Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Quotes: Pragmatism. Prayer. Prejudice. Present and Future.

A collection of quotes on various topics. The sentence in bold face is a plain statement of the quote that follows.

Pragmatism
Meaning is tested by consequences.
Pragmatism 109 He [Kennedy] tested the meaning of a proposition by its consequences. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days

Prayer
Pray where it’s appropriate rather than in school and prayer will have more meaning to our children.
Prayer 47 [On the Supreme Court’s banning school prayer]: JFK: ...pray a good deal more at home ...attend our churches with a good deal more fidelity, and we can make the true meaning of prayer much more important in the lives of all of our children. Sorenson, Kennedy

Prayer has greatest meaning not when people express themselves, but when God is present in their prayers.
Prayer 18 Man achieves the fullness of prayer not when he expresses himself, but when he lets God be most fully present in prayer. Pope John Paul II, Threshold.

God help the unhappy and turbulent souls.
Prayer 148 Alyosha praying: God have mercy upon all of them, have all these unhappy and turbulent souls in thy keeping, and set them in the right path; all ways are thine; save them according to thy wisdom. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.

Pray to God for gladness.
Prayer 290 My friends, pray to God for gladness. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.

When you pray, you learn something.
Prayer 47 No man ever prayed heartily, without learning something. Emerson, Nature.

She tried to send up a prayer through the gray banks of clouds.
Prayer 562 Returning to the arched window, she lifted her eyes—scowling, poor, dim-sighted Hepzibah, in the face of Heaven!—and strove to send up a prayer through the dense, gray pavement of clouds. Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables.

Prejudice
The reality of racial prejudice.
Prejudice 207 Pauli Murray: “What’d you get, black boy,/ When they knocked you down in the gutter,/ And they kicked your teeth out,/ And they broke your skull with clubs,/ And they bashed your stomach in?/ ...What’s the Top Man say, black boy?/ Mr. Roosevelt regrets....” Blum, V Was for Victory

Prejudices enslave the prejudiced.
Prejudice 125 Prejudices are chains. Irving Stone, The Passions of the Mind (Life of Freud).

The U.S. Army’s policy during WWII that mingling of the races would not be forced but would be separate but equal.
Prejudice 211 ...Secretary of War Stimson on September 20, 1944, reminded the President of the “War Department’s long-standing policy not to force the intermingling of the races but to provide equality of treatment.” Blum, V Was for Victory

The British prejudice against the Scots.
Prejudice 291 Colonel Talbot on the Scots: Let them stay in their own barren mountains and puff and swell, and hang their bonnets on the horns of the moon, if they have a mind; but what business have they to come where people wear breeches, and speak an intelligible language? . Sir Walter Scott, Waverley.

Present and Future
Mass movements deprecate the present in favor of a glorious future.
Present and future 73 All mass movements deprecate the present by depicting it as a preliminary to a glorious future, a mere doormat on the threshold of the millennium. Hoffer, The True Believer

F Scott Fitzgerald: Today marks the end of the succession of days leading up to the present.
Present, past, future xvi If Hemingway’s code proclaims the principle: “Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” Fitzgerald’s was essentially the more poetic and opposite, “Today [is] a day that marks an end to all the succession of days which have gone before.” Preface. Larry W. Phillips. F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing.

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