Martin Luther King, Jr., was the conscience of his generation.... He and I grew up in the same South, he the son of a clergyman, I... the son of a farmer. We both knew from opposite sides, the invisible wall of racial segregation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Harvey, Jr.: I was afraid something like this would happen. Being around all those young students was bound to give Father ideas.<...br />Laura: Young ideas, nuts. They're the oldest ideas in the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Put simply, conservatives highlight the government's role in promoting individual virtue but downplay the government's responsibil...ity to create a society in which virtue can flourish. Liberals are wary of regulating personal behavior, but would give government a powerful say over the shape of social and economic life. In essence, liberals and conservatives disagree over what are the most important sins. For conservatives, the sins that matter are personal irresponsibility, the flight from family life, sexual permissiveness, the failure of individuals to work hard. For liberals, the gravest sins are intolerance, a lack of generosity toward the needy, narrow-mindedness toward social and racial minorities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Simon, Simon, listen! Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your own faith may not fail...; and you, when once you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For mainstream American blacks, the vast majority of churches have Hebrew names--Ebenezer, Mount Zion, Canaan, Mount Moriah, Taber...nacle, New Hebron, Mount Olive. Hebraic traditions run deep in the black church. More than any people on earth, including the Jews, American blacks have adopted the Mosaic model of social organization, with the exalted political prophet bonded to the "children of Israel" below. Blacks and Jews have in common a history of cyclical swings between cultural separatism and assimilation. Black Zionists helped establish an independent Liberia in 1847, some fifty years before the emergence of modern Jewish Zionism. Jews, who have canonized no new prophets in two millennia and who shudder at the memory of their false messiahs, look with both longing and horror upon the last generation's procession of black prophets: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Louis Farrakhan, and Jesse Jackson. Depending on one's prediction of the outcome, blacks and Jews are either intimate enemies or quarrelsome cousins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Once, when dust rolled up from the road and the fields were high with heavy-handled wheat and the leaves of every tree were gray a...nd curledup and hung head down, I went in the meadow with an old broom like a gun, where the dandelions had begun to seed and the low ground was cracked, and I flushed grasshoppers from the goldenrod in whirring clouds like quail and shot them down. I smelled wheat in the warm wind and every weed. I tasted dust in my mouth.... I hunted Horse Simon in the shade of a tree. I rode the broom over the brown meadow grass and with a fist like pistol butt and trigger shot the Indian on Horse Simon down.... My horse had a golden tail. Dust rolled up behind. He was on the tractor in a broad-brimmed hat. With a fist like a pistol butt and trigger, going fast, I shot him down.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Channing you have seen and described is the real Simon Pure. You have seen him. Many a good ramble may you have together! You ...will see in him still more of the same kind to attract and to puzzle you. How to serve him most effectually has long been a problem with his friends. Perhaps it is left for you to solve it. I suspect that the most you or any one can do for him is to appreciate his genius,--to buy and read, and cause others to buy and read, his poems. That is the hand which he has put forth to the world,--take hold of that. Review them if you can,--perhaps take the risk of publishing something more which he may write. Your knowledge of Cowper will help you to know Channing. He will accept sympathy and aid, but he will not bear questioning, unless the aspects of the sky are particularly auspicious. He will ever be "reserved and enigmatic," and you must deal with him at arm's length.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »