Birthday Backdrop Quotes

In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future of the city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where note even the ashes of his glory would remain.

Students at the University of Chicago were warned that the adult world was “rough and bloody … but if you have enough of the lust of battle in you, you will have a pretty good time after all.” Elsewhere in the Windy City, in a major address to mark Washington’s birthday, he thundered his gospel, “Life is strife,” against a backdrop of Stars and Stripes. “There is an unhappy tendency among certain of our cultivated people,” Roosevelt went on, “to lose the great manly virtues, the power to strive and fight and conquer.” He urged his audience, in the name of Washington, to be ready for the day when America had to uphold its honor “by an appeal to the supreme arbitrament of the sword.