Elena de la Madriaga: Ladies and gentleman, it seems like if the only embarrassment here tonight is my presence, if the truth will... quiet your unspoken questions, I give it gladly. For five years, I was the woman of the Comanche Stone Calf. He treated me like a wife. The work was hard, the scoldings frequent. And occasionally he beat me. I did not bear him any children. I know that many of you regard me as a degraded woman. Degraded by the touch of a savage Comanche, by having had to live as one of them. You said, why did I not kill myself. I did not. Why, I, I can't. Guthrie McCabe: Well I as hell can. She didn't kill herself because her religion forbids it. You know sometimes it takes a lot more courage to live than it does to die.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Paris is the city in which one loves to live. Sometimes I think this is because it is the only city in the world where you can ste...p out of a railway station--the Gare D'Orsay--and see, simultaneously, the chief enchantments: the Seine with its bridges and bookstalls, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Tuileries Gardens, the Place de la Concorde, the beginning of the Champs Elysees--nearly everything except the Luxembourg Gardens and the Palais Royal. But what other city offers as much as you leave a train?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It must be confessed that the Pilgrims possessed but few of the qualities of the modern pioneer. They were not the ancestors of th...e American backwoodsmen. They did not go at once into the woods with their axes. They were a family and church, and were more anxious to keep together, though it were on the sand, than to colonize a New World.... It is true they were busy at first about their building, and were hindered in that by much foul weather; but a party of emigrants to California or Oregon, with no less work on their hands,--and more hostile Indians,--would do as much exploring the first afternoon, and the Sieur de Champlain would have sought an interview with the savages, and examined the country as far as the Connecticut, and made a map of it, before Billington had climbed his tree.... Nevertheless, the Pilgrims were pioneers, and the ancestors of pioneers, in a far grander enterprise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A country is strong which consists of wealthy families, every member of whom is interested in defending a common treasure; it is w...eak when composed of scattered individuals, to whom it matters little whether they obey seven or one, a Russian or a Corsican, so long as each keeps his own plot of land, blind in their wretched egotism, to the fact that the day is coming when this too will be torn from them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and ...of the race of giants.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »