It is exasperating to see little brown men and little yellow men from the mysterious Orient, and the opaque black men of Africa (t...o say nothing of those impudent American Negroes!) who come to the U.N. and talk smart to us, who are scurrying all over our globe in their strange modes of dress--much as if they were new, unpleasant arrivals from another planet. Many whites believe in their ulcers that it is only a matter of time before the Marines get the signal to round up these truants and put them back securely in their cages.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The appeal to heaven breaks off. The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness.... It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Natives of another hemisphere, they beheld, with curiosity, all the pleasing features of the American forest. The landscape before... them was fair, if it was strange and rude. The little flower which at this season stars our woods and roadsides with its profuse blooms, might attract even eyes as stern as theirs with its humble beauty. The useful pine lifted its cones into the frosty air. The maple, which is already making the forest gay with its orange hues, reddened over those houseless men. The majestic summits of Wachusett and Monadnoc towering in the horizon, invited the steps of the adventure westward.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even to this day it is easier than it ought to be for me to get a rise out of an American by telling him something about himself w...hich is equally true about every human being on the face of the globe. He at once resents this as a disparagement and an assertion on my part that people in other parts of the globe are not like that, and are loftily superior to such weaknesses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are at the present time two great nations in the world--the Russians and the Americans. The American relies upon his persona...l interest to accomplish his ends and gives free scope to the unguided exertions and common sense of the people. The Russian centers all his authority of society in a single arm. The principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude. Their starting point is different and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the struggle against sexism demands the destruction of the American state, and ... the immediate personal nature of sexism req...uires struggle against men who enforce that oppression as well as its institutions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This is the shape of the tree, And the flower and the leaf, and the three pale beautiful pilgrims:... This is what you are to me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If American has points of inferiority to English, they are merely matters of degree; if the Americans are, as Oliver Wendell Holme...s said in 1858, "the Romans of the modern world--the great assimilating people," the English are only to an exceedingly limited degree its Greeks. They are tarred too much with the same brush of pragmatism, democracy, industrialism, and materialism for deep cleavage. Even America is not wholly democratic culturally; there are remarkable enclaves of aristocratic culture in the cosmopolitan and tradition-bound society of the Eastern seaboard, whose members look east toward Europe far more than they look west towards the heartland of Americanism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs... from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[Asked if American women would ever win full suffrage:] Assuredly. I firmly believed at one time that I should live to see that da...y. I have never for one moment lost faith. It will come but I shall not see it ... it is inevitable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »