Alvin York Quotes

On the eve of America’s entrance into World War II, Walter Brennan embodied fundamental decency and democratic virtues that made him indispensable to Cooper’s signature Everyman roles. Brennan’s performance in Sergeant York (September 27, 1941) foreshadows the country’s emergence from isolationism into a reluctant, then confirmed internationalism. Although Brennan received an Academy Award nomination for his work in Sergeant York, his low-key style is barely mentioned in later accounts of the film, which focus on Gary Cooper as Alvin York, a backwoods Tennessee conscientious objector who overcomes religious objections to war to become the nation’s greatest war hero. Brennan’s Pastor Pile persuades York to fight for his principles, to abide by the law and register for the draft, and then to serve in the army after he is denied conscientious objector status.

Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson later said that there should be a “consilience” between art and science. 79 Former NASA astronaut Mae Jemison took selected images with her on her first trip to space, including a poster of dancer and former artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Judith Jamison performing the dance Cry, and a Bundu statue from Sierra Leone, because, as she said, “the creativity that allowed us . . . to conceive and build and launch the space shuttle, springs from the same source as the imagination and analysis it took to carve a Bundu statue, or the ingenuity it took to design, choreograph, and stage ‘Cry.’ . . . That’s what we have to reconcile in our minds, how these things fit together.” 80 As a jazz musician once told me, musicians are mathematicians as well as artists. Morse’s story suggests that the argument started not because of the need to bring art and science together, but because they were once not so far apart. 81 When Frank Jewett Mather Jr. of The Nation stated that Morse “was an inventor superimposed upon an artist,” it was factually true. 82 Equally true is that Morse could become an inventor because he was an artist all the while. In one of the final paintings that laid him flat, the painting that failed to secure his last attempt at a commission, one he had worked fifteen years to achieve, Morse may have left a clue about his shift from art to invention, and the fact that the skills required for both are the same. He painted The House of Representatives (1822–23) as evidence of his suitability for a commission from Congress to complete a suite of paintings that still adorn the U.S. Capitol building. The painting has an odd compositional focus. In the center is a man screwing in an oil chandelier, preoccupied with currents. Morse was “rejected beyond hope of appeal” by the congressional commission led by John Quincy Adams. When he toured the picture for seven weeks—displayed in a coffee house in Salem, Massachusetts, and at exhibitions in New York, Boston, Middleton, and Hartford, Connecticut—it lost twenty dollars in the first two weeks. Compounded by a litany of embarrassing, near-soul-stealing artistic failures, he took to his bed for weeks, “more seriously depressed than ever.” This final rejection forced him to shift his energies to his telegraph invention. 83 By 1844 Morse went to the Capitol focused on a current that would occupy the work of Congress—obtaining a patent for the telegraph.

When we notice the prices on the menu we ask Ken if we can have the money instead and just go to Burger King. He laughs and tells us no because life is about experiencing new things. When the waiter takes our orders, Preston asks for the filet mignon but pronounces it totally wrong. Alvin asks for the New York strip steak, and then asks to substitute the sides for another New York strip steak. The waiter starts laughing, but we don’t because we know he is serious. Malcolm and I both play it safe with pasta. It was always a dream of mine to eat at a fancy restaurant. Now that the dream is fulfilled, there is room for more dreams.

Life tol'ably queer. You think you've got a grip on it, then you open your hands and you find there's nothing in them.

Before 2010, market news between Chicago and New York was transmitted fastest on cables that ran along the rights-of-way of roads and railways. But that year, a company called Spread Networks spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build a high-speed fiber-optic cable that went in a much straighter line and cut round-trip transmission of information and orders from 16 milliseconds to just 13. That 3-millisecond differential basically meant that only traders who used the new cable could make a profit by trading on momentary price differences between Chicago and New York.

And then you go to college and some teacher says to you, “Hey, why don’t you go to Alvin Ailey and go dance.” Madonna: No, he said, “You’re too good for this. You don’t need this. This is an environment for people who don’t know what they want to do with their lives. Go. Go to New York.