Washington Famous Quotes

George Washington famously warned against ... 'ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear

You think too much.' 'I suppose I do; but I can’t help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches--a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen carries her crown.

The War Department in Washington briefly weighed more ambitious schemes to relieve the Americans on a large scale before it was too late. But by Christmas of 1941, Washington had already come to regard Bataan as a lost cause. President Roosevelt had decided to concentrate American resources primarily in the European theater rather than attempt to fight an all-out war on two distant fronts. At odds with the emerging master strategy for winning the war, the remote outpost of Bataan lay doomed. By late December, President Roosevelt and War Secretary Henry Stimson had confided to Winston Churchill that they had regrettably written off the Philippines. In a particularly chilly phrase that was later to become famous, Stimson had remarked, 'There are times when men have to die.

(The Mona Lisa), that really is the ugliest portrait I’ve seen, the only thing that supposedly makes it famous is the mystery behind it,” Katherine admitted as she remembered her trips to the Louvre and how she shook her head at the poor tourists crowding around to see a jaundiced, eyebrow-less lady that reminded her of tight-lipped Washington on the dollar bill. Surely, they could have chosen a better portrait of the First President for their currency?

They fought their first action in March of 1775. Embarked on eight small ships, they sailed to the Bahamas and captured a British fort near Nassau, seizing gunpowder and supplies. Later, during the Revolutionary War, Marines fought several engagements in their distinctive green coats, such as helping George Washington to cross the Delaware River, and assisting John Paul Jones on the Bonhomme Richard to capture the British frigate Serapis during their famous sea fight.

In science, modesty and genius do not coexist well together. (In Washington, modesty and cleverness don't.) Einstein is perhaps the most famous exception to the rule.

In 1908, in a wild and remote area of the North Caucasus, Leo Tolstoy, the greatest writer of the age, was the guest of a tribal chief “living far away from civilized life in the mountains.” Gathering his family and neighbors, the chief asked Tolstoy to tell stories about the famous men of history. Tolstoy told how he entertained the eager crowd for hours with tales of Alexander, Caesar, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. When he was winding to a close, the chief stood and said, “But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock….His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.” “I looked at them,” Tolstoy recalled, “and saw their faces all aglow, while their eyes were burning. I saw that those rude barbarians were really interested in a man whose name and deeds had already become a legend.” He told them everything he knew about Lincoln’s “home life and youth…his habits, his influence upon the people and his physical strength.” When he finished, they were so grateful for the story that they presented him with “a wonderful Arabian horse.” The next morning, as Tolstoy prepared to leave, they asked if he could possibly acquire for them a picture of Lincoln. Thinking that he might find one at a friend’s house in the neighboring town, Tolstoy asked one of the riders to accompany him. “I was successful in getting a large photograph from my friend,” recalled Tolstoy. As he handed it to the rider, he noted that the man’s hand trembled as he took it. “He gazed for several minutes silently, like one in a reverent prayer, his eyes filled with tears.” Tolstoy went on to observe, “This little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become. Now, why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes? He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skilful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character. “Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country—bigger than all the Presidents together. “We are still too near to his greatness,” Tolstoy concluded, “but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.

Eliza had never seen Alex quite so happy and relaxed. She shook her head and laughed at the incongruity of it all: Imagine General Washington's famous aide-de-camp taking the time to stop and admire the birds. "One day, Alex, when you tire of being a soldier, we will spend all of our days just like this, watching birds and taking in the sun, surrounded by children of our own. You'd like that, wouldn't you, my love?" "Eliza, you and the Pastures have already taken a perfectly fine soldier and turned him into a lovesick pup. And at this moment, on this very day, there's nothing and nowhere I'd rather be.

Stuyvesants and Vanderbilts and Roosevelts and staid, respectable Washington Square. Trinity Church. Mrs. Astor’s famous ballroom, the Four Hundred, snobby Ward McAllister, that traitor Edith Wharton, Delmonico’s. Zany Zelda and Scott in the Plaza fountain, the Algonquin Round Table, Dottie Parker and her razor tongue and pen, the Follies. Cholly Knickerbocker, 21, Lucky Strike dances at the Stork, El Morocco. The incomparable Hildegarde playing the Persian Room at the Plaza, Cary Grant kneeling at her feet in awe. Fifth Avenue: Henri Bendel, Bergdorf’s, Tiffany’s.

I had, by then, done my share of reading on Philadelphia, so I knew that, in another time, when the Task was here in Philadelphia, the city had fallen victim to a fever. And among the men who combatted this fever was Benjamin Rush, a famous doctor, which is hard to countenance given the theory he put forth in defense of the city. Colored people were immune to the fever, he told Philadelphia, and more than immune, their very presence could alter the air itself, sucking up the scourge and holding it captive in our fetid black bodies. And so tasking men were brought in by the hundreds on the alleged black magic of our bodies. They all died. And when the city began to fill with their corpses, its masters searched for a space far from the whites who were felled by the disease. And they chose a patch of land where no one lived, and tossed us into pits. Years later, after the fever had been forgotten, after the war had birthed this new country, they built rows and rows of well-appointed houses right on top of those people, and and named a square for their liberating general. It struck me that even here, in the free North, the luxuries of this world were built right on top of us.

Since it is instituted by God, appointed by God, and permitted by God, government is accountable to God. The same sinfulness that tempts us as citizens also tempts those citizens who reside within government. They are not more special than us. They are not our betters. If anything, the added temptation of that proximity to power and other people’s money makes those within government even more prone to temptation. Our Founders understood this, which is why they viewed government to be both vital and limited. George Washington famously compared it to a fire. Both are a useful tool, but one that must be tended to regularly and kept from raging out of control.

Later in 1776, Paine accompanied the Continental army in its retreat from New Jersey to Philadelphia.   During this time, Paine began a new series of pamphlets.   Eventually, these sixteen pamphlets became The American Crisis.   In them, Paine comments on the American war effort and urges the colonists to keep fighting.    This pamphlet, the first in the series, is perhaps the most famous.   The pamphlet was read to George Washington’s troops in December 1776.   Days later, these same troops crossed the Delaware River and attacked the British encampment in Trenton, New Jersey.   The pamphlet opens with a familiar line: “These are the times that try men’s souls.

In Isaac Newton’s lifetime, no more than a few thousand people had any idea what he looked like, though he was one of England’s most famous men, yet now millions of people have quite a clear idea—based on replicas of copies of rather poorly painted portraits. Even more pervasive and indelible are the smile of Mona Lisa, The Scream of Edvard Munch, and the silhouettes of various fictional extraterrestrials. These are memes, living a life of their own, independent of any physical reality. “This may not be what George Washington looked like then,” a tour guide was overheard saying of the Gilbert Stuart painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “but this is what he looks like now.” Exactly.

But the launching had been a great success and now that the Space Hotel was safely in orbit, there was a tremendous hustle and bustle to send up the first guests. It was rumored that the President of the United States himself was going to be among the first to stay in the hotel, and of course there was a mad rush by all sorts of other people across the world to book rooms. Several kings and queens had cabled the White House in Washington for reservations, and a Texas millionaire called Orson Cart, who was about to marry a Hollywood starlet called Helen Highwater, was offering one hundred thousand dollars a day for the honeymoon suite. But you cannot send guests to a hotel unless there are lots of people there to look after them, and that explains why there was yet another interesting object orbiting the earth at that moment. This was the large Commuter Capsule containing the entire staff for Space Hotel “U.S.A.” There were managers, assistant managers, desk clerks, waitresses, bellhops, chambermaids, pastry chefs and hall porters. The capsule they were traveling in was manned by the three famous astronauts, Shuckworth, Shanks and Showler, all of them handsome, clever and brave. “In exactly one hour,” said Shuckworth,

We know from subsequent leaks that the president was indeed presented with information about the seriousness of the virus and its pandemic potential beginning at least in early January 2020. And yet, as documented by the Washington Post, he repeatedly stated that “it would go away.” On February 10, when there were 12 known cases, he said that he thought the virus would “go away” by April, “with the heat.” On February 25, when there were 53 known cases, he said, “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away.” On February 27, when there were 60 cases, he said, famously, “We have done an incredible job. We’re going to continue. It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.” On March 6, when there were 278 cases and 14 deaths, again he said, “It’ll go away.” On March 10, when there were 959 cases and 28 deaths, he said, “We’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.” On March 12, with 1,663 cases and 40 deaths recorded, he said, “It’s going to go away.” On March 30, with 161,807 cases and 2,978 deaths, he was still saying, “It will go away. You know it—you know it is going away, and it will go away. And we’re going to have a great victory.” On April 3, with 275,586 cases and 7,087 deaths, he again said, “It is going to go away.” He continued, repeating himself: “It is going away.… I said it’s going away, and it is going away.” In remarks on June 23, when the United States had 126,060 deaths and roughly 2.5 million cases, he said, “We did so well before the plague, and we’re doing so well after the plague. It’s going away.” Such statements continued as both the cases and the deaths kept rising. Neither the virus nor Trump’s statements went away.

the fact is, our relationships to these corporations are not unambiguous. some memebers of negativland genuinely liked pepsi products. mca grew up loving star wars and didn't mind having his work sent all over the united states to all the "cool, underground magazines" they were marketing to--why would he? sam gould had a spiritual moment in the shower listening to a cd created, according to sophie wong, so that he would talk about tylenol with his independent artist friends--and he did. many of my friends' daughters will be getting american girl dolls and books as gifts well into the foreseeable future. some skateboarders in washington, dc, were asked to create an ad campaign for the east coast summer tour, and they all love minor threat--why not use its famous album cover? how about shilling for converse? i would have been happy to ten years ago. so what's really changed? the answer is that two important things have changed: who is ultimately accountable for veiled corporate campaigns that occasionally strive to obsfucate their sponsorship and who is requesting our participation in such campaigns. behind converse and nike sb is nike, a company that uses shit-poor labor policies and predatory marketing that effectively glosses over their shit-poor labor policies, even to an audience that used to know better. behind team ouch! was an underground-savvy brainreservist on the payroll of big pharma; behind the recent wave of street art in hip urban areas near you was omd worldwide on behalf of sony; behind your cool hand-stenciled vader shirt was lucasfilm; and behind a recent cool crafting event was toyota. no matter how you participated in these events, whether as a contributor, cultural producer, viewer, or even critic, these are the companies that profited from your attention.

The great irony, then, is that the nation’s most famous modern conservative economist became the father of Big Government, chronic deficits, and national fiscal bankruptcy. It was Friedman who first urged the removal of the Bretton Woods gold standard restraints on central bank money printing, and then added insult to injury by giving conservative sanction to perpetual open market purchases of government debt by the Fed. Friedman’s monetarism thereby institutionalized a régime which allowed politicians to chronically spend without taxing. Likewise, it was the free market professor of the Chicago school who also blessed the fundamental Keynesian proposition that Washington must continuously manage and stimulate the national economy. To be sure, Friedman’s “freshwater” proposition, in Paul Krugman’s famous paradigm, was far more modest than the vast “fine-tuning” pretensions of his “salt-water” rivals. The saltwater Keynesians of the 1960s proposed to stimulate the economy until the last billion dollars of potential GDP was realized; that is, they would achieve prosperity by causing the state to do anything that was needed through a multiplicity of fiscal interventions. By contrast, the freshwater Keynesian, Milton Friedman, thought that capitalism could take care of itself as long as it had precisely the right quantity of money at all times; that is, Friedman would attain prosperity by causing the state to do the one thing that was needed through the single spigot of M1 growth.

As I grew into boyhood, I extended the range of my observations. My holiday afternoons were spent in rambles about the surrounding country. I made myself familiar with all its places famous in history or fable. I knew every spot where a murder or robbery had been committed, or a ghost seen. I visited the neighboring villages, and added greatly to my stock of knowledge, by noting their habits and customs, and conversing with their sages and great men. I even journeyed one long summer's day to the summit of the most distant hill, whence I stretched my eye over many a mile of terra incognita, and was astonished to find how vast a globe I inhabited.

Madison’s response is famously expressed in Federalist 10, “The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard against Domestic Faction and Insurrection”—arguing that tyranny of the majority was most likely to occur in small republics. When a republic holds a critical mass of diverse interests, no single group is likely to hold the upper hand for long. The combination of diversity and size serves as a cooling mechanism on more heated local passions and prejudices. In a large republic, the necessity of cobbling together broad governing coalitions means that narrow self-interest is forced to give way to a more enlightened self-interest, in the recognition that pursuing the common good can bring about mutual benefits.I

One day, Harry Anslinger was told that there were also white women, just as famous as Billie, who had drug problems—but he responded to them rather differently. He called Judy Garland, another heroin addict, in to see him. They had a friendly chat, in which he advised her to take longer vacations between pictures, and he wrote to her studio, assuring them she didn’t have a drug problem at all. When he discovered that a Washington society hostess he knew—“a beautiful, gracious lady,” he noted—had an illegal drug addiction, he explained he couldn’t possibly arrest her because “it would destroy . . . the unblemished reputation of one of the nation’s most honored families.” He helped her to wean herself off her addiction slowly, without the law becoming involved.

On September 2, the day the Democratic National Convention in Chicago nominated George McClellan for president, news flashed across the country of the fall of Atlanta to General William Tecumseh Sherman after a long siege. Just as the Democrats met to declare the war a failure and crafted a platform that would lead to a negotiated Confederate independence of some kind, Sherman famously sent a telegram to Washington: “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.” Confederates’ rising hopes plummeted, and many war-weary Northerners, represented by the famous New York diarist George Templeton Strong, saw victory now on the immediate horizon: “Glorious news this morning—Atlanta taken at last!!! It is . . . the greatest event of the war.”45 The Democrats’ peace platform put Lincoln’s apparent moderation in a different light; and Douglass had seen a devotion in the president’s heart and mind

No one embodied the spirit of the frontier more than Daniel Boone, who faced and defeated countless natural and man-made dangers to literally hand cut the trail west through the wilderness. He marched with then colonel George Washington in the French and Indian War, established one of the most important trading posts in the West, served three terms in the Virginia Assembly, and fought in the Revolution. His exploits made him world famous; he served as the model for James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales and numerous other pioneer stories. He was so well known and respected that even Lord Byron, in his epic poem Don Juan, wrote, “Of the great names which in our faces stare, The General Boon, back-woodsman of Kentucky, Was happiest amongst mortals anywhere …” And yet he was accused of treason—betraying his country—the most foul of all crimes at the time. What really happened to bring him to that courtroom? And was the verdict reached there correct?

The Poet" The riches of the poet are equal to his poetry His power is his left hand It is idle weak and precious His poverty is his wealth, a wealth which may destroy him like Midas Because it is that laziness which is a form of impatience And this he may be destroyed by the gold of the light which never was On land or sea. He may be drunken to death, draining the casks of excess That extreme form of success. He may suffer Narcissus' destiny Unable to live except with the image which is infatuation Love, blind, adoring, overflowing Unable to respond to anything which does not bring love quickly or immediately. ...The poet must be innocent and ignorant But he cannot be innocent since stupidity is not his strong point Therefore Cocteau said, "What would I not give To have the poems of my youth withdrawn from existence? I would give to Satan my immortal soul." This metaphor is wrong, for it is his immortal soul which he wished to redeem, Lifting it and sifting it, free and white, from the actuality of youth's banality, vulgarity, pomp and affectation of his early works of poetry. So too in the same way a Famous American Poet When fame at last had come to him sought out the fifty copies of his first book of poems which had been privately printed by himself at his own expense. He succeeded in securing 48 of the 50 copies, burned them And learned then how the last copies were extant, As the law of the land required, stashed away in the national capital, at the Library of Congress. Therefore he went to Washington, therefore he took out the last two copies Placed them in his pocket, planned to depart Only to be halted and apprehended. Since he was the author, Since they were his books and his property he was reproached But forgiven. But the two copies were taken away from him Thus setting a national precedent. For neither amnesty nor forgiveness is bestowed upon poets, poetry and poems, For William James, the lovable genius of Harvard spoke the terrifying truth: "Your friends may forget, God may forgive you, But the brain cells record your acts for the rest of eternity." What a terrifying thing to say! This is the endless doom, without remedy, of poetry. This is also the joy everlasting of poetry. Delmore Schwartz

JULIAN HUXLEY’S “EUGENICS MANIFESTO”: “Eugenics Manifesto” was the name given to an article supporting eugenics. The document, which appeared in Nature, September 16, 1939, was a joint statement issued by America’s and Britain’s most prominent biologists, and was widely referred to as the “Eugenics Manifesto.” The manifesto was a response to a request from Science Service, of Washington, D.C. for a reply to the question “How could the world’s population be improved most effectively genetically?” Two of the main signatories and authors were Hermann J. Muller and Julian Huxley. Julian Huxley, as this book documents, was the founding director of UNESCO from the famous Huxley family. Muller was an American geneticist, educator and Nobel laureate best known for his work on the physiological and genetic effects of radiation. Put into the context of the timeline, this document was published 15 years after “Mein Kampf” and a year after the highly publicized violence of Kristallnacht. In other words, there is no way either Muller or Huxley were unaware at the moment of publication of the historical implications of eugenic agendas.

He had to backtrack immediately to account for the most famous and most acclaimed poet in America, Phillis Wheatley, who was, very unfortunately for Jefferson’s argument, unquestionably black. She had been brought to Boston as an enslaved African at the age of about six, learned English and Latin as a child, and began writing poetry as a teenager. Her published works earned accolades on both sides of the Atlantic. Among her admirers were Voltaire, who praised Wheatley’s “very good English verse,” George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and even the naval hero John Paul Jones, who addressed her as “the celebrated Phillis the African favorite of the Nine [Muses] and Apollo” when he sent her some of his own verses. Dr. Rush cited her as a proof of black ability, listing her accomplishments when he wrote in 1775, “We have many well attested anecdotes of as sublime and disinterested virtue among them as ever adorned a Roman or a Christian character.”14 Franklin went to see Wheatley when she was in London, a literary celebrity on book tour. The acclaim irked Jefferson: “The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”15

Ten days later I was amazed to receive a letter from Diana written just days after she’d arrived home--in fact, before I’d written her a thank-you letter. I was mortified by my delay in writing to her. I had managed to fire off proper thank-you notes to Ambassador Wight and Ms. Gillett, but I had so much more to say to Diana. Her letter was the most heartwarming one I have ever received--even more so, now that I know what personal strain she was under then. After thanking us “a million times” for coming to see them in Washington, she wrote, “From the beginning to the end I had a lump in my throat looking at what a special little man Patrick had grown up to be--Goodness, you must be extremely proud of him and if either of my boys turn out like Patrick I will have no worries and I really mean every word.” I had a lump in my throat as I read this. I was very proud of Patrick and deeply touched by Diana’s praise. Diana added that, for her, the high point of the visit to Washington was seeing Patrick and me. She explained, “Being able to get in touch with a v. happy and memorable part of my past meant a tremendous amount to me and kept me going for days!” Seeing the world-famous Diana in such a warm and personal way after five years and realizing how much she still cherished our friendship kept me going for months, even years!

home of Elon Simpson. We were right off of Washington Square, a part of the city marked by well-appointed brownstones with shuttered windows and a park hailing back to this country’s birth. Here was the seat of this city’s Quality—and the seat of our dead. I had, by then, done my share of reading on Philadelphia, so I knew that, in another time, when the Task was here in Pennsylvania, the city had fallen victim to a wave of fever. And among the men who combatted this fever was Benjamin Rush, a famous doctor, which is hard to countenance given the theory he put forth in defense of the city. Colored people were immune to the fever, he told Philadelphia, and more than immune, their very presence could alter the air itself, sucking up the scourge and holding it captive in our fetid black bodies. And so tasking men were brought in by the hundreds on the alleged black magic of our bodies. They all died. And when the city began to fill with their corpses, its masters searched for a space far from the whites who were felled by the disease. And they chose a patch of land where no one lived, and tossed us into pits. Years later, after the fever had been forgotten, after the war had birthed this new country, they built rows and rows of well-appointed houses right on top of those people, and named a square for their liberating general. It struck me that even here, in the free North, the luxuries of this world were built right on top of us.

While these tactics were aggressive and crude, they confirmed that our legislation had touched a nerve. I wasn’t the only one who recognized this. Many other victims of human rights abuses in Russia saw the same thing. After the bill was introduced they came to Washington or wrote letters to the Magnitsky Act’s cosponsors with the same basic message: “You have found the Achilles’ heel of the Putin regime.” Then, one by one, they would ask, “Can you add the people who killed my brother to the Magnitsky Act?” “Can you add the people who tortured my mother?” “How about the people who kidnapped my husband?” And on and on. The senators quickly realized that they’d stumbled onto something much bigger than one horrific case. They had inadvertently discovered a new method for fighting human rights abuses in authoritarian regimes in the twenty-first century: targeted visa sanctions and asset freezes. After a dozen or so of these visits and letters, Senator Cardin and his cosponsors conferred and decided to expand the law, adding sixty-five words to the Magnitsky Act. Those new words said that in addition to sanctioning Sergei’s tormentors, the Magnitsky Act would sanction all other gross human rights abusers in Russia. With those extra sixty-five words, my personal fight for justice had become everyone’s fight. The revised bill was officially introduced on May 19, 2011, less than a month after we posted the Olga Stepanova YouTube video. Following its introduction, a small army of Russian activists descended on Capitol Hill, pushing for the bill’s passage. They pressed every senator who would talk to them to sign on. There was Garry Kasparov, the famous chess grand master and human rights activist; there was Alexei Navalny, the most popular Russian opposition leader; and there was Evgenia Chirikova, a well-known Russian environmental activist. I didn’t have to recruit any of these people. They just showed up by themselves. This uncoordinated initiative worked beautifully. The number of Senate cosponsors grew quickly, with three or four new senators signing on every month. It was an easy sell. There wasn’t a pro-Russian-torture-and-murder lobby in Washington to oppose it. No senator, whether the most liberal Democrat or the most conservative Republican, would lose a single vote for banning Russian torturers and murderers from coming to America. The Magnitsky Act was gathering so much momentum that it appeared it might be unstoppable. From the day that Kyle Scott at the State Department stonewalled me, I knew that the administration was dead set against this, but now they were in a tough spot. If they openly opposed the law, it would look as if they were siding with the Russians. However, if they publicly supported it, it would threaten Obama’s “reset” with Russia. They needed to come up with some other solution. On July 20, 2011, the State Department showed its cards. They sent a memo to the Senate entitled “Administration Comments on S.1039 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law.” Though not meant to be made public, within a day it was leaked.

After three weeks of lectures and receptions in New York, Einstein paid a visit to Washington. For reasons fathomable only by those who live in that capital, the Senate decided to debate the theory of relativity. Among the leaders asserting that it was incomprehensible were Pennsylvania Republican Boies Penrose, famous for once uttering that “public office is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and Mississippi Democrat John Sharp Williams, who retired a year later, saying, “I’d rather be a dog and bay at the moon than stay in the Senate another six years.” On the House side of the Capitol, Representative J. J. Kindred of New York proposed placing an explanation of Einstein’s theories in the Congressional Record. David Walsh of Massachusetts rose to object. Did Kindred understand the theory? “I have been earnestly busy with this theory for three weeks,” he replied, “and am beginning to see some light.” But what relevance, he was asked, did it have to the business of Congress? “It may bear upon the legislation of the future as to general relations with the cosmos.” Such discourse made it inevitable that, when Einstein went with a group to the White House on April 25, President Warren G. Harding would be faced with the question of whether he understood relativity. As the group posed for cameras, President Harding smiled and confessed that he did not comprehend the theory at all. The Washington Post carried a cartoon showing him puzzling over a paper titled “Theory of Relativity” while Einstein puzzled over one on the “Theory of Normalcy,” which was the name Harding gave to his governing philosophy. The New York Times ran a page 1 headline: “Einstein Idea Puzzles Harding, He Admits.

While the overall systems of heterosexism and ableism are still with us, they have adapted in limited ways. These adaptations are held up as reassurance to those who fought long and hard for a particular change that equality has now been achieved. These milestones—such as the recognition of same-sex marriage, the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Title 9, the election of Barack Obama—are, of course, significant and worthy of celebration. But systems of oppression are deeply rooted and not overcome with the simple passage of legislation. Advances are also tenuous, as we can see in recent challenges to the rights of LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, and intersex) people. Systems of oppression are not completely inflexible. But they are far less flexible than popular ideology would acknowledge, and the collective impact of the inequitable distribution of resources continues across history. COLOR-BLIND RACISM What is termed color-blind racism is an example of racism’s ability to adapt to cultural changes.3 According to this ideology, if we pretend not to notice race, then there can be no racism. The idea is based on a line from the famous “I Have a Dream” speech given by Dr. Martin Luther King in 1963 during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. At the time of King’s speech, it was much more socially acceptable for white people to admit to their racial prejudices and belief in white racial superiority. But many white people had never witnessed the kind of violence to which blacks were subjected. Because the struggle for civil rights was televised, whites across the nation watched in horror as black men, women, and children were attacked by police dogs and fire hoses during peaceful protests and beaten and dragged away from lunch counters.

Fine art galleries are the excellent setups for exhibiting art, generally aesthetic art such as paints, sculptures, and digital photography. Basically, art galleries showcase a range of art designs featuring contemporary and traditional fine art, glass fine art, art prints, and animation fine art. Fine art galleries are dedicated to the advertising of arising artists. These galleries supply a system for them to present their jobs together with the works of across the country and internationally popular artists. The UNITED STATE has a wealth of famous art galleries. Lots of villages in the U.S. show off an art gallery. The High Museum of Fine art, Alleged Gallery, Henry Art Gallery, National Gallery of Art Gallery, Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Agora Gallery, Rosalux Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, The Alaska House Gallery, and Anchorage Gallery of History and Art are some of the renowned fine art galleries in the United States. Today, there are on the internet fine art galleries showing initial artwork. Several famous fine art galleries show regional pieces of art such as African fine art, American art, Indian fine art, and European art, in addition to individual fine art, modern-day and modern fine art, and digital photography. These galleries collect, show, and keep the masterpieces for the coming generations. Many famous art galleries try to entertain and educate their local, nationwide, and international audiences. Some renowned fine art galleries focus on specific areas such as pictures. A great variety of well-known fine art galleries are had and run by government. The majority of famous fine art galleries supply an opportunity for site visitors to buy outstanding art work. Additionally, they organize many art-related tasks such as songs shows and verse readings for kids and grownups. Art galleries organize seminars and workshops conducted by prominent artists. Committed to quality in both art and solution, most well-known fine art galleries provide you a rich, exceptional experience. If you wish to read additional information, please visit this site

Maybe nostalgia is itself the problem. A Democrat I met in Macon during a conversation we had about the local enthusiasm for Trump told me that “people want to go back to Mayberry”, the setting of the beloved old Andy Griffith Show. (As it happens, the actual model for Mayberry, Mount Airy, a bedraggled town in North Carolina, has gone all in on the Trump revolution, as the Washington Post recently reported.) Maybe it’s also true, as my liberal friends believe, that what people in this part of the country secretly long to go back to are the days when the Klan was riding high or when Quantrill was terrorizing the people of neighboring Kansas, or when Dred Scott was losing his famous court case. For sure, there is a streak of that ugly sentiment in the Trump phenomenon. But I want to suggest something different: that the nostalgic urge does not necessarily have to be a reactionary one. There is nothing un-progressive about wanting your town to thrive, about recognizing that it isn’t thriving today, about figuring out that the mid-century, liberal way worked better. For me, at least, that is how nostalgia unfolds. When I drive around this part of the country, I always do so with a WPA guidebook in hand, the better to help me locate the architectural achievements of the Roosevelt years. I used to patronize a list of restaurants supposedly favored by Harry Truman (they are slowly disappearing). And these days, as I pass Trump sign after Trump sign, I wonder what has made so many of Truman’s people cast their lot with this blustering would-be caudillo. Maybe what I’m pining for is a liberal Magic Kingdom, a non-racist midwest where things function again. For a countryside dotted with small towns where the business district has reasonable job-creating businesses in it, taverns too. For a state where the giant chain stores haven’t succeeded in putting everyone out of business. For an economy where workers can form unions and buy new cars every couple of years, where farmers enjoy the protection of the laws, and where corporate management has not been permitted to use every trick available to them to drive down wages and play desperate cities off one against the other. Maybe it’s just an impossible utopia, a shimmering Mayberry dream. But somehow I don’t think so.

Jones, along with the US military attaché in Indonesia, took Subandrio’s advice. He emphasized to Washington that the United States should support the Indonesian military as a more effective, long-term anticommunist strategy. The country of Indonesia couldn’t be simply broken into pieces to slow down the advance of global socialism, so this was a way that the US could work within existing conditions. This strategic shift would begin soon, and would prove very fruitful. But behind the scenes, the CIA boys dreamed up wild schemes. On the softer side, a CIA front called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which funded literary magazines and fine arts around the world, published and distributed books in Indonesia, such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm and the famous anticommunist collection The God That Failed.33 And the CIA discussed simply murdering Sukarno. The Agency went so far as to identify the “asset” who would kill him, according to Richard M. Bissell, Wisner’s successor as deputy director for plans.34 Instead, the CIA hired pornographic actors, including a very rough Sukarno look-alike, and produced an adult film in a bizarre attempt to destroy his reputation. The Agency boys knew that Sukarno routinely engaged in extramarital affairs. But everyone in Indonesia also knew it. Indonesian elites didn’t shy away from Sukarno’s activities the way the Washington press corps protected philanderers like JFK. Some of Sukarno’s supporters viewed his promiscuity as a sign of his power and masculinity. Others, like Sumiyati and members of the Gerwani Women’s Movement, viewed it as an embarrassing defect. But the CIA thought this was their big chance to expose him. So they got a Hollywood film crew together.35 They wanted to spread the rumor that Sukarno had slept with a beautiful blond flight attendant who worked for the KGB, and was therefore both immoral and compromised. To play the president, the filmmakers (that is, Bing Crosby and his brother Larry) hired a “Hispanic-looking” actor, and put him in heavy makeup to make him look a little more Indonesian. They also wanted him bald, since exposing Sukarno—who always wore a hat—as such might further embarrass him. The idea was to destroy the genuine affection that young Sakono, and Francisca, and millions of other Indonesians, felt for the Founding Father of their country. The thing was never released—not because this was immoral or a bad idea, but because the team couldn’t put together a convincing enough film.36

The Washington Monument is just one part of the original design - there were due to be another thirty or so columns and statues of famous Revolutionary Americans. Unfortunately, the entire budget was used on the tower, and there was nothing left for the rest.

They listened to a series of speeches by civil rights luminaries, capped off by a rousing, crowd-pleasing address by Martin Luther King. While the SCLC named their protest “Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom,” its stated goals of expressing black unity and urging federal action on civil rights made the moniker that Jimmy gave it, “the March on Washington,” equally appropriate. That name, of course, was subsequently claimed by the much larger and more famous civil rights demonstration six years later. The huge crowds and celebrated oratory of the 1963 “March on Washington for Jobs and Justice” completely superseded the Prayer Pilgrimage in both size and importance, but the thousands who attended the 1957 affair made it the largest civil rights demonstration to date and a significant moment in the rising civil rights movement of the mid-1950s. Jimmy concluded his article with this assessment of the impact of the Prayer Pilgrimage: “The southern people went home determined beyond the expectations of even King. No one in the South is big enough to stop this march of people and no one can call it off.” 66

Purpose is the primary fuel of ambition. Purpose creates a destination. We can only become fully engaged in life when we feel that we are doing something that really matters. Purpose is what inspires us, lights us up, and floats our boats. Washington Irving—the famous author, historian and essayist—said, “Great minds have purposes, others have wishes. Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune, but great minds rise above it.

George Washington, in his famous Farewell Address, warned future generations “to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.

And in the famous picture of the 1776 crossing of the Delaware on Christmas night, two men depicted at the front of the boat include Prince Whipple and Oliver Cromwell – two black patriots who served with George Washington and other American generals during the Revolution.

Research from Brunel University shows that chess students who trained with coaches increased on average 168 points in their national ratings versus those who didn’t. Though long hours of deliberate practice are unavoidable in the cognitively complex arena of chess, the presence of a coach for mentorship gives players a clear advantage. Chess prodigy Joshua Waitzkin (the subject of the film Searching for Bobby Fischer) for example, accelerated his career when national chess master Bruce Pandolfini discovered him playing chess in Washington Square Park in New York as a boy. Pandolfini coached young Waitzkin one on one, and the boy won a slew of chess championships, setting a world record at an implausibly young age. Business research backs this up, too. Analysis shows that entrepreneurs who have mentors end up raising seven times as much capital for their businesses, and experience 3.5 times faster growth than those without mentors. And in fact, of the companies surveyed, few managed to scale a profitable business model without a mentor’s aid. Even Steve Jobs, the famously visionary and dictatorial founder of Apple, relied on mentors, such as former football coach and Intuit CEO Bill Campbell, to keep himself sharp. SO, DATA INDICATES THAT those who train with successful people who’ve “been there” tend to achieve success faster. The winning formula, it seems, is to seek out the world’s best and convince them to coach us. Except there’s one small wrinkle. That’s not quite true. We just held up Justin Bieber as an example of great, rapid-mentorship success. But since his rapid rise, he’s gotten into an increasing amount of trouble. Fights. DUIs. Resisting arrest. Drugs. At least one story about egging someone’s house. It appears that Bieber started unraveling nearly as quickly as he rocketed to Billboard number one. OK, first of all, Bieber’s young. He’s acting like the rock star he is. But his mentor, Usher, also got to Billboard number one at age 18, and he managed to dominate pop music for a decade without DUIs or egg-vandalism incidents. Could it be that Bieber missed something in the mentorship process? History, it turns out, is full of people who’ve been lucky enough to have amazing mentors and have stumbled anyway.

What are we left with then? We are left with a system where ObamaCare is a rule for, as Leona Helmsley so famously described them, the little people. For everybody who doesn't have power and juice and connections in Washington, for everyone--look for the men and women at home, maybe you have an army of lobbyists working for you. Maybe you have Senators' cell phones on your speed dial. Maybe you can walk the corridors of power. In that case you too get an exemption. But if you are just a hard-working American, if you are just trying to provide for your family, if you are just trying to do an honest day's work, make your community better, raise your kids, set a good example, then the message this President has sent--and sadly the message the Senate has sent--is you don't count. We are going to treat everybody else better than you.   That

After the battle ended and the Union army was in rapid retreat, Beauregard stated sardonically that had Richmond dispatched adequate supplies to the Confederate armies, he would have been able to pursue the Union army all the way to Washington, implying that Davis had short-changed his troops and cost the Confederates an even greater victory. In his official report, which made its way into the newspapers, Beauregard suggested that Davis had prevented the pursuit and destruction of McDowell's army, as well as the potential capture of Washington D.C. itself.  This only added to the animosity Davis already felt toward the celebrity-seeking general, and it would eventually lead to Beauregard being sidelined during the middle of the war.

On March 15, Washington addressed the officers, determined to squash a reported scheme to march on Congress. For the first time, he confronted a hostile audience of his own men. Washington sternly rebuked talk of rebellion, saying it would threaten the liberties for which they had fought. An insurrection would only "open the floodgates of civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood." He then staged the most famous coup de théâtre of his career. He was about to read aloud a letter from a congressman when the words swam before his eyes. So he fished in his pockets for his glasses. "Gentlemen," he said, "you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in service to my country." The mutinous soldiers, inexpressibly moved, were shamed by their opposition to Washington and restored to their senses. Washington agreed to lobby Congress on their behalf, and a committee chaired by Hamilton granted the officers a pension payment equivalent to five years' full pay.

In early September, convinced that the best way to defend Richmond was to divert attention to Washington, Lee had decided to invade Maryland after obtaining Jefferson Davis’s permission. Today the decision to invade Maryland is remembered through the prism of Lee hoping to win a major battle in the North that would bring about European recognition of the Confederacy, potential intervention, and possible capitulation by the North, whose anti-war Democrats were picking up political momentum.

Feeling increasingly at odds with his superiors, in a letter sent from Gaines’ Mills, Virginia dated June 28, 1862, a frustrated McClellan wrote to Secretary of War Stanton, “If I save the army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to any other person in the Washington.  You have done your best to sacrifice this army.”  McClellan’s argument, however, flies in the face of common knowledge that he had become so obsessed with having sufficient supplies that he’d actually moved to Gaines’ Mill to accommodate the massive amount of provisions he’d accumulated.  Ultimately unable to move his cache of supplies as quickly as his men were needed, McClellan eventually ran railroad cars full of food and supplies into the Pamunkey River rather than leave them behind for the Confederates. Despite

The Compromise of 1850 was authored by the legendary Whig politician Henry Clay. In addition to admitting California to the Union as a free state to balance with Texas, it allowed Utah and New Mexico to decide the issue of slavery on the basis of what became known as “popular sovereignty”, which meant the settlers could vote on whether their state should be a free state or slave state. Though a Whig proposed popular sovereignty in 1850, popular sovereignty as an idea would come to be championed by and associated with Democratic Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas.  The Compromise also abolished the slave trade – though not the existence of slavery itself – in Washington, D.C.

Nevertheless, attending Mount Washington Female College likely offered more spacious living than Boyd had enjoyed at home. The circular explained, “All the apartments are provided with registers for ventilation, and the admission of warm air, in the winter season, from large brick furnaces. The Gas arrangements are also complete…Mount Washington College affords to its pupils ample means and appliances, for thorough physical and intellectual training, with all the advantages and surroundings of a Christian family. … The college is furnished with complete apparatus for illustration in the departments of Chemistry and Natural Philosophy; and the public may rest assured that whatever maybe necessary, from time to time, to keep pace with the progress of the age, will be brought into the service of the College.” Boyd

Years later, my friend, Attorney W. T. Skoll of Spokane, Washington, showed me the new volume of the Federal Reporter, Vol. 61, p. 163, containing the decisions rendered on the Mudsill mine-salting case, and Mr. Skoll informed me that this was the only mine-salting case ever passed on by the Circuit Judges of the United States. Thus did the Mudsill mine-salting operation end, and become part of our law history to be used as a precedent in future mine-salting cases.

Keynes’s third act of statesmanship was to negotiate the American loan in September-December 1945. He estimated that Britain’s deficit on current account would total nearly $7bn over the first three post-war years. Keynes went to Washington in September 1945 to seek a grant of $5bn ‘without strings’. He returned, three months and several famous rows later, with a loan of $3.75bn conditional on a commitment to make sterling convertible into other currencies a year after the loan agreement was ratified. It was probably the most humiliating experience of his life.

My advice is that, inna famous words of Abraham Lincoln unless maybe it was George Washington or from a movie I saw sometime, who knows, is that the truth is your friend, even when it sure as shit don’t look that way, and now that I think of it, it mighta been what’s-his-name, Clint Eastbrook, but where I’m goin’ wit’ this is that if you’re tryin’ to get somewhere, pretty much anywhere, the shortest route is by way of the truth, which, by the way, prob’ly also has the least traffic whereas Bullshit Boulevard is always jammed.

And journalists could play rough. When John Quincy Adams went swimming in the nude in the Potomac River, it’s reported that Washington’s first woman reporter stole his clothes and would not give them back until the President answered her questions. More recently, Lyndon B. Johnson famously (and somewhat ruefully) said, ‘If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read, “President Can’t Swim”.

I have a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” This was nine weeks before the March on Washington, when King would deliver another version of the same refrain that would become etched in history, eventually considered the most famous American speech of the twentieth century. What he said at Cobo on that Sunday in June was virtually lost to history, overwhelmed by what was to come, but the first time King dreamed his dream at a large public gathering, he dreamed it in Detroit.

So radical was Washington State’s political tradition that it led Jim Farley, the Democratic National Chairman in the 1930s, to coin his famous quip about “the forty-seven states and the Soviet of Washington.

Wilson had a compelling reason for having recommended Herlihy: He had been involved in some of the biggest takeover battles in corporate America. Earlier in the year he had helped advise JP Morgan Chase in its acquisition of Bear Stearns. His firm—Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz—was synonymous with corporate warfare. One of its founding partners, Martin Lipton, had devised among the most famous of antitakeover defenses, the “poison pill.” If Treasury was planning a government-led hostile takeover—the first in history—then Herlihy was certainly the lawyer they wanted.

By the terms of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in June of last year legalizing the practice of destitute families selling their children, hoping they’d have a better life, or of rich families taking a famous downer as a trophy to impress their friends, I have no legal status if granted freedom. I would be “a non-person and vulnerable as a piece of furniture abandoned on a sidewalk,” as Justice William O. Washington said in his blistering dissent when the court announced its decision. Spartak Jones, 16, the first legal slave since the Civil War America’s top gymnast, handsome, poor, kidnapped and sold, contemplating his future San Francisco in the year 2115 The Chronicles of Spartak—Rising Son, a novel

He began representing the state in Washington two years before its most famous citizen was even born.

Casey was most famous for his supposed lack of diction; his “mumbling” became so legendary in Washington that Reagan quipped that Casey was the only CIA director in history who didn’t need to use a scrambler phone. On some minutes of National Security Council meetings, Casey’s indecipherable comments were recorded as “??????.

1963 March on Washington. Mahalia Jackson sang a triumphant “How I Got Over,” recalling the storefront singer of her youth and not the officious matriarch of national television. But she did more than set the crowd up for Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech. When Dr. King’s first paragraphs didn’t excite, the showman in Mahalia instructed her to go with the hits. “Martin, tell them about the dream,” she kept repeating until he got the message. Without her insistence, America would not have heard his most famous words.

2,000–3,000 PEOPLE, NOT GENERAL FAME This is one of the messages Eric burned into my brain last year, and it’s guided many decisions since. We were sitting in a large soaking tub talking about the world (as mathematicians and human guinea pigs do in San Francisco), and he said: “General fame is overrated. You want to be famous to 2,000 to 3,000 people you handpick.” I’m paraphrasing, but the gist is that you don’t need or want mainstream fame. It brings more liabilities than benefits. However, if you’re known and respected by 2–3K high-caliber people (e.g., the live TED audience), you can do anything and everything you want in life. It provides maximal upside and minimal downside. GOOD QUESTION TO ASK YOURSELF WHEN TACKLING INCUMBENT COMPANIES (OR IDEAS) “How is their bread buttered?” “What is it that they can’t afford to say or think?” “CONSENSUS” SHOULD SET OFF YOUR SPIDEY SENSE “Somehow, people have to learn that consensus is a huge problem. There’s no ‘arithmetic consensus’ because it doesn’t require a consensus. But there is a Washington consensus. There is a climate consensus. In general, consensus is how we bully people into pretending that there’s nothing to see. ‘Move along, everyone.’ I think that, in part, you should learn that people don’t naturally come to high levels of agreement unless something is either absolutely clear, in which case consensus isn’t present, or there’s an implied threat of violence to livelihood or self.” TF: I start nearly every public presentation I give with a slide that contains one quote: “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” —Mark Twain. This isn’t just for my audience. It’s also a reminder for me.

Petrov was the commander in charge when satellite data indicated there were five American ICBMs on their way to strike Moscow with nuclear weapons. For reasons having to do with human intuition, Petrov became suspicious of that attack information. Years later, he told Washington Post reporter David Hoffman what he was thinking at the time. “I had a funny feeling in my gut,” Petrov said, asking himself, Who starts a nuclear war against another superpower with just five ICBMs? In 1983, Petrov made the decision to interpret the early-warning signal as a “false alarm,” he said, thereby not sending a report up the chain of command. For his well-placed skepticism, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov famously became known as “the man who saved the world from nuclear war.

In 1767 he crossed to France, where he was received with honor; but before his return home in 1775 he lost his position as postmaster through his share in divulging to Massachusetts the famous letter of Hutchinson and Oliver. On his arrival in Philadelphia he was chosen a member of the Continental Congress and in 1777 he was despatched to France as commissioner for the United States. Here he remained till 1785, the favorite of French society; and with such success did he conduct the affairs of his country that when he finally returned he received a place only second to that of Washington as the champion of American independence. He died on April 17, 1790.

General Douglas MacArthur was the most brilliant, most important, and most valuable military leader in American history—at least that’s what Douglas MacArthur thought. When asked by a proper British gentlewoman if he had ever met the famous general, Dwight D. Eisenhower—himself about to march into history—supposedly replied, “Not only have I met him, ma’am; I studied dramatics under him for five years in Washington and four years in the Philippines.

To his eternal delight, the Chicago Daily Tribune printed its front page before the polls had closed, with the blazing headline: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. In one of the most famous photographs in American political history, a beaming Truman holds up the paper in triumph. He had reason to rejoice: Not only had he won a miraculous political victory, but the Democrats had retaken both houses of Congress. The Republican reign on Capitol Hill was over after two short years, and the Democrats reasserted their longstanding dominance in Washington.

ANYONE WRITING ABOUT Francis Marion immediately confronts the task of sifting fact from folklore. The mythmaking began with the first and highly embellished biography of him, written in 1809 by Mason L. “Parson” Weems, the same man who fabricated the famous story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. The romantic tradition continued with the Walt Disney television series that ran from 1959 to 1961, starring Leslie Nielsen as the Swamp Fox, and took another turn in 2000 with the popular film The Patriot, in which Mel Gibson portrayed a Rambo-like action figure loosely, if inaccurately, based on Marion. As stated on an interpretive marker at Marion’s gravesite in Pineville, South Carolina, much about the Swamp Fox remains obscured by legend, even though his achievements are “significant and real.

its more famous neighbor in Lexington, the Virginia Military Institute (150). The outbreak of the Civil War nearly blotted Washington College from view, first by diverting students to Confederate military service (in the 4th, 25th, 52nd, and 58th Virginia Infantry and 14th Virginia Cavalry), and then by attracting the unwanted attention of marauding Union forces under David Hunter in 1864. “Hunters Army” ensured that “all closed doors were broken down” and “Window Glass & Sash were smashed to pieces,” so that the trustees were “compelled to report the buildings in a very dilapidated condition.” By that summer’s end, Washington College barely had a

Members of RAND, including analyst Daniel Ellsberg, were famously part of a study team that produced the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg leaked copies of the papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post in 1971.

The hemp plant entered Mexico, as we have seen, after Washington and other Virginia planters enthusiastically spread it around the southern United States. As early as 1902, anthropologist Carl Lumholtz observed that some of the Indians in northwestern Mexico were using its leaves in religious rites whenever the peyote cactus was unavailable. They called it rosa maria (Rosemary) but whether they anthropomorphized it and considered it a goddess (like Peyote Woman) is not clear. In the Tepe-hua region, rosa maria became santa rosa (Saint Rose), but elsewhere it became maria juana (Mary Jane) – and, hence our modern name, marijuana. Under the latter title it was celebrated in the famous marching song of Pancho Villa’s rebels during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920:

Washington cultivated a culture of open dialogue, practicing his famous self-discipline of silence, encouraging arguments to compete, listening and probing, until he made up his mind to act.

The Family’s only publicized gathering is the National Prayer Breakfast, which it established in 1953 and which, with congressional sponsorship, it continues to organize every February at the Washington, D.C., Hilton. Some 3,000 dignitaries, representing scores of nations and corporate interests, pay $425 each to attend. For most, the breakfast is just that, muffins and prayer, but some stay on for days of seminars organized around Christ’s messages for particular industries. In years past, the Family organized such events for executives in oil, defense, insurance, and banking. The 2007 event drew, among others, a contingent of aid-hungry defense ministers from Eastern Europe, Pakistan’s famously corrupt Benazir Bhutto, and a Sudanese general linked to genocide in Darfur.

In his farewell address, George Washington famously warned against “the baneful effects” of political enmity.41

As President Ronald Reagan famously joked with the chief surgeon on March 30, 1981, as he was wheeled into the operating room at George Washington University Hospital, after being shot by John Hinckley Jr., “I hope you’re all Republicans.” (To which the surgeon, a self-described liberal Democrat, replied, “We’re all Republicans today, Mr. President.”)

Before Irene was a fiancée, she had set out from Staten Island for Washington, DC, the story went, “to find herself.” In a family whose eldest aunt was famous for being the first white woman up the Amazon, there was room for such things.

Where is the Ark today? I believe it is in a warehouse in Washington, or so says the ending of a famous Indiana Jones documentary!

Flying saucer crash retrieval rumors mounted in 1947 near the Riconosciuto stomping ground in Tacoma, Washington. The Tacoma News Tribune reported upon a retrieval by William Guy Bannister, the FBI Special Agent in Charge of the area at the time.16 Bannister became famous much later in life when he shared office space with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans, possibly employing Lee Harvey Oswald as an agent provocateur. Crisman, too, had been connected to Oswald via a subpoena from the investigation of JFK’s death by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. Some alleged that Crisman was one of the three hoboes photographed after their arrest in the railroad yard behind the infamous grassy knoll on November 22, 1963. Crisman was notably silent about both Maury Island and JFK in his 1970 memoir of life in Tacoma, entitled Murder of a City, written under the pseudonym of Jon Gold.17 He did have warm comments about Marshall Riconosciuto, however, and recounted that the young Michael “had discovered several electronic bugs” at his father’s office.

By now I was quite likely the most famous fugitive in America, and a drenched teenager suddenly emerging from a secret passage in the floor of the Washington Monument would probably get a lot of attention from the tourists inside.

Quoting page 60: In the 1960s, racism was chiefly understood to mean discrimination by whites against African-Americans. But in the immigration debate of the Progressive Era, the nation’s most prominent black leaders—most notably the Republican conservative, Booker T. Washington, and the socialist intellectual, W.E.B. DuBois—supported the restrictionists. Washington, in his famous Atlanta address at the Cotton States Exposition in 1895, pleaded with industrial leaders to employ loyal, hardworking freedmen, rather than import millions of European immigrants to take the industrial jobs that otherwise might have freed native-born African-Americans from segregated misery in the rural South.

Yet the Woke messaging keeps flying. Speaking in New York’s Washington Square on September 18, 2019, Senator Warren let fire this zinger. “We’re not here today because of famous arches or famous men. In fact, we’re not here because of men at all.”20 But if Warren ever arrives in the White House, it will be because of men—not all of them, obviously, but sufficient numbers of them. And the lesson of the Trump presidency is that insulting voters loses their votes. Those who aspire to conjure up a counter-Trump movement of militant progressive forces imagine that American demographics have tilted to the point that a politics of (in their view) righteous grievance can outvote the (in their view) wrongful grievance that Trump has summoned up. They are kidding themselves about their math, but even if they were correct, what kind of answer would that be? Trump is president not only because many of your fellow citizens are racists, or sexists, or bigots of some other description, although surely some are. Trump is president also because many of your fellow citizens feel that accusations of bigotry are deployed casually and carelessly, even opportunistically. Anti-racism can easily devolve from a call to equal justice for all into a demand for power and privilege. We speak, you listen. We demand, you comply. We win, you lose.

Despite Old Leatherman’s mystique, Edward Payson Weston was probably America’s most famous pedestrian. In 1860, he bet his friend that Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t win the presidency. In 1861, he walked nearly five hundred miles, from Boston to Washington, DC, for Lincoln’s inauguration, arriving a few hours late but in time to attend the inaugural ball. He launched his pro career a few years later, walking thirteen hundred miles from Portland, Maine, to Chicago in twenty-six days. Two years later he walked five thousand miles for $25,000. Two years after that, the showman walked backward for two hundred miles. He competed in walking events against the best in Europe. Once, in his old age, he staged a New York to San Francisco one-hundred-day walk, but he arrived five days late. Peeved, he walked back to New York in seventy-six days. He told a reporter he wanted to become the “propagandist for pedestrianism,” to impart the benefits of walking to the world. A devout pedestrian, he preached walking over driving. Unfortunately, he was seriously injured in 1927 when a taxicab crashed into him in New York, confining him in a wheelchair for the remainder of his life.

Mr. Bliss wanted a country home in the city, so he purchased the old estate called ‘The Oaks’ which they both had seen together before she left. He loved the fact that it sat up on a one-hundredfoot-high hill which sloped down to Rock Creek, and was the highest point in Georgetown. It would require very extensive work on the mansion and grounds over many years. Mrs. Bliss returned after only two months in Paris to begin planning the enormous task that the estate grounds would require. She envisioned an estate like those in Italy with terraces dug into the hillside comprised of lovely areas resembling outdoor rooms stepping down from the most formal at the top to less formal as you wander down to the creek. She hired Beatrix Jones Farrand, a famous landscape gardener who worked on estates from Maine down the east coast to Washington.” They would eventually name the estate “Dumbarton Oaks” because of its history as part of the Rock of Dumbarton grant that Queen Anne of England made in 1702 to Scotsman Colonel Ninian Beall.

We unwittingly did what so many Constellations before and since have done. We took the Pyramid mindset’s bait. To put a point on it, and to our cheers, Obama told the Republicans, “Elections have consequences. . . . I won.” Here’s the thing: elections have consequences for the winner too, and not all of them are good. Not only does a candidate win, but winning-and-losing also wins. The Pyramid mindset wins. The Washington establishment and the media know only this battle mode. Not surprisingly, the “elections have consequences” quip became famous again less than two years later: the Republicans hurled it back when they won control of the House in the midterm elections.

Without Washington’s guidance or public responsibility, [Hamilton] had again revealed a blazing, ungovernable temper that was unworthy of him and rendered him less effective. He also revealed anew that the man who had helped to forge a new structure of law and justice for American society remained mired in the old-fashioned world of blood feuds. When it came to intensely personal conflicts, New York’s most famous lawyer still turned instinctively not to the courtroom, but to the dueling ground.

George Washington had said that “virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” John Adams had insisted that public virtue, “the only foundation of republics,” could not “exist in a nation without private” virtue. Alexander Hamilton had written that “virtue and honor” were the “foundation of confidence” that underpinned “the institution of delegated power.” The contemporary Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke had famously declared that “society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free.” Trump had said to hell with all that. And he had gotten elected anyway. It’s true that many presidents seem petty when measured against the founders. But Trump was different even from prior unsavory men who had attained the presidency. They had at least feigned that they cared about these values and expectations. Trump had campaigned against them and won on that basis.

The Scriptures talk a lot about the “head of the corner” or the “chief cornerstone.” God uses the illustration of cornerstones to draw our attention to the Cornerstone He has chosen to build His house. Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste. Isaiah 28:16 Typically, a cornerstone is the first stone to be set in place whenever a structure is built, and all other stones in the building are aligned to it. Cornerstones mark the beginning point of construction, unite walls at intersections, and determine the positioning of the building. They support and set the reference point for how an entire framework comes together. Cornerstones often represent “the nominal starting place in the construction of a monumental building, usually carved with the date and laid in place with appropriate ceremonies.”20 You may have seen the famous picture of George Washington laying the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol building. These stones can be symbolic or ceremonial in nature, and many times, they are inscribed with information about the building’s importance and why it was built. Be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead, even by him doth this man stand here before you whole. This is the stone which was set at nought of you builders, which is become the head of the corner. Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved. Acts 4:10-12 Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God; And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord: Ephesians 2:19-21