Representative John Lewis Quotes

Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.

He maligned war hero John McCain for “getting caught” in Vietnam, even as McCain was dying; and then he maligned him again after his death. He fanned the proverbial flames of existing racial tensions and exacerbated the situation with his petulant undiplomatic style. He then went somewhere beyond petty upon the death of Georgia representative John Lewis, a true civil rights hero, when he simply dismissed him because “he didn’t have nice things to say about me.

Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film Lincoln is dramatization at its best. It shows the president, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, trying to make good on the claim, in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal: what more praiseworthy cause could a hedgehog possibly pursue? But to abolish slavery, Lincoln must move the Thirteenth Amendment through a fractious House of Representatives, and here his maneuvers are as foxy as they come. He resorts to deals, bribes, flattery, arm-twisting, and outright lies—so much so that the movie reeks, visually if not literally, of smoke-filled rooms. 27 When Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) asks the president how he can reconcile so noble an aim with such malodorous methods, Lincoln recalls what his youthful years as a surveyor taught him: [A] compass . . . [will] point you true north from where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp . . . , [then] what’s the use of knowing true north? 28 I had the spooky sense, when I saw the film, that Berlin was sitting next to me, and at the conclusion of this scene leaned over to whisper triumphantly: “You see? Lincoln knows when to be a hedgehog (consulting the compass) and when a fox (skirting the swamp)!

goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy,” he admonished the House of Representatives in a speech of his own on July 4, 1821: She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. . . . She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners, . . . she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. . . . She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

For me, the nomination of Barack Obama as a candidate for president and his inauguration in Washington represents a brief glimpse at the power and potential of peace. There was a radiance about America then, a great coming together of so many people, races, generations, and beliefs. For one brief moment in our history, we found a way to put down our strife against one another. For a few days, weeks, and months all the false reasons we use daily to look down on others, to separate ourselves from one another, fell away, and we opened our hearts to the kind of equality that our founders envisioned but did not have the courage to create. In that moment we decided to face the truth of our oneness with one another, and when we did we experienced the beauty of peace.

Despite everything that has happened, regardless of the pain of their loss, despite all the other nonviolent peaceful warriors who suffered and sometimes fell, I have never once considered giving up or giving out. I could not let myself get lost in a sea of despair, because I had faith that the truth is bigger than all humanity. The tragedy of their loss was a crisis of faith, but in that struggle I discovered that you can kill a Medgar Evers or a Jimmie Lee Jackson. You can kill three civil rights workers named Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. You can bomb four innocent little girls in church on a Sunday morning. You can even kill three of the finest leaders of the twentieth century, but you cannot kill the truth they represented. The truth marches on; it is not connected to the life of any one individual. When a person dies, the dream does not die. You can kill a man, but the truth that he stood for will never die.

The American republic now extended across a third of a continent, and was unlikely to stop there. How then could the British time bomb of generosity—the ocean of land ceded in 1783—fail to revive familiar protests of “no taxation without representation”? Where, if that happened, would Hamilton’s “UNION” be? Madison solved these issues of time and space by shifting scale. In doing so he drew, knowingly or not, 65 on Machiavelli. For only in republics, the Florentine had observed, could the “common good” be “looked to properly.” By expanding the number who benefited, the influence of the few who didn’t could be reduced: not all parts, submerged in wholes, need drown. 66 Scale could be the life preserver. There were, Madison acknowledged, dangers in this: By enlarging too much the number of electors [voters], you render the representative too little acquainted with all their local circumstances and lesser interests; as by reducing it too much, you render him unduly attached to these, and too little fit to comprehend and pursue great and national objects. But surely there existed “a mean, on both sides of which inconveniences will be found to lie.” In this way balancing factions—a Burkean enterprise—could put “inconveniences” to good use: Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. The proposed Constitution “forms a happy combination in this respect; the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local and particular to the State legislatures.” 67

Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson later said that there should be a “consilience” between art and science. 79 Former NASA astronaut Mae Jemison took selected images with her on her first trip to space, including a poster of dancer and former artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Judith Jamison performing the dance Cry, and a Bundu statue from Sierra Leone, because, as she said, “the creativity that allowed us . . . to conceive and build and launch the space shuttle, springs from the same source as the imagination and analysis it took to carve a Bundu statue, or the ingenuity it took to design, choreograph, and stage ‘Cry.’ . . . That’s what we have to reconcile in our minds, how these things fit together.” 80 As a jazz musician once told me, musicians are mathematicians as well as artists. Morse’s story suggests that the argument started not because of the need to bring art and science together, but because they were once not so far apart. 81 When Frank Jewett Mather Jr. of The Nation stated that Morse “was an inventor superimposed upon an artist,” it was factually true. 82 Equally true is that Morse could become an inventor because he was an artist all the while. In one of the final paintings that laid him flat, the painting that failed to secure his last attempt at a commission, one he had worked fifteen years to achieve, Morse may have left a clue about his shift from art to invention, and the fact that the skills required for both are the same. He painted The House of Representatives (1822–23) as evidence of his suitability for a commission from Congress to complete a suite of paintings that still adorn the U.S. Capitol building. The painting has an odd compositional focus. In the center is a man screwing in an oil chandelier, preoccupied with currents. Morse was “rejected beyond hope of appeal” by the congressional commission led by John Quincy Adams. When he toured the picture for seven weeks—displayed in a coffee house in Salem, Massachusetts, and at exhibitions in New York, Boston, Middleton, and Hartford, Connecticut—it lost twenty dollars in the first two weeks. Compounded by a litany of embarrassing, near-soul-stealing artistic failures, he took to his bed for weeks, “more seriously depressed than ever.” This final rejection forced him to shift his energies to his telegraph invention. 83 By 1844 Morse went to the Capitol focused on a current that would occupy the work of Congress—obtaining a patent for the telegraph.

The journey home, Kennan reported, had been a reintroduction to capitalism, of which he had seen little recently except Norway and Austria, which had been too idyllic and too depressing, respectively, to be representative. Germany, as he passed through it, had been a “great garden, well-kept and blooming, . . . populated by clean and healthy people.” London had been full of business activity but striking for its social stability: he had forgotten that such a thing existed. So “I got back to this country almost a complete convert to the horrors of capitalism, ready to forgive even radio advertising, . . . and the Saturday Evening Post.

The Kennans sailed for Europe in mid-July 1936, sharing the SS Manhattan with the “gum-chewing supermen” and “hefty amazons” who would represent the United States at the Berlin Olympics. Upon arrival in Hamburg, [t]he athletes lined the rail of the ship and light-heartedly shouted their locker-room banter at the people on shore. It did not occur to them that these people would not be apt to understand much of it. They failed to notice that the country before their eyes was a country different—excitingly, provocatively different—from their own. To myself, for whom these transitions from one world to another had never ceased to be momentous, awe-compelling experiences, . . . this was a little sad.

The United States had no foreign policy, only the reflections of domestic politics internationally. There was no satisfaction in representing that. The country was succumbing to a consumerism in which people equated charm with the absence of halitosis, balanced competing claims about toothpaste, and fretted about whether their refrigerators ejected ice cubes or required an ice pick.

So in a limited sense, the conversation partners were able to say that we are all worshiping the same God, but in terms of a general consensus that was as far as it could go, because “the image of God is too closely linked with the identity of each of the religions.” 167 Nevertheless, common ground was found along the way. Thus, after “a number of dialogues, John B. Taylor summed up the common features: common creatureliness before God, common responsibility before God’s judgment, the human being as God’s representative and servant, [and] the struggle for a more just, better world.” 168 To these could be added the mutual affirmation of humanity’s need for divine revelatory guidance as well as a belief in our God-given dignity and inherently moral nature. And both see Jesus as a holy man and prophet.

At a meeting of the " Columbian Independent Company," commanded by Capt. Nicholas Snider, of Taneytown, and the " Independent Pipe Creek Company," under the command of Capt. Thomas Hook, held at Middleburg, Oct. 13, 1821, information of the death of Gen. John Ross Key was first received. Middleburg is on the Western Maryland Railroad, forty-eight miles from Baltimore and fifteen from Westminster, in a fertile and thriving section of country. The merchants are Ferdinand Warner and H. D. Fuss; the physician. Dr. Charles Thompson; and the hotel-keeper, Lewis F. Ijynn. A large pottery establishment is conducted

In America, the American Federation of Labor, which included most of organized labor, specialized in organizing only craft unions. That is, carpenters, plumbers, masons, painters, machinists, etc., were organized in unions representing these separate crafts. They constituted only a small part of the labor force. The vast majority of workers were unskilled and were employed in factories or single industries and were unorganized. There were three large industrial unions—the United Mine Workers of John L. Lewis, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union of David Dubinsky and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of Sidney Hillman.