There is an inner world; and a spiritual faculty of discerning it with absolute clearness, nay, with the most minute and brilliant... distinctness. But it is part of our earthly lot that it is the outer world, in which we are encased, which is the lever that brings that spiritual faculty into play.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Yiddish acted as the cement that bound the Jewish community together on a socialist foundation. What language we spoke was critica...l. It reflected our identity, our loyalty, our distinctness not only from the gentile environment, but from other Jews as well. The use of Yiddish was an expression not only of love of a language, but of pride in ourselves as a people; it was an acknowledgement of a historical and cultural yerushe, heritage, a link to generations of Jews who came before and to the political activists of Eastern Europe. Above all it was the symbol of resistance to assimilation, an insistence on remaining who we were.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"All is quiet at Harper's Ferry," say the journals. What is the character of that calm which follows when the law and the slavehol...der prevail? I regard this event as a touchstone designed to bring out, with glaring distinctness, the character of this government. We needed to be thus assisted to see it by the light of history. It needed to see itself. When a government puts forth its strength on the side of injustice, as ours to maintain slavery and kill the liberators of the slave, it reveals itself a merely brute force, or worse, a demoniacal force.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The dullest soul cannot go upon such an expedition without some of the spirit of adventure; as if he had stolen the boat of Charon... and gone down the Styx on a midnight expedition in the realms of Pluto.... The silent navigator shoves his craft gently over the water, with a smothered pride and sense of benefaction, as if he were phosphor, or light-bringer, to these dusky realms, or some sister moon, blessing the spaces with her light. The waters, for a rod or two on either hand and several feet in depth, are lit up with more than noonday distinctness, and he enjoys the opportunity which so many have desired, for the roofs of a city are indeed raised, and he surveys the midnight economy of the fishes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He is no mystic, either, more than Newton or Arkwright or Davy, and tolerates none. Not one obscure line, or half line, did he eve...r write. His meaning lies plain as the daylight.... It has the distinctness of picture to his mind, and he tells us only what he sees printed in largest English type upon the face of things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »