Departing Speech Quotes

Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art: I warm'd both hands before the fire of life; It sinks; and I am ready to depart.

Pull yourself together, Detective. You're embarrassing yourself, and more imprtant, you're embarrassing me." "They're going to do it outside. In public." "So the fuck what?" "Public," Peabody said, head still between her knees. "You're being honored by this department and this city for having the integrity, the courage, and the skill to take out a blight on this department and this city. Dirty, murdering, greedy, treacherous cops are sitting in cages right now because you had that integrity, courage, and skill. I don't care if they do this damn thing in Grand Central, you will get on your feet. You will not puke, pass out, cry like a baby, or squeal like a girl. That's a goddamn order." "I had more of a 'Relax, Peabody, this is a proud moment' sort of speech in mind," McNab murmured to Roarke. Roarke shook his head, grinned. "Did you now? You've a bit to learn yet, haven't you?

Excerpt from Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality. Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write. Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words. I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

I want to go home," she whispered to me. "Forget that last speech, I want to go home.

Nu mă pot lăsa posedat de un eveniment, oricât ar fi el de actual și de catastrofal. Îl discut un ceas, două, încerc să-l înțeleg, mă acomodez sau nu mă acomodez cu el, dar apoi trec mai departe și mă ocup de altceva. Măcar atâta libertate să mai profităm cât ni se îngăduie: libertatea de a ne alege subiectele de reflecție, de conversație sau glumă...

When you depart from standard usage, it should be deliberate and not an accidental lapse. Like a poet who breaks the rules of poetry for creative effect, this only works when you know and respect the rule you are breaking. If you have never heard of the rules you are breaking, you have no right to do so, and you are likely to come off like a buffoon or a barbarian. Breaking rules, using slang and archaic language can be effective, but it is just as likely to give you an audience busy with wincing.

...as of this moment there's the police department way, the federal law enforcement way, the military way... and my way. If you want me to function at my best then you're going to have to accept that I'm going to have to make up some of my own rules. I don't know enough about your playbook and, quite frankly, I don't like the way you operate. If I'm not a cop anymore then I'm something else, something new. Okay, then from here on out I'll decide what that is; and that includes building, shaping, and leading my team. My team, my rules.

because the cigarette or spliff was an indispensable technology, a substitute for speech in social situations, a way to occupy the mouth and hands when alone, a deep breathing technique that rendered exhalation material, a way to measure and/or pass the time. More important than the easily satisfiable addiction, what the little cylinders provided me was a prefabricated motivation and transition, a way to approach or depart from a group of people or a topic, enter or exit a room, conjoin or punctuate a sentence. The hardest part of quitting would be the loss of narrative function; it would be like removing telephones or newspapers from the movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age; there would be no possible link between scenes, no way to circulate information or close distance, and when I imagined quitting smoking, I imagined “settling down,” not because I associated quitting with a more mature self-care, but because I couldn’t imagine moving through an array of social spaces without the cigarette as bridge or exit strategy.

A 389-page audit released in 2020 found that money overseen by the Mississippi Department of Human Services (DHS) and intended for the state’s poorest families was used to hire an evangelical worship singer who performed at rallies and church concerts; to purchase a Nissan Armada, Chevrolet Silverado, and Ford F-250 for the head of a local nonprofit and two of her family members; and even to pay the former NFL quarterback Brett Favre $1.1 million for speeches he never gave.

I’ll never forget walking through airport security when I was flying to give a speech to a Christian men’s group in Montana. The Department of Homeland Security screeners obviously didn’t recognize me as “Jase the Duckman” from Duck Dynasty, and I felt like I was one wrong answer away from being led to an interrogation room in a pair of handcuffs!

Let us remark by the way, that to be blind and to be loved, is, in fact, one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness upon this earth, where nothing is complete. To have continually at one's side a woman, a daughter, a sister, a charming being, who is there because you need her and because she cannot do without you; to know that we are indispensable to a person who is necessary to us; to be able to incessantly measure one's affection by the amount of her presence which she bestows on us, and to say to ourselves, "Since she consecrates the whole of her time to me, it is because I possess the whole of her heart"; to behold her thought in lieu of her face; to be able to verify the fidelity of one being amid the eclipse of the world; to regard the rustle of a gown as the sound of wings; to hear her come and go, retire, speak, return, sing, and to think that one is the centre of these steps, of this speech; to manifest at each instant one's personal attraction; to feel one's self all the more powerful because of one's infirmity; to become in one's obscurity, and through one's obscurity, the star around which this angel gravitates,—few felicities equal this. The supreme happiness of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for one's own sake—let us say rather, loved in spite of one's self; this conviction the blind man possesses. To be served in distress is to be caressed. Does he lack anything? No. One does not lose the sight when one has love. And what love! A love wholly constituted of virtue! There is no blindness where there is certainty. Soul seeks soul, gropingly, and finds it. And this soul, found and tested, is a woman. A hand sustains you; it is hers: a mouth lightly touches your brow; it is her mouth: you hear a breath very near you; it is hers. To have everything of her, from her worship to her pity, never to be left, to have that sweet weakness aiding you, to lean upon that immovable reed, to touch Providence with one's hands, and to be able to take it in one's arms,—God made tangible,—what bliss! The heart, that obscure, celestial flower, undergoes a mysterious blossoming. One would not exchange that shadow for all brightness! The angel soul is there, uninterruptedly there; if she departs, it is but to return again; she vanishes like a dream, and reappears like reality. One feels warmth approaching, and behold! she is there. One overflows with serenity, with gayety, with ecstasy; one is a radiance amid the night. And there are a thousand little cares. Nothings, which are enormous in that void. The most ineffable accents of the feminine voice employed to lull you, and supplying the vanished universe to you. One is caressed with the soul. One sees nothing, but one feels that one is adored. It is a paradise of shadows.

General Garrison assembled all of the men for a memorial service, and captured their feelings of sadness, fear, and resolve with the famous martial speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V: Whoever does not have the stomach for this fight, let him depart. Give him money to speed his departure since we wish not to die in that man’s company. Whoever lives past today and comes home safely will rouse himself every year on this day, show his neighbor his scars, and tell embellished stories of all their great feats of battle. These stories he will teach his son and from this day until the end of the world we shall be remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for whoever has shed his blood with me shall be my brother. And those men afraid to go will think themselves lesser men as they hear of how we fought and died together.

You mentioned earlier that if I wanted to help, Miss Oliviera, I should save the lectures, and help,” Mr. Smith said as he sprayed. “Perhaps that’s exactly what Fates do.” I shook my head, bewildered. “I’m sorry?” “Perhaps Fates are people like us…ordinary souls who’ve found themselves caught up in the battle between good and evil, and have chosen to take a stand and help do what’s right.” Mr. Smith was lecturing again, but this time the speech seemed to be directed at John, too. His tone was kindly, however. “Maybe that’s why John’s fingerprints aren’t in the Isla Heusos Police Department database, and why no one will find his footsteps here. Small things that take just a moment to do, yes, but that could add up, in the end, to make an enormous difference to someone. What do you say to that, Miss Oliviera?” “I…I don’t know,” I said. I was confused. I supposed he was right, though. This could certainly explain how John was able to drift like a ghost in and out of the Isla Heusos Cemetery-and my various schools-leaving behind no trace, except rumors and the faintest images on video, and broken padlocks and chains.

This was an administration that approved the sale of 20 percent of America’s uranium to Russia with a $145 million payback to the Clinton Foundation, and a quick $500,000 to Bill for a speech in Moscow. Obama’s Department of Justice was so corrupt, so unlawful, so immoral that they tried to drag a corrupt woman across the 2016 presidential election finish line after she put our classified secrets at risk. They watched as she deleted thirty thousand emails and destroyed evidence.

In the modern era, teachers and scholarship have traditionally laid strenuous emphasis on the fact that Briseis, the woman taken from Achilles in Book One, was his géras, his war prize, the implication being that her loss for Achilles meant only loss of honor, an emphasis that may be a legacy of the homoerotic culture in which the classics and the Iliad were so strenuously taught—namely, the British public-school system: handsome and glamorous Achilles didn’t really like women, he was only upset because he’d lost his prize! Homer’s Achilles, however, above all else, is spectacularly adept at articulating his own feelings, and in the Embassy he says, “‘Are the sons of Atreus alone among mortal men the ones / who love their wives? Since any who is a good man, and careful, / loves her who is his own and cares for her, even as I now / loved this one from my heart, though it was my spear that won her’ ” (9.340ff.). The Iliad ’s depiction of both Achilles and Patroklos is nonchalantly heterosexual. At the conclusion of the Embassy, when Agamemnon’s ambassadors have departed, “Achilles slept in the inward corner of the strong-built shelter, / and a woman lay beside him, one he had taken from Lesbos, / Phorbas’ daughter, Diomede of the fair colouring. / In the other corner Patroklos went to bed; with him also / was a girl, Iphis the fair-girdled, whom brilliant Achilles / gave him, when he took sheer Skyros” (9.663ff.). The nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos played an unlikely role in a lawsuit of the mid-fourth century B.C., brought by the orator Aeschines against one Timarchus, a prominent politician in Athens who had charged him with treason. Hoping to discredit Timarchus prior to the treason trial, Aeschines attacked Timarchus’ morality, charging him with pederasty. Since the same charge could have been brought against Aeschines, the orator takes pains to differentiate between his impulses and those of the plaintiff: “The distinction which I draw is this—to be in love with those who are beautiful and chaste is the experience of a kind-hearted and generous soul”; Aeschines, Contra Timarchus 137, in C. D. Adams, trans., The Speeches of Aeschines (Cambridge, MA, 1958), 111. For proof of such love, Aeschines cited the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos; his citation is of great interest for representing the longest extant quotation of Homer by an ancient author. 32

Michael was wrapping up a speech. He said: Spectra is a company run by people, and we take your health very seriously. As our business relies on overseas suppliers, especially those in southern China, we are taking precautionary measures with this announcement of Shen Fever. We are working in accordance with the New York State Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the next few weeks, we will keep you abreast of new updates for keeping you safe. We would appreciate your cooperation and compliance.

And then there’s Mississippi. A 389-page audit released in 2020 found that money overseen by the Mississippi Department of Human Services (DHS) and intended for the state’s poorest families was used to hire an evangelical worship singer who performed at rallies and church concerts; to purchase a Nissan Armada, Chevrolet Silverado, and Ford F-250 for the head of a local nonprofit and two of her family members; and even to pay the former NFL quarterback Brett Favre $1.1 million for speeches he never gave. (Favre later returned the money.) There’s more.

The Longbourn party were the last of all the company to depart, and, by a manoeuvre of Mrs. Bennet, had to wait for their carriage a quarter of an hour after everybody else was gone, which gave them time to see how heartily they were wished away by some of the family. Mrs. Hurst and her sister scarcely opened their mouths, except to complain of fatigue, and were evidently impatient to have the house to themselves. They repulsed every attempt of Mrs. Bennet at conversation, and by so doing threw a languor over the whole party, which was very little relieved by the long speeches of Mr. Collins, who was complimenting Mr. Bingley and his sisters on the elegance of their entertainment, and the hospitality and politeness which had marked their behaviour to their guests. Darcy said nothing at all. Mr. Bennet, in equal silence, was enjoying the scene. Mr. Bingley and Jane were standing together, a little detached from the rest, and talked only to each other. Elizabeth preserved as steady a silence as either Mrs. Hurst or Miss Bingley; and even Lydia was too much fatigued to utter more than the occasional exclamation of "Lord, how tired I am!" accompanied by a violent yawn.

Abraham Lincoln understood this moral bond explicitly: “We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducting more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tell us,” he said in his first important public speech, in 1838. “We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them—they are a legacy bequeathed to us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors.

Thank you Neil, and to the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks from the heart. My family, my agent, editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as mine, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists. I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.) Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write. (Well, I love you too, darling.) Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom. Thank you.

On the labour front in 1919 there was an unprecedented number of strikes involving many millions of workers. One of the lager strikes was mounted by the AF of L against the United States Steel Corporation. At that time workers in the steel industry put in an average sixty-eight-hour week for bare subsistence wages. The strike spread to other plants, resulting in considerable violence -- the death of eighteen striking workers, the calling out of troops to disperse picket lines, and so forth. By branding the strikers Bolsheviks and thereby separating them from their public support, the Corporation broke the strike. In Boston, the Police Department went on strike and governor Calvin Coolidge replaced them. In Seattle there was a general strike which precipitated a nationwide 'red scare'. this was the first red scare. Sixteen bombs were found in the New York Post Office just before May Day. The bombs were addressed to men prominent in American life, including John D. Rockefeller and Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. It is not clear today who was responsible for those bombs -- Red terrorists, Black anarchists, or their enemies -- but the effect was the same. Other bombs pooped off all spring, damaging property, killing and maiming innocent people, and the nation responded with an alarm against Reds. It was feared that at in Russia, they were about to take over the country and shove large cocks into everyone's mother. Strike that. The Press exacerbated public feeling. May Day parades in the big cities were attacked by policemen, and soldiers and sailors. The American Legion, just founded, raided IWW headquarters in the State of Washington. Laws against seditious speech were passed in State Legislatures across the country and thousands of people were jailed, including a Socialist Congressman from Milwaukee who was sentenced to twenty years in prison. To say nothing of the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 which took care of thousands more. To say nothing of Eugene V. Debs. On the evening of 2 January 1920, Attorney General Palmer, who had his eye on the White House, organized a Federal raid on Communist Party offices throughout the nation. With his right-hand assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, at his right hand, Palmer effected the arrest of over six thousand people, some Communist aliens, some just aliens, some just Communists, and some neither Communists nor aliens but persons visiting those who had been arrested. Property was confiscated, people chained together, handcuffed, and paraded through the streets (in Boston), or kept in corridors of Federal buildings for eight days without food or proper sanitation (in Detroit). Many historians have noted this phenomenon. The raids made an undoubted contribution to the wave of vigilantism winch broke over the country. The Ku Klux Klan blossomed throughout the South and West. There were night raidings, floggings, public hangings, and burnings. Over seventy Negroes were lynched in 1919, not a few of them war veterans. There were speeches against 'foreign ideologies' and much talk about 'one hundred per cent Americanism'. The teaching of evolution in the schools of Tennessee was outlawed. Elsewhere textbooks were repudiated that were not sufficiently patriotic. New immigration laws made racial distinctions and set stringent quotas. Jews were charged with international conspiracy and Catholics with trying to bring the Pope to America. The country would soon go dry, thus creating large-scale, organized crime in the US. The White Sox threw the Series to the Cincinnati Reds. And the stage was set for the trial of two Italian-born anarchists, N. Sacco and B. Vanzetti, for the alleged murder of a paymaster in South Braintree, Mass. The story of the trial is well known and often noted by historians and need not be recounted here. To nothing of World War II--

Free speech must be replaced by hate speech regulations, with hate itself left undefined. Freedom of religion must be replaced by secular universalism. Freedom of association and contract must be prohibited, so long as that freedom cuts against the appropriate standards of ethnic, racial, or sexual diversity (under this standard, for example, an all-black school is considered diverse, while a police department that doesn’t represent ethnic populations proportionately is considered discriminatory, even if that police department staffs based on meritocratic concerns). Due process must be supplanted with mob rule, private property with public need.

People like Mrs. Lee were used to only one kind of Chinese wedding banquet—the kind that took place in the grand ballroom of a five-star hotel. There would be the gorging on salted peanuts during the interminable wait for the fourteen-course dinner to begin, the melting ice sculptures, the outlandish floral centerpieces, the society matron invariably offended by the faraway table she had been placed at, the entrance of the bride, the malfunctioning smoke machine, the entrance of the bride again and again in five different gowns throughout the night, the crying child choking on a fish ball, the three dozen speeches by politicians, token ang mor executives and assorted high-ranking officials of no relation to the wedding couple, the cutting of the twelve-tier cake, someone’s mistress making a scene, the not so subtle counting of wedding cash envelopes by some cousin,* the ghastly Canto pop star flown in from Hong Kong to scream some pop song (a chance for the older crowd to take an extended toilet break), the distribution of tiny wedding fruitcakes with white icing in paper boxes to all the departing guests, and then Yum seng!†—the whole affair would be over and everyone would make the mad dash to the hotel lobby to wait half an hour for their car and driver to make it through the traffic jam.

At the very least, it’s clear the decision to use sex-incongruent language of any sort should normally be a free choice. It’s not acceptable on the part of any organisation to coercively require this on pain of sanction. Trying to encourage social norms of politeness in a company or institution, including encouraging people to use preferred pronouns where sex isn’t relevant, is one thing; having HR departments threaten people with accusations of ‘transphobia’ and ‘hate speech’ if they don’t is quite another. As a trans person, having your preferred pronouns or other sex-incongruent terms used by others is a courtesy on their part and not a right on yours.

Some incidents of facial profiling have been more inconvenient than others. I’ll never forget walking through airport security when I was flying to give a speech to a Christian men’s group in Montana. The Department of Homeland Security screeners obviously didn’t recognize me as “Jase the Duckman” from Duck Dynasty, and I felt like I was one wrong answer away from being led to an interrogation room in a pair of handcuffs! Hunting season had recently ended, so my hair and beard were in full bloom! The security screeners saw a Bible in my bag, and I guess they figured I was a Christian nut because of my long hair and bushy beard. Somehow, I made it through the metal detector and an additional pat-down, and I guess they couldn’t find a justifiable reason to detain me. But as I was getting my belongings back together, I accidentally bumped into a woman. She screamed! It must have been an involuntary reflex. It was a natural response, because she thought I was going to attack her. Once she finally settled down, I made my way to the gate and sat down to compose myself. After a few minutes, a young boy walked up and asked me for my autograph. Finally, I thought to myself. Somebody recognizes me from Duck Dynasty. Not everyone here believes I’m the Unabomber! Man, I could have used the kid about twenty minutes earlier, when I was trying to get through security! I looked over at the boy’s mother, and she was smiling from ear to ear. I realized they were very big fans. I signed my name on a piece of paper and handed it to the kid. “Can I ask you a question?” he said. “Sure, buddy,” I said. “Ask me anything you want.” “How much does Geico pay y’all?” he asked. My jaw dropped as I looked at the kid. “Wait a minute, man,” I said. “I’m not a caveman!” “What do you mean?” the boy asked. “I’m Jase the Duckman,” I said. “You know--from Duck Dynasty? Quack, quack?” It didn’t take me long to realize the boy had no idea what I was talking about. In a matter of minutes, I went from being a potential terrorist to being a caveman selling insurance.

Within the evangelical community, Dobson emerged as Obama’s fiercest critic. In June 2008 he lashed out at Obama on his radio program, accusing him of distorting the Bible to fit his worldview, of having a “fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution,” and of appealing to the “lowest common denominator of morality.” Dobson especially took issue with a speech Obama had given in 2006 in which he had defended the right of people of faith to bring their religious beliefs into the public square, while also pointing out that Christians disagreed among themselves on how best to do so. Whose Christianity would win out? “Would we go with James Dobson’s, or Al Sharp-ton’s?” Obama had asked. “Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy?” Should Old Testament passages dictate that slavery was acceptable but eating shellfish was not? “Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount—a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application?” Dobson was not amused. 5

a 1960 self-published broadside, A Business Man Looks at Communism, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat [sic] and Republican Parties.” Protestant churches, public schools, universities, labor unions, the armed services, the State Department, the World Bank, the United Nations, and modern art, in his view, were all Communist tools. He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy and disparagingly of the American civil rights movement. The Birchers agitated to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren after the Supreme Court voted to desegregate the public schools in the case Brown v. Board of Education, which had originated in Topeka, in the Kochs’ home state of Kansas. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” Fred Koch claimed in his pamphlet. Welfare in his view was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where he predicted that they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech, Koch claimed that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.

Lynum had plenty of information to share. The FBI's files on Mario Savio, the brilliant philosophy student who was the spokesman for the Free Speech Movement, were especially detailed. Savio had a debilitating stutter when speaking to people in small groups, but when standing before a crowd and condemning his administration's latest injustice he spoke with divine fire. His words had inspired students to stage what was the largest campus protest in American history. Newspapers and magazines depicted him as the archetypal "angry young man," and it was true that he embodied a student movement fueled by anger at injustice, impatience for change, and a burning desire for personal freedom. Hoover ordered his agents to gather intelligence they could use to ruin his reputation or otherwise "neutralize" him, impatiently ordering them to expedite their efforts. Hoover's agents had also compiled a bulging dossier on the man Savio saw as his enemy: Clark Kerr. As campus dissent mounted, Hoover came to blame the university president more than anyone else for not putting an end to it. Kerr had led UC to new academic heights, and he had played a key role in establishing the system that guaranteed all Californians access to higher education, a model adopted nationally and internationally. But in Hoover's eyes, Kerr confused academic freedom with academic license, coddled Communist faculty members, and failed to crack down on "young punks" like Savio. Hoover directed his agents to undermine the esteemed educator in myriad ways. He wanted Kerr removed from his post as university president. As he bluntly put it in a memo to his top aides, Kerr was "no good." Reagan listened intently to Lynum's presentation, but he wanted more--much more. He asked for additional information on Kerr, for reports on liberal members of the Board of Regents who might oppose his policies, and for intelligence reports about any upcoming student protests. Just the week before, he had proposed charging tuition for the first time in the university's history, setting off a new wave of protests up and down the state. He told Lynum he feared subversives and liberals would attempt to misrepresent his efforts to establish fiscal responsibility, and that he hoped the FBI would share information about any upcoming demonstrations against him, whether on campus or at his press conferences. It was Reagan's fear, according to Lynum's subsequent report, "that some of his press conferences could be stacked with 'left wingers' who might make an attempt to embarrass him and the state government." Lynum said he understood his concerns, but following Hoover's instructions he made no promises. Then he and Harter wished the ailing governor a speedy recovery, departed the mansion, slipped into their dark four-door Ford, and drove back to the San Francisco field office, where Lynum sent an urgent report to the director. The bedside meeting was extraordinary, but so was the relationship between Reagan and Hoover. It had begun decades earlier, when the actor became an informer in the FBI's investigation of Hollywood Communists. When Reagan was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, he secretly continued to help the FBI purge fellow actors from the union's rolls. Reagan's informing proved helpful to the House Un-American Activities Committee as well, since the bureau covertly passed along information that could help HUAC hold the hearings that wracked Hollywood and led to the blacklisting and ruin of many people in the film industry. Reagan took great satisfaction from his work with the FBI, which gave him a sense of security and mission during a period when his marriage to Jane Wyman was failing, his acting career faltering, and his faith in the Democratic Party of his father crumbling. In the following years, Reagan and FBI officials courted each other through a series of confidential contacts. (7-8)

What is it like to be made vice-president? On one level, it's a nearly hallucinatory degree of success. I was barely forty years old, and a shaky, sixty-three-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the entire Western world. It was also like throwing up in convention-hall bathrooms before giving speeches, and after. It was sitting through dinners with men and women with whom I had nothing in common. Spending an enormous amount of time on trains. Promising thins and agreeing to things as advised by people I had barely met, on very little sleep. Huge sums of money were changing hands and everything happening on the grandest scale imaginable while still in most moments remaining pointless and usually outright seedy. I pretended to learn to fly-fish; I watched sporting events. In Maine I was assaulted by a lobster; it seized my lapel in a threatening manner. I tasted local foods and admired factories,farms, department stores, hotels, and (unless I'm misremembering) several empty plots of land.... It was like being given what was almost the nation's highest honor by a man you held in infinite esteem and regarded with perhaps a certain amount of terrified suspicion, a man who disliked you and clearly wanted nothing to do with you, who would scowl and change the subject at the mention of your name. And then being given a very important and very nasty job by that person, and despised for it, almost as much as you despised yourself.

To begin with, it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting-up of a "standard English" which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called "good prose style." On the other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations. Afterwards one can choose--not simply accept--the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impression one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally.

The Federal Reserve The Federal Reserve Bank was founded in 1913. Most people think that this bank is an American Federal Company. That is just as wrong as the conviction that the Bank of England belongs to the British Crown or to the whole of England. The Federal Reserve is in the hands of the Rothschilds and company. In his speech before the Senate, on December 15, 1987, Senator Jesse Helms said: “The principal instrument of the control over the American economy and money is the Federal Reserve System.” The Federal Reserve has a monopoly over the expenditure of the dollar as a world currency and determining the interest rate, and it disposes of a lot more monopolies. How does the Federal Reserve Bank operate? Suppose the United States government needs a couple of billion dollars for its expenses that cannot be paid with taxes income. At that moment it addresses the Federal Reserve Board. Then government bonds for the needed billion dollars are printed in the Bureau of Printing and Engraving. After these bonds are handed over to the bankers of the Federal Reserve, the board grants a loan to the government in the amount of the bond issue. The Federal Reserve draws interest from the government from the day the bonds are delivered. From that day on the government is allowed to draw checks against the Federal Reserve for the amount of the bonds. What are the consequences of this incredible transaction? The government simply saddles the people with a billion dollar debt to the Federal Reserve Bank, apart from the interest on interest that also has to be paid by “ordinary people”. What does the Federal Reserve have to say about “their” money? “Neither paper currency nor deposits have value as commodities. Intrinsically, a dollar bill is just a piece of paper, deposits merely book entries.”[76] When the Federal Reserve needs new, or more, currency to transact its business, it takes the bonds over to the United States Treasury for safekeeping and asks the Treasury Department for the billions of dollars of new currency it needs. The Bank is accommodated on condition that it will pay the printing bill. It only pays for the expenditure costs of the banknotes, which are no more than a mere 500 dollars for ink and paper!

But come on—tell me the proposal story, anyway.” She raised an eyebrow. “Really?” “Really. Just keep in mind that I’m a guy, which means I’m genetically predisposed to think that whatever mushy romantic tale you’re about to tell me is highly cheesy.” Rylann laughed. “I’ll keep it simple, then.” She rested her drink on the table. “Well, you already heard how Kyle picked me up at the courthouse after my trial. He said he wanted to surprise me with a vacation because I’d been working so hard, but that we needed to drive to Champaign first to meet with his former mentor, the head of the U of I Department of Computer Sciences, to discuss some project Kyle was working on for a client.” She held up a sparkly hand, nearly blinding Cade and probably half of the other Starbucks patrons. “In hindsight, yes, that sounds a little fishy, but what do I know about all this network security stuff? He had his laptop out, there was some talk about malicious payloads and Trojan horse attacks—it all sounded legitimate enough at the time.” “Remind me, while I’m acting U.S. attorney, not to assign you to any cybercrime cases.” “Anyhow. . . we get to Champaign, which as it so happens, is where Kyle and I first met ten years ago. And the limo turns onto the street where I used to live while in law school, and Kyle asks the driver to pull over because he wants to see the place for old time’s sake. So we get out of the limo, and he’s making this big speech about the night we met and how he walked me home on the very sidewalk we were standing on—I’ll fast-forward here in light of your aversion to the mushy stuff—and I’m laughing to myself because, well, we’re standing on the wrong side of the street. So naturally, I point that out, and he tells me that nope, I’m wrong, because he remembers everything about that night, so to prove my point I walk across the street to show him and”—she paused here— “and I see a jewelry box, sitting on the sidewalk, in the exact spot where we had our first kiss. Then I turn around and see Kyle down on one knee.” She waved her hand, her eyes a little misty. “So there you go. The whole mushy, cheesy tale. Gag away.” Cade picked up his coffee cup and took a sip. “That was actually pretty smooth.” Rylann grinned. “I know. Former cyber-menace to society or not, that man is a keeper

The enemy won some points at the very beginning. On both of the two days preceding his remarks about Worth, Hitchcock notes that American deserters had been shot while crossing the Rio Grande. Probably they were just bored with army rations but there was some thought that they might be responding to a proclamation of General Ampudia’s which spies had been able to circulate in camp. Noting the number of Irish, French, and Polish immigrants in the American force, Ampudia had summoned them to assert a common Catholicism, come across the river, cease “to defend a robbery and usurpation which, be assured, the civilized nations of Europe look upon with the utmost indignation,” and settle down on a generous land bounty. Some of them did so, and the St. Patrick Battalion of American deserters was eventually formed, fought splendidly throughout the war, and was decimated in the campaign for Mexico City — after which its survivors were executed in daily batches.… This earliest shooting of deserters as they swam the Rio Grande, an unwelcome reminder that war has ugly aspects, at once produced an agitation. As soon as word of it reached Washington, the National Intelligencer led the Whig press into a sustained howl about tyranny. In the House J. Q. Adams rose to resolve the court-martial of every officer or soldier who should order the killing of a soldier without trial and an inquiry into the reasons for desertion. He was voted down but thereafter there were deserters in every Whig speech on the conduct of the war, and Calm Observer wrote to all party papers that such brutality would make discipline impossible. But a struggling magazine which had been founded the previous September in the interest of sports got on a sound financial footing at last. The National Police Gazette began to publish lists of deserters from the army, and the War Department bought up big editions to distribute among the troops. Taylor sat in his field works writing prose. Ampudia’s patrols reconnoitered the camp and occasionally perpetrated an annoyance. Taylor badly needed the Texas Rangers, a mobile force formed for frontier service in the Texas War of Independence and celebrated ever since. It was not yet available to him, however, and he was content to send out a few scouts now and then. So Colonel Truman Cross, the assistant quartermaster general, did not return from one of his daily rides. He was still absent twelve days later, and Lieutenant Porter, who went looking for him with ten men, ran into some Mexican foragers and got killed.

Be Positive I thank my God at all times for you because of the grace (the favor and spiritual blessing) of God which was bestowed on you in Christ Jesus, [so] that in Him in every respect you were enriched, in full power and readiness of speech [to speak of your faith] and complete knowledge and illumination [to give you full insight into its meaning]. 1 CORINTHIANS 1:4- 5 The Word of God says, “Depart from evil and do good; seek, inquire for, and crave peace and pursue (go after) it!” (Psalm 34:14). “Do all things without grumbling and faultfinding and complaining [against God] and questioning and doubting [among yourselves]” (Philippians 2:14). Be positive. Get rid of gossiping and complaining. Start your day by reading the Bible so that you will know how to speak from the authority of God’s Word. Spend time listening to God, and then tell others what you hear Him say. Bring life to whatever situations you face.

To study for a Master's degree in Modern American Literature and Comparative Word Literature seemed like preparation for a profession without a future. Since I was greatly interested in world affairs and politics, I inquired about such studies but was told that they accepted only American citizens. Thus I embarked on the study of literature in February, 1948 and commuted daily from Brooklyn to Columbia University. In the first semester, I had to take two extra courses in the School of General Studies, besides the regular load of credits in the Graduate School, Department of Philosophy. The extra were a speech course, including phonetics. The other requirement for a foreign student was Composition, taught by William Kunstler, the now well-known lawyer, dedicated to the defense of radical defendants. He was then a literary critic, before going off to law school.

An IT College Graduate To advance the goals and objectives of the IT department by utilizing strong programming skills and to improve organizational efficiencies and productivity through the use of state-of-the-art technologies Perl, MySQL, Linux, Apache, Mason, XML, XSL, HTML, JavaScript, Java, MS C11, ASP, 8086 Assembly, Fortran, COBOL, network firewall and hack-proof server installation and configuration, and automatic mass Web site building Internet-based public relations for online applications Network administration Wireless applications Speech recognition Excellent customer service skills Complex, technical troubleshooting and problem solving abilities Projects on time and within budget

Meanwhile, angered by white violence in the South and inspired by the gigantic June 23 march in Detroit, grassroots people on the streets all over the country had begun talking about marching on Washington. “It scared the white power structure in Washington, D.C. to death,” as Malcolm put it in his “Message to the Grassroots” and in his Autobiography.6 So the White House called in the Big Six national Negro leaders and arranged for them to be given the money to control the march. The result was what Malcolm called the “Farce on Washington” on August 28, 1963. John Lewis, then chairman of SNCC and fresh from the battlefields of Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama where hundreds of blacks and their white student allies were being beaten and murdered simply for trying to register blacks to vote, was forced to delete references to the revolution and power from his speech and, specifically, to take out the sentence, “We will not wait for the President, the Justice Department nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power, outside of any national structure, that could and would assure us a victory.” Marchers were instructed to carry only official signs and to sing only one song, “We Shall Overcome.” As a result, many rank-and-file SNCC militants refused to participate.7 Meanwhile, conscious of the tensions that were developing around preparations for the march on Washington and in order to provide a national rallying point for the independent black movement, Conrad Lynn and William Worthy, veterans in the struggle and old friends of ours, issued a call on the day of the march for an all-black Freedom Now Party. Lynn, a militant civil rights and civil liberties lawyer, had participated in the first Freedom Ride from Richmond, Virginia, to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1947 and was one of Robert Williams’s attorneys.8 Worthy, a Baltimore Afro-American reporter and a 1936–37 Nieman Fellow, had distinguished himself by his courageous actions in defense of freedom of the press, including spending forty-one days in the Peoples Republic of China in 1957 in defiance of the U.S. travel ban (for which his passport was lifted) and traveling to Cuba without a passport following the Bay of Pigs invasion in order to help produce a documentary. The prospect of a black independent party terrified the Democratic Party. Following the call for the Freedom Now Party, Kennedy twice told the press that a political division between whites and blacks would be “fatal.

Steven Burrows, head of the Intellectual Property Department, was there too. He'd earned the nickname "Seven" because of an acceptance speech he gave during an awards dinner for The Top 40 Lawyers Under 40, announcing that his greatest accomplishment did not relate to his practice, but instead was when he engaged in all seven deadly sins in one day.

In 2008, the Swedish telecom company Ericsson found itself under investigation by the U.S. State Department for selling telecom equipment to the regimes of Iran, Sudan, and Syria, all considered state sponsors of terrorism. In 2011, Ericsson was named in a State Department report proposing to include telecom restrictions as part of its new sanctions against terrorist regimes. That year, Ericsson sponsored a speech by Bill Clinton and paid him a whopping $750,000, around three times Clinton’s fee at the time. Ericsson had never previously sponsored a Clinton speech. Ericsson’s timing could not have been more fortuitous, since later that year the State Department unveiled its new sanctions list for Iran. Telecom sanctions were not on it. Douglas

in the popular sense; all people, of any class or gender, speak and sing and seize a vernacular; at any point in history, a received potentiality of living language has situated us as human. For Dante, the vernacular of lyric, whose “sweet new style” was turned from the incipiently wandering language of women and of exile1 by the Stil Novo poets, was a matrix of potential resistance, radical mobility, and human dignity. Written during Dante’s own exile from Florence, De vulgare eloquentia seeks to consolidate a vision of a unified national language by claiming an exilic vernacular as the exemplary speech of the citizen. In

You never mentioned a single thing about running into Everett.” “Because you just got home, and again, I’m trying to take a bath, and just so everyone knows, the water is turning a little chilly.” She sent what she hoped was a pointed look toward the door, but her message was ignored. “Chilly water is incredibly beneficial for a lady’s skin, but back to Everett.” Lucetta scooted her chair forward. “Did his wards run off another nanny, and did he ask you to accept a position with him, and . . . did you feel compelled to turn down his offer because of that pesky attraction you feel for the man?” “I’m not attracted to Mr. Mulberry,” was the only protest she could think to respond. “How could you not be attracted to the gentleman?” Abigail countered. “A person would have to be blind not to notice that he’s incredibly handsome. Add in the fact he’s now responsible for three children, and well that must make him downright scrumptious to a lady who has a soft spot for little ones.” “I do not find Mr. Mulberry scrumptious,” Millie argued, wincing when Abigail sent her an incredulous look. “Oh, very well, I might have, when I first laid eyes on the man, thought he was a little handsome—although not scrumptious, mind you. But after he refused to consider me as a nanny for his wards, his handsomeness faded in a flash. Furthermore—” A knock on the door interrupted her speech. “Mrs. Hart? Are you in there?” Mr. Kenton, Abigail’s butler, called through the door. Abigail rose to her feet and moved across the room. “I am, Mr. Kenton, but Miss Longfellow is in the middle of her bath, so in order to preserve her modesty, I suggest you don’t open this door.” “Very good, ma’am, but I’m here to tell you that Miss Longfellow has a visitor. He gave his name as Mr. Everett Mulberry. May I tell him Miss Longfellow is receiving this evening?” “Of course she’s receiving, Mr. Kenton. Tell Mr. Mulberry she’ll be down directly.” “Tell him I’m not available,” Millie called. “Do no such thing, Mr. Kenton,” Abigail countered. “Millie is certainly available, and she’ll receive Mr. Mulberry in the drawing room in five minutes, ten at the most.” “Very good, ma’am.” Listening to Mr. Kenton’s departing footsteps, Millie frowned at Abigail, who’d turned away from the door and was beaming back at her. “I have no desire to see Mr. Mulberry, and since I am in the middle of my bath, which does, indeed, make me unavailable, you’ll need to go and make my excuses to the man.” “You’ve been complaining that your water is getting cold. That means you’ll have to get out of the tub soon to avoid freezing to death, making you available to speak with Mr. Mulberry.” “Perhaps I’ve decided to heed Lucetta’s advice and enjoy the benefits cold water is supposed to deliver to my skin.” Abigail

but I did hear some things about his speech that I think bear repeating: 1. He is a strong believer that people who talk too much seem to have bad luck. 2. People who do not return phone calls promptly do not seem to make the grade at a highly profitable firm. 3. People who object to end runs will never make it in football, or with successful investment banking firms. Certain groups do need to observe a “chain of command” atmosphere, but highly motivated, intelligent people do not need this handcuff. 4. A firm that has enthusiastic receptionists and telephone operators starts off with a tremendous advantage over the dummies of the world. Keep in mind that the first impression people receive from Bear Stearns is with those associates. 5. If a business person has to ask his accounting department if he is making a profit, he will not be in business very long.

The Supreme Court was beyond their constitutional power when they handed George W. Bush the victory in 2000 by ruling that if all the votes were counted in Florida, as that state’s supreme court had ordered, it would “cause irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush].” They were beyond their constitutional power every single time they struck down a law passed by Congress and signed by the president over the years. And most important, the Supreme Court was way beyond their constitutional authority every single time they created out of whole cloth new legal doctrines, such as “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, “privacy” in Roe v. Wade, or “corporations are people” in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. But in the fine tradition of John Marshall, today’s Supreme Court wants you to believe that they are the über-overlords of our nation. They can make George W. Bush president, without any appeal. They can make money into speech, they can turn corporations into people, and the rest of us have no say in it. And they’re wrong. It’s not what the Constitution says, and it’s not what most of our Founders said. Which raises the question: If the Supreme Court can’t decide what is and what isn’t constitutional, then what is its purpose? What’s it really supposed to be doing? The answer to that is laid out in the Constitution in plain black-and-white. It’s the first court where the nation goes for cases involving disputes about treaties, ambassadors, controversies between two or more states, between a state and citizen of another state, between citizens of different states, and between our country and foreign states. Read Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution—it’s all there. Not a word in there about “judicial supremacy” or “judicial review”—the supposed powers of the court to strike down (or write) laws by deciding what is and what isn’t constitutional. President Thomas Jefferson was pretty clear about that—as were most of the Founders—and the court didn’t start seriously deciding “constitutionality” until after all of them were dead. But back in the day, here’s what Jefferson had to say: The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves… When the legislative or executive functionaries act unconstitutionally, they are responsible to the people in their elective capacity.177 Their elective capacity? That’s a fancy presidential-founder way of saying that the people can toss out on their butts any member of Congress or any president who behaves in a way that’s unconstitutional. The ultimate remedy is with the people—it’s the ballot box. If we don’t like the laws being passed, then we elect new legislators and a new president. It’s pretty simple.

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the world rejoiced. In celebrating the twentieth anniversary of its fall, I reflected on the kind of conviction, the kind of voice, required to break down walls—be they miles of concrete in a former Communist region or invisible but no-less-apparent barricades in an office setting, or in our community or home. Would the Berlin Wall have fallen without President Reagan’s 1987 speech challenging Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”? Probably, but not as quickly. Yet according to The Wall Street Journal, officials in the State Department, the National Security Council, and the White House all pushed Reagan to deep-six his “tear down this wall” rhetoric. They warned that Reagan’s “sock-it-to-’em” line would incense Gorbachev and fray relations. Reagan left the line in. The wall came tumbling down.

Just play this out as a thought experiment,” he said. “Imagine if you had genuine, high-quality early-childhood education for every child, and suddenly every black child in America—but also every poor white child or Latino [child], but just stick with every black child in America—is getting a really good education. And they’re graduating from high school at the same rates that whites are, and they are going to college at the same rates that whites are, and they are able to afford college at the same rates because the government has universal programs that say that you’re not going to be barred from school just because of how much money your parents have. “So now they’re all graduating. And let’s also say that the Justice Department and the courts are making sure, as I’ve said in a speech before, that when Jamal sends his résumé in, he’s getting treated the same as when Johnny sends his résumé in. Now, are we going to have suddenly the same number of CEOs, billionaires, etc., as the white community? In ten years? Probably not, maybe not even in twenty years. “But I guarantee you that we would be thriving, we would be succeeding. We wouldn’t have huge numbers of young African American men in jail. We’d have more family formation as college-graduated girls are meeting boys who are their peers, which then in turn means the next generation of kids are growing up that much better. And suddenly you’ve got a whole generation that’s in a position to start using the incredible creativity that we see in music, and sports, and frankly even on the streets, channeled into starting all kinds of businesses. I feel pretty good about our odds in that situation.

The main shift, and it has been obvious for decades, is that art history can no longer occupy itself in an innocent fashion with the biography of form because art itself is no longer preoccupied with form. The generation of classic art history, from the 1890s to the 1920s, as by no means out of tune with an artistic modernism that, for all its rhetoric of rupture, still reckoned in ratios of good form to bad form, form to non-form, form to content. That early twentieth-century paradigm has long since broken down as art redistributes itself in events, vectors, emotions, ideas, clusters or swarms of artifice. Art today is less about form than about the conditions of possibility of effective speech and action, the tension between enunciation and performance, the virtues of images. Today creativity itself is differently distributed in society: in the mass media and social networks, i amateur or outsider art, in fashion elite and democratic, in the proliferation of recognized but little-esteemed aesthetic categories - 'the zany, the cute, and the interesting,' for example. Even the sophisticated discourses of modernism that have dominated art-history departments over the last three decades - the 'classic art history' of our time - are not keeping pace. They are still organized by master-discipline chains reaching back into the 1960s, chains of psychic involvement that binds generations, despite everything, to the old courses of form.

No one would take seriously the equally illogical plan of disbanding our fire department, or disbanding our police department to stop crime”—but the speech attracted little attention.

wide database should be the inequity and bias with which “terrorist” content is already discovered and determined by companies. By and large, Silicon Valley tech companies rely on the US government to define “terrorism,” and remove content from groups on the State Department’s list of foreign designated terrorist organizations (FTOs). While I’ve heard staffers from Facebook suggest that doing so is a legal obligation, numerous lawyers I consulted with disagree. Just as the leader of a designated foreign terrorist organization can publish an opinion piece in the New York Times—they can and they have—so too can they publish a page on Facebook.

There are exceptions to this rule—that is, if a group or individual also appears on the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Controls list of “specially designated nationals”—but this list is short.

In the early years of my work in this field, I observed as an elite crew of law professors and media experts, State Department officials, and corporate executives sought solutions that centered free expression issues that aligned, almost perfectly, with the goals of the US government.

His first day on the job came right as Boeing completed its merger with McDonnell Douglas. The resultant mammoth government contractor held a picnic to boost morale but ended up failing at even this simple exercise. “The head of one of the departments gave a speech about it being one company with one vision and then added that the company was very cost constrained,” Hollman said. “He asked that everyone limit themselves to one piece of chicken.

And our own beloved Carl Sandburg had this to say about the fire-belching evangelist Billy Sunday: You come along—tearing your shirt—yelling about Jesus. I want to know what the hell you know about Jesus. Jesus had a way of talking soft, and everybody except a few bankers and higher-ups among the con men of Jerusalem liked to have Jesus around because he never made any fake passes, and he helped the sick and gave people hope. You come along calling us all damn fools—so fierce the froth of your own spit slobbers over your lips—always blabbering we’re all going to hell straight off and you know all about it. I’ve read Jesus’s words. I know what he said. You don’t throw any scare into me. I’ve got your number. I know how much you know about Jesus. You tell people living in shanties Jesus is going to fix it up all right with them by giving them mansions in the skies after they’re dead and the worms have eaten ’em. You tell $6-a-week department store girls all they need is Jesus. You take a steel trust wop, dead without having lived, gray and shrunken at forty years of age, and you tell him to look at Jesus on the cross and he’ll be all right. You tell poor people they don’t need any more money on pay day, and even if it’s fierce to be out of a job, Jesus’ll fix that all right, all right—all they gotta do is take Jesus the way you say. Jesus played it different. The bankers and corporation lawyers of Jerusalem got their murderers to go after Jesus because Jesus wouldn’t play their game. I don’t want a lot of gab from a bunkshooter in my religion.

Sirius took a breath, and then tapped his spoon on his wine glass. The reception was quiet as they all looked to him. All eyes were on him now. It was time for the Best Man to make his own vow. He had to support them. He had to smile for them. They were happy. And he knew that James would be happy for him if their roles were switched. James was looking right at him, and so was Lily. They wanted him to rise and talk. And so he did, holding his glass in his hands. "Well," Sirius said, his voice echoing through the now silent Leaky Cauldron. They were all staring at him, "I'm supposed to make a speech, being the Best Man and all . . . but I'm really not one for speeches. That was always James's department. . ." There was a small laugh through the crowd. "When I first met you, Evans," Sirius said, as the room went quiet again, "I swore that you were wrong for James. And yes, I was jealous. And yes, I acted like an idiot. But I know James, and now I know you, and I know that you both were made for each other." Lily smiled warmly at him, and Sirius cleared his throat and continued. "Who would have thought I would be sitting here, making a toast to that four eyed freak that came running into my compartment that first day of school?" he said, "I know I wouldn't have guessed it. But I'm glad that I can see you on the happiest day of your life. I'm glad I was a part of it." He raised his glass to James, and got that mischievous smile again, "You were right, mate. It is like a fairy tale. And we all know what happens at the end of fairy tales. All evil's conquered, everything's set right, and Prince Charming and his girl go riding off in the distance happily ever after. So don't be scared, James. Because you two were written out to live happily ever after. I see the real thing in you two. Something that none of us here in this room is ever going to have for ourselves. You really do love each other." James took Lily's hand, and smiled down on his best friend. Sirius smiled back, and then turned to the crowd, his glass still raised, "So, here's a toast to true love, mates. Here's a toast to my brother," he turned, and looked to Lily, "And my sister." "Here, here!" the audience roared, clashing their glasses together, and Lily looked to Sirius, in an expression that she had never given him. Not one of loathing, or disgust or annoyance. . . but of surprise. Sirius grinned, and raised his glass to her again with a nod. She returned the nod, her smile rising again, and then Sirius took his seat. "Touching," Remus said. "Don't push it, wolf," Sirius growled as he went back to playing with his food. Lily was still staring at him from where she was sitting. He could feel her eyes on him, trying to get him to look at her again. But he wouldn't let himself. He had said what he had said, and there was nothing else about it.

Sirius took a breath, and then tapped his spoon on his wine glass. The reception was quiet as they all looked to him. All eyes were on him now. It was time for the Best Man to make his own vow. He had to support them. He had to smile for them. They were happy. And he knew that James would be happy for him if their roles were switched. James was looking right at him, and so was Lily. They wanted him to rise and talk. And so he did, holding his glass in his hands. "Well," Sirius said, his voice echoing through the now silent Leaky Cauldron. They were all staring at him, "I'm supposed to make a speech, being the Best Man and all . . . but I'm really not one for speeches. That was always James's department. . ." There was a small laugh through the crowd. When I first met you, Evans," Sirius said, as the room went quiet again, "I swore that you were wrong for James. And yes, I was jealous. And yes, I acted like an idiot. But I know James, and now I know you, and I know that you both were made for each other." Lily smiled warmly at him, and Sirius cleared his throat and continued. "Who would have thought I would be sitting here, making a toast to that four eyed freak that came running into my compartment that first day of school?" he said, "I know I wouldn't have guessed it. But I'm glad that I can see you on the happiest day of your life. I'm glad I was a part of it." He raised his glass to James, and got that mischievous smile again, "You were right, mate. It is like a fairy tale. And we all know what happens at the end of fairy tales. All evil's conquered, everything's set right, and Prince Charming and his girl go riding off in the distance happily ever after. So don't be scared, James. Because you two were written out to live happily ever after. I see the real thing in you two. Something that none of us here in this room is ever going to have for ourselves. You really do love each other." James took Lily's hand, and smiled down on his best friend. Sirius smiled back, and then turned to the crowd, his glass still raised, "So, here's a toast to true love, mates. Here's a toast to my brother," he turned, and looked to Lily, "And my sister." "Here, here!" the audience roared, clashing their glasses together, and Lily looked to Sirius, in an expression that she had never given him. Not one of loathing, or disgust or annoyance. . . but of surprise. Sirius grinned, and raised his glass to her again with a nod. She returned the nod, her smile rising again, and then Sirius took his seat. "Touching," Remus said. "Don't push it, wolf," Sirius growled as he went back to playing with his food. Lily was still staring at him from where she was sitting. He could feel her eyes on him, trying to get him to look at her again. But he wouldn't let himself. He had said what he had said, and there was nothing else about it.

One three-page letter from a thirty-seven-year-old white woman from Pleasantville, New York, concluded: “I am so glad you didn’t sneeze.” Almost ten years later, King would build the final speech of his life around that line, although he would add dramatic power to the anecdote by attributing the letter to a ninth-grade student at White Plains High School. “I, too, am happy that I didn’t sneeze,” he would say. He would repeat the refrain to celebrate all the joys, struggles, and triumphs he would have missed had he made an abrupt move that day in Blumstein’s department store. Thoughts of death had long preoccupied him. Now he saw that nonviolent movements grew stronger when they came under attack. Violent assaults on the determinedly nonviolent aroused sympathy and attracted support for the cause. It was a lesson that would shape the last ten years of his life.

He survived the singing. . .he survived the collection of money for the home guard, a flag drill and a speech. . .But he did not survive a recitation by a . . .child. When she reached the lines A man is dying in no-man's land, Before he goes, he asks for your hand. . . . Asa departed the rally. He was glad to escape, but he was no happier outside than he had been inside. He was not sure where the greater sickness lay, in himself, unable by love or war to feel himself united with his neighbors, or in his neighbors, united by the cause and in the manner they were. He looked up at the stars, winter's constellations setting in the west, summer's constellations marching up the eastern sky. They had the power to calm and ease, but to take that calm and ease on the first night of so many men's deaths seemed ignoble. Endure the pain, he told himself, star love is too easy. The stars ask nothing of you. He defended himself against his own abuse. "I ask a good deal of myself. What? In God's name, what? Tell me quickly," his suffering self demanded. "To know, to understand." It was a barren defense. He got no comfort out of it. He took what comfort he could get from the stars.

Brandon picked up his beer and tipped it at me. “Josh is actually great at that. That’s why he always bags a bird.” He was wingmanning me for Kristen. I just hoped she found dead turkeys sexy. Kristen smiled at me. A genuine smile. “Have you hunted all your life?” “Yup.” I put the lid on the pot call and handed it back to Brandon. Kristen poked at her salad. Then she looked back up at me, her eyes innocent. “Is it true that ‘vegetarian’ is a Native American word for ‘bad hunter’?” Brandon laughed so suddenly he choked. I smiled at her, happy to see her coming back to her old self. “You know, I still don’t have a car,” Sloan said over her pasta after Brandon stopped laughing. “You two broke my Corolla.” Kristen snorted. “Really? You’re going to put this on us? The hamster probably died.” “What hamster?” Sloan looked confused. Kristen skewered a crouton. “The one running in the wheel under the hood.” Brandon and I laughed, and Sloan pressed her lips into a line, trying to look angry, but she couldn’t keep a straight face. “How can you let her drive that thing?” I shook my head at Brandon. “I told her, I don’t know how many times, that I’ll buy her a new car,” Brandon said, still chuckling. Sloan shrugged. “I don’t want a new car. That was the car I learned to drive in. I had my first kiss in that car.” Brandon gave her a mock serious look. “Well, then it definitely has to go.” Sloan smiled at him and leaned over and kissed him fleetingly on the lips. I watched my best friend look at her for a moment after she went back to her food. He really loved her. I remembered the first time he started talking about her, three years ago. We were sitting in a duck blind in South Dakota, and he went on for hours about this woman he’d been seeing. I’d never seen him so into someone. I made a mental note to talk about that during my best-man speech. “Hey, didn’t you two meet on a call?” I asked, trying to recall the story he’d told me. “At a hospital or something?” Sloan smiled sweetly at Brandon. “Yeah. I only gave him my number because he was in uniform.” I grinned. “Can’t say no to a man in uniform, huh?” I twirled my fork around my pasta. It was incredible. Some kind of venison Bolognese. Sloan was a great cook. Kristen and I really should eat here more often. “No, I can,” she said. “It’s just I figured they wouldn’t let a felon or registered sex offender into the fire department.

Arizona used welfare dollars to pay for abstinence-only sex education. Pennsylvania diverted TANF funds to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. Maine used the money to support a Christian summer camp.[14] And then there’s Mississippi. A 389-page audit released in 2020 found that money overseen by the Mississippi Department of Human Services (DHS) and intended for the state’s poorest families was used to hire an evangelical worship singer who performed at rallies and church concerts; to purchase a Nissan Armada, Chevrolet Silverado, and Ford F-250 for the head of a local nonprofit and two of her family members; and even to pay the former NFL quarterback Brett Favre $1.1 million for speeches he never gave.

There’s more. DHS contractors squandered TANF dollars on college football tickets, a private school, a twelve-week fitness camp that state legislators could attend free of charge ($1.3 million), and a donation to the University of Southern Mississippi for a wellness center ($5 million). Welfare funds also went to a ministry run by former professional wrestler Ted DiBiase—the Million Dollar Man and the author of the memoir Every Man Has His Price—for speeches and wrestling events. DiBiase’s price was $2.1 million. Brett DiBiase, the Million Dollar Man’s son, was serving as deputy administrator for Mississippi’s Department of Human Services at the time. He and five others have been indicted on fraud and embezzlement charges.

This culture within FPD influences officer activities in all areas of policing, beyond just ticketing. Officers expect and demand compliance even when they lack legal authority. They are inclined to interpret the exercise of free-speech rights as unlawful disobedience, innocent movements as physical threats, indications of mental or physical illness as belligerence. Police supervisors and leadership do too little to ensure that officers act in accordance with law and policy, and rarely respond meaningfully to civilian complaints of officer misconduct.

Weiss’ account of the leading role in this campaign to limit Americans’ free speech rights played by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the U.S. Department of State is particularly troubling. We learn that Mrs. Clinton collaborated closely with the man who was at the time the Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, through a series of high-level meetings that came to be known as “The Istanbul Process.” Its explicit purpose was to find ways to accommodate the OIC’s demands for the official stifling of any critical examination of Islam.

By the time George Bush’s re-election campaign got under way in 2004, there was little doubt he’d make terrorism the focal point of all of his speeches and press conferences. His surrogates went farther still, overtly portraying a vote for his Democratic rival, Senator John Kerry, as an invitation to annihilation. “If we make the wrong choice,” Vice President Dick Cheney warned a Des Moines audience, “the danger is that we’ll get hit again—that we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.” In May, just prior to the Democratic Convention, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that al Qaeda’s preparations for an attack were 90 percent complete; immediately after the convention, the Department of Homeland Security issued yet another terrorist alert, which diverted America’s attention away from Kerry and back to the “wartime” president, George Bush. The strategy worked.

First, fidelity. The dictionary defines fidelity as a strict and continuing faithfulness to an obligation, trust, or duty. To my mind, that word on our shield reminds us that the FBI must abide two obligations at the same time. First, the FBI must be independent of all political forces or interests in this country. In a real sense, it must stand apart from other institutions in American life. But, second, at the same time, it must be part of the United States Department of Justice, and constrained by the rule of law and the checks and balances built into our brilliant design by our nation’s founders.

As devious as this plot was, it could never have succeeded to the degree that it did had Clinton not abetted it with such vigor. That summer, she failed to emerge as the overwhelming front-runner everyone had expected, weighed down by stories on Clinton Foundation “buckraking” and the revelation that she had kept a private e-mail server as secretary of state and destroyed much of her correspondence. She also refused to release transcripts of highly paid speeches she’d delivered to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms. In August, e-mails surfaced showing that Bill Clinton, through the foundation, had sought State Department permission to accept speaking fees in repressive countries such as North Korea and the Republic of the Congo. A poll the same day found that the word voters associated most with his wife was “liar.” Clinton’s tone-deaf response to the steady drip of revelations only deepened their impact because

During his speech, Lord Sydenham warned that the Mandate as being presented by Churchill to the League of Nations, ‘will undoubtedly, in time, transfer the control of the Holy Land to New York, Berlin, London, Frankfurt and other places. The strings will not be pulled from Palestine; they will be pulled from foreign capitals; and for everything that happens during this transference of power, we shall be responsible.’22 When the vote was taken, the views of the anti-Zionist Lords prevailed, with sixty voting against the Balfour Declaration, and only twenty-nine for it. On the following day, Major Hubert Young, a senior official in the Middle East Department of the Colonial Office, who in 1918 had participated in the Arab Revolt against the Turks, warned Churchill that the anti-Zionist vote ‘will have encouraged the Arab Delegation to persist in their obstinate attitude.’ Unless the vote in the Lords could be ‘signally overruled’ by the Commons, Britain’s pledges to the Jews would not be able to be fulfilled.

In my opinion, it’s too soon for Helen to marry anyone, but when she does…she will need a husband with a placid temperament. One who will allow her to develop at her own pace.” “And you assume I wouldn’t,” he said rather than asked. “I think you will command and govern a wife just as you do everything else. I don’t believe you would ever harm her physically, but you’ll whittle her to fit your life, and make her exceedingly unhappy. This environment--London, the crowds, the department store--is so ill suited to her nature that she would wither like a transplanted orchid. I’m afraid I can’t support the idea of marriage for you and Helen.” Pausing, she took a long breath before saying, “I believe it’s in her best interest for the engagement to be broken.” A heavy silence descended. “Is that what she wants?” “She said earlier today that she has no wish to see you again.” Throughout Kathleen’s speech, Winterborne had looked away as if he were only half listening. At that last remark, however, she found herself the target of a bladelike gaze. Perhaps, she thought uneasily, it would be best to leave soon.

It is not the last fatal crisis of a slow mental malady, as is so often the case in these more effeminate modern times; still less is it that more theoretical disgust of life, founded on a conviction of its worthlessness, which induced so many of the later Romans, on Epicurean as well as Stoical principles, to put an end to their existence. It is not through any unmanly despondency that Ajax is unfaithful to his rude heroism. His delirium is over, as well as his first comfortless feelings upon awaking from it; and it is not till after the complete return of consciousness, and when he has had time to measure the depth of the abyss into which, by a divine destiny, his overweening haughtiness has plunged him, when he contemplates his situation, and feels it ruined beyond remedy:—his honour wounded by the refusal of the arms of Achilles; and the outburst of his vindictive rage wasted in his infatuation on defenceless flocks; himself, after a long and reproachless heroic career, a source of amusement to his enemies, an object of derision and abomination to the Greeks, and to his honoured father,—should he thus return to him—a disgrace: after reviewing all this, he decides agreeably to his own motto, "gloriously to live or gloriously to die," that the latter course alone remains open to him. Even the dissimulation,—the first, perhaps, that he ever practised, by which, to prevent the execution of his purpose from being disturbed, he pacifies his comrades, must be considered as the fruit of greatness of soul. He appoints Teucer guardian to his infant boy, the future consolation of his own bereaved parents; and, like Cato, dies not before he has arranged the concerns of all who belong to him. As Antigone in her womanly tenderness, so even he in his wild manner, seems in his last speech to feel the majesty of that light of the sun from which he is departing for ever. His rude courage disdains compassion, and therefore excites it the more powerfully. What a picture of awaking from the tumult of passion, when the tent opens and in the midst of the slaughtered herds he sits on the ground bewailing himself!