America's Memorable Quotes

1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.

So, if I'm no cheerleader of sports, why write a chapter about it? Sports do have some positive impact on society. They solve problems, such as how to get inner-city kids to spend $175 on shoes. They serve as a backdrop for some of our most memorable commercials. And they remain the one and only relevant application of math. Not only that, but we have sports to thank for most of the last century's advances in manliness. The system starts in school, where gym class separates the men from the boys. Then those men are taught to be winners, or at least, losers that hate themselves.

So, it was done, the break was made, in words at least: on July 2, 1776, in Philadelphia, the American colonies declared independence. If not all thirteen clocks had struck as one, twelve had, and with the other silent, the effect was the same. It was John Adams, more than anyone, who had made it happen. Further, he seems to have understood more clearly than any what a momentous day it was and in the privacy of two long letters to Abigail, he poured out his feelings as did no one else: The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more.

A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless eduction, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well. But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crime. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492 The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them. Here was another piece of nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom of human beings everywhere else. There were pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see. It was sort of ice-cream cone on fire. It looked like this: [image] Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines. The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black. Color was everything. Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which is a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched the seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away. The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.

She had, without realizing it at the time, learned to follow Nick's gaze, learned to learn his lust...his desires remained memorized within her. She looked at the attractive women he would look at...She had become him: she longed for these women. But she was also herself, and so she despised them. She lusted after them, but she also wanted to beat them up. A rapist. She had become a rapist, driving to work in a car.

[Independence Day] will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

Estoy convencido de que nunca nos sucede nada que no hayamos previsto, nada para lo que no estemos preparados. Nos han tocado malos tiempos, como a todos los hombres, y hay que aprender a vivir sin ilusiones

Just because I haven't put a lot of thought into this book doesn't mean you shouldn't. I warn you to read this book carefully. Savor my ideas. Memorize the pertinent passages. Eat with it, sleep with it, let nature take its course. Because what I have dictated is nothing less than a Constitution for the Colbert Nation. And, like our Founding Fathers, I hold my Truths to be self-evident, which is why I did absolutely no research. I didn't need to. The only research I needed was a long hard look in the mirror.

He had experiences as rich and memorable as any young man has ever enjoyed, and was moved by none of them.

Something that once had importance might be forgotten by most people but because millions of people once knew it, a force is present that can be harnessed. There might be so much significance attached to a song, for example, or a fact, that it can’t die but only lies dormant, like a vampire in his coffin, waiting to be called forth from the grave once again. There is more magic in the fact that the first mass worldwide photo of the Church of Satan was taken by Joe Rosenthal – the same man who took the most famous news photo in history – the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. There’s real occult significance to that – much more than in memorizing grimoires and witches’ alphabets. People ask me about what music to use in rituals – what is the best occult music. I’ve instructed people to go to the most uncrowded section of the music store and it’s a guarantee what you’ll find there will be occult music. That’s the power of long-lost trivia. I get irritated by people who turn up their noses and whine ‘Why would anyone want to know that?’ Because once upon a time, everyone in America knew it. Suppose there’s a repository of neglected energy, that’s been generated and forgotten. Maybe it’s like a pressure cooker all this time, just waiting for someone to trigger its release. ‘Here I am,’ it beckons, ‘I have all this energy stored up just waiting for you – all you have to do is unlock the door. Because of man’s stupidity, he’s neglected me to this state of somnambulism – dreaming the ancient dreams – even though I was once so important to him.’ Think about that. A song that was once on millions of lips now is only on your lips. Now what does that contain? Those vibrations of that particular tune, what do they evoke, call up? What do they unlock? The old gods lie dormant, waiting.

'Till America has learned to love literature not as an amusement, not as a mere doggerel to memorize in a college room, but for its humanizing and ennobling energy, my dear reverend president, she will not have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of a people. That which raises it from a dead name to a living power.'

The first panel misquotes the preamble and conclusion of the Declaration of Independence, leaving out five words from within its selected excerpts. The architect requested the omissions so the text would fit better! Surely this memorable text should not be altered for so petty a reason. We know Jefferson would not approve, for whenever he sent correspondents a copy of the Declaration he took pains to show what the Continental Congress had added to his draft and what it had cut. The altered text reads,

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

In six years, Hoover circled the globe five times. He lived through the Boxer Rebellion in China, hacked through the jungles of Borneo, rode camels across the red emptiness of Western Australia, rubbed shoulders with Wyatt Earp and Jack London in a Klondike saloon, camped beside the Great Pyramids of Egypt. He had experiences as rich and memorable as any young man has ever enjoyed, and was moved by none of them. In

I've just come to my room, Livy darling, I guess this was the memorable night of my life. By George, I never was so stirred since I was born. I heard four speeches which I can never forget... one by that splendid old soul, Col. Bob Ingersoll, — oh, it was just the supremest combination of English words that was ever put together since the world began... How handsome he looked, as he stood on that table, in the midst of those 500 shouting men, and poured the molten silver from his lips! What an organ is human speech when it is played by a master! How pale those speeches are in print, but how radiant, how full of color, how blinding they were in the delivery! It was a great night, a memorable night. I doubt if America has seen anything quite equal to it. I am well satisfied I shall not live to see its equal again... Bob Ingersoll’s music will sing through my memory always as the divinest that ever enchanted my ears. And I shall always see him, as he stood that night on a dinner-table, under the flash of lights and banners, in the midst of seven hundred frantic shouters, the most beautiful human creature that ever lived... You should have seen that vast house rise to its feet; you should have heard the hurricane that followed. That's the only test! People might shout, clap their hands, stamp, wave their napkins, but none but the master can make them get up on their feet. {Twain's letter to his wife, Livy, about friend Robert Ingersoll's incredible speech at 'The Grand Banquet', considered to be one of the greatest oratory performances of all time}

For many viewers, though, the most memorable part of the parade was the very first float. Anointed “God’s Float” by its creators, it consisted of a replica of a house of worship with large photos of churches and synagogues arrayed along the sides. Two phrases appeared in grand Gothic script at each end: “Freedom of Worship” and “In God We Trust.”5

The first is the hot dog. Memorably defined by H. L. Mencken as “a cartridge filled with the sweepings of abattoirs,

In 1936, the federal court struck down all federal restrictions against birth control, in a case memorably named U.S. v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries.

History proves that great civilizations collapse when the gap between the haves and have-nots is too great. Sadly, America is on that same course because we haven’t learned from history. We only memorize historical dates and names, not the lesson.” “Aren’t prices supposed to go up?

Sober for seven years, Spencer had replaced his heroin and methamphetamine addiction with martial arts even before he’d left for federal prison. The jujitsu practice had sustained him throughout his incarceration—even when his girlfriend dumped him and when his former martial-arts teacher and onetime father figure was arrested and jailed for taking indecent liberties with a teenage female student. Spencer stuck to his recovery and to his prison workouts, ignoring the copious drugs that had been smuggled inside, and he read voraciously about mixed martial arts. Using the Bureau of Prisons’ limited email system, he had Ginger copy articles about various MMA fighters—laboriously pasting in one block of text at a time—so he could memorize pro tips and workout strategies and, eventually, through her, reach out directly to fighters and studio owners for advice.

Assessment centers on demonstrated competencies, not memorized content. Standardized tests are used thoughtfully to identify and assist students lagging in “learning how to learn” skills. Students teach and learn from each other. They learn to make the most of online resources and machine intelligence and draw on adults for guidance.

Till America has learned to love literature not as an amusement, not as mere doggerel to memorize in a college room, but for its humanizing and ennobling energy, my dear reverend president, she will not have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of a people. That which raises it from a dead name to a living power.

The first choice Anne had to make before she picked up her pen was what meter to use, since this was a crucial part of declaring her intentions as a Puritan and as a poet. Once she had decided, she could not waver. This was partly for practical reasons. Each page was precious to Anne. Although her wealthy father did have a larger supply of paper and vellum than most people and she herself had a small bound book to write in, once she had used up this writing material, it was expensive to get more, and it could take months to arrive from England. Mistakes were a costly luxury, therefore, and drafts were an impossibility. Anne would have to think out the lines first and memorize them before hazarding them onto paper.

If you need some inspiration to push back against those sponsors, consider the case of George Lucas. When he was filming the original Star Wars, he wanted a bold launch for his movie. The Directors Guild of America protested. Most films at the time started by naming the writer and director in the opening title sequence—in this case, thanking the film’s creators rather than its sponsors. It was how things were done. Despite the protests of the Directors Guild, Lucas decided to forgo opening credits entirely. The result was one of the most memorable beginnings in movie history. And he paid for it—the Directors Guild fined him $250,000 for his daring. His loyalty was to his audience’s experience, and he was willing to sacrifice for it. You should be, too.

This is essentially how company mission statements are created, and why you need not give a fuck about memorizing or adhering to them. They are the products of untold man-hours of "brainstorming" and "focus-grouping" resulting in the blandest, most generalized, least-potentially-offensive, frequently asinine copy that could have been created by any group of monkeys in any boardroom in America.

But to play in an international tournament of the caliber announced, he had to spend much more time at careful, precise study, analysis, and memorization. He stopped answering his phone, because he didn’t want to be interrupted or tempted to socialize—even for a chess party—and at one point, to be alone with the chessboard, he just threw some clothes in a suitcase, didn’t tell anyone where he was going, and checked into the Brooklyn YMCA. During his stay there, he sometimes studied more than sixteen hours per day. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, describes how people in all fields reach success. He quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin: “In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chessplayers, criminals and what have you, the number comes up again and again [the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours of practice].” Gladwell then refers to Bobby: “To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fischer got to that elite level in less than that amount of time: it took him nine years.) Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.

I’m about as political as a Bengal tiger. . . . I have a feeling that a nation is more than just government, laws and rules. It’s an attitude. It’s the people’s outlook. Dean Martin once asked me what I wanted for my baby daughter, and I realize now that my answer was kind of an attitude toward my country. Well, he asked me this on election day and the bars were closed anyway, so he had a lot of time to listen and I told him. . . . I told him that I wanted for my daughter Marisa what most parents want for their children. I wanted to stick around long enough to see that she got a good start and I would like her to know some of the values that we knew as kids, some of the values that an articulate few now are saying are old-fashioned. But most of all I want her to be grateful, as I am grateful for every day of my life that I spend in the United States of America. . . . I don’t care whether she ever memorizes the Gettysburg Address or not, but I want her to understand it, and since very few little girls are asked to defend their country, she will probably never have to raise her hand to that oath, but I want her to respect all who do. I guess that is what I want for my girl. That is what I want for my country, and that’s what I want for the men that you people are going to pick from here to go shape our destinies.

Let us consider some of the most important Anarchist acts within the last two decades. Strange as it may seem, one of the most significant deeds of political violence occurred here in America, in connection with the Homestead strike of 1892. During that memorable time the Carnegie Steel Company organized a conspiracy to crush the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Henry Clay Frick, then Chairman of the Company, was intrusted with that democratic task. He lost no time in carrying out the policy of breaking the Union, the policy which he had so successfully practiced during his reign of terror in the coke regions. Secretly, and while peace negotiations were being purposely prolonged, Frick supervised the military preparations, the fortification of the Homestead Steel Works, the erection of a high board fence, capped with barbed wire and provided with loopholes for sharpshooters. And then, in the dead of night, he attempted to smuggle his army of hired Pinkerton thugs into Homestead, which act precipitated the terrible carnage of the steel workers. Not content with the death of eleven victims, killed in the Pinkerton skirmish, Henry Clay Frick, good Christian and free American, straightway began the hounding down of the helpless wives and orphans, by ordering them out of the wretched Company houses.

DePaul University professor Jason Hill is a Jamaican immigrant who is openly gay but politically conservative. Hill describes himself this way: “I’m mixed race, but I’m perceived as being black in America. And, like any person of color who has lived in America, I’ve experienced my fair share of racism. But I don’t see America as a nation of extreme bigotry.”55 In his book We Have Overcome, Hill offers a memorable insight into the paradox of progressives who defend

Perhaps most important, Strauss, Arendt, and Kissinger all started out in America in the same place, rejecting the ideologies that provided the grounding for the vast majority of their fellow German-Jewish émigrés. They were neither Marxists nor Zionists (though all felt a deep emotional attachment to Israel), nor did they adopt the quasi-official ideology of the United States, liberal democracy. What was left for them? Arendt provided the most succinct and memorable answer: all three engaged in what she called “thinking without a banister.” In

Another thing I liked about the Dewey decimal system was that it could sometimes function as a secret code. Every once in a while during my high school years, I would hesitantly and cautiously type “gay” into a search bar in a card catalog. Just “gay,” as if more specificity would kill me right on the spot. Libraries were the only space I felt remotely comfortable even acknowledging the question—which didn’t yet even have words or language, just the faint outline of the punctuation. And where if not a library could I go to understand the unknown, to expand my world, to make sense out of gibberish? I would type “gay” and then survey the titles that came up and then click the window closed without ever doing any further exploring. I didn’t know what I thought I might find if I actually went to the aisle where the books were. A very quiet gay bar, perhaps? I figured it wasn’t worth the risk. But as I closed the screen, I memorized the Dewey decimal number of the section where, I presumed, a mirror ball sprinkled stardust across the aging carpet and the rows of books waiting to be opened.

There were countless fugitive slaves, but only one - Dred Scott - had the patience to endure the vicissitudes of America's legal system. But it was all worth it when he made it to the highest court in the land and was told by the chief justice that he was a) wrong and b) not a man, but a piece of property. His true reward, however, would come years later, after he was dead and it was of no use to him. For his case was a precedent, and today it is discussed by historians, memorized by high-school students, and joked about by assholes like myself.

If they studied their paper money for clues as to what their country was all about, they found, among a lot of other baroque trash, a picture of a truncated pyramid with a radiant eye on top of it, like this: Not even the President of the United States knew what that was all about. It was as though the country were saying to its citizens, “In nonsense is strength.” *** A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless education, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well. But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crimes. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them. Here

One of the few memorable Federalist documents, to be put alongside the government reports of Hamilton, is Noah Webster’s dictionary of the American language, which he compiled during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Webster’s work seems to represent a fallback position for moderate Federalists: If you cannot control the people, perhaps you can control their language, and thus how they think and speak. As one scholar states, “Webster’s main motivation for writing and publishing it was not to celebrate American life or to expand independence. Instead, he sought to counteract social disruption and reestablish the deferential world order that he believed was disintegrating.”106 Not only was

Family Theater was created by Father Patrick Peyton of the Holy Cross Fathers in an effort to promote family unity and prayer. Initially it was seen as a forum to broadcast the Rosary: when the networks refused to allow such a narrow one-denominational appeal, Peyton broadened the scope, made it a weekly drama, added the glamor of Hollywood, and saved the “message” for the slots normally reserved for commercials. Throughout the ten-year run, only one commercial was heard: the continuous appeal for family prayer in America. Al Scalpone created the slogans that were used on each broadcast: A world at prayer is a world at peace and, most memorably, The family that prays together stays together. A line from Tennyson was used to open each broadcast: More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.

For many years, a family of ospreys lived in a large nest near my summer home in Maine. Each season, I carefully observed their rituals and habits. In mid-April, the parents would arrive, having spent the winter in South America, and lay eggs. In early June, the eggs hatched. The babies slowly grew, as the father brought fish back to the nest, and in early to mid August were large enough to make their first flight. My wife and I recorded all of these comings and goings with cameras and in a notebook. We wrote down the number of chicks each year, usually one or two but sometimes three. We noted when the chicks first began flapping their wings, usually a couple of weeks before flying from the nest. We memorized the different chirps the parents made for danger, for hunger, for the arrival of food. After several years of cataloguing such data, we felt that we knew these ospreys. We could predict the sounds the birds would make in different situations, their flight patterns, their behavior when a storm was brewing. Reading our “osprey journals” on a winter’s night, we felt a sense of pride and satisfaction. We had carefully studied and documented a small part of the universe. Then, one August afternoon, the two baby ospreys of that season took flight for the first time as I stood on the circular deck of my house watching the nest. All summer long, they had watched me on that deck as I watched them. To them, it must have looked like I was in my nest just as they were in theirs. On this particular afternoon, their maiden flight, they did a loop of my house and then headed straight at me with tremendous speed. My immediate impulse was to run for cover, since they could have ripped me apart with their powerful talons. But something held me to my ground. When they were within twenty feet of me, they suddenly veered upward and away. But before that dazzling and frightening vertical climb, for about half a second we made eye contact. Words cannot convey what was exchanged between us in that instant. It was a look of connectedness, of mutual respect, of recognition that we shared the same land. After they were gone, I found that I was shaking, and in tears. To this day, I do not understand what happened in that half second. But it was one of the most profound moments of my life.

The Sputnik moment for the Open Classroom movement came in 1983, when a blue-ribbon commission appointed by Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education, T. H. Bell, delivered a scathing report, entitled, A Nation at Risk, whose famously ominous conclusion warned that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” The response this time was a fervent and growing bipartisan campaign for more accountability from schools, mostly in the form of more of those standardized tests. And by 2001, “accountability” had become a buzzword. Under President George W. Bush that year, the “No Child Left Behind” Act tied federal funding to students’ performance on tests. Eight years later, President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” program sought similar results, although this time using carrots instead of sticks. However the federal policy was constructed, the message was becoming clear: for schools to survive, their students would have to score high on mandated tests. Teachers consequently understood that to preserve their own jobs, they’d have to spend more time and energy on memorization and drills. The classrooms of the so-called Third Industrial Revolution began to look ever more like the dreary common schools of the turn of the twentieth century, and the spirit of Emile retreated once again.

I was witness to events of a less peaceful character. One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two red ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast locked in each other's embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noonday prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life went out. The smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vice to his adversary's front, and through all the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go by the board; while the stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and, as I saw on looking nearer, had already divested him of several of his members. They fought with more pertinacity than bulldogs. Neither manifested the least disposition to retreat. It was evident that their battle-cry was "Conquer or die." In the meanwhile there came along a single red ant on the hillside of this valley, evidently full of excitement, who either had despatched his foe, or had not yet taken part in the battle; probably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs; whose mother had charged him to return with his shield or upon it. Or perchance he was some Achilles, who had nourished his wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus. He saw this unequal combat from afar—for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red—he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard within half an inch of the combatants; then, watching his opportunity, he sprang upon the black warrior, and commenced his operations near the root of his right fore leg, leaving the foe to select among his own members; and so there were three united for life, as if a new kind of attraction had been invented which put all other locks and cements to shame. I should not have wondered by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and playing their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment's comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight! Two killed on the patriots' side, and Luther Blanchard wounded! Why here every ant was a Buttrick—"Fire! for God's sake fire!"—and thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer. There was not one hireling there. I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea; and the results of this battle will be as important and memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill, at least.

In her mind, her actions were treason to the false federation, but loyalty to the real United States of America, the one created by a document she had memorized. The real document was set on fire by what the news called "petty arsons" when the National Archives burned down. Bev knew better—she knew who was behind the destruction of the country's most important document. It was more than a document, it was a symbol—a symbol of freedom from tyranny, and one the Federal Government could no longer afford to abide by.

Every American should memorize the preamble and keep its principles in mind while voting. If we elect only officials who understand the Constitution and its goals, America’s future will be safe.

I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” —Acts 10:34–35 (NRSV) We stared at the school handout. “That’s pouring it on pretty thick,” Kate said. I nodded. “Was it like this when we were in school?” I asked. Presidents’ Day was approaching, and Frances’s school was hosting a patriotic assembly. The kids had a packet of songs and poems to memorize. Some of them seemed over the top in their worship of the United States. Don’t get me wrong. I love America. I studied abroad in college and returned home profoundly grateful for my sprawling, boisterous, beautiful, dynamic country. But no country is perfect, and the United States is not the kingdom of God. Was it right to fill impressionable kids’ minds with such unvarnished patriotic worship? Aren’t we supposed to see the world through God’s eyes, thankful for our religious freedom, but calling out greed and injustice when we see it? “Maybe I learned some of these songs in school,” Kate said. “I can’t remember.” “Well, then probably Frances won’t remember either,” I said. “She’ll form her own ideas as she grows up.” And, suddenly, I realized that was the point of patriotism. Frances could form her own ideas. She was free to think and believe what seemed right to her. She was free to grow up and disagree with Kate and me completely. That was the glory of America. Lord, help me to see the world through Your eyes. —Jim Hinch Digging Deeper: Ps 22:28; Is 30:21

In America everybody is of opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors. --Unpopular Essays, ch. 10, “Ideas that Have Harmed Mankind” (1950)

I would be a genius now,” Quilty has said three times already, “if only I’d memorized Shakespeare instead of Lulu.” “If only,” says Mack. Mack himself would be a genius now if only he had been born a completely different person. But what could you do? He’d read in a magazine once that geniuses were born only to women over thirty; his own mother had been twenty-nine. Damn! So fucking close!

We have memorized America, how it was born and who we have been and where. In ceremonies and silence we say the words, telling the stories, singing the old songs. We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.

In idealizing or romanticizing America, a Jewish songwriter would inevitably change it. Irving Berlin suppressed his own Jewish identity, but he also did something much more dramatic and extraordinary. In a memorable riff in Operation Shylock (1993), Philip Roth dubs Berlin “the greatest Diasporist of all” and writes, “The radio was playing ‘Easter Parade’ and I thought, but this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas.’ The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.” The passage is hilarious, the tone that of a tummler, but the argument couldn’t be more serious. “Is that so disgraceful a means of defusing the enmity of centuries? Is anyone really dishonored by this? If schlockified Christianity is Christianity cleansed of Jew hatred, then three cheers for schlock. If supplanting Jesus Christ with snow can enable my people to cozy up to Christmas, then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”21 Though the passage is unequivocal in its endorsement of Berlin’s “means of defusing the enmity of centuries,” note that Roth himself, whom Jewish critics used to lecture for showing disrespect to the fathers and the faith, could not sound more Jewish in this passage and in Operation Shylock as a glorious whole. The

When public schools first began opening to girls, the curriculum was mainly based on memorization and beatings.

The Kansas conservatives, it seems to me, can be divided into two basic groups. On one side are the true believers, the average folks who have been driven into right-wing politics by what they see as the tyranny of the lawyers, the America-haters at Harvard, the professional politicians in Washington, or the eviction of God from public space. These kinds of Con will throw themselves under the wheels of an abortion doctor’s car; they will go door-to-door and spend their life savings for their causes; they will agitate, educate, and organize with a conviction that anyone who believes in democracy has to admire. On the other side are the opportunists: professional politicians and lawyers and Harvard men who have discovered in the great right-wing groundswell an easy shortcut to realizing their ambitions. Many of them once aspired to join—maybe even did join—the state’s moderate Republican insider club. Rising up that way, however, would take years, maybe a lifetime, when by mouthing some easily memorized God-talk and changing their position on abortion—as Brownback2 and other leading Cons have done—they could instantly have a movement at their back, complete with superdedicated campaign workers they wouldn’t have to pay and a national network of pundits and think tanks and talk-show hosts ready to plug them in. Kansas’s bright young Republicans know which way

Jack Kennedy’s death in Dallas on November 22, 1963, was one of the most tragically memorable moments in the lives of those who lived through it. So Poppy Bush’s inability or unwillingness to say where he was on that day is extremely odd, to say the least.

While Pirlo’s New York sojourn was mostly memorable off the field, who could not adore a man who says about his free kicks, “Each shot bears my name and they’re all my children.” But his greatest comments may be about his own humanity. On his looks, he once wrote, “If I glimpse the mirror when I get up, or before going to bed at night, I see a man of average ugliness. With stubble, an unruly mane of hair, a squint nose, slightly protruding ears, and bags under my eyes. But I also see a man who’s completely happy with the figure staring back at him.

If Indians are in the area you settle in, you will have no trouble with them unless you get out of line. Indians are one of the easiest race types of all to get along with. Although solid of face they have a great sense of humor and enjoy real comedy immensely. A friend of mine near Gallup, New Mexico had a store that he called John's Teepee that sold Indian souvenirs and curios. He up a number of large roadside signs in Navajo territory. They read: GENUINE BEADED BELTS AND NAVAJO RUGS AT JOHN'S TEEPEE 1 MILE. The first night the signs were up the Indians painted the right side of the T in teepee in a half circle making the T into a P. In northern Arizona through the woodland areas the state put up road signs reading LOOK OUT FOR THE DEER. The Indians quickly painted a line half way through the D in deer making the D into a B. To me this kind of humor is really funny, a lot funnier than the form jokes written by television writers and memorized by so-called television "Adlib" comedians who are no funnier than their ability to memorize a script.

Phonics was used to teach reading in America without question until the 1890s when John Dewey began a movement to change education from intellectual training to conditioning students to be obedient, conformist, non-thinkers. One of his disciples William Gray, dean of the University of Chicago’s School of Education, convinced the National Education Association that phonics instruction should be replaced with the look-say technique. (Look-say involves memorizing a whole word without recognizing the individual sounds of letters in the word. Committing the word to memory through repetition is a form of behavior conditioning.) In 1930 Scott Foresman published Gray’s new reader, Dick and Jane. These readers, or primers, soon gained dominance in American elementary schools.

Porter’s next new Hollywood work, MGM’s High Society (1956), was second-division Porter. It hit his characteristic points—the Latin rhythm number in “Mind If I Make Love To You,” the charm song full of syncopation and “wrong” notes in “You’re Sensational.” Porter even turned himself inside out in two numbers for Louis Armstrong, “High Society Calypso” (the Afro-Caribbean anticipation of reggae had just begun to trend in America) and, in duet with Bing Crosby, “Now You Has Jazz.” And the film’s hit, “True Love,” is a waltz so simple neither the vocal nor the chorus has any syncopation whatever. This is smooth Porter, the Tin Pan Alley Porter who wants everyone to like him, even the tourists. Everything about High Society is smooth—to a fault. Armstrong gives it flair, but everyone else is so relaxed he or she might be bantering between acts on a telethon. These are pale replicas of the characters so memorably portrayed in MGM’s first go at this material, The Philadelphia Story, especially by Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. In their first moment, the two are in mid-fight; she breaks his golf clubs and he starts to take a swing at her, recalls himself to manly grace, and simply shoves her self-satisfied mug out of shot. This is not tough love. It’s real anger, and while Philip Barry, who wrote the Broadway Philadelphia Story, is remembered only as a boulevardier, he was in fact a deeply religious writer who interspersed romantic comedies with allegories on the human condition, much as Cole Porter moved between popular and elite composition. Underneath Barry’s Society folderol, provocative relationships undergo scrutiny as if in Christian parable; his characters are likable but worrisome—and, from First Couple Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly on down, there is nothing worrisome in this High Society.

Birx commented on the importance of testing asymptomatic people. She argued that the only way to figure out who was sick was to test them. She memorably exclaimed, “That’s why it’s so dangerous—people don’t even know they’re sick!” I felt myself looking around the room, wondering if I was the only one who had heard this.

Because it is ignorance about money that causes so much greed and fear,” said rich dad. “Let me give you some examples. A doctor, wanting more money to better provide for his family, raises his fees. By raising his fees, it makes health care more expensive for everyone. It hurts the poor people the most, so they have worse health than those with money. Because the doctors raise their fees, the attorneys raise their fees. Because the attorneys’ fees have gone up, schoolteachers want a raise, which raises our taxes, and on and on and on. Soon there will be such a horrifying gap between the rich and the poor that chaos will break out and another great civilization will collapse. History proves that great civilizations collapse when the gap between the haves and have-nots is too great. Sadly, America is on that same course because we haven’t learned from history. We only memorize historical dates and names, not the lesson.

Years later it occurred to me that I was doing the same thing when I was helping my daughter memorize “Paul Revere’s Ride.” I was teaching her to love sacrifice and goodness and truth and beauty, and I was teaching her the history of America and therefore teaching her to love America,

We will have to downscale our gigantic enterprises and institutions­ - corporations, governments, banks, schools, hospitals, markets, farms­ - and learn to live locally, hence responsibly. We will have to drive less and create decent public transportation that people want to use. We will have to produce less garbage (including pollution) and consume less fossil fuel. We will have to reacquire the lost art of civic planning and redesign our rules for building. If we can do these things, we may be able to recreate a nation of places worth caring about, places of enduring quality and memorable character.

Today, as provost of Harvard University, Steve Hyman is mostly engaged in the many political and administrative tasks that come with leading a large institution. But he is a neuroscientist by training, and in 1996 to 2001, when he was the director of the NIMH, he wrote a paper, one both memorable and provocative in kind, that summed up all that had been learned about psychiatric drugs. Titled “Initiation and Adaptation: A Paradigm for Understanding Psychotropic Drug Action,” it was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, and it told of how all psychotropic drugs could be understood to act on the brain in a common way.46 Antipsychotics, antidepressants, and other psychotropic drugs, he wrote, “create perturbations in neurotransmitter functions.” In response, the brain goes through a series of compensatory adaptations. If a drug blocks a neurotransmitter (as an antipsychotic does), the presynaptic neurons spring into hyper gear and release more of it, and the postsynaptic neurons increase the density of their receptors for that chemical messenger. Conversely, if a drug increases the synaptic levels of a neurotransmitter (as an antidepressant does), it provokes the opposite response: The presynaptic neurons decrease their firing rates and the postsynaptic neurons decrease the density of their receptors for the neurotransmitter. In each instance, the brain is trying to nullify the drug’s effects. “These adaptations,” Hyman explained, “are rooted in homeostatic mechanisms that exist, presumably, to permit cells to maintain their equilibrium in the face of alterations in the environment or changes in the internal milieu.” However, after a period of time, these compensatory mechanisms break down. The “chronic administration” of the drug then causes “substantial and long-lasting alterations in neural function,” Hyman wrote. As part of this long-term adaptation process, there are changes in intracellular signaling pathways and gene expression. After a few weeks, he concluded, the person’s brain is functioning in a manner that is “qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from the normal state.” His was an elegant paper, and it summed up what had been learned from decades of impressive scientific work. Forty years earlier, when Thorazine and the other first-generation psychiatric drugs were discovered, scientists had little understanding of how neurons communicated with one another. Now they had a remarkably detailed understanding of neurotransmitter systems in the brain and of how drugs acted on them. And what science had revealed was this: Prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known “chemical imbalance.” However, once a person is put on a psychiatric medication, which, in one manner or another, throws a wrench into the usual mechanics of a neuronal pathway, his or her brain begins to function, as Hyman observed, abnormally.

But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crimes. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

The ship had already played a short-lived but memorable part in the early days of the conflict. On February 24, during the initial invasion, the crew of the Moskva famously demanded that a garrison of thirteen border guards on the Ukrainian-owned Snake Island—right at a crucial military and shipping access point to the Black Sea—lay down their arms and surrender. Their response, roughly translated as “Russian warship, go fuck yourself,” went viral. Barely six weeks later, the ship was aflame in the same sea it was protecting, hit by a pair of Ukrainian-made Neptune missiles. The photographs that followed were yet another embarrassment to Putin: There was the pride of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, christened after its capital city, burning brightly. In state media, the Russian government claimed the ship had caught fire and sunk in bad weather—an excuse that even some of its own state TV hosts didn’t buy. The death toll remained unknown. The successful attack became the first of many stories about Ukrainian inventiveness and pluck. “People are using the MacGyver metaphor,” observed Ben Hodges, the former United States Army commander for Europe, referring to the popular 1980s TV show in which the lead character constantly improvised to get out of impossible jams. “With the Moskva, they MacGyvered a very effective antiship system that they put on the back of a truck to make it mobile and move it around.” More importantly, the war’s narrative was changing. The Russians had retreated from Kyiv. They had lost their warship. For the first time it looked like Ukraine might survive. There was even talk about Ukraine winning—if you defined winning as forcing Russia to retreat back to its own borders, the borders that existed prior to February 24, 2022.

At the foot of the ladder, he [Gene Cernan Apollo 17] delivered the short speech he had memorized for the occasion. "Is like to just say what I believe history will record: That America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came, and God willing, as we shall return: with peace and hope for all mankind.

As the legal historian Richard Epstein memorably put it, the “ink was scarcely dry on the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” which forbade the government as well as employers from taking race into account for any reason, when policies of racial discrimination began proliferating throughout the public and private sectors. In the historical blink of an eye, colorblindness transformed from an idea whose time had finally come into a symptom of moral backwardness—from a noble principle responsible for beating slavery and Jim Crow into a marker of evil. In the half century since the victories of the civil rights movement, some of America’s most celebrated scholars have been hard at work writing a false history of colorblindness. In their view, colorblindness was not the motivating principle behind the anti-racist activism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but was instead an idea created by white racists, conservatives, and reactionaries. Kimberlé Crenshaw, for instance, has criticized the “color-blind view of civil rights” that she alleges “developed in the neoconservative ‘think tanks’ during the seventies.” George Lipsitz, a black-studies professor at the University of California, writes that colorblindness is part of a “long-standing historical whiteness protection program” associated with “Indigenous dispossession, colonial conquest, slavery, segregation, and immigrant exclusion.” According to these scholars, there is no contradiction to reconcile: colorblindness had nothing to do with abolition or the civil rights movement to begin with; colorblindness has instead always been a Trojan horse for white supremacy.

On 2 November 1917, five weeks before Allenby walked through the Jaffa Gate, the government in London had issued a document that was to have a fateful and lasting impact on the Holy Land, the Middle East and the world. The foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, wrote to Lord Rothschild, representing the World Zionist Organization, to inform him that: His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. The sixty-seven typewritten words of the Balfour Declaration combined considerations of imperial planning, wartime propaganda, biblical resonances and a colonial mindset, as well as evident sympathy for the Zionist idea. With them, as the writer Arthur Koestler was to quip memorably – neatly encapsulating the attendant and continuing controversy – ‘one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third’.8 Lloyd George highlighted sympathy for the Jews as his principal motivation. But the decisive calculations were political, primarily the wish to outsmart the French in post-war arrangements in the Levant9 and the impulse to use Palestine’s strategic location – its ‘fatal geography’ – to protect Egypt, the Suez Canal and the route to India.10 Other judgements have placed greater emphasis on the need to mobilize Jewish public opinion behind the then flagging Allied war effort. As Balfour told the war cabinet at its final discussion of the issue on 31 October: ‘If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal [Zionism], we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and in America.’11 Historians have spent decades debating the connections and contradictions between Balfour’s public pledge to the Zionists, the secret 1916 Sykes–Picot agreement between Britain, France and Russia about post-war spheres of influence in the Middle East, and pledges about Arab independence made by the British in 1915 to encourage Sharif Hussein of Mecca to launch his ‘revolt in the desert’ against the Turks. The truth, buried in imprecise definitions, misunderstandings and duplicity, remains elusive.

Lockdown America, especially the mass incarceration and police violence that target poor communities of color, drive such leaders underground. Often, they have been murdered by the police. The Black Panther Party leaders, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, who were murdered by Chicago police, together offer perhaps the most memorable case in point. The Philadelphia police bombing and shooting of MOVE Organization members is another example, as discussed at the outset of Part One of this book.

Liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas admits that she “doesn’t have a single memorable policy or legislative accomplishment to her name.

Hillary served as a U.S. senator from New York but did not propose a single important piece of legislation; her record is literally a blank slate. Liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas admits that she “doesn’t have a single memorable policy or legislative accomplishment to her name.”2 Despite traveling millions of miles as secretary of state, Hillary negotiated no treaties, secured no agreements, prevented no conflicts—in short, she accomplished nothing. Lack of accomplishment is one thing; deceit is quite another. Everyone who has followed her career knows that Hillary is dishonest to the core, a “congenital liar” as columnist William Safire once put it. The writer Christopher Hitchens titled his book about the Clintons No One Left to Lie To. Even Hollywood mogul David Geffen, an avid progressive, said a few years ago of the Clintons, “Everybody in politics lies but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”3 She said her mother named her after the famed climber Sir Edmund Hillary, until someone pointed out that Hillary was born in 1947 and her “namesake” only became famous in 1953. On the campaign trail in 2008, Hillary said she had attempted as a young woman to have applied to join the Marines but they wouldn’t take her because she was a woman and wore glasses. In fact, Hillary at this stage of life detested the Marines and would never have wanted to join. She also said a senior professor at Harvard Law School discouraged her from going there by saying, “We don’t need any more women.”4 If this incident actually occurred one might expect Hillary to have identified the professor. Certainly it would be interesting to get his side of the story. But she never has, suggesting it’s another made-up episode.

Hillary served as a U.S. senator from New York but did not propose a single important piece of legislation; her record is literally a blank slate. Liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas admits that she “doesn’t have a single memorable policy or legislative accomplishment to her name.”2 Despite traveling millions of miles as secretary of state, Hillary negotiated no treaties, secured no agreements, prevented no conflicts—in short, she accomplished nothing.

The first speech, at the all-white but liberal University of Cape Town, remains one of Bobby’s most memorable, beginning with one of his favorite devices of leading listeners in one direction and then taking them somewhere else entirely. “I came here,” he said, “because of my deep interest [in] and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier…a land which once imported slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America.” His audience understood instinctively their speaker’s point: that he had not come as a pious missionary but as someone struggling with his own country’s racial shame.

Know that there’s nothing more optimistic than springtime in Paradise Valley, but if you need year-round renewal memorize this line from a Richard Hugo poem set in Philipsburg so you have it handy for life’s little cold snaps: “The car that brought you here still runs.

English physician Charles White, the well-known author of a treatise on midwifery, entered the debate over species in 1799. Unlike Scotland’s Lord Kames, White circled around religion and employed a new method of proving the existence of separate race species—comparative anatomy. He did not want the conclusions in his Account on the Regular Gradation in Man to “be construed so as to give the smallest countenance to the pernicious practice of enslaving mankind.” His only objective was “to investigate the truth.” White disputed Buffon’s legendary contention that since interracial unions were fertile, the races had to be of the same species. Actually, orangutans had been “known to carry off negro-boys, girls, and even women,” he said, sometimes enslaving them for “brutal passion.” On the natural scale, Europeans were the highest and Africans the lowest, approaching “nearer to the brute creation than any other of the human species.” Blacks were superior in areas where apes were superior to humans—seeing, hearing, smelling, memorizing things, and chewing food. “The PENIS of an African is larger than that of an European,” White told his readers. Most anatomical museums in Europe preserved Black penises, and, he noted, “I have one in mine.

China, talking about restrooms is very important, especially when seconds count. Memorize these characters: (Nán) is male, (Nǚ) is female. Often they may be more prominently displayed than the words “Men” or “Women” or even the familiar gender-specific silhouettes we are accustomed to seeing. Not to worry, however, if you can’t read the Chinese characters for the two gender choices. The general rule of thumb in almost all of China is “men left, women right,” meaning that the men’s restroom will be on the left-hand side and women’s on the right. Only in the areas populated primarily by minority peoples is the opposite true. If you’re female, and at least half the human race is of that persuasion, then you have a special treat in store at some Chinese airport restrooms outside of the largest cities like Beijing and Shanghai. You may walk into one of the lovely modern stalls provided for you. Lulled into a sense of security and familiarity by such a modern-looking restroom so far from home, you don’t even think to check to see if there is any toilet paper in the stall. That’s because in America there are always several giant-sized rolls in industrial-looking acrylic dispensers.

Dave Chappelle performed a hysterical skit of a blind White supremacist, who thinks he is White, and who spits out anti-Black ideas like tobacco. In the end he tragically—or, for the viewer, comically—learns he is a Black man. Of all the notable antiracist sketches he did, that first sketch of the racist Black man may have been Chappelle’s most clever and memorable.

The venerable ex-Chancellor Walworth thus expressed himself: "It would be as brutal, in my opinion, to send men to butcher our own brothers of the Southern States as it would be to massacre them in the Northern States. We are told, however, that it is our duty to, and we must, enforce the laws. But why—and what laws are to be enforced? There were laws that were to be enforced in the time of the American Revolution.... Did Lord Chatham go for enforcing those laws? No, he gloried in defense of the liberties of America. He made that memorable declaration in the British Parliament, 'If I were an American citizen, instead of being, as I am, an Englishman, I never would submit to such laws—never, never, never!'" [Prolonged applause.]

It was on July 2, 1776 that the Second Continental Congress voted for the legal separation of the Thirteen Colonies from Great Britain. On July 1, 1776, in anticipation of this great day, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail that Independence Day, would be the most memorable day in the history of America. He wrote “I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.” He was right about the day; however he was off regarding the actual signing by two days. Americans now celebrate Independence Day on July 4th, since the resolution of independence was debated on in a closed session of Congress and the Congressional Vote didn’t take place until July 4, 1776. Independence Day has become a National Day to be celebrated with friends enjoying barbecues, picnics and patriotic concerts. So it will be on this day with me. Yesterday I learned that my book “Suppressed I Rise” had been selected for two awards by the Florida Authors & Publishers Association, to be conferred next month at the Hilton Hotel in Disney World. Although July 4th is our nations “Independence Day” it will have additional meaning for me and my friends who have contributed so much of themselves to make these awards a reality. This year the 4th of July will certainly have a special significance to me.

And memorize this now: 1 tablespoon equals 3 teaspoons. Forget this fact and you will invariably make mistakes when trying to scale recipes up or down. It also helps to remember that 4 tablespoons equal ¼ cup.

If we fail to act soon we will face an economic, social, and political crisis that will threaten our free institutions.” The looming oil crisis, said Carter in one of the more memorable lines of his presidency, “is the moral equivalent of war.