Pledge Movie Quotes

But it doesn't happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. For, the seventeenth-century humanist to the contrary, each man is an island complete unto himself, and as he sinks, the moving feet go on around him, from nowhere to nowhere and with no time to lose. The world is long past the Boy Scout stage of its development; now each man dies as he was meant to die, and as he was born, and as he lived: alone, all alone. Without any God, without any hope, without any record to show for his life. ("New York Blues")

Through The Mecca I saw that we were, in our own segregated body politic, cosmopolitans. The black diaspora was not just our own world but, in so many ways, the Western world itself. Now, the heirs of those Virginia planters could never directly acknowledge this legacy or reckon with its power. And so that beauty that Malcolm pledged us to protect, black beauty, was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black five-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit. Serious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” Bellow quipped. Tolstoy was “white,” and so Tolstoy “mattered,” like everything else that was white “mattered.” And this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?

And in the complicated, relished, introspective web of young lovers, or more exactly, young petters, they progress along the oldest channel in the world and the most deceptive, for they are certain it is unique to them. Even as they are calling themselves engaged, they are losing the details of their subtle involved pledging of a troth. They are moved and warmed by intimacies between them, by long husky conversations in the parlor, in inexpensive restaurants, by the murmurs, the holding of hands in the dark velvet caverns of movie houses. They forget most of the things that have advanced them into love, feel now only the effect of them. And of course their conversation alters, new themes are bruited. Shy sensitive girls may end up as poetesses or they may turn bitter and drink alone in bars, but nice shy sensitive Jewish girls usually marry and have children, gain two pounds a year, and worry more about refurbishing hats and trying a new casserole than about the meaning of life. After their engagement, Natalie talks over their prospects.

These were the kids who would take LSD for recreational purposes, who relied upon tape recorders to supply the weird studio effects their music required and who could repeat the cosmic wisdom of the Space Brothers as if it were the Pledge of Allegiance. Brought up on space heroes and super beings, as revealed to them in comic books and TV shows, the whole galaxy was their birthright, just as Mad magazine and cheap B-movies had shown them hows stupid and flimsy a construct daily life could be. To the subtle dismay of their parents, this was a generation capable of thinking the unthinkable as a matter of course. That their grand cosmological adventure should come to an end just as Neil Armstrong succeeded in bringing Suburbia to the Moon is another story and it will have to wait for another time.

The minute he arrived at his own parents' house and was confronted by the smallness of the rooms, the old walls covered with dusty calendars, and passepartout pictures of animals, the electrical wires snaking and dangling loosely from the ceiling, the buzzing fluorescent lamp that never lit properly, transforming the house into a gloomy, dusty cubicle, he wanted to return to the city. He could not properly splice in movie landscapes here, because everything was too familiar, and because he was too connected with the droning quarrels.

Many girls still learn the bare biological facts from friends, movies and the Internet. Parents, schools and legislators fear that once children know about sex they will become sexually active. Yet  several  studies  from the USA show that making ‘virginity pledges’, for example, makes no difference to the extent of sexual activity among young people and that, contrary to fears, comprehensive education about sexuality leads to delay and less engagement in sex, with fewer partners, as well as greater use of contraceptives.

Meet the New Boss What?! Mr. Klutz was fired? It couldn’t be true! We were all shocked. I thought it was one of those times when something really horrible happens and then it turns out just to be a dream. I saw that in a movie once. But the next morning while we were putting our backpacks away, everybody was talking about what happened. “Dr. Carbles can’t fire Mr. Klutz!” said Michael. “Well, he did,” said Ryan. “But Mr. Klutz is the best principal in the world!” said Neil the nude kid. Neil was right. Everybody loved Mr. Klutz. I was sad. Some kids were crying. Teachers were hugging each other in the hallway and dabbing their eyes with tissues. It was like Mr. Klutz had died. After we pledged the allegiance, our teacher, Miss Daisy, said we should remember the good times we had with Mr. Klutz. “Remember when he got his foot caught at the top of the flagpole and was hanging upside down?” said Ryan. “Remember when he dressed like Santa in the holiday pageant, and he was hanging upside down from his sleigh?” said Michael. “Once I got called to his office, and he was hanging upside down from the ceiling,” I told everybody. “Mr. Klutz sure hangs upside down a lot,” said Emily, who is a big crybaby. It was hard to concentrate on reading and math that morning. We were all thinking about the good old days with Mr. Klutz. When it was time to go to the vomitorium for lunch, we were still talking about him. “They’ll have to get us a new principal,” said Andrea, who