The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a fu...ture which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... when we shall have our amendment to the Constitution of the United States, everyone will think it was always so, just exactly ...as many young people believe that all the privileges, all the freedom, all the enjoyments which woman now possesses were always hers. They have no idea of how every single inch of ground that she stands upon to-day has been gained by the hard work of some little handful of women of the past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I feel some unwillingness to quit the remembrance of the past. With all the hope of the new I feel that we are leaving the old.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let all our dealings with the redman be characterized by justice and good faith, and let there be the most liberal provision for h...is physical wants, for education in its widest sense, and for religious instruction and training. To do this will cost money, but like all money well expended, it is a wise economy.... If by reason of the intrigues of the whites or from any cause Indian wars come, then let us correct the errors of the past. Always the numbers and the prowess of the Indians have been underrated.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The general review of the past tends to satisfy me with my political life. No man, I suppose, ever came up to his ideal. The first... half [of] my political life was first to resist the increase of slavery and secondly to destroy it.... The second half of my political life has been to rebuild, and to get rid of the despotic and corrupting tendencies and the animosities of the war, and other legacies of slavery.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...when I have formed the sounds, said the words out loud, those who had assumed Yiddish was a language of the past only, suddenly... felt it had been revived. As my tongue, mouth, lips, throat, lungs physically pushed Yiddish into the world--as I, a Jew, spoke a Jewish language to other Jews--Yiddish was very much alive. Not unlike a lebn geblibene, a survivor, of an overwhelming catastrophe, it seemed to be saying 'khbin nisht vos ikh bin amol geven. I am not what I once was. Ober 'khbin nisht geshtorbn. Ikh leb. But I did not die. I live.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The moon is a white strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me acr...oss space I shall never fully know. But the moon that pulls the tides, and the moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist.... When we describe the moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded th...eir crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past,--as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,--the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »