Road Quotes - page 89
We are presently moving down a dead-end road that can lead to national disaster. America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism. The home that all too many Americans left was solidly structured idealistically; its pillars were solidly grounded in the insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage. All men are made in the image of God. All men are brothers. All men are created equal. Every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Every man has rights that are neither conferred by, nor derived from the State - they are God-given. Out of one blood, God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. What a marvelous foundation for any home! What a glorious and healthy place to inhabit. But America's strayed away, and this unnatural excursion has brought only confusion and bewilderment. It has left hearts aching with guilt and minds distorted with irrationality.
Martin Luther King Jr.
The rationalism of René Descartes had a liberating effect on women because it assumed that the mind, not the body, was the instrument for sensation and knowledge and that men and women had the same potential for understanding. Cartesianism denied that formal education was the road to higher insight; anyone could think and reason logically. The effect of these ideas was not only to inspire a number of women, such as Mary Astell, Lady Damaris Masham, Marie de Gournay, to enter philosophical discourse with the outstanding male thinkers of their time, but it also helped them to create a new form for such a discourse through personal correspondence.
René Descartes
His decipherment of Nature might be crude, yet he had the courage to insist that the mechanical sense could be made of the workings of Nature, throughout the realms of physics, chemistry, and even physiology. By reasserting the unity and rationality of Nature, he did as much as any man to put seventeenth-century scientists back on the intellectual road first trodden by the Greeks.
René Descartes
Thy wisdom speaks in me, and bids me dare
Beacon the rocks on which high hearts are wreckt.
I never was attached to that great sect,
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, - perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
In the two hundred years since St. Louis was born we have done many things in this land men have not done before. But the greatest of these has been the accomplishment of learning to live together, learning to live together in freedom and fulfillment, all religions, all races, all heritages, German and Irish, Italian and English, french-yes, even Texans. We have done much, but our work on this earth is not yet done; we walk a long road and we carry a precious trust. We are not looking for, we shall never look for, the short cuts. We shall never resort to battleship diplomacy or rely upon the umbrella of appeasement. We will be resolute but we will never be reckless. We will be restrained in the face of provocation because we know America's strength. We will never be reluctant in the face of peril because we trust that strength of America.
Lyndon B. Johnson
His soaring vaunt escaped the blooming ears of us,
He's gone, he's dead, he's dirt, he disappears from us! Be this the death of highest thrust of human all?
The flaming end of bright and shining crewmen all?Destroyed? His road is run? It's but a bend of it;
Make no mistake, this only seems.
R. A. Lafferty
