My whole family has been having trouble with immigrants ever since we came to this country.
—Edgar Y. Harburg
The melting pot failed to function in one crucial area. Religions and nationalities, however different, generally learned to live together, even to grow together, in America. But color was something else. Reds were murdered like wild animals. Yellows were characterized as a peril and incarcerated en masse during World War II for no really good reason by our most liberal president. Browns have been abused as the new slave labor on farms. The blacks, who did not come here willingly, are now, more than a century after emancipation by Lincoln, still suffering a host of slavelike inequalities.
—Theodore M. Hesburgh
I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.
—Samuel Johnson
There was something so heavy about the burden of history, of the past. I wasn't sure I had it in me to keep looking back.
—Sarah Dessen in Just Listen
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it.
—Joseph Conrad
We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.
—Shirley Abbott
Jon Stewart: Your mother is from Kansas. She's a white woman. Your father, African. Are you concerned that you may go into the voting booth and… your white half will all of a sudden decide, "I can't do this"?Barack Obama: Yeah. It's a problem.
—From The Daily Show, October 2008
I think it's helpful to remind white ethnics that they, too, came here in boats; that they, too, lived in slums; that they, too, had yellow fever; that they, too, were stigmatized as incorrigible; that they, too, had the highest homicide rates and the highest incarceration rates and the highest rates of mental illness; and that everything that was said about them in those days is now being said about Salvadorans, Dominicans, African Americans, Mexicans, Vietnamese, and Cambodians in our inner cities.
—Tom Hayden
The power of love to change bodies is legendary, built into folklore, common sense, and everyday experience. Love moves the flesh, it pushes matter around.… Throughout history, "tender loving care" has uniformly been recognized as a valuable element in healing.
—Larry Dossey
Even Napoleon had his Watergate.
—Yogi Berra
In the long history of man, countless empires and nations have come and gone. Those which created no lasting works of art are reduced today to short footnotes in history's catalog. Art is a nation's most precious heritage. For it is in our works of art that we reveal to ourselves, and to others, the inner vision which guides us as a Nation. And where there is no vision, the people perish. We in America have not always been kind to the artists and the scholars who are the creators and the keepers of our vision. Somehow, the scientists always seem to get the penthouse, while the arts and the humanities get the basement.
—Lyndon B. Johnson
The British during World War ii came up with some imaginative ideas. One was to freeze the clouds, move them along the coast of southern England, and use them as platforms for antiaircraft guns.
—Richard Kehl
History is more or less bunk.
—Henry Ford
Love is never defeated, and I could add, the history of Ireland proves it.
—Pope John Paul II
There it was. That fierce loyalty. He didn't have a clue how that was the most attractive thing about him.
—Mariana Zapata in Under Locke