Attest Quotes
After four years of sitting through lectures, I have a feeling you're not in the mood for another one. What I have learned about graduation speeches is that they're too long and rarely remembered. So I'll keep this short. I just can't attest to how memorable it will be. I've also learned that it's important to refer to someone associated with the University. So I picked one, an SMU trustee, who by the way is not here, Reverend Mark Craig. Now, I asked Mark to deliver the sermon at the First United Methodist Church in Austin before my second inauguration as Governor of Texas. I still remember his Fort Worth twang as he talked about Moses. God called Moses to action, and Moses repeatedly found excuses not to act. 'Who am I that I should go to Pharoah, and bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt? Oh, my Lord, I pray, send some other person. I have sheep to tend. And the people won't believe me. I'm not a very good speaker'.
George W. Bush
As for the woman styling herself Mother Teresa, I can attest that until I wrote my little pamphlet, she had been the recipient, the beneficiary, of a twenty-five year Niagra of one-hundred percent favorable publicity in every secular, Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic, or non-religious outlet of any kind at all in the media. Only by the grace of my intervention [laughter] could it not be said, when she died, that no one had ever said a single word against her; and that no one had ever pointed out that she had fawned on the Duvalier family in Haiti and said that they were the Lord's anointed and beloved of the poor.
Christopher Hitchens
But the dwellers in the country have little understanding of, and therefore little sympathy with, the longing for green fields which haunts the dweller in towns. The secret dream of almost every inhabitant in those dusky streets where even a fresh thought would scarcely seem to enter, is to realise an independence, and go and live in the country. Where is every holiday spent but in the country! What do the smoky geraniums, so carefully tended in many a narrow street and blind alley attest, but the inherent love of the country! To whom do the blooming and sheltered villas, which are a national feature in English landscape, belong, but to men who pass the greater part of their lives in small dim counting-houses! This love of nature is divinely given to keep alive, even in the most toiling and world-worn existence, something of the imaginative and the apart. It is a positive good quality; and one good quality has some direct, or indirect tendency to produce another.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
The poor child, as Charles Lamb so touchingly expresses it, is not brought, but "dragged out," and if the wits are sharpened, so, too, is the soft, round cheek. The crippled limb and broken constitution attest the effects of the over-early struggle with penury; but the child of rich parents suffers, though in another way; there is the heart that is crippled, by the selfishness of indulgence and the habit of relying upon others. It takes years of harsh contact with the realities of life to undo the enervating work of a spoilt and over aided childhood. We cannot too soon learn the strong and useful lessons of exertion and self-dependance.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon