My father! The sun is my father, and the earth is my mother, and on her bosom I will recline.
—Tecumseh, 1810
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Quotes
Football causeth fighting, brawling, contention, quarrel picking, murder, homicide and great effusion of bloode, as daily experience teacheth.
—Philip Stubbes, 1583You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she’ll be constantly running back.
—Horace, 20 BCThis is not a clash between civilizations. It is a clash about civilization.
—Tony Blair, 2006If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.
—Margaret Atwood, 2005There is a kind of revolution of so general a character that it changes the mental tastes as well as the fortunes of the world.
—La Rochefoucauld, 1665It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me.
—Martin Luther King Jr., 1962Secrets are rarely betrayed or discovered according to any program our fear has sketched out.
—George Eliot, 1860The highest result of education is tolerance.
—Helen Keller, 1903The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.
—John Updike, 1963The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.
—Wallace Stevens, 1952He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
—Francis Bacon, 1625It’s good to remember that in crises, natural crises, human beings forget for a while their ignorances, their biases, their prejudices. For a little while, neighbors help neighbors and strangers help strangers.
—Maya Angelou, 2011