Eagle Scout Quotes

Darlin’, I wasn’t just a Boy Scout, I was an Eagle Scout.

Becoming an Eagle Scout is just about the only thing you can put on your resume at age fifty that you did at age fourteen--and it still impresses.

If the Eagle Scouts had some sort of Sith equivalent, Marcone was it.

Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a thousand feet high, open to the sky, life a woman undressing before an intruder and provoking him to rape her. We ring Russia's borders with missile-launching pads, and then scream that she's threatening us. In all history there's never been a more lurid mass example of the sadist-masochist expression of the thanatos instinct than the present conduct of the United States. The Nazis by comparison were Eagle Scouts.

Hope? The word seemed to bang from wall to wall. Hope? No, I don't think there's any hope. We're too empty here...She touched her heart. This isn't a country at all, it's a collection of football players and Eagle Scouts. Cowards. We think we're happy. We're not. We're doomed.

Wincing, I turned, gave her a salute, because that’s what mafia hit men do when they’re in a bathroom with a naked girl, they salute her like a freaking boy scout, and then leave.

Today You Soar "Like the grand eagle, you spread your wings And put forth the effort to do great things. Looking skyward you dared to challenge the wind, Harnessing power to help you ascend. With an eye on the goal, fixed in flight, You climbed to an impressive height. Undaunted by gusts and unkind gails, You never gave up and would not fail. So now you’ve reached where few even try As the eagle high in a glorious sky. Not superior, but grand. Not proud, but sure. Not a cub, wolf, or bear but an eagle pure. Today you soar.

Some say freedom is a gift placed in our hands by our forefathers. Some say freedom is a human right that none should be denied. Some say freedom is a privilege that can and will be seized if taken for granted. Some say freedom is the key that opens doors otherwise meant to imprison. Some say freedom is power to do, to be, to say, and to accomplish what the oppressed cannot. Some say freedom is a responsibility—a weight to be carried and shared by those willing to protect it. Perhaps freedom is all these things. But in my eyes, I see freedom as a treasure. It is a gem so rare and precious the fiercest battles rage over it. The blood of thousands is spilled for it—past, present, and future. Where true and unblemished freedom exists, it shines with perfect clarity, drawing the greedy masses, both those who desire a portion of the spoils and those who would rob the possessor of the treasure, hoping to bury it away. Without freedom I am a slave in shackles on a ship lost at sea. With freedom I am a captain; I am a pirate; I am an admiral; I am a scout; I am the eagle souring overhead; I am the north star guiding a crew; I am the ship itself; I am whatever I choose to be.

When I was interviewing people to work for me, and I came upon a candidate who had been an Eagle Scout, I’d almost always try to hire him. I

Becoming an Eagle Scout is just about the only thing you can put on your resume at age fifty that you did at age fourteen—and it still impresses. (Despite

The guy is a fucking Boy Scout. Like, for real. He got the Eagle Scout badge. I bet he could kill a bunny with a bow in the dark.

Who was this criminal mastermind behind Silk Road? Not at all whom you would expect. Ross Ulbricht was the kind of kid any parent would be proud of, an Eagle Scout from Austin, Texas, who had earned a master's degree in science and engineering.

She nodded, but looked off into the distance, keeping her weight on her uninjured ankle. "Uh...I have to go...you know...I have to go." He looked up at her, his brow furrowed. "Go where?" "Oh my god. Shoot me now," she said, fisting her hands. "I'm trying to-oh." His eyes lit up with comprehension. He dug around in the bag a little bit, and handed her a roll of toilet paper. "Here." She eyed his bag hopefully. "You got a toilet and shower in there, too, Eagle Scout?" He laughed. "I wish. It's not so bad, I promise." "Maybe not for you," she pointed out. "At least you get to stand. I have to squat with my bare butt hanging out with a white flag for all the forest creatures.

selfless Scoutmasters gave us their time not because they knew what we’d become, but because they knew what we could become.

The boys teach; the Scoutmaster tests.

I was twelve years old. I got out my bicycle and road over to KFWB. They said, ‘What do you want?’ I said, ‘I’d like to give a weekly radio program for the Boy Scouts.’ They said, ‘Are you an Eagle?’ I said, ‘No, I’m a Tenderfoot.’ They said, ‘Did the Boy Scouts send you?’ I said, ‘No, I just got the idea and came over.’ They said, ‘Well, run along.’ So I went over to KNX. They liked the idea and arranged a time for the first program. I then went to the Boy Scouts, told them what had happened, and asked for their approval and cooperation. They said it was all right to give the program but that they would not cooperate. In fact, they never did. Every time I asked for the Boy Scout band, they said No. Individual Scouts all gave their services willingly. There were boy sopranos; trumpet, trombone, and piano soloists; and Scouts who spoke on their experiences building fires and tying knots. The volume of fan mail increased each month. After two years, the organization called up KNX, said they’d never authorized the program, and demanded that I be put out and they be put in. They were. The band finally played. A few weeks later, KNX took the program off the air.

As for the world beyond my family—well, what they would see for most of my teenage years was not a budding leader but rather a lackadaisical student, a passionate basketball player of limited talent, and an incessant, dedicated partyer. No student government for me; no Eagle Scouts or interning at the local congressman’s office. Through high school, my friends and I didn’t discuss much beyond sports, girls, music, and plans for getting loaded. Three of these guys—Bobby Titcomb, Greg Orme, and Mike Ramos—remain some of my closest friends. To this day, we can laugh for hours over stories of our misspent youth. In later years, they would throw themselves into my campaigns with a loyalty for which I will always be grateful, becoming as skilled at defending my record as anyone on MSNBC. But there were also times during my presidency—after they had watched me speak to a big crowd, say, or receive a series of crisp salutes from young Marines during a base tour—when their faces would betray a certain bafflement, as if they were trying to reconcile the graying man in a suit and tie with the ill-defined man-child they’d once known. That guy? they must have said to themselves. How the hell did that happen? And if my friends had ever asked me directly, I’m not sure I’d have had a good answer.

I’d never set foot on the AT, but I’d heard much about it from the guys at Kennedy Meadows. It was the PCT’s closest kin and yet also its opposite in many ways. About two thousand people set out to thru-hike the AT each summer, and though only a couple hundred of them made it all the way, that was far more than the hundred or so who set out on the PCT each year. Hikers on the AT spent most nights camping in or near group shelters that existed along the trail. On the AT, resupply stops were closer together, and more of them were in real towns, unlike those along the PCT, which often consisted of nothing but a post office and a bar or tiny store. I imagined the Australian honeymooners on the AT now, eating cheeseburgers and guzzling beer in a pub a couple of miles from the trail, sleeping by night under a wooden roof. They’d probably been given trail names by their fellow hikers, another practice that was far more common on the AT than on the PCT, though we had a way of naming people too. Half the time that Greg, Matt, and Albert had talked about Brent they’d referred to him as the Kid, though he was only a few years younger than me. Greg had been occasionally called the Statistician because he knew so many facts and figures about the trail and he worked as an accountant. Matt and Albert were the Eagle Scouts, and Doug and Tom the Preppies. I didn’t think I’d been dubbed anything, but I got the sinking feeling that if I had, I didn’t want to know what it was.

A second case concerns Charles Whitman, the 1966 “Texas Tower” sniper who, after killing his wife and mother, opened fire atop a tower at the University of Texas in Austin, killing sixteen and wounding thirty-two, one of the first school massacres. Whitman was literally an Eagle Scout and childhood choirboy, a happily married engineering major with an IQ in the 99th percentile. In the prior year he had seen doctors, complaining of severe headaches and violent impulses (e.g., to shoot people from the campus tower). He left notes by the bodies of his wife and his mother, proclaiming love and puzzlement at his actions: “I cannot rationaly [sic] pinpoint any specific reason for [killing her],” and “let there be no doubt in your mind that I loved this woman with all my heart.” His suicide note requested an autopsy of his brain, and that any money he had be given to a mental health foundation. The autopsy proved his intuition correct—Whitman had a glioblastoma tumor pressing on his amygdala.

mailbox decorated with both an eagle and a lily, to signify that the youngest scouts risked their lives delivering its letters. When news of the Uprising reached Hitler, he ordered Himmler to send in his harshest troops, kill every Pole, and pulverize the whole city block by block, bomb, torch, and bulldoze it beyond repair as a warning to the rest of occupied Europe. For the job, Himmler chose the most savage units in the SS, composed of criminals, policemen, and former prisoners of war. On the Uprising’s fifth day, which came to be known as “Black Saturday,” Himmler’s battle-hardened SS and Wehrmacht soldiers stormed in, slaughtering 30,000 men, women, and children. The following day, while packs of Stukas dive-bombed the city—in archival films, one hears them whining like megaton mosquitoes—ill-equipped and mainly untrained Poles fought fiercely, radioed London to air-drop food and supplies, and begged the Russians to launch an immediate attack. Antonina wrote in her diary that two SS men opened the door, guns drawn, yelling: “Alles rrraus!!” Terrified, she and the others left the house and waited in the garden, not knowing what to expect but fearing the worst. “Hands

If you stay neutral, you’re in the wrong as an Eagle Scout. In my vision, being an Eagle Scouts is actively trying to do good.

Troop 75 of Ridgefield,

Troop 75 of Ridgefield, Connecticut.

We sat together in three leather chairs next to a painting of nineteenth-century statesman Henry Clay and turned the conversation to Scouting and citizenship.

Face each day unafraid and seek your fair share of the world's work.

At Sanford’s 1998 funeral in Duke Chapel, childhood friend Dickson Philips eulogized this Eagle from Troop 20 in the town of Laurinburg. To the assembled crowd, he eloquently said, “[Terry Sanford] took an oath when he was twelve years old and kept it. It started out, ‘On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country,’ and included such things as ‘help other people at all times.’ He believed it: He was the eternal Boy Scout.

walked down the hill and stuck out my thumb, standing in the same spot where I had stood when I hitchhiked to high school. My clothes and gear were in my official Boy Scout backpack, a big old thing on an aluminum rack, with my sleeping bag and pup tent lashed to it. I’d been a serious Boy Scout — I joined at 12, after my failed Little League career, and took to it immediately, racking up merit badges and making it all the way to Eagle Scout. I knew first aid, how to start a fire in the rain, how to make a mean camp stew, and lots of other useful stuff. And I didn’t mind sleeping outside, which was a good thing, since there was no way I could afford motels. My official Boy Scout sheath knife, a serious piece of business with a leather-wrapped handle and a five-inch blade, was also in the pack; I’d move it into my boot by the end of the first day.

The first campsite is at mile 7.0 (6,180), but it is small and does not have a nearby water source. The trail continues climbing, following a series of switchbacks until reaching a bench known as Lenny’s Rest in honor of Eagle Scout Leonard Southwell, at mile 7.9 (6,543). There is an intersection here with Indian Creek Trail #800, a single-track sometimes used as an alternate to Waterton Canyon. The trail then descends, crossing Bear Creek at mile 8.7 (6,177). This is the last reliable water source until the end of Segment 1 at the South Platte River. There are several good campsites in this area. At mile 9.8 (6,689) the CT begins to parallel and then occasionally cross West Bear Creek. There is a good, dry campsite at mile 11.8 (7,309) near leaning rocks. The trail continues climbing to a ridge at mile 12.6 (7,517), the segment’s highest point. From here, the CT descends 4 miles before reaching a gentle, grassy slope on a hillside with possible campsites at mile 16.6 (6,240) offering the convenience of river water a short distance below. Travel another 0.2 mile before reaching Douglas County Rd 97 and the South Platte River Trailhead, the end of Segment 1, at mile 16.8 (6,117). From here, the trail continues over the river on the Gudy Gaskill Bridge, the last water for over 10 miles. Due to private property, there is no camping along the river.

The barriers to modern megaleakers like Manning have crumbled: They needn’t spend a year photocopying. They needn’t be Eagle Scouts or war heroes who penetrate the government’s most elite layer only to go rogue—just one of the millions of Americans with access to secret government documents or the many, many uncountable millions more with access to secret corporate information. And perhaps most important, they needn’t risk reprisal by exposing their identities to the journalists they hope will amplify their whistleblowing.

The fifty-three-year-old former Eagle Scout from South Carolina didn’t drink, smoke, or swear; the most colorful expletive in his vocabulary was “dad gum.”7 He was a West Pointer and had been an artillery commander in World War II.

It was all chaos, confusion and dust, Head and eyes were flecked with blood, Rocks crash through with a roar, Among stupefying shrieks, The Mongol Kalmak proceed. Oshpur the shepherd lord Scouts with eagle eyes In search of the forty sons - Smoke obscures. Entering the fray, Smoke-maned Manas is a panther Loping toward his prey.

This happened in a recent football season when Navy was to meet a team that used the Eagle 5–4 defense, one which had not been used against Navy to any extent in the recent past.

Always be prepared. Boy Scout? He glanced up, ready with a sarcastic response, but Noah wasn't laughing at him. He had his arm bent at the elbow, holding three fingers in the air, giving the scout salute. Yeah. Eagle. Me too. So, maybe they did have something in common, after all.

but born in the mobile home, so that’s like the Eagle Scout of trailer trash.

The world, it seems, does not much care anymore if you are an Eagle Scout, or even a Tenderfoot. It's all about how many "followers" you have, the perfection of your spray-tanned abs; whether you had the genius to sell a start-up company that hasn't produced a single viable product.

I was never an Eagle Scout, but I did become a Cub Scout and learned how to salute by bringing my index and middle fingers together and touching my forehead just above my right eyebrow. With the other fingers curled around touching each other in the palm of my hand, I could snap a smart salute and did so whenever, or not, the occasion arose. Evening meetings were held in the parish hall of the Lutheran Church, within walking distance of home. My uniform was second hand and already had most of the required patches sewn onto it. It was quite worn and had a faded look, which suited me just fine. It gave the illusion that I had been around a while, and wasn’t just the tenderfoot that I really was.

Two white teenagers, one of them an Eagle Scout, had been looking forward to being part of the motorcade. Upset at the cancellation, they drove into black neighborhoods on a motorcycle carrying a Confederate flag. When they came upon two black boys on bicycles, one of the white youths fired his pistol at thirteen-year-old Virgil Ware and killed him.