Grant us a common faith that man shall know bread and peacethat he shall know justice and righteousness, freedom and security, an equal opportunity and an equal chance to do his best not only in our own lands, but throughout the world. And in that faith let us march toward the clean world our hands can make.
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Once on a yellow piece of paper with green lines he wrote a poem And he called if 'Chops' because that was the name of his dog And that's what it was all about And his teacher gave him an A and a gold star And his mother hung it on the kitchen door and read it to his aunts That was the year Father Tracy took all the kids to the zoo And he let them sing on the bus And his little sister was born with tiny toenails and no hair And his mother and father kissed a lot And the girl around the corner sent him a Valentine signed with a row of X's and he had to ask his father what the X's meant And his father always tucked him in bed at night And was always there to do it Once on a piece of white paper with blue lines he wrote a poem And he called it 'Autumn' because that was the name of the season And that's what it was all about And his teacher gave him an A and asked him to write more clearly And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door because of its new paint And the kids told him Father Tracy smoked cigars And left butts on the pews And sometimes they would burn holes That was the year his sister got glasses with thick lenses and black frames And the girl around the corner laughed when he asked her to go see Santa Claus And the kids told him why his mother and father kissed a lot And his father never tucked him in bed at night And his father got mad when he cried for him to do it Once on a paper torn from his notebook he wrote a poem And he called it 'Innocence: A Question' because that was the question about his girl And that's what it was all about And his professor gave him an A and a strange steady look And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door because he never showed her That was the year Father Tracy died And he forgot how the end of the Apostle's Creed went And he caught his sister making out on the back porch And his mother and father never kissed or even talked And the girl around the corner wore too much makeup That made him cough when he kissed her but he kissed her anyway because that was the thing to do And at three A.M. he tucked himself into bed his father snoring soundly That's why on the back of a brown paper bag he tried another poem And he called it 'Absolutely Nothing' Because that's what it was really all about And he gave himself an A and a slash on each damned wrist And he hung it on the bathroom door because this time he didn't think he could reach the kitchen
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A man said to the universe 'Sir, I exist' 'However,' replied the universe. 'The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.'
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Its a Story they tell in the border country, where Massachusetts joins Vermont and New Hampshire. Yes, Danl Websters deador, at least, they buried him. But every time theres a thunderstorm around Marshfield, they say you can hear his rolling voice in the hollows of the sky. And they say that if you go to his grave and speak loud and clear, Danl WebsterDanl Webster! the groundll begin to shiver and the trees begin to shake. And after a while youll hear a deep voice saying, Neighbor, how stands the Union? Then you better answer the Union stands as she stood, rock-bottomed and copper-sheathed, one and indivisible, or hes liable to rear right out of the ground. At least, thats what I was told when I was a youngster.
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A tide began to surge beneath the calm surface of Stephen's friendliness. This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am. Try to be one of us, repeated Davin. In your heart you are an Irishman but your pride is too powerful. My ancestors threw off their language and took another, Stephen said. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy that I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for? For our freedom, said Davin. No honourable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Wolfe Tone to those of Parnell, but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. And you invite me to be one of you. I'd see you damned first. They died for their ideals, Stevie, said Davin. Our day will come yet, believe me. Stephen, following his own thought, was silent for an instant... When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets ... Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.
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Then took he the wound, smiling, And died, content.
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He saw that it was an ironical thing for him to be running thus toward that which he had been at such pains to avoid. But he said, in substance, to himself that if the earth and the moon were about to clash, many people would doubtless plan to get upon the roofs to witness the collision.
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Unless, governor, teacher inspector, visitor, This map becomes their window and these windows...
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A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.' The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the turtle standing on' 'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the little old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'
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Music is expression of harmony in sound. Love is the expression of harmony in life.
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A man said to the Universe, 'Sir! I exist!' 'However,' replied the universe, 'The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.'
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I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
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This 2006 target is signaling they want to move back to 'neutral,' but also that they're happy to loosen policy if the economy does weaken.
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But not the first Illusion, the new earth,The march upon the solitary fire,The casting of the dice of death and birthAgainst a giant, for a blind desire,The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried,The metal sleeping in the mountainside.
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Have you ever been out for a late autumn walk in the closing part of the afternoon, and suddenly looked up to realize that the leaves have practically all gone And the sun has set and the day gone before you knew it - and with that a cold wind blows across the landscape That's retirement.
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Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.
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This required abandoning the idea that there is a universal quantity called time that all clocks measure. Instead, everyone would have his own personal time. The clocks of two people would agree if they were at rest with respect to each other but not if they were moving. This has been confirmed by a number of experiments, including one in which an extremely accurate timepiece was flown around the world and then compared with one that had stayed in place. If you wanted to live longer, you could keep flying to the east so the speed of the plane added to the earth
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A man said to the Universe: "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied the Universe, "the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."
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He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate.
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I think of those who were truly great. The names of those who in their lives fought for life, Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.
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It's no mystery why many of us in the media can't get enough of the fabricators Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, the latter of whom concocted more than a score of bogus feature stories for the New Republic (and who wrote for other magazines, including this one, once) in the mid-1990s. Anyone--journalist, student, academic--who has ever stared at a blank screen, their brains grinding emptiness, and thought, How can I fill this hole? knows that in those desperate moments before a deadline, almost anyone can do almost anything: make stuff up, plagiarize, scribble senseless half-truths.
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His mother called such people ignorant and superstitious, but his father only shook his head slowly and puffed his pipe and said that sometimes old stories had a grain or two of truth in them and it was best not to take chances. It was why, he said, he crossed himself whenever a black cat crossed his path.
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Surely Shakespeare is wicked, the map a bad example With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal—
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In addition to self-awareness, imagination and conscience, it is the fourth human endowment-independent will-that really makes effective self-management possible. It is the ability to make decisions and choices and to act in accordance with them. It is the ability to act rather than to be acted upon, to proactively carry out the program we have developed through the other three endowments. Empowerment comes from learning how to use this great endowment in the decisions we make every day.
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Honesty rare as a man without self-pity, kinders as large and plain as a prairie wind.
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Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.
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'I am enchanted, believe me, To die, thus, In this mediaeval fashion, According to the best legends;
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A man said to the Universe: 'Sir, I exist!'
'However,' replied the Universe,
'the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.'
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Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.
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We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
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