Progress is the life-style of man. The general life of the human race is called Progress, and so is its collective march. Progress... advances, it makes the great human and earthly journey towards what is heavenly and divine; it has its pauses, when it rallies the stragglers, its stopping places when it meditates, contemplating some new and splendid promised land that has suddenly appeared on its horizon. It has its nights of slumber; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker to see the human spirit lost in shadow, and to grope in the darkness without being able to awake sleeping progress.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America has a history of political isolation and economic self-sufficiency; its citizens have tended to regard the rest of the wor...ld as a disaster area from which lucky or pushy people emigrate to the Promised Land. Alternatively, they think of other nations as mere showplaces for picturesque scenery, odd flora and fauna and quaint artifacts. The American tourist abroad therefore wears clothes suitable for a trip to a disaster area, or for a visit to a museum or zoo: comfortable, casual, brightly colored, relatively cheap: not calculated to arouse envy or pick up dirt. Britain, on the other hand, remains in imagination a world empire. Its citizens go abroad as representatives of the Top Nation, concerned to uphold its reputation and present a good example to lesser races. Britons therefore dress up rather than down for travel, whatever the local conditions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The majority of Black Americans are unaware of the complexity of the meaning of Israel to American Jews. But, ironically, Afro-Zio...nists have as an intense an emotional identification with Africa and with the Third World as American Jews have with Israel. Doubly ironic, this same intensity of identification with a "Motherland" seems rooted in the mythologies common to both groups. In this special sense--in the spiritual sense implied by "Zion" and "Diaspora" and "Promised Land"MBlack Americans are America's Jews. But given the isolation of Black Americans from any meaningful association with Africa, extensions of the mythology would be futile. We have no distant homeland preparing an ingathering.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here in Wellfleet, this pure sand plateau, known to sailors as the Table-lands of Eastham, on account of its appearance, as seen f...rom the ocean ... stretched away northward from the southern boundary of the town, without a particle of vegetation,--as level almost as a table,--for two and a half or three miles, or as far as the eye could reach; slightly rising towards the ocean, then stooping to the beach, by as steep a slope as sand could lie on, and as regular as a military engineer could desire. It was like the escarped rampart of a stupendous fortress, whose glacis was the beach, and whose champaign the ocean. From its surface we overlooked the greater part of the Cape. In short, we were traversing a desert, with the view of an autumnal landscape of extraordinary brilliancy, a sort of Promised Land, on the one hand, and the ocean on the other. Yet, though the prospect was so extensive, and the country for the most part destitute of trees, a house was rarely visible,--we never saw one from the beach,--and the solitude was that of the ocean and the desert combined. A thousand men could not have seriously interrupted it, but would have been lost in the vastness of the scenery as their footsteps in the sand.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Casey Jones, mounted to the cabin, Casey Jones, throttle in his hand,... Casey Jones mounted to the cabin, Took his farewell journey to the Promised Land.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everything that was ever to happen to me in the future had its germ or impulse in the conditions of my life on Dover Street. My fr...iendships, my advantages and disadvantages, my gifts, my habits, my ambitions--these were the materials out of which I built my after life, in the open workshop of America. My days in the slums were pregnant with possibilities; it only needed the ripeness of events to make them fruit forth in realities. Steadily as I worked to win America, America advanced to lie at my feet. I was an heir, on Dover Street, awaiting maturity. I was a princess waiting to be led to the throne.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the aspiring immigrant ... is not content to progress alone. Solitary success is imperfect success in his eyes. He must take h...is family with him as he rises.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession. A true man finds so much work to do that he has no time to contemplate his yeste...rdays; for to-day and to-morrow are here, with their impatient tasks. The world is so busy, too, that it cannot afford to study any man's unfinished work; for the end may prove it a failure, and the world needs masterpieces.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »