All Presidents start out to run a crusade but after a couple of years they find they are running something less heroic and much mo...re intractable: namely the presidency. The people are well cured by then of election fever, during which they think they are choosing Moses. In the third year, they look on the man as a sinner and a bumbler and begin to poke around for rumours of another Messiah.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The thirst for adventure is the vent which Destiny offers; a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new country, speak to the imagination ...and offer swing and play to the confined powers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we could have any security against moods! If the profoundest prophet could be holden to his words, and the hearer who is ready ...to sell all and join the crusade, could have any certificate that to-morrow his prophet shall not unsay his testimony!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,--who ...had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under the pretense of going à la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing ...what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »