Toussaint Quotes

When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.

The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased.

The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.

The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.

In politics all abstract terms conceal treachery.

It is Toussaint's supreme merit that while he saw European civilisation as a valuable and necessary thing, and strove to lay its foundations among his people, he never had the illusion that it conferred any moral superiority. He knew French, British, and Spanish imperialists for the insatiable gangsters that they were, that there is no oath too sacred for them to break, no crime, deception, treachery, cruelty, destruction of human life and property which they would not commit against those who could not defend themselves.

The chances of seeing an idea through to completion are inversely proportional to the time you’ve spent talking about it beforehand.

An army is a miniature of the society which produces it.

Les meilleurs livres sont ceux dont on se souvient du fauteuil dans lequel on les a lus.

Property-owners are the most energetic flag-waggers and patriots in every country, but only so long as they enjoy their possessions: to safeguard those they desert God, King and Country in a twinkling.

In the fight between you and reality, be discouraging.

Yet when the masses turn (as turn they will one day) and try to end the tyranny of centuries, not only the tyrants but all ‘civilisation’ holds up its hands in horror and clamours for ‘order’ to be restored. If a revolution carries high overhead expenses, most of them it inherits from the greed of reactionaries and the cowardice of the so-called moderates. Long before abolition the mischief had been done in the French colonies and it was not abolition but the refusal to abolish which had done it.

The slave-trade and slavery were the economic basis of the French Revolution. ‘Sad irony of human history,’ comments Jaurès. ‘The fortunes created at Bordeaux, at Nantes, by the slave-trade, gave to the bourgeoisie that pride which needed liberty and contributed to human emancipation.

Where imperialists do not find disorder they create it deliberately...They want an excuse for going in...

As for Toussaint, she venerated Jean Valjean and liked everything he did. One

There are and always will be some who, ashamed of the behaviour of their ancestors, try to prove that slavery was not so bad after all, that its evils and its cruelty were the exaggerations of propagandists and not the habitual lot of the slaves. Men will say (and accept) anything in order to foster national pride or soothe a troubled conscience.

Uninhibited, they wallowed with zest in the filth and mire of their political conceptions and needs, among the very leaders of their society, but nevertheless the very dregs of human civilisation and moral standards. A historian who finds excuses for such conduct by references to the supposed spirit of the times, or by omission, or by silence, shows thereby that his account of events is not to be trusted.

Leader of a backward and ignorant mass, he was yet in the forefront of the great historical movement of his time. The blacks were taking their part in the destruction of European feudalism begun by the French Revolution, and liberty and equality, the slogans of the revolution, meant far more to them than to any Frenchman. That was why in the hour of danger Toussaint, uninstructed as he was, could find the language and accent of Diderot, Rousseau, and Raynal, of Mirabeau, Robespierre and Danton. And in one respect he excelled them all. For even these masters of the spoken and written word, owing to the class complications of their society, too often had to pause, to hesitate, to qualify. Toussaint could defend the freedom of the blacks without reservation, and this gave to his declaration a strength and a single-mindedness rare in the great documents of the time. The French bourgeoisie could not understand it. Rivers of blood were to flow before they understood that elevated as was his tone Toussaint had written neither bombast nor rhetoric but the simple and sober truth.

Too much meaning is bad at Toussaint." "Reason must sleep," said Christabel. "The stories come before the meanings," I said. "As I said, reason must sleep," she said again. I do not believe all these explanations. They diminish. The idea of Woman is less than brilliant Vivien, and the idea of Merlin will not allegorise into male wisdom. He is Merlin

As a woman ravaged by intense pain and the loss of virtually all my life’s goals, I have been transformed by suffering and love. And brought to a higher place.

1789 the French bourgeoisie was the most powerful economic force in France, and the slave-trade and the colonies were the basis of its wealth and power.

There’ll be nothing left of us, any more than of them I’d stake more than my life on it So smile. I crouch down in front of the tombs of: Anaïs Caussin (1986–1993) Nadège Gardon (1985–1993) Océane Degas (1984–1993) Léonine Toussaint (1986–1993)

For the painful essence of withdrawal does not reside in the present suffering it brings - withdrawal is painless on the level of the immediate moment - but in the prospect of suffering to come, the rich future that one can imagine one's torture enjoying.

For where books, for instance, always offer a thousand times more than they are, television offers exactly what it is, its essential immediacy, its ever-evolving, always-in-progress superficiality.

Pendant ces années, je n'en ai pas voulu à Philippe Toussaint de la solitude dans laquelle il me laissait parce que je ne la ressentais pas, je ne la vivais pas, elle glissait sur moi. Je crois que la solitude et l'ennui touchent le vide des gens. Moi, j'étais repue.

The first sign of a thoroughly ill-adjusted or bankrupt form of society is that the ruling classes cannot agree how to save a situation. It is this division which forces the breach, and the ruling classes will continue to fight with each other, just so long as they do not fear the mass seizure of power.

Écrire, c'est fermer les yeux en les gardant ouverts.

Il me semblait en effet qu'une idée, aussi brillante fût-elle, n'était pas vraiment digne d'être retenue si, pour simplement s'en souvenir, il fallait la noter.

It all began with dreams that did not come true.

I lead a life of contradiction. I’ve experienced horrific pain, a non-caring medical system, and total loss of the career I felt I was born for. Yet I feel completely blessed.

And yet that's the best way to watch television actively: with your eyes closed.

3 novembre. Sainte Grisaille. Bruges n'en finit plus d'étouffer dans la brouillasse. Toutes les tristesses de la Toussaint se sont tassées au ciel.

Rémy Toussaint

My name is Violette Toussaint. I was a level-crossing keeper, now I’m a cemetery keeper. I savor life, I sip at it, like jasmine tea sweetened with honey. And

The slopes to treachery from the dizzy heights of revolutionary leadership are always so steep and slippery that leaders, however well intentioned, can never build their fences too high

The town hall had stopped paying him as a cemetery keeper a few months after his disappearance. That, too, I only discovered much later. The Toussaint parents received his paychecks and completed his tax returns.

For that matter," said Toussaint, "it's true. We would be assassinated before we'd have time to say Boo! And then, since Monsieur doesn't sleep in the house. But don't be afraid, mademoiselle, I fasten the windows like Bastilles. Women alone ! I'm sure that's enough to make us shudder! Just imagine! To see men come into the room at night and say Hush ! to you and set themselves about cutting your throat. It isn't so much the dying, people die, that's all right, we know very well that we have to die, but it is the horror of having such people touch yhaving such people touch you. And then their knives, they must cut badly ! 0 God !

Then it was cooler and there was rain in the woods, the smell of leaf mold and mushrooms. The refreshed river hissed. He looked up at a sky that seemed set with rondels of thick glass. He found the brothers tearing out a beaver dam near their old hut on the Rivière des Fourres. Both brothers, muddy and glad to leave the beaver dam for a reunion, were in fair health though Toussaint’s beard showed white side streaks and Fernand groaned when he straightened up.

Before Philippe Toussaint, despite the foster families and my bitten nails, I saw the sunlight on the facades, rarely the shadows. With him, I came to understand what disillusion means. That it wasn’t enough to derive pleasure from a man to love him. The gorgeous guy’s picture on glossy paper had become dog-eared. His laziness, his lack of courage when facing his parents, his latent violence, and the smell of other girls on his fingertips, had stolen something from me.

In point of fact, he was not afraid to die, not anymore. He now understood with a faith that he had never before possessed that he would see those he had lost when he died, that everything would be made whole, that he would talk to Boukman, and his mother and father and sister, again. It was true that there was no need on earth that could not be slaked and satisfied. When you are thirsty there is water. When you are hungry there is food. It is impossible to need a thing without that thing being available for the having. A man may want a green horse that flies, but he canot need one, for there is no such thing. At this precise moment, Toussaint felt that he needed Boukman, that he could not bear it if he never saw him again, and he knew, because this need existed, that it would be met.

Me and old Jeffrey... we spent about fifty years killing each other over and over again, every day. I was so filled with hate. That man was everything I despised and vice versa. I was afraid we'd end up like Hunding and Helgi-- immortal enemies, still sniping at each other thousands of years later." "But you didn't?" "Funny thing. Eventually... I just got tired of it. I stopped looking for Jeffrey Toussaint on the battlefield. I figured something out. You can't hold on to hate forever. It won't do a thing to the person you hate, but it'll poison you, sure enough.

My poem must expurgate my manhood unveil the animality of the best of my being, reveal both the monster behind the friendly smile and the humanity of my most evil deeds; I shall undress the species to its pure nudity, relegate our vanity to the dustbin of time; I shall tell a new story.

Gift Nothing will hurt you that much despite how you feel the stress on your back shapes your insight this splendid November rain Toussaint. I find you by your marks, he says an imprint But when I summon you, I talk to—I say— my memory of your face. It’s kind of crazy to others. They’re not very interesting he says. When I first came to this country, and now I know the language I say, but I had in a dream spoken it many years previously. That is, not the language of the dead the language of France. I took one year of French in 1964 and then nothing but once, in 1977 I spoke French in a dream all night: I was in the future I moved here in 1992. Country of the more logical than I? though the people of my quartier know and like me, even as I a foreigner remain strange You do everything alone a woman said to me. There are ways to care without interfering but the French speak of anguish frequently they are conscious of emotional extremity a terrible gift. It’s all a gift, he says . . . some haven’t been opened. I’m not sure he said that it’s nearly my sixty-seventh birthday today though it’s the day of the dead hello we love you they say.

Once again, it seemed, I was discovering the truth of the rule, a rule I'd never explicitly formulated to myself, but whose veracity I'd quite often sensed in a vague sort of way, which was that the chances of seeing an idea through to completion are inversely proportional to the time you've spent talking about it beforehand.

She misunderstood my method, in my opinion, not realizing that my approach, rather obscure to those unfamiliar, was based on the idea that in my struggle with reality, I could exhaust any opponent with whom I was grappling, like one can wear out an olive, for example, before successfully stabbing it with a fork, and that my propensity not to hasten matters, far from having a negative effect, in fact prepared for me a fertile ground where, when things seemed ripe, I could make my move with ease.

In the street, asked a running man the way to the post office. I've always enjoyed asking people in a hurry for information.

Lord, you came and served me with unconditional love. Help me to love like you. Amen.

Constitutions are what they turn out to be.

If a revolution carries high overhead expenses, most of them it inherits from the greed of reactionaries and the cowardice of so called moderates.

The following morning, I met with the mayor. I had barely set foot in his office before he told me that Philippe Toussaint and I would be employed starting in August of 1997 as cemetery keepers. That we would each receive the minimum wage, a house that went with the job, and that any water and electricity we used, as well as our household taxes, would be paid for by the council.

if he knew how upset I was for opening my big fat mouth. “I’m sorry about what happened in there. I shouldn’t have told Mama about Joseph Theodore Page being on Ted’s birth certificate, but she

I walked head down, pressing my feet down hard on the pavement to push the city under water.... With the town sinking at the rate of thirty centimeters a century, I explained, or three millimeters a year, or point zero zero zero zero zero zero one millimeter a second, one might reasonably hope, by pressing our feet down hard on the pavement as we walked, to play some part in the drowning of the town.

...we had long silences together over the line. I liked those moments. With my ear close to the receiver, I'd try to hear her breath, her breathing. When she broke the silence, her voice became more important.

If it is written in the books of providence", the sorceress said after a while, “that Geralt will find Ciri, then it will happen. Regardless of whether the witcher sets off into the mountains or sits in Toussaint. Predestination overtakes humans. Not vice versa. Do you understand that? Do you understand, Mr. Regis Terzieff-Godefroy?" "Better than you think, Miss Vigo.” The vampire turned the sausage link in his fingers. "However, you must excuse me, I do not accept that predestination is in some book, written by the hand of a great Demiurge, or the will of heaven, or the unalterable judgment of any providence. Rather, it is the result of many seemingly unconnected facts, events, and actions. I tend to agree with you that the predestination overtakes humans...and not only humans. However, I accept much less the view that it could not also be reversed. Because this view is a convenient fatalism. It is a paean to apathy and baseness on a feather bed and the charming warmth of a woman’s womb. In short, to live in a dream. Life, Miss Vigo may be a dream, may end in a dream ... But it's a dream that you must actively dream. Therefore, Miss Vigo, the road awaits us." "Go ahead." Fringilla stood up, almost as violent as Milva had recently. "As you wish! Snow, cold, and predetermination await you on the passes. And the atonement that you so urgently seem to need. Go ahead! But the witcher is staying here. In Toussaint! With me!" "I believe," the vampire replied calmly, "You are mistaken, Miss Vigo. The dream you dream with the witcher is, I confess with a bow, magical and beautiful. However, any dream that we dream for too long becomes a nightmare. And from it we awake with a scream.

Guardi, Cécile… […] In quale altro posto si può trovare un simile insieme di persone diverse? Ricchi e poveri di tutte le razze, di tanti paesi, dalle storie diverse, che credono in Dio, Jehovah, Allah, o che non credono in niente, come il miscredente che le parla? E giocano insieme, imparano gomito a gomito e fraternizzano? C’è forse un altro posto in cui Églantine de Saint-André avrebbe la possibilità di incontrare Toussaint Baoulé e di amarlo?

I don't like the way he say you. Like I different. Like I didn't just see one-of-me-like-me beat until she fall. [...] But my boy doesn't see. He can't see. Can't hear, either. He never tried to mimic my words and so he doesn't understand and I see again, why Mama so afraid of Below.

C’était une femme originale et solitaire. Elle entretenait un commerce étroit avec les esprits, épousait leurs querelles et refusait de voir certaines personnes de sa famille mal considérées dans le monde où elle se réfugiait. Un petit héritage lui échut qui venait de sa soeur. Ces cinq mille francs, arrivés à la fin d’une vie, se révélèrent assez encombrants. Il fallait les placer. Si presque tous les hommes sont capables de se servir d’une grosse fortune, la difficulté commence quand la somme est petite. Cette femme resta fidèle à elle-même. Près de la mort, elle voulut abriter ses vieux os. Une véritable occasion s’offrait à elle. Au cimetière de sa ville, une concession venait d’expirer et, sur ce terrain, les propriétaires avaient érigé un somptueux caveau, sobre de lignes, en marbre noir, un vrai trésor à tout dire, qu’on lui laissait pourla somme de quatre mille francs. Elle acheta ce caveau. C’était là une valeur sûre, à l’abri des fluctuations boursières et des événements politiques. Elle fit aménager la fosse intérieure, la tint prête à recevoir son propre corps. Et, tout achevé, elle fit graver son nom en capitales d’or. Cette affaire la contenta si profondément qu’elle fut prise d’un véritable amour pour son tombeau. Elle venait voir au début les progrès des travaux Elle finit par se rendre visite tous les dimanches après-midi. Ce fut son unique sortie et sa seule distraction. Vers deux heures de l’après-midi, elle faisait le long trajet qui l’amenait aux portes de la ville où se trouvait le cimetière. Elle entrait dans le petit caveau, refermait soigneusement la porte, et s’agenouillait sur le prie-Dieu. C’est ainsi que, mise en présence d’elle-même, confrontant ce qu’elle était et ce qu’elle devait être, retrouvant l’anneau d’une chaîne toujours rompue, elle perça sans effort les desseins secrets de la Providence. Par un singulier symbole, elle comprit même un jour qu’elle était morte aux yeux du monde. À la Toussaint, arrivée plus tard que d’habitude, elle trouva le pas de la porte pieusement jonché de violettes. Par une délicate attention, des inconnus compatissants devant cette tombe laissée sans fleurs, avaient partagé les leurs et honoré la mémoire de ce mort abandonné à lui-même.

Apart from when I was working. He inhaled me. Drank me. Enveloped me. He was wildly sensual. He made me melt in his mouth like a caramel, like icing sugar. I was on a perpetual high. When I think of that period of my life, I’m at a fun fair. He always knew where to place his hands, his mouth, his kisses. He never got lost. He had a roadmap of my body, routes that he knew by heart and I didn’t even know existed. When we’d finished making love, our legs and our lips trembled in unison. We inhabited each other’s burning desire. Philippe Toussaint always said, “Violette, bloody hell, bloody fucking hell, Violette, I’ve never known anything like it! You’re a sorceress, I’m sure you’re a sorceress!” I think he was already cheating on me that first year. I think

Yet Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint. And even that is not the whole truth. ... Today by a natural reaction we tend to a personification of the social forces, great men being merely or nearly instruments in the hands of economic destiny. As so often the truth does not lie in between. Great men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment. ... In a revolution, when the ceaseless slow accumulation of centuries bursts into volcanic eruption, the meteoric flares and flights above are a meaningless chaos and lend themselves to infinite caprice and romanticism unless the observer sees them always as projections of the sub-soil from which they came.

[in response to Jean-François, who claimed that, "there is no irrevocable liberty for the former slaves except that which the Spanish monarch would grant them because, as a legitimate king, he alone has the right to legitimate that freedom"] . . . [W]e are free by natural right. It could only be kings . . . who dare claim the right to reduce into servitude men made like them and whom nature has made free.

The slaves destroyed tirelessly. Like the peasants in the Jacquerie or the Luddite wreckers, they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much. [...] Now that they held power they did as they had been taught. In the frenzy of the first encounters they killed all. Yet they spared the priests whom they feared and the surgeons who had been kind to them. They, whose women had undergone countless violations, violated all the women who fell into their hands, often on the bodies of their still bleeding husbands, fathers and brothers. “Vengeance ! Vengeance” was their war-cry, and one of them carried a white child on a pike as a standard. And yet they were surprisingly moderate, then and afterwards, far more humane than their masters had been or would ever be to them. [...] Compared with what their masters had done to them in cold blood, what they did was negligible, and they were spurred on by the ferocity with which the whites in Le Cap treated all slave prisoners who fell into their hands.

Sept ans plus tôt, elle m’avait expliqué qu’elle n’avait jamais ressenti un tel sentiment avec personne, une telle émotion, une telle vague de douce et chaude mélancolie qui l’avait envahie en me voyant faire ce geste si simple, si apparemment anodin, de rapprocher très lentement mon verre à pied du sien pendant le repas, très prudemment, et de façon tout à fait incongrue en même temps pour deux personnes qui ne se connaissaient pas encore très bien, qui ne s’étaient rencontrées qu’une seule fois auparavant, de rapprocher mon verre à pied du sien pour aller caresser le galbe de son verre, l’incliner pour le heurter délicatement dans un simulacre de trinquer sitôt entamé qu’interrompu, il était impossible d’être à la fois plus entreprenant, plus délicat et plus explicite, m’avait-elle expliqué, un concentré d’intelligence, de douceur et de style. Elle m’avait souri, elle m’avait avoué par la suite qu’elle était tombée amoureuse de moi dès cet instant. Ce n’était donc pas par des mots que j’étais parvenu à lui communiquer ce sentiment de beauté de la vie et d’adéquation au monde qu’elle ressentait si intensément en ma présence, non plus par mes regards ou par mes actes, mais par l’élégance de ce simple geste de la main qui s’était lentement dirigée vers elle avec une telle délicatesse métaphorique qu’elle s’était sentie soudain étroitement en accord avec le monde jusqu’à me dire quelques heures plus tard, avec la même audace, la même spontanéité naïve et culottée, que la vie était belle, mon amour.

In overthrowing me, you have cut only the trunk of the tree of liberty. It will spring up again for its roots are numerous and deep!

כשאני אומר שלא עשיתי כלום, כוונתי לומר שלא עשיתי אלא את ההכרחי בלבד, חשבתי, קראתי, האזנתי למוזיקה, עשיתי אהבה, יצאתי לטיולים, הלכתי לבריכה, ליקטתי פטריות.

למען האמת כבר מההתחלה, מהיום הראשון שבו חציתי לראשונה את מפתן חדר העבודה שלי באור הרך והנפלא של הזריחה והדלקתי את המחשב שלי, טרדה את מנוחתי שאלה קטנה אך סבוכה למדי, ובמקום להכות בברזל בעודו חם ולפתור אותה בו במקום, בביטחון האינסטינקטיבי של החלטות המתקבלות בלהט ההתחלה, העדפתי לשקול ולבחון אותה באריכות מהיבטים שונים, וכך מצאתי את עצמי די מהר תקוע לחלוטין ובלי כל יכולת להתחיל, וכל שכן להמשיך.

קיים יחס הפוך בין הסיכוי להוציא לפועל רעיון כלשהו לזמן שהקדשנו לדיבור עליו לפני כן. וזאת, לדעתי, מהסיבה הפשוטה שאם מיצינו את כל ההנאה האפשרית מאותו רעיון בשלבים הקודמים להגשמתו, כשאנו ניגשים לעבודה לא נשארים לנו אלא הכאב שהוא חלק בלתי נפרד מתהליך היצירה, העול, העמל.

Toussaint affirms an irreconcilable contradiction: flight is to occur alongside an inalienable freedom that, as his own descriptions attest, is actually not a given but struggled for and fought over. Toussaint conceives freedom to be inalienable once acquired, but this admission disturbs the freedom as natality narrative. Freedom is not immutable. Flight is first experienced after bondage and is not an originary naturalism. Toussaint has a late realization of the nonuniversal quality of revolutionary republicanism, the rift between the self-reflexive hero and the crowd desiring the hero to put them ahead of the sovereign self, and conflict between the Haitian state and the Haitian nation with the latter’s non-sovereign conception of freedom.

...omdat ze niet begreep dat ik met mijn benaderingswijze, die op het oog nogal ondoorzichtig was, in zekere zin beoogde de realiteit waarmee ik werd geconfronteerd murw te maken, zoals men er pas in slaagt bij voorbeeld een olijf aan zijn vork te prikken als men haar eerst murw heeft gemaakt, en dat mijn neiging nooit iets te forceren niet nadelig voor me was maar in werkelijkheid juist het terrein voor me effende waar ik, als de dingen me rijp leken, zou kunnen scoren.

Immers, naar mijn idee had ze een verkeerd idee van mijn methode, omdat ze niet begreep dat ik met mijn benaderingswijze, die op het oog nogal ondoorzichtig was, in zekere zin beoogde de realiteit waarmee ik werd geconfronteerd murw te maken, zoals men er pas in slaagt bij voorbeeld een olijf aan zijn vork te prikken als men haar eerst murw heeft gemaakt, en dat mijn neiging nooit iets te forceren niet nadelig voor me was maar in werkelijkheid juist het terrein voor me effende waar ik, als de dingen me rijp leken, zou kunnen scoren.

If a revolution carries high overhead expenses, most of them it inherits from the greed of reactionaries and the cowardice of the so-called moderates. Long before abolition the mischief had been done in the French colonies and it was not abolition but the refusal to abolish which had done it.

Guinea Pig never has the same name two weeks in a row. This

Once gave up meat for 6 months, but was broken by the smell of turkey bacon.

Georges Lefebvre, the great contemporary historian of the French Revolution, who on occasion after occasion exhaustively examines all the available evidence and repeats that we do not know and will never know who were the real leaders of the French Revolution, nameless, obscure men, far removed from the legislators and the public orators.

The March. It’s from Mr. Lawrence’s Toussaint L’Ouverture series. Painted in 1995.

Il est en souvent ainsi dans la vie, ou l'attitude qu'on a avec une femme qu'on vient de rencontrer , les discussions qu'on peut avoir avec elle, et plus tard, qui sait, les tendres attentions et les caresses, et meme les querelles et les brouilles ulterieures, poursuivent ou completent, corrigent ou amendent, celles qu'on a eues avec un'autre femme, comme si, dans notre solipsisme invetere, c'etait toujours a une seule et meme femme, qui englobair toutes les femmes de notre vie, que nous nous adressions. (p.80)

Disconnecting isn’t always permanent. It can be in certain situations, and when it is, it becomes much clearer that we needed to disconnect in the first place. But a lot of times we disconnect, and then we evolve and grow without the relationship weighing us down. And the other person evolves and grows, too. And that, a lot of the time, makes it possible to reconnect, on better and healthier terms.

Mostly people don’t want to pay you any mind, Toussaint has learned. It’s just they think they have to, some of them, but if you give them any excuse at all they’ll go right back to only minding about themselves.

Dutchess called God the "Everlasting." Did Pastor Phil think the Everlasting answered prayers? “Sure! mean, your grandmother wrote to you, didn't she?” "I didn't pray for that." "Oh. Yeah. Well, you know what I mean." Pastor Phil said God was unfathomable, but God heard her. And Toussaint too, and all the billions of the living. God might respond in hours or days. Or it might take years, or it might seem like there wasn't any response at all, but that wasn't true. It was just that sometimes people couldn't understand what God said. For my thoughts are not your thoughts; nor are your ways my ways. Pastor Phil said that a lot. Then she'd stare misty-eyed out of a window, especially if it was nighttime. She told Toussaint that waiting for God could be agonizing. But God sits with people in their travail.

Fanon remained faithful to the ideals of the French Revolution, hoping that they might be achieved elsewhere, in the independent nations of what was then known as the Third World. He was a “Black Jacobin,” as the Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James described Toussaint Louverture in his classic history of the Haitian Revolution.

Toussaint Academy is one of the best private schools in the country.

Overcoming setbacks and roadblocks is the point. “If there is no struggle, there is no progress,” Frederick Douglass once said.

You gotta ‘know’ the ‘ledge’ so you don’t fall off of it. Knowledge is power. Don’t ever forget that.

The worst thing you can do in life is allow the world to see you weak. If they see you weak, they know what to attack. Like animals, people prey on weakness.

Up High safe. Nothing good come from below.

In a revolution, when the ceaseless slow accumulation of centuries bursts into volcanic eruption, the meteoric flares and flights above are a meaningless chaos and lend themselves to infinite caprice and romanticism unless the observer sees them always as projections of the sub-soil from which they came.

Western Conservative Baptist Seminary Moishe Rosen Jews for Jesus Ray C. Stedman, D.D. (deceased) Peninsula Bible Church (Palo Alto, CA) Stanley D. Toussaint, Th.D. Dallas Theological Seminary Willem VanGemeren, Ph.D. Trinity Evangelical Divinity

Lieutenant,” Toussaint said, stepping out of the jeep, “it looks like the welcome wagon is on its way.

È bene parlare solo quando si deve dire qualcosa che valga più del silenzio.”-“Esiste un momento per tacere, così come esiste un momento per parlare.”-“Nell’ordine, il momento di tacere deve venire sempre prima: solo quando si sarà imparato a mantenere il silenzio, si potrà imparare a parlare rettamente.”-“Tacere quando si è obbligati a parlare è segno di debolezza e imprudenza, ma parlare quando si dovrebbe tacere, è segno di leggerezza e scarsa discrezione.”-“Quando si deve dire una cosa importante, bisogna stare particolarmente attenti: è buona precauzione dirla prima a se stessi, e poi ancora ripetersela, per non doversi pentire quando non si potrà più impedire che si propaghi.”-“Quando si deve tenere un segreto non si tace mai troppo: in questi casi l’ultima cosa da temere è saper conservare il silenzio.”-“Il riserbo necessario per saper mantenere il silenzio nelle situazioni consuete della vita, non è virtù minore dell’abilità e della cura richieste per parlare bene; e non si acquisisce maggior merito spiegando ciò che si fa piuttosto che tacendo ciò che si ignora.”-“Si è naturalmente portati a pensare che chi parla poco non è un genio, e chi parla troppo, è uno stolto o un pazzo: allora è meglio lasciar credere di non essere genii di prim’ordine rimanendo spesso in silenzio, che passare per pazzi, travolti dalla voglia di parlare.”-“Qualunque sia la disposizione che si può avere al silenzio, è bene essere sempre molto prudenti; desiderare fortemente di dire una cosa, è spesso motivo sufficiente per decidere di tacerla.”-“Il silenzio è necessario in molte occasioni; la sincerità lo è sempre: si può qualche volta tacere un pensiero, mai lo si deve camuffare. Vi è un modo di restare in silenzio senza chiudere il proprio cuore, di essere discreti senza apparire tristi e taciturni, di non rivelare certe verità senza mascherarle con la menzogna.” ”da L’arte di tacere”-Joseph Antoine Dinouart Toussaint (Amiens, 1716-1786)

Can’t say that I like this all that much,” Toussaint said, his rifle raised now and at the ready. “Feels like a trap to me.

The income of the world’s 500 richest people exceeds the cumulative income of the world’s 416 million poorest people. —UNITED NATIONS DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM

There wasn't a human being for several kilometers around, not a news-stand, not a shop, not a café, not a school. Not a cat, not a skinhead. Nothing.

Marie se sentait bien, nue sous les draps a l'abri de l'orage, les sens exacerbes dans le noir, les yeux brillants dans les eclairs, savourant avec volupte la dimension erotique du plaisir qu'il y a de jouir de l'orage dans la chaleur d'un lit, la fenetre ouverte dans la nuit, quand le ciel se dechire et les elements se dechainent. La main et le regard, il n'est jamais question que de cela dans la vie, en amour, en art.

As part of a clandestine advance guard, their route was perilously unprotected. Lucas was glad to have Toussaint watching his back. Soldiering was in the private’s blood, but it wasn’t in Lucas’s. He’d been diverted from the infantry into the CRC, the Cultural Recovery Commission, a minuscule cadre of experts in art and architecture, recruited and dispatched to find, preserve, and protect the treasures that the Nazis had looted so far in their conquest of Europe. In

To Toussaint’s dismay, British cruisers patrolling the waters off Saint-Domingue strictly enforced these limits on maritime activity.

Nicolas Appert, a talented chef with no formal education, wondered whether the method he used to put up sugared fruit in glass jars might be applied to the problem of conserving soup, vegetables, beef stew, and beans. “A dynamic and jovial little man,” according to French historian Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, Appert began his experiments by funneling peas and boiled beef into old champagne bottles, corking them, and sitting them in hot-water baths for varying lengths of time. As curiosity became obsession, Appert sold his Parisian confectionery business and retired to a small town just outside the city, where he spent the better part of a decade perfecting his method. In 1803, Appert delivered the first batch of preserved food to the French navy for field-testing. The contents of his bottles received rave reviews: the beef was pronounced “very edible,” while the beans and green peas had “all the freshness and flavor of freshly picked vegetables.” Appert was awarded the prize and promptly used the money to finance more experiments. Rather than patent his technique, he published a book of detailed instructions so that anyone could master “l’art de conserver.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, he died a pauper. Despite being formally recognized as “a benefactor of humanity” by the French government, even his wife eventually left him, and he ended up buried in a mass grave.

The smell went deep, past her walled-in thoughts, bringing Naomi’s voice to her head—To Angela Tous-saint, the strongest, smartest woman I know—and an image of Naomi’s smiling teeth that nearly knocked her from her feet. Smell could do that. Smell just took you where it wanted you to go.

Yet when the masses turn (as turn they will one day) and try to end the tyranny of centuries, not only the tyrants but all ‘civilisation’ holds up its hands in horror and clamours for ‘order’ to be restored. If a revolution carries high overhead expenses, most of them it inherits from the greed of reactionaries and the cowardice of the so-called moderates.

True, but at least you have more room to swing. Maybe this Thomas swung too wide?

The most dramatic of all slave revolts occurred in the French island colony of Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti). This was France’s major sugar-producing island. Plantation production had increased so rapidly in the late eighteenth century that, by the early 1790s, Saint-Domingue contained some 400,000 slaves. Under the leadership of one of their number, known by the French name of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the slaves of Saint-Domingue rose against and killed their white French masters in 1791.

Having a super big brain had its advantages. JT knew that all this problem needed was some serious thinking. Some super-powered brain power,