Quote of the Week

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places (and there are so many) where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."
-Howard Zinn, patriot, historian, and author

Quote of the Week

"You choose your own path or you have it chosen for you."
-Heros

Quote of the Week

The Presidential Inauguration is a time when the nation reflects on poetry. This time the honor of the inaugural poem has gone to Elizabeth Alexander.

Here are a couple of the better offerings from inaugurations past. The first from the poem Robert Frost read in 1961 at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy:

The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia.
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak.
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.


And then this from Maya Angelou at Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993:

Lift up your eyes upon
The day breaking for you.

Give birth again
To the dream.

Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands.

Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For new beginnings.

Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.

The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out upon me, the
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.

No less to Midas than the mendicant.

No less to you now than the mastodon then.

Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes, into
Your brother's face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.

Quote of the Week

"A terrorist has an ideology. That ideology is savage. It's brutal. It's primitive. It is the worst ideology you can imagine because it's ancient. It's not relevant to our normal times. When you kill a terrorist you do not kill the ideology."
-Deepak Chopra

Quote of the Week

And Still I Rise

Quote of the Week

"I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A bird will fall frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself".

-Master Chief John Urgayle quoting "Self-Pity" by D.H. Lawrence in the film GI Jane

Quote of the Week

"Abandon your fears or be abandoned because of them"
-Caroline Myss

Quote of the Week

"We [Democrats] believe we must be the family of America, recognizing that at the heart of the matter we are bound one to another, that the problems of a retired school teacher in Duluth are our problems; that the future of the child -- that the future of the child in Buffalo is our future; that the struggle of a disabled man in Boston to survive and live decently is our struggle; that the hunger of a woman in Little Rock is our hunger; that the failure anywhere to provide what reasonably we might, to avoid pain, is our failure."

-Mario Cuomo
DNC Keynote Address delivered 7/16/1984 in San Francisco

Quote of the Week

"The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few, booted and spurred ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God."
-Thomas Jefferson

Quote of the Week

Socrates put on trial, for undermining state religion and corrupting young people, offered this speech in his own defense, as reported in Plato's Apology. And this is after he had been convicted by the jury, where he refused to accept his penalty, exile from Athens or a commitment to silence, even though he knew the next sentence would be death.

"Perhaps someone might say, "Socrates, can you not go away from us and live quietly, without talking?" Now this is the hardest thing to make some of you believe. For if I say that such conduct would be disobedience to the god and that therefore I cannot keep quiet, you will think I am jesting and will not believe me; and if again I say that to talk every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself and others is the greatest good to man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living, you will believe me still less. This is as I say, gentlemen, but it is not easy to convince you."

Quote of the Week

"And now -- now we must look to the future. Let us heed the voice of the people and recognize their common sense. If we do not, we not only blaspheme our political heritage, we ignore the common ties that bind all Americans. Many fear the future. Many are distrustful of their leaders, and believe that their voices are never heard. Many seek only to satisfy their private work -- wants; to satisfy their private interests. But this is the great danger America faces -- that we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual; each seeking to satisfy private wants. If that happens, who then will speak for America? Who then will speak for the common good?

This is the question which must be answered in 1976: Are we to be one people bound together by common spirit, sharing in a common endeavor; or will we become a divided nation? For all of its uncertainty, we cannot flee the future. We must not become the "New Puritans" and reject our society. We must address and master the future together. It can be done if we restore the belief that we share a sense of national community, that we share a common national endeavor. It can be done.

There is no executive order; there is no law that can require the American people to form a national community. This we must do as individuals, and if we do it as individuals, there is no President of the United States who can veto that decision."
-Barbara Jordan, 1976 DNC Keynote Address

Quote of the Week

"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
- Thomas Paine

Quote of the Week

"Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor -- never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees -- not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own."
-Elie Wiesel
The Perils of Indifference
Delivered April 12,1999 Washington, D.C.

Quote of the Week

"to be forewarned is to be forearmed"