Liberty Statue Quotes

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsiblity on the West Coast.

The last woman I was in was the Statue of Liberty.

No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country...we did not, in fact, come to the United States at all. The United States came to us.

The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources--because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples.

Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.

United States: the country where liberty is a statue.

I took a puff of the wrong cigarette at a fraternity dance once, and the cops had to get me, y'know. I broke two teeth trying to give a hickie to the Statue of Liberty.

Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

The Statue of Liberty, that frequently malevolent bitch, has an enormous tumor in her gut that has spread to her brain and eyes. With regard to the Native Americans she has Alzheimer's or mad cow disease and can't remember her past, and her blind eyes can't see the terrifying plight of most of the Indian tribes. Meanwhile she blows China and stomps Cuba to death, choosing to forget the Native cultures she has already destroyed.

I thought to myself that there are surely a lot of big things in America. The Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty are big. The Mississippi River and the Grand Canyon are big. The skies over the prairie are big. But there is nothing bigger than a man’s opinion of himself.

...It looked very different from the Statue of Liberty, but what did that matter? What was the good of having the statue without the liberty, the freedom to go where one chose if one was held back by one's color? No, I preferred the Eiffel Tower, which made no promises." ~ Josephine Baker, once she had seen the Eiffel Tower

Freedom is only part of the story and half the truth.... That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplanted by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast. —VIKTOR E. FRANKL, Man’s Search for Meaning

"The wanderer in Manhattan must go forth with a certain innocence, because New York is best seen with innocent eyes. It doesn't matter if you are younger or old. Reading our rich history makes the experience more layered, but it is not a substitute for walking the streets themselves. For old-timer or newcomer, it is essential to absorb the city as it is now in order to shape your own nostalgias. That's why I always urge the newcomer to surrender to the city's magic. Forget the irritations and the occasional rudeness; they bother New Yorkers too. Instead, go down to the North River and the benches that run along the west side of Battery Park City. Watch the tides or the blocks of ice in winter; they have existed since the time when the island was empty of man. Gaze at the boats. Look across the water at the Statue of Liberty or Ellis Island, the place to which so many of the New York tribe came in order to truly live. Learn the tale of our tribe, because it's your tribe too, no matter where you were born. Listen to its music and its legends. Gaze at its ruins and monuments. Walk its sidewalks and run fingers upon the stone and bricks and steel of our right-angled streets. Breathe the air of the river breeze."

We stole the Statue of Liberty…! [the minions cheer] …the small one, from Las Vegas!” [the cheers stop] — as Gru

Its magnificence was indescribable, and its magnitude was inconceivable. She felt overwhelmed in the presence of its greatness. Pg 87

The main objects of all science, the freedom and happiness of man. . . . [are] the sole objects of all legitimate government. (A plaque with this quotation, with the first phrase omitted, is in the stairwell of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.)

...the Statue of Liberty's got this invitation: 'Give me your tired, your poor, your reeking homeless--' 'Huddled masses,' said Ira. 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.' ... Okay, fine. So like everybody in the old countries says, 'Hey, I'm a huddled mass,' and they all wanna come over.

I peered into the deep-sae canyon, hoping to spot a toppled skyscraper. Maybe even the Statue of Liberty.

A big, sandy-haired man held his daughter on his shoulders, showing her the Statue of Liberty. I would never know what this statue meant to others, she had always been an ugly joke for me. And the American flag was flying from the top of the ship, above my head. I had seen the French flag drive the French into the most unspeakable frenzies, I had seen the flag which was nominally mine used to dignify the vilest purposes: now I would never, as long as I lived, know what other saw when they saw a flag.

Robbing the Hotel Theresa was like taking a piss on the Statue of Liberty. It was like slipping Jackie Robinson a Mickey the night before the World Series.

You talk about her as if she is the Notre Dame Cathedral!" "She is. And the Statue of Liberty and Abbey Road and the best burrito of your life. Didn't you know?

Why are you perpetuating a childhood you grew up despising?

Confession is good for the soul even after the soul has been claimed” (p. 381).

Knowledge can never imprison you, but you can be captive to your ignorance.

[deconstruction and other French theories] was the gift of the French. They gave Americans a language they did not need. It was like the Statue of Liberty. Nobody needs French theory.

If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model and the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister, then New York is their cousin. Her hair is dyed autumn red or aubergine or Egyptian henna, depending on her mood. Her skin is pale as frost and she wears beautiful Jil Sander suits and Prada pumps on which she walks faster than a speeding taxi (when it is caught in rush hour, that is). Her lips are some unlikely shade of copper or violet, courtesy of her local MAC drag queen makeup consultant. She is always carrying bags of clothes, bouquets of roses, take-out Chinese containers, or bagels. Museum tags fill her pockets and purses, along with perfume samples and invitations to art gallery openings. When she is walking to work, to ward off bums or psychos, her face resembles the Statue of Liberty, but at home in her candlelit, dove-colored apartment, the stony look fades away and she smiles like the sterling roses she has brought for herself to make up for the fact that she is single and her feet are sore.

the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country.

It was about as easy getting the Statue of Liberty to spread cunny, which did take some dynamite persuasion.

The Fitzpatricks have enough fuck-you money to build a dick-shaped statue the size of Lady Liberty.

The one ugly one, Laverne, wasn't too bad a dancer, but the other one, old Marty, was murder. Old Marty was like dragging the Statue of Liberty around the floor.

The American flag doesn't give her glory on a peaceful, calm day. It's when the winds pick up and become boisterous, do we see her strength. When she unfolds her hand, and shows her frayed fingers, where we see the stretch of red-blood lines of man that fought for this land. The purity of white stripes that strips our sins, and the stars of Abraham's covenant, broad in a midnight blue sky. The rights our forefathers established. As it waves high in the currents of freedom, where the Torch of Liberty shines over the sea, does she give meaning to unity. When we strive as one nation, or when it drops half-mast, to a fallen soldier.

The Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty are big. The Mississippi River and the Grand Canyon are big. The skies over the prairie are big. But there is nothing bigger than a man’s opinion of himself.

Liberty is too precious a thing to be buried in books. Humans should hold it up in their hands every single day of their lives and say from the deepest fathoms of their soul – “I am free – to think – to speak – to act – the way a real, novel, civilized being should – my ancestors couldn’t, but I can, and my children will”.

Everyone knew that any place up north was roughly the same: lawless, relatively savage, and while they might have nice museums and the Statue of Liberty, people cared so little for each other they’d let you die in the street.

She seemed perfect to you, and even during her first attack of vertigo, which you happened to witness when you were six (the two of you climbing up the inner staircase of the Statue of Liberty), you were not alarmed, because she was a good and conscientious mother, and she managed to hide her fear from you by turning the descent into a game: sitting on the stairs together and going down one step at a time, asses on the rungs, laughing all the way to the bottom.

It was a funny thing, he thought, that when you live all your life in a place, you almost never do the things that tourists go there to do—like walk on the beach or go swimming in the ocean. He couldn’t remember the last time he went swimming. He wasn’t even sure he still owned a bathing suit. It was like something he had heard about New York—that half the people who live in the city never go to the top of the Empire State Building or visit the Statue of Liberty.

I listen to her and think about it, and I realize I would be an absolute moron to walk away from this, no matter what her terms are. I didn't stay in Mew York and let David go to San Francisco because I like the Statue of Liberty. I did it because I want to climb the ladder as high as I possibly can. I did it because I want my name, the name my father gave me, in big, bold letters one day. This is my chance.

I didn’t stay in New York and let David go to San Francisco because I like the Statue of Liberty. I did it because I want to climb the ladder as high as I possibly can. I did it because I want my name, the name my father gave me, in big, bold letters one day. This is my chance.

Today it is the Western democratic tradition that attracts and empowers people of all continents, creeds, and colors. When the Chinese students cried and died for democracy in Tiananmen Square, they brought with them not representations of Confucius or Buddha but a model of the Statue of Liberty.

The men of Easy Company lined the rails to see the Statue of Liberty slip astern. For nearly every one of them, it was his first trip outside the United States. A certain homesickness set in, coupled with a realization, as the regimental scrapbook Currahee put it, of “how wonderful the last year had been.

It is not for nothing that that vivacious lady is standing up there with the torch of liberty in her hand, as a beacon to the whole world - take a look at the world through her eyes, if you really want to see something – and you won’t just see scenery – you’ll see the whole parade of what humans have carved out for themselves after centuries of fighting – fighting so they could stand on their own two feet, free and decent, no matter their race, religion and creed.

The president, the secretary of state, the businessman, the preacher, the vendor, the spies, the clients and managers—all walking around Wall Street like chickens with their heads cut off—rushing to escape bankruptcy—plotting to melt down the Statue of Liberty—to press more copper pennies—to breed more headless chickens—to put more feathers in their caps—medals, diplomas, stock certificates, honorary doctorates—eggs and eggs of headless chickens—multitaskers—system hackers—who never know where they’re heading--northward, backward, eastward, forward, and never homeward—(where is home)—home is in the head—(but the head is cut off)—and the nest is full of banking forms and Easter eggs with coins inside. Beheaded chickens, how do you breed chickens with their heads cut off? By teaching them how to bankrupt creativity.

10. Never allow your imagination to stop. It was the imagination of great people that brought us the internet, the pyramids, cars, airplanes, boats, great novels, beautiful painting, classical songs, great movies, water irrigation, solar panels, the statue of liberty, the wall of china and so forth. Never under estimate your imagination.

As Emmett walked out the door and climbed into his bright yellow car, I thought to myself that there are surely a lot of big things in America. The Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty are big. The Mississippi River and the Grand Canyon are big. The skies over the praries are big. But there is nothing bigger than a man's opinion of himself.

From where I stood, the Statue of Liberty was a flourescent green fleck against the sky, and beyond her sat Ellis Island, the focus of so many myths; but it had been built too late for those early Africans - who weren't immigrants in any case - and it had been closed too soon to mean anything to the later Africans like Kenneth, or the cabdriver, or me.

Thanks, Ms. Liberty! Is that a sari you're wearing? I hope not.

Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

Almost all of the newspapers printed Laboulaye’s request for what he called “The Monument to Independence” (The

I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

The last marchers passed and General Schofield leaned over to Stone. “This is the best parade I have ever seen in New York.” The president appeared to gruffly agree.

It is not the gift from the millionaires of France to the millionaires of America, but a gift of the whole people of France to the whole people of America.

but then William Vanderbilt stepped forward to pay the entire expense. The U.S. Navy bought a ship in Egypt expressly to move the piece.

Perhaps Jeanne-Émilie served as the model for the body, but someone equally significant would have served for the face. He tended to use people important to him

But Bartholdi never once confirmed that the face of Liberty was indeed that of his mother. When one takes a closer look, Liberty’s face does not resemble his mother at all. His

Suddenly Shirley understood why her father had brought her 10,000 miles to live among strangers. Here, she did not have to wait for gray hairs to be considered wise. Here, she could speak up, question even the conduct of the President. Here, Shirley Temple Wong was somebody. She felt as if she had the power of ten tigers, as if she had grown as tall as the Statue of Liberty.

The Statue of Liberty was so resonantly reimagined as a monument to immigration that few remember it was built as an anti-slavery monument, uniting Republican France and the victorious Union

Congress passed the measure, and Grant signed the bill on his last full day in office, giving General William Tecumseh Sherman, commander of the U.S. Army, the opportunity to choose which island.

The form of statuary is everything, and it is nothing. It is nothing without the spirit. It is everything with the idea.” Those words, it would be claimed, were the last written by the great poet.

Times Square—loud and bright twenty-four hours a day, bearing a more stunning light than the Statue of Liberty ever could, a Disneyfied Lucifer leading New York’s damned to a fire ever-building, ever-burning.

Don't you think the Golden Gate Bridge looks to the East in the same way the Statue of Liberty faces Europe, the Old World?' Mike now asked. 'That the Bridge and the Statue face in opposite directions, the Bridge is the end whereas the Statue is the beginning?' 'The Golden Gate Bridge should be understood symbolically,' Foucault responded, 'in the sense that it does not go from America back to America but that it should be something that could possibly open up out of America.

In 1890, Joseph Pulitzer, who had labored so long on Liberty’s behalf, built his World Building, just east of City Hall, next to the Brooklyn Bridge. It would be the tallest building on the planet at that time, trumping Liberty by four feet.

In all of his agonizing visits to Vanves, Auguste Bartholdi would have spent a great deal of time staring at Charles. Across from him, hour after hour, Auguste Bartholdi had nothing to do but observe the face of the once-gifted brother he had loved.

In some odd gush of patriotism, my mother had once vomited on the Liberty Bell, the Statue of Liberty, and a bust of Benjamin Franklin in a single summer, aborting our vacation and causing my father to swear off historical sites until the day he died.

In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

1891-1892 Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of exiles. 1883 The New Colossus by EMMA LAZARUS, written to raise funds to complete the Statue of Liberty

When live entertainment was not available, women delivered the film and ran the projectors for the hundreds of movies that were shown to the soldiers. Frances witnessed the popularity of movies time after time; they were shown in warehouses, airplane hangars, on battered portable screens, or projected against the wall of a building in the village square where townsfolk crammed in around the soldiers. “Charlie and Doug” were the two favorites, but anything showing familiar sights from home—the Statue of Liberty, a Chicago department store, or San Francisco’s Golden Gate—created a sensation and bolstered morale. Toward the end of the war German propaganda films left behind by the retreating army became a prime attraction.30 Frances traveled to and from Paris for a few days at a time, usually arriving on or near the front after a battle to witness doctors and nurses doing what they could for the injured in the shattered villages and burying the dead. She was struck by how thoroughly exhausted the Europeans were after four devastating years of war.

Not only would the statue be a tribute to French-American friendship; it was “intended to do honor to the glorious memory of our fathers.” Laboulaye promised: “At night, a luminous aureola, projected from the head, will radiate on the far flowing waves of the Ocean.

True meaning of America is not discrimination and segregation, it is equality and inclusion. And so long as that force of equality and inclusion runs through the veins of even ten Americans, no brainless bigot can succeed in poisoning the soul of our great land of liberty.

there was nothing to believe but that one colored in the room is fine, two is twenty, and three means close up shop and everybody go home; all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country. And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white powder. She looked them over, the friends of her life, staring at her. They saw what she saw, she realized. She read it in their faces. They would never win. The game was fixed. The villains would succeed. The heroes would die. The sight of Beanie’s mother howling at her son’s coffin would haunt them all in the next few days. Next week, or next month some time, some other mother would take her place, howling her grief. And another after that. They saw the future, too, she could tell. It would continue forever. It was all so very grim. But then, she thought, every once in a while there’s a glimmer of hope. Just a blip on the horizon, a whack on the nose of the giant that set him back on his heels or to the canvas,

As long as that statue [of Liberty] stands, the tradition of immigrant hospitality and justice it symbolises will continue to haunt us. Will we whose ancestors respected no boundaries seek to erect impermeable borders? Will the descendants of Ellis Island bar the 'golden door', even as our economic and military policies around the globe continue to create 'tempest-tossed' populations? Or will we listen…to the voice of Christ speaking through the immigrant poor: 'Listen! I stand at the door knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and we will share communion' (Rev. 3:20).

From his yacht, the Mayflower, President Woodrow Wilson hit a button at five minutes to six on December 5, and “the statue bloomed into vivid brightness. The torch, which had seemed dim as a glowworm in the harbor, now beamed with fifteen 500 candlepower electric lamps so it was the brightest thing on the horizon.

Before the lunch ended, one of the organizers promised a reporter that, in 1883, when the full construction was complete, the group would be invited for lunch in the statue’s head. They were assured they would have a staircase to aid their ascent and a telescope to survey the countryside beyond Paris from that fourteenth floor.

In this first appeal, the notion of French amity was pushed into the background. The group explained that Liberty would be a functional monument to capitalism, “an impressive ornament to the entrance of the commercial Metropolis of the Union.” She would also serve as a “beacon or a signal station.” French-American friendship was listed third.

Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

As Emmett walked out the door and climbed into his bright yellow car, I thought to myself that there are surely a lot of big things in America. The Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty are big. The Mississippi River and the Grand Canyon are big. The skies over the prairie are big. But there is nothing bigger than a man’s opinion of himself.

Sister Gee stared at her neighbors as they surrounded her, and at that moment she saw them as she had never seen them before: they were crumbs, thimbles, flecks of sugar powder on a cookie, invisible, sporadic dots on the grid of promise, occasionally appearing on Broadway stages or on baseball teams with slogans like “You gotta believe,” when in fact there was nothing to believe but that one colored in the room is fine, two is twenty, and three means close up shop and everybody go home; all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country. And

Within the fair’s buildings visitors encountered devices and concepts new to them and to the world. They heard live music played by an orchestra in New York and transmitted to the fair by long-distance telephone. They saw the first moving pictures on Edison’s Kinetoscope, and they watched, stunned, as lightning chattered from Nikola Tesla’s body. They saw even more ungodly things—the first zipper; the first-ever all-electric kitchen, which included an automatic dishwasher; and a box purporting to contain everything a cook would need to make pancakes, under the brand name Aunt Jemima’s. They sampled a new, oddly flavored gum called Juicy Fruit, and caramel-coated popcorn called Cracker Jack. A new cereal, Shredded Wheat, seemed unlikely to succeed—“shredded doormat,” some called it—but a new beer did well, winning the exposition’s top beer award. Forever afterward, its brewer called it Pabst Blue Ribbon. Visitors also encountered the latest and arguably most important organizational invention of the century, the vertical file, created by Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal System. Sprinkled among these exhibits were novelties of all kinds. A locomotive made of spooled silk. A suspension bridge built out of Kirk’s Soap. A giant map of the United States made of pickles. Prune makers sent along a full-scale knight on horseback sculpted out of prunes, and the Avery Salt Mines of Louisiana displayed a copy of the Statue of Liberty carved from a block of salt. Visitors dubbed it “Lot’s Wife.

Down here, in our Cajun Magic Kingdom, I’m the Statue of Liberty. La Liberté éclairant le monde. But uptown, where the mold and the mildew still reign supreme, I go by Tiffany Proulx, which sounds like Peru, only without the pesky e inside. Most people call me Tiff, as in a fight, albeit a very small one. More like a squabble. A misunderstanding that’s bound to sort itself out. Just give it a little time is all.

Big Cyndi is six-six and on the planetoid side of three hundred pounds, the former intercontinental tag-team wrestling champion with Esperanza, aka Big Chief Mama to Esperanza's Little Pocahontas. Her head was cube shaped and topped with hair spiked to look like the Statue of Liberty on a bad acid trip. She wore more makeup than the cast of Cats, her clothing form-fitted like sausage casing, her scowl the stuff of sumos.

Liberty,” boomed Wednesday, as they walked to his car, “is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses.” “Yeah?” said Shadow. “Quoting,” said Wednesday. “Quoting someone French. That’s who they have a statue to, in their New York harbor: a bitch, who liked to be fucked on the refuse from the tumbril. Hold your torch as high as you want to, m’dear, there’s still rats in your dress and cold jism dripping down your leg.

Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness, unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

Nothing motivated New Yorkers so well as rivalry. The New York Times retorted the next day in an editorial: “[Boston] proposes to take our neglected statue of Liberty and warm it over for her own use and glory. Boston has probably again overestimated her powers. This statue is dear to us, though we have never looked upon it, and no third rate town is going to step in and take it from us. Philadelphia tried to do that in 1876, and failed. Let Boston be warned .

Standing at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, Johnson signed the Immigration Act on Oct. 3, 1965. It abolished the national origins formula that had been in place since 1924, meaning that preference was no longer given to immigrants from some European countries. “This system violated the basic principle of American democracy – the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man,” Johnson said. “It has been un-American in the highest sense.

What is soft power? It is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. It arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies. When our policies are seen as legitimate in the eyes of others, our soft power is enhanced. America has long had a great deal of soft power. Think of the impact of Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms in Europe at the end of World War II; of young people behind the Iron Curtain listening to American music and news on Radio Free Europe; of Chinese students symbolizing their protests in Tiananmen Square by creating a replica of the Statue of Liberty; of newly liberated Afghans in 2001 asking for a copy of the Bill of Rights; of young Iranians today surreptitiously watching banned American videos and satellite television broadcasts in the privacy of their homes. These are all examples of America’s soft power. When you can get others to admire your ideals and to want what you want, you do not have to spend as much on sticks and carrots to move them in your direction. Seduction is always more effective than coercion, and many values like democracy, human rights, and individual opportunities are deeply seductive. As General Wesley Clark put it, soft power “gave us an influence far beyond the hard edge of traditional balance-of-power politics.” But attraction can turn to repulsion if we act in an arrogant manner and destroy the real message of our deeper values.

Life in the Cause would lurch forward as it always did. You worked, slaved, fought off the rats, the mice, the roaches, the ants, the Housing Authority, the cops, the muggers, and now the drug dealers. You lived a life of disappointment and suffering, of too-hot summers and too-cold winters, surviving in apartments with crummy stoves that didn’t work and windows that didn’t open and toilets that didn’t flush and lead paint that flecked off the walls and poisoned your children, living in awful, dreary apartments built to house Italians who came to America to work the docks, which had emptied of boats, ships, tankers, dreams, money, and opportunity the moment the colored and the Latinos arrived. And still New York blamed you for all its problems. And who can you blame? You were the one who chose to live here, in this hard town with its hard people, the financial capital of the world, land of opportunity for the white man and a tundra of spent dreams and empty promises for anyone else stupid enough to believe the hype. Sister Gee stared at her neighbors as they surrounded her, and at that moment she saw them as she had never seen them before: they were crumbs, thimbles, flecks of sugar powder on a cookie, invisible, sporadic dots on the grid of promise, occasionally appearing on Broadway stages or on baseball teams with slogans like “You gotta believe,” when in fact there was nothing to believe but that one colored in the room is fine, two is twenty, and three means close up shop and everybody go home; all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country. And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white powder. She looked them over, the friends of her life, staring at her. They saw what she saw, she realized. She read it in their faces. They would never win. The game was fixed. The villains would succeed. The heroes would die.

. I think it might not be a bad idea to remove the inscription from the Statue of Liberty which calls for the “wretched refuse” of the other countries to migrate here. This is not what you want to build a nation of. If we have immigration, we ought to have it from the best sources. At the moment, the sociologists have won out on that issue with their claims that there are no differences among immigrants. But I would maintain that there are most marked differences, in both innate intelligence and personality, among people who enter the U.S.

To mark its global centrality, the French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi asked the Egyptian government to let him build a ninety-foot statue of an Arab peasant woman wearing robes and holding a torch above her head to welcome Eastern travelers to the Mediterranean. When Egypt declined on account of the project’s high cost, he took the idea to France, which financed the sculpture. Once the Muslim woman was refashioned into a Roman goddess, France gifted the statue to the United States, where the woman became a symbol of liberty for immigrants entering New York Harbor.

We have won the battle of making the White House human again, but the war has just begun - the war against systemic racism, against misogyny, against homophobia, against islamophobia, against gun violence, and against post-pandemic health and economic crisis. So, though we may celebrate the victory for a short while, we mustn't lose sight of the issues - we must now actually start working as one people - as the American people to heal the wounds on the soul of our land of liberty. It's time to once again start dreaming and working towards the impossible dream - the dream of freedom not oppression, the dream of assimilation not discrimination, and above all, the dream of ascension not descension.

took fresh eyes to view the fourteen-acre Bedloe’s Island as promising for anything but oysters. Isaac Bedlow, a Dutchman, had acquired the island in 1667. It changed hands again before being bought for government use as a pesthouse and quarantine station in 1750. In 1814, federal authorities built the star-shaped Fort Wood there, housing three hundred men and seventy guns. For many years, it was the site of all federal executions. The last one had taken place on July 13, 1860, when an infamous pirate, Albert Hicks, was hanged for murdering a captain and two boys on an oyster sloop. Boats crammed against the shore to get a glimpse. Anyone older than twenty in New York would have associated the island with such gory events.

These statues have a complex history. They were not erected to honor the Confederate dead following the war or even at the end of Reconstruction. Most appeared in the early 1920s to send a message that the race-relation liberalization that happened between 1880 and 1900 would not return. The progress and normalcy would be replaced by a racist/statist/“progressive” movement rallying around new eugenic laws, zoning, white supremacy, forced exclusion, state segregation and so on—policies supported not by the people but by white elites infected with demographic fear and pseudo-science. This is when a movement started putting up these statues, not to honor history but as a symbol of intimidation and state control of association.

A turning point in Yeltsin's intellectual growth occurred during his first visit to the United States in September 1989; more specifically his first visit to a supermarket in Houston, Texas. Seeing aisles and aisles of shelves filled with all kinds of food and household items, each in dozens of varieties, was both dazzled and depressed. For Yeltsin, as well as many other Russians visiting the United States for the first time, a supermarket was far more impressive than tourist attractions like the Statue of Liberty or the Lincoln Memorial. It was impressive precisely because of its normality. A cornucopia of consumer goods beyond the imagination of most Soviets was available to ordinary citizens without the need to queue for hours. And everything was displayed very attractively. For someone who grew up in the frugal conditions of communism, even a member of the relatively privileged elite, visiting a supermarket in the West was a complete assault on the senses.

Are you chuckling yet? Because then along came you. A big, broad meat eater with brash blond hair and ruddy skin that burns at the beach. A bundle of appetites. A full, boisterous guffaw; a man who tells knock know jokes. Hot dogs - not even East 86th Street bratwurst but mealy, greasy big guts that terrifying pink. Baseball. Gimme caps. Puns and blockbuster movies, raw tap water and six-packs. A fearless, trusting consumer who only reads labels to make sure there are plenty of additives. A fan of the open road with a passion for his pickup who thinks bicycles are for nerds. Fucks hard and talks dirty; a private though unapologetic taste for porn. Mysteries, thrillers, and science fiction; a subscription to National Geographic. Barbecues on the Fourth of July and intentions, in the fullness of time, to take up golf. Delights in crappy snack foods of ever description: Burgles. Curlies. Cheesies. Squigglies - you're laughing - but I don't eat them - anything that looks less like food than packing material and at least six degrees of separation from the farm. Bruce Springsteen, the early albums, cranked up high with the truck window down and your hair flying. Sings along, off-key - how is it possible that I should be endeared by such a tin ear?Beach Boys. Elvis - never lose your roots, did you, loved plain old rock and roll. Bombast. Though not impossibly stodgy; I remember, you took a shine to Pearl Jam, which was exactly when Kevin went off them...(sorry). It just had to be noisy; you hadn't any time for my Elgar, my Leo Kottke, though you made an exception for Aaron Copeland. You wiped your eyes brusquely at Tanglewood, as if to clear gnats, hoping I didn't notice that "Quiet City" made you cry. And ordinary, obvious pleasure: the Bronx Zoo and the botanical gardens, the Coney Island roller coaster, the Staten Island ferry, the Empire State Building. You were the only New Yorker I'd ever met who'd actually taken the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. You dragged me along once, and we were the only tourists on the boat who spoke English. Representational art - Edward Hopper. And my lord, Franklin, a Republican. A belief in a strong defense but otherwise small government and low taxes. Physically, too, you were such a surprise - yourself a strong defense. There were times you were worried that I thought you too heavy, I made so much of your size, though you weighed in a t a pretty standard 165, 170, always battling those five pounds' worth of cheddar widgets that would settle over your belt. But to me you were enormous. So sturdy and solid, so wide, so thick, none of that delicate wristy business of my imaginings. Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches. How luck we are, when we've spared what we think we want! How weary I might have grown of all those silly pots and fussy diets, and how I detest the whine of sitar music!

Sometimes Frankl’s ideas are inspirational, as when he explains how dying patients and quadriplegics come to terms with their fate. Others are aspirational, as when he asserts that a person finds meaning by “striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.” He shows how existential frustration provoked and motivated an unhappy diplomat to seek a new, more satisfying career. Frankl also uses moral exhortation, however, to call attention to “the gap between what one is and what one should become” and the idea that “man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life.” He sees freedom and responsibility as two sides of the same coin. When he spoke to American audiences, Frankl was fond of saying, “I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.” To achieve personal meaning, he says, one must transcend subjective pleasures by doing something that “points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself … by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love.

I enjoyed practicing corporate law, and for a while I convinced myself that I was an attorney at heart. I badly wanted to believe it, since I had already invested years in law school and on-the-job training, and much about Wall Street law was alluring. My colleagues were intellectual, kind, and considerate (mostly). I made a good living. I had an oce on the forty-second oor of a skyscraper with views of the Statue of Liberty. I enjoyed the idea that I could ourish in such a high-powered environment. And I was pretty good at asking the “but” and “what if” questions that are central to the thought processes of most lawyers. It took me almost a decade to understand that the law was never my personal project, not even close. Today I can tell you unhesitatingly what is: my husband and sons; writing; promoting the values of this book. Once I realized this, I had to make a change. I look back on my years as a Wall Street lawyer as time spent in a foreign country. It was absorbing, it was exciting, and I got to meet a lot of interesting people whom I never would have known otherwise. But I was always an expatriate.

This week we'll be learning about key elements of high quality picture books. Using the award winner lists in our course materials, select one picture book and share why it received its award. For example, Abuela is listed in the 100 Picture Books Everyone Should Know. According to Publishers Weekly, this is why it's so good: "In this tasty trip, Rosalba is "always going places" with her grandmother--abuela . During one of their bird-feeding outings to the park, Rosalba wonders aloud, "What if I could fly?" Thus begins an excursion through the girl's imagination as she soars high above the tall buildings and buses of Manhattan, over the docks and around the Statue of Liberty with Abuela in tow. Each stop of the glorious journey evokes a vivid memory for Rosalba's grandmother and reveals a new glimpse of the woman's colorful ethnic origins. Dorros's text seamlessly weaves Spanish words and phrases into the English narrative, retaining a dramatic quality rarely found in bilingual picture books. Rosalba's language is simple and melodic, suggesting the graceful images of flight found on each page. Kleven's ( Ernst ) mixed-media collages are vibrantly hued and intricately detailed, the various blended textures reminiscent of folk art forms. Those searching for solid multicultural material would be well advised to embark.

A famous American Freudian, commenting on a paper I had read, reported that he just had returned from Moscow. There, he said, he had found a lower frequency of neurosis as compared with the United States. He added that this might be traced to the fact that in Communist countries, as he felt, people are more often confronted with a task to complete. 'This speaks in favor of your theory,' he concluded, 'that meaning direction and task orientation are important in terms of mental health.' A year later, some Polish psychiatrists asked me to give a paper on logotherapy, and when I did so I quoted the American psychoanalyst. 'You are less neurotic than the Americans because you have more tasks to complete,' I told them. And they smugly smiled. 'But do not forget,' I added, 'that the Americans have retained their freedom also to choose their tasks, a freedom which sometimes seems to me to be denied to you.' They stopped smiling. How fine it would be to synthesize East and West, to blend tasks with freedom. Freedom then could fully develop. It really is a negative concept which requires a positive complement. And the positive complement is responsibleness. [...] Freedom threatens to degenerate into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. I like to say that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast should be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

CHALLENGES TO YOUNG POETS Invent a new language anyone can understand. Climb the Statue of Liberty. Reach for the unattainable. Kiss the mirror and write what you see and hear. Dance with wolves and count the stars, including the unseen. Be naïve, innocent, non-cynical, as if you had just landed on earth (as indeed you have, as indeed we all have), astonished by what you have fallen upon. Write living newspaper. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance level for hot air. Write and endless poem about your life on earth or elsewhere. Read between the lines of human discourse. Avoid the provincial, go for the universal. Think subjectively, write objectively. Think long thoughts in short sentences. Don't attend poetry workshops, but if you do, don't go the learn "how to" but to learn "what" (What's important to write about). Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces. Resist much, obey less. Secretly liberate any being you see in a cage. Write short poems in the voice of birds. Make your lyrics truly lyrical. Birdsong is not made by machines. Give your poem wings to fly to the treetops. The much-quoted dictum from William Carlos Williams, "No ideas but in things," is OK for prose, but it lays a dead hand on lyricism, since "things" are dead. Don't contemplate your navel in poetry and think the rest of the world is going to think it's important. Remember everything, forget nothing. Work on a frontier, if you can find one. Go to sea, or work near water, and paddle your own boat. Associate with thinking poets. They're hard to find. Cultivate dissidence and critical thinking. "First thought, best thought" may not make for the greatest poetry. First thought may be worst thought. What's on your mind? What do you have in mind? Open your mouth and stop mumbling. Don't be so open minded that your brains fall out. Questions everything and everyone. Be subversive, constantly questioning reality and status quo. Be a poet, not a huckster. Don't cater, don't pander, especially not to possible audiences, readers, editors, or publishers. Come out of your closet. It's dark there. Raise the blinds, throw open your shuttered windows, raise the roof, unscrew the locks from the doors, but don't throw away the screws. Be committed to something outside yourself. Be militant about it. Or ecstatic. To be a poet at sixteen is to be sixteen, to be a poet at 40 is to be a poet. Be both. Wake up and pee, the world's on fire. Have a nice day.

It’s not always so easy, it turns out, to identify your core personal projects. And it can be especially tough for introverts, who have spent so much of their lives conforming to extroverted norms that by the time they choose a career, or a calling, it feels perfectly normal to ignore their own preferences. They may be uncomfortable in law school or nursing school or in the marketing department, but no more so than they were back in middle school or summer camp. I, too, was once in this position. I enjoyed practicing corporate law, and for a while I convinced myself that I was an attorney at heart. I badly wanted to believe it, since I had already invested years in law school and on-the-job training, and much about Wall Street law was alluring. My colleagues were intellectual, kind, and considerate (mostly). I made a good living. I had an office on the forty-second floor of a skyscraper with views of the Statue of Liberty. I enjoyed the idea that I could flourish in such a high-powered environment. And I was pretty good at asking the “but” and “what if” questions that are central to the thought processes of most lawyers. It took me almost a decade to understand that the law was never my personal project, not even close. Today I can tell you unhesitatingly what is: my husband and sons; writing; promoting the values of this book. Once I realized this, I had to make a change. I look back on my years as a Wall Street lawyer as time spent in a foreign country. It was absorbing, it was exciting, and I got to meet a lot of interesting people whom I never would have known otherwise. But I was always an expatriate. Having spent so much time navigating my own career transition and counseling others through theirs, I have found that there are three key steps to identifying your own core personal projects. First, think back to what you loved to do when you were a child. How did you answer the question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? The specific answer you gave may have been off the mark, but the underlying impulse was not. If you wanted to be a fireman, what did a fireman mean to you? A good man who rescued people in distress? A daredevil? Or the simple pleasure of operating a truck? If you wanted to be a dancer, was it because you got to wear a costume, or because you craved applause, or was it the pure joy of twirling around at lightning speed? You may have known more about who you were then than you do now. Second, pay attention to the work you gravitate to. At my law firm I never once volunteered to take on an extra corporate legal assignment, but I did spend a lot of time doing pro bono work for a nonprofit women’s leadership organization. I also sat on several law firm committees dedicated to mentoring, training, and personal development for young lawyers in the firm. Now, as you can probably tell from this book, I am not the committee type. But the goals of those committees lit me up, so that’s what I did. Finally, pay attention to what you envy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You mostly envy those who have what you desire. I met my own envy after some of my former law school classmates got together and compared notes on alumni career tracks. They spoke with admiration and, yes, jealousy, of a classmate who argued regularly before the Supreme Court. At first I felt critical. More power to that classmate! I thought, congratulating myself on my magnanimity. Then I realized that my largesse came cheap, because I didn’t aspire to argue a case before the Supreme Court, or to any of the other accolades of lawyering. When I asked myself whom I did envy, the answer came back instantly. My college classmates who’d grown up to be writers or psychologists. Today I’m pursuing my own version of both those roles.