him what night he had made of it.
Henry James
A rhinestone skein, a jeweled brocade of light,–the city is a garment stretched so thinher festive colors bleed into the night.
Michael Burch
Installing massive amounts of wireless devices into every city may eventually be proven to be a global weather modification system.
Steven Magee
The cities were sucking all the life of the country into themselves and destroying it. Men were no longer individuals but units in a vast machine, all cut to one pattern, with the same tastes and ideas, the same mass-produced education that did not educate but only pasted a veneer of catchwords over ignorance. Why do you want to bring that back?
Leigh Brackett
On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession.
Ross Macdonald
I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities.
Jane Jacobs
To generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and districts four conditions are indispensable:1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two...2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there...
Jane Jacobs
It happened every single day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin.
Kate Christensen
Some big insect flew in and began walking on the table. I don’t know what insect it was, but it was brown, shining, and rich in structures. In the city the big universal chain of insects gets thin, but where there’s a leaf or two it’ll be represented.
Saul Bellow
It is strange being in a crowd where no one knows your face or cares for your purpose. In Lykos, I would have been jostled by men I'd grown up with, run across girls I'd chased and wrestled with as a child. Here, other Colors slam into me and offer not even a faint apology. This is a city, and I do not like it. I feel alone.
Pierce Brown
To live in a city, one must be larger than one's environment or enjoy belonging to the crowd.
Louis L'Amour
Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.
Don DeLillo
This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of people, unable to have direct contact with more satisfying means of living, take life vicariously, as readers, spectators, passive observers: a world where people watch shadow-heroes and heroines in order to forget their own clumsiness or coldness in love, where they behold brutal men crushing out life in a strike riot, a wrestling ring or a military assault, while they lack the nerve even to resist the petty tyranny of their immediate boss: where they hysterically cheer the flag of their political state, and in their neighborhood, their trades union, their church, fail to perform the most elementary duties of citizenship.Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand, remote from the nature that is outside them and no less remote from the nature within, handicapped as lovers and as parents by the routine of the metropolis and by the constant specter of insecurity and death that hovers over its bold towers and shadowed streets - living thus the mass of inhabitants remain in a state bordering on the pathological. They become victims of phantasms, fears, obsessions, which bind them to ancestral patterns of behavior.
Lewis Mumford
I went back to the clanging city, I went back where my old loves stayed, But my heart was full of my new love's glory, My eyes were laughing and unafraid.I met one who had loved me madly And told his love for all to hear -- But we talked of a thousand things together, The past was buried too deep to fear.I met the other, whose love was given With never a kiss and scarcely a word -Oh, it was then the terror took me Of words unuttered that breathed and stirred.Oh, love that lives its life with laughter Or love that lives its life with tears Can die - but love that is never spoken Goes like a ghost through the winding years…I went back to the clanging city, I went back where my old loves stayed, My heart was full of my new love's glory, - But my eyes were suddenly afraid.
Sara Teasdale
Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that.
J.D. Salinger
Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.
Nelson Algren
Unity despite diversity is exactly what defines Christianity as distinct from and antithetical to all other religious belief systems". ~R. Alan Woods [2006]
R. Alan Woods
Watch other people for clues about who they are, not just clues about how much they are or are not like you.
Patti Digh
Looking at my reflection tonight, I see a new girl staring back at me. She has big hair and big eyes and a big heart. Not only is she the perfect size and pretty...she is smart. -Mackenzie
Tara Michener
A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
Steve Jobs
The more sects we have the better. They are all getting somebody in (to the Church) that the others could not: and even with the numerous divisions we are all doing tolerably well.
Abraham Lincoln
It is a big deal to work with people who are different from you. And if you're white or of a higher class,no matter what race you are, you'll probably mess up. Maybe get yelled at. But there are worse things. Like keeping your dignity safe at home, while the world goes to hell.
Kelly J. Cogswell
I begged Ana to shut them up, come out as Cuban, play the jail card. But she refused to claim that authority. 'It will mean you, as a Kentucky girl, have nothing valuable to say about Cuba. And Cubans have nothing to say about the rest of the world.
Kelly J. Cogswell
There were no actual villains, just inertia. The administration genuinely wanted more diversity for reasons of its image as well as fairness, notwithstanding the cranky alumni letters in The Daily Princetonian. ... Hiring committees had not a clue where to look for or how to attract suitable candidates. And so, though a high-level recruitment plan existed on paper, there was only foot-dragging and defensive excuse making.
Sonia Sotomayor
The differences were plain enough, and yet I saw that they were as nothing compared with what we had in common. As I lay in bed at night, the sky outside my window reflecting the city's dim glow, I thought about Abuelita’s fierce loyalty to blood. But what really binds people as family? The way they shore themselves up with stories; the way siblings can feud bitterly but still come through for each other; how an untimely death, a child gone before a parent, shakes the very foundations; how the weaker ones, the ones with invisible wounds, are sheltered; how a constant din is medicine against loneliness; and how celebrating the same occasions year after year steels us to the changes they herald. And always food at the center of it all.
Sonia Sotomayor
Unlike the clonal longevity of asexual organisms, sexually reproduced plants and animals usually have briefer, individual life cycles. In short, the enormous diversity afforded by the evolutionary invention of sexual reproduction came with a price—death of the individual.
Richard J. Borden
Instead of thinking those who don't share your passions are not 'real Christians,' recognize the beauty of diversity within the body of Christ. Instead of being angry with others for not feeling your urgency about an issue, give them time to come around.
Holly Sprink
Maybe the word hasn’t been invented yet – that thing beyond diversity. We often define movements by what they’re against, but the final goal is greater than the powers it dismantles, deeper than any statistic. It’s something like equity – a commitment to harvesting a narrative language so broad it has no face, no name.
Daniel José Older
I don't know any Baptists who don't want to see folks get saved… you start winning folks to the Lord and baptizing them… They'll pretty well put up were [your methods].
Richard Hogue
Assuming Sandberg's advice is completely useless for working-class women is just as shortsighted as claiming her advice needs to be completely applicable to all women. And let’s be frank: if Sandberg chose to offer career advice for working-class women, a group she clearly knows little about, she would have been just as harshly criticized for overstepping her bounds.
Roxane Gay
We All Bleed RedWe have a confirmed threat against the homeland and I for one am grateful for the Americans sitting in the Army conference room in Fort Stewart, Georgia. The display cubes and screens lets us see different locations, cities, departments of the armed forces. It also allows us to see three commonalities. (1) We are all different. I take such pleasure in seeing the diverse group we call the intelligence community. We are different races, nationalities, and ethnic groups.(2) This brings us to the second commonality…we are all Americans. Yes, we fuss, we have differences of opinions, but we are all Americans.(3) The third and most important commonality is the fact that we all bleed red. We are humankind.These are the bonds that unite us…bond us…make us better beings. I have not mentioned religion because my God allows me to respect other people’s belief. I just ask that as we work through this crisis that we hold dearly on to these three commonalities.The Director of National Intelligence
James M. Robinson
I'm tired of feeling like I should be grateful when popular culture deigns to acknowledge the experiences of people who are not white, middle class or wealthy, and heterosexual.
Roxane Gay
It's not about adding diversity for the sake of diversity, it's about subtracting homogeneity for the sake of realism.
Mary Robinette Kowal