Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. Nothing adds such dignity to characte...r as the recognition of one's self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place, everywhere conceded--a place earned by personal merit, not an artificial attainment by inheritance, wealth, family and position.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To be human is to have one's little modicum of romance secreted away in one's composition. One never ceases to make a hero of one'...s self, (in private,) during life, but only alters the style of heroism from time to time as the drifting years belittle certain gods of his admiration and raise up others in their stead.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When the shadow of death blots out my joy And erases the face of the sun... Give me strength to endure, hope to believe That living and dying are one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways or lose his next election. Only fools and theorists imagine tha...t our society can be handled with gloves or long poles. One must make one's self a part of it. If virtue won't answer our purpose, we must use vice, or our opponents will put us out of office, and this was as true in Washington's day as it is now, and always will be."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We all bear traces of the starvation struggle which for so long made up the life of the race. Our very organism holds memories and... glimpses of that long life of our ancestors which still goes on among so many of our contemporaries. Nothing so deadens the sympathies and shrivels the power of enjoyment as the persistent keeping away from the great opportunities for helpfulness and a continual ignoring of the starvation struggle which makes up the life of at least half the race. To shut one's self away from that half of the race life is to shut one's self away from the most vital part of it; it is to live out but half the humanity to which we have been born heir.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when t...he stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.... Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inne...r self.... The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discr...iminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of m...easuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One thing I hate about the New Deal is that it is killing what, to me, is the American pioneering spirit. I simply do not know wha...t to tell my own boys, leaving school and confronting this new world whose ideal is Security and whose practice is dependence upon government instead of upon one's self.... All the old character-values seem simply insane from a practical point of view; the self-reliant, the independent, the courageous man is penalized from every direction ... [ellipses in source]LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »