Alamo Sayings And Quotes

Everything outside of here is vulnerable, but this tower, this room, is where we can make a stand if we have to. This is our Alamo." "Everybody died at the Alamo. What's the midway, the Little Big Horn?" Ethan looked at her, exasperated. She shrugged. "I'm just saying that ifyou want to rally the troops, avoid the A word.

It would be fair to say that the coppers in Amersham jail didn’t take much of a shine to me. My little dance, my little ego, it didn’t do me any favours in there. I wasn’t the bat-biting, Alamo-pissing, ‘Crazy Train’-singing rock’n’roll hero. All that celebrity shit counts for nothing with the Thames Valley Police.

I know the name of your seventh-grade Texas History teacher.” When the Texan expresses skepticism that this could be possible, you smile and say, “Coach.

His day is done. Is done. The news came on the wings of a wind, reluctant to carry its burden. Nelson Mandela’s day is done. The news, expected and still unwelcome, reached us in the United States, and suddenly our world became somber. Our skies were leadened. His day is done. We see you, South African people standing speechless at the slamming of that final door through which no traveller returns. Our spirits reach out to you Bantu, Zulu, Xhosa, Boer. We think of you and your son of Africa, your father, your one more wonder of the world. We send our souls to you as you reflect upon your David armed with a mere stone, facing down the mighty Goliath. Your man of strength, Gideon, emerging triumphant. Although born into the brutal embrace of Apartheid, scarred by the savage atmosphere of racism, unjustly imprisoned in the bloody maws of South African dungeons. Would the man survive? Could the man survive? His answer strengthened men and women around the world. In the Alamo, in San Antonio, Texas, on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, in Chicago’s Loop, in New Orleans Mardi Gras, in New York City’s Times Square, we watched as the hope of Africa sprang through the prison’s doors. His stupendous heart intact, his gargantuan will hale and hearty. He had not been crippled by brutes, nor was his passion for the rights of human beings diminished by twenty-seven years of imprisonment. Even here in America, we felt the cool, refreshing breeze of freedom. When Nelson Mandela took the seat of Presidency in his country where formerly he was not even allowed to vote we were enlarged by tears of pride, as we saw Nelson Mandela’s former prison guards invited, courteously, by him to watch from the front rows his inauguration. We saw him accept the world’s award in Norway with the grace and gratitude of the Solon in Ancient Roman Courts, and the confidence of African Chiefs from ancient royal stools. No sun outlasts its sunset, but it will rise again and bring the dawn. Yes, Mandela’s day is done, yet we, his inheritors, will open the gates wider for reconciliation, and we will respond generously to the cries of Blacks and Whites, Asians, Hispanics, the poor who live piteously on the floor of our planet. He has offered us understanding. We will not withhold forgiveness even from those who do not ask. Nelson Mandela’s day is done, we confess it in tearful voices, yet we lift our own to say thank you. Thank you our Gideon, thank you our David, our great courageous man. We will not forget you, we will not dishonor you, we will remember and be glad that you lived among us, that you taught us, and that you loved us all.

Don't you know how to square numbers near 50? He says 'You square 50- that's 2500- and subtract 100 times the difference of your number from 50.. If you want the correction, square the difference and add it on. That makes 2304' (Hans Bethe to Feynman at Los Alamos)

This was, I think, the secret of his attraction for women. I mean, it felt almost that he could read their minds—many women have said this to me. Women at Los Alamos who were pregnant could say, ‘The only one who would understand was Robert.’ He had a really almost saintly empathy for people.

From the beginning, the prospect of American settlements in Texas was entirely dependent on slavery. It was no secret. Everyone knew it. Austin would say it over and over and over: The only reason Americans would come to Texas was to farm cotton, and they would not do that without slaves. They really didn’t know any other way.

Everyone has the seventh-grade story where, you know, they make the field trip and then all the white kids start treating them differently,” says Ruben Cordova, a San Antonio art historian. “Davy Crockett’s [death], it’s sort of like a Chicano version of the Jewish Christ killers. If you’re looking at the Alamo as a kind of state religion, this is the original sin. We killed Davy Crockett.

Bacher asked for a receipt from the Army for the material it would soon explode. Los Alamos was officially an extension of the University of California working for the Army under contract and Bacher wanted to document the university’s release from responsibility for some millions of dollars’ worth of plutonium that would soon be vaporized. Bainbridge thought the ceremony a waste of time but Farrell saw its point and agreed. To relieve the tension Farrell insisted on hefting the hemispheres first to confirm that he was getting good weight. Like polonium but much less intensely, plutonium is an alpha emitter; “when you hold a lump of it in your hand,” says Leona Marshall, “it feels warm, like a live rabbit.”2390 That gave Farrell pause; he set the hemispheres down and signed the receipt.

You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.

Dad led me over to his cot. A neat pile of books was stacked next to it. He said his bout with TB had set him to pondering about mortality and the nature of the cosmos. He’d been stone-cold sober since entering the hospital, and reading a lot more about chaos theory, particularly about the work of Mitchell Feigenbaum, a physicist at Los Alamos who had made a study of the transition between order and turbulence. Dad said he was damned if Feigenbaum didn’t make a persuasive case that turbulence was not in fact random but followed a sequential spectrum of varying frequencies. If every action in the universe that we thought was random actually conformed to a rational pattern, Dad said, that implied the existence of a divine creator, and he was beginning to rethink his atheistic creed. “I’m not saying there’s a bearded old geezer named Yahweh up in the clouds deciding which football team is going to win the Super Bowl,” Dad said. “But if the physics — the quantum physics — suggests that God exists, I’m more than willing to entertain the notion.” Dad showed me some of the calculations he’d been working on. He saw me looking at his trembling fingers and held them up. “Lack of liquor or fear of God — don’t know which is causing it,” he said. “Maybe both.

I’d say the guy was just plain nuts. Who wants to die for some stupid bird?” “I bet he didn’t think it was a stupid bird,” Garrett said, “especially if he traveled all the way down here from Minnesota to protect it.” By this point, Red was pretty sure he and Garrett would not get along on a long-term basis. “Little son of a bitch cared more about birds than people,” Red said. “That kind of thing—taking a stand—changes the world,” Garrett said. “Think of the guy in Tiananmen Square.” “Where?” Red asked. “Or the students at Kent State.” “Never heard of it,” Red said. “Or Nathan Hale,” Garrett said. “The Skipper on Gilligan’s Island?” “Or, hey, what about the men at the Alamo?” Damn it. That was a good point.

Starla, when you work in a restaurant, it’s not called ‘pie with ice cream on top.’ It’s called pie a la mode. Try saying it one time.” “A-la-mo,” she pronounced. “There’s a good girl,” Darius said, grinning. “The next time you ask a customer if he wants some dessert, you ask him if he wants pie Alamo.

1. You must lead from the front. Always. 2. Speed is everything. There must be a sense of urgency. 3. Listen to the locals. They often know more than the Nobel Prize Laureates. 4. Don’t wait for federal agencies to tell you what to do ... tell them what you need. 5. Keep the public informed on the details. Do it early and often and without fanfare. Transparency inspires confidence. Confidence inspires cohesion. 6. Make quick decisions when plans fail. They will fail. As the saying goes, “No battle plan completely survives the first shot.” 7. Demand and expect excellence. There is no reason government cannot function in a competent manner. Refuse to accept failure. 8. Ignore the politics, focus on doing a good job. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. If you do a good job, that will all take care of itself. If you don’t, there is no amount of PR that will help you. 9. Read the old playbook, then throw it out and get ready to improvise. 10. Hope for the best but prepare for the worst, immediately. Assume you are at the Alamo. If you end up attacking an ant hill with a sledge hammer ... that’s okay. But if you end up bringing a knife to a gun fight ... that’s a failure. If you prepare for war and peace breaks out, great! But if you prepare for peace and war breaks out, you’re in trouble!

In 1942 the government ordered the construction of a perimeter fence around the then-secret Site Y of the Manhattan Project. Consequently, they established an explicit border to distinguish the scientists and army personnel within the fence, atop the Hill, as “insiders,” and the communities outside the fence, below the Hill, as “outsiders.” As a result of the distinction between the Hill and the Valley, Los Alamos has become what Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa (1999) writes of the borderlands region of South Texas: a “place of contradictions” where “hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominent features of this landscape” (19). The Hill-Valley binary is not simply geographic. Chicano literary scholar José David Saldívar (1997) says of topospatial readings such as this one that “the aim of these topospatial readings, it bears some repeating, is to show the profound interactions of space and history, geography and psychology, nationhood and imperialism, and to define space as not just a ‘setting’ but as a formative presence throughout” (79). The U.S. military deliberately constructed this institution, and it continues to overshadow northern New Mexico seventy-five years after the Manhattan Project was instituted on the Pajarito Plateau. The dichotomizing of the Hill and the Valley made objects of the people of New Mexico by enticing them away from land-based lifestyles with well-paying jobs in the nuclear industry, jobs that ultimately sickened, injured, and even killed them by contamination or explosion. In the chapter “Entering into the Serpent” from Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa (1999) claims that “in trying to become ‘objective,’ Western culture made ‘objects’ of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing ‘touch’ with them. This dichotomy is the root of all violence” (59). Nuevomexicanas/os’ ascent up el camino de la culebra, the snake road, is a literal entering into the Anzaldúan serpent. This entering into the serpent is the catalyst for conocimiento, or a coming to consciousness.

The Mexican army offered surrender to the Alamo defenders, and 27-year-old commander of the Alamo William Barret Travis’ response was a single defiant cannon shot. After 12 long days of siege by the numerically superior Mexican forces, legend says that Travis offered escape to those defenders who did not want to stay with him and face certain death, calling the question on his offer with a literal line in the sand drawn with his sword. Mere hours later, all the defenders lay dead on the grounds of the mission, never knowing that, four days earlier, a convention of delegates from all over Texas had drawn up and signed a Declaration of Independence from Mexico, formally establishing the Republic of Texas. At

We were a group of people connecting both honestly and dishonestly, appearing composed at dusk and bedraggled at day break, committed, whether we wanted it or not, to share conditions of need, agitation, and sometimes joy, which is to say: we were a community.