All Quotes By Tag: American-history

“The greatest lie ever sold to mankind is that it needs to be better, stronger, faster and more powerful than it already was intended to be when it was created in the beginning.”

“Despite it all, there were heroes who rose above their circumstances. Those who reached out to people of another race with compassion and even love.”

“America, the only America that would endure, I believed now with a conviction as sharp as a knife turning in my breast, did not belong to Judge Thayer, or to Governor Fuller of Massachusetts, or to the President of the United States, who had refused a shoemaker and a fish peddler his word of clemency. The American that lent me its direction forever now was Lola’s, and it was Bill Williams, and Mother’s and Michael’s, and mine; and I knew, with a terrible humility in the presence of their innocence, that it was Saco’s and Vanzetti’s as well.”

“This outlook, one that said that American history must be the history of nature speaking through men, not of men shaping nature, became the single most powerful force in American intellectual life in the nineteenth century and shaped some of America’s greatest works of literature, such as Moby Dick, Leaves of Grass and Walden, as well as generating an American school of philosophy , to be furthered by William James and John Dewey.”

“Once people said: Give me liberty or give me death. Now they say: Make me a slave, just pay me enough.”