President John Adams: Observations
It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.
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Bishop Thomas Marsh Clark: Observations
Innovation is not always improvement, but there can be no improvement without innovations. That which is more familiar to us was a novelty once, and that which is new to us will become familiar in the process of time.
(At 1898 Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Rhode Island)
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Michel De Montaigne: Observations
The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold. The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes.
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K O Eckland: Observations
Within all of us is a varying amount of space lint and star dust, the residue from our creation. Most are too busy to notice it, and it is stronger in some than others. It is strongest in those of us who fly and is responsible for an unconscious, subtle desire to slip into some wings and try for the elusive boundaries of our origin.
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Christopher Hoctor: Observations
Leadership is much like parenting. Neither will ever be perfect but both rely on learning the lessons; not just the old academic lessons, but an aggressive pursuit of learning from what is going on today.
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Christopher Hoctor: Observations
I don't like it when visitors or citizens speak foreign languages here, but if we 'must' speak English to live here, then Americans should have to speak the local language anywhere they go
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President Thomas Jefferson: Observations
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.
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Jon Newlin: Observations
The language and thought police are hardly some Orwellian invention; America has been unusually susceptible to plagues of Comstockery and self-righteous tomfoolery.
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Joseph Story: Observations
Let the American youth never forget, that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings, and blood of their ancestors.
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Jim Titus: Observations
As age takes its toll, the cohesive unit breaks down into singular parts that can no longer absorb the stresses given to them.
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Leo Tolstoy: Observations
If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one's reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state.
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Mark Twain: Observations
In this age of inventive wonders all men have come to believe that in some genius' brain sleeps the solution of the grand problem of aerial navigation—and along with that belief is the hope that that genius will reveal his miracle before they die, and likewise a dread that he will poke off somewhere and die himself before he finds out that he has such a wonder lying dormant in his brain. We all know the air can be navigated—therefore, hurry up your sails and bladders—satisfy us—let us have peace.
(In a letter to the San Francisco Alta California newspaper, 1 August 1869)
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Kurt Vonnegut: Observations
Go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
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