Lawyers From The United States

"Both Roe and Casey emphasize the burdens of parenting, and insofar as you and many of your amici focus on the ways in which forced parenting, forced motherhood, would hinder womens access to the workplaceand to equal opportunities, it's also focused on the consequences of parenting and the obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy. Why don't the safe haven laws take care of that problem?"

"These rioters, if not subdued, not only will destroy the livelihoods of law-abiding citizens but will also take more innocent lives. Many poor communities that still bear scars from past upheavals will be set back still further. One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers."

"Judge Jackson will coddle criminals and terrorists, and she will twist or ignore the law to reach the result that she wants. That's not what we need in a Supreme Court justice, and that's why I will be voting against her confirmation."

"People who were active in the movement during the 30s invariably have their favorite Olson stories to tell. One of the most revealing is a tale told by Jimmy Flowers. Flowers was an organizer for the United Farmers League during this period and an active member of the Communist Party. One day he dropped into Olson's office to dish out some hell about farm conditions in rural Minnesota. Olson's schedule was filled up pretty tight for the day, so he suggested that the two of them meet at 5:30 and drive to his home and spend the evening together. The first thing Jimmy did on reaching the Governor's home was take a hot bath (a rare luxury for a travelling farm organizer), and then he joined Olson and some other guests Floyd had invited over for the occasion. Not all of them were "good Farmer-Laborites" by any means. A few hours later, the influentials departed, and Floyd asked Jimmy what he thought. Well, Jimmy didn't think much of the affair, and he said so in his usually blunt way. He doubted the sincerity of the Governor's friends when it came to helping the farmers. Olson was equally blunt. He walked over to his bookshelf, pulled out a volume of Lenin's Collected Works, and turned to an essay called Left Wing Communism and Infantile Disorder. "You lousy Commie son of a bitch," said Olson (with more good nature than anger), "You're standing here talking to me about revolution, and you haven't even got the workers and farmers organized. That has to come first, and then we can move ahead ...." The story is indicative of the Olson approach. Floyd Olson was a practical politician with a genuine dedication to the people. He didn't believe in advancing policies they would refuse to accept. He realized that the degree of change possible was dependent not simply on a governor's decrees, or high sounding platforms, but the level of militancy and political understanding of the people themselves. He would move left as the people moved left. He would articulate that leftward progress, even encourage it, but never at the price of endangering the Farmer-Labor Movement in the process."

"At his funeral, tens of thousands gathered for the services in the Minneapolis Auditorium—the largest and most impressive funeral which Minnesota had ever given a man in either public or private life. Two hundred thousand people lined the streets and followed the hearse to the grave. The rich and poor alike gathered—the poor to pay their last tribute to their friend and champion; the rich to pay their respects to a man who played the game hard but fair. A great American had passed on. Thus fate snatched this leader of the common people as he was about to ascend the threshold to carry on the battle for them on the national scene."

"I'm sure he would have been president."

"He was entering the national political picture for the first time, pleading eloquently for a national Farmer-Labor Party. There were little lines around his eyes that afternoon and he looked older somehow. He spoke effectively in the evening, but without the thunder and lightning that used to bring the most bitten audiences of independent farmers to their feet as a single man. After the meeting a few of us took him to a late show, trying to cheer him up, he looked so tired. At the table there, or dancing, he was conspicuous. People didn't know who he was but they sensed that he was "somebody." For even then with fatal sickness creeping over him, he radiated a graceful power, a magnetic fellowship that was irresistible. There were no tables when we came in—but the waiter took a look at Floyd and found one. He looked about him slowly, obviously a stranger here, yet at home. And people who saw him that night must have wished, as we were wishing, that they could see him again soon. Unlike us, though, they could not have been aware that this was but a breath-taking before an important engagement, a rest after a very minor skirmish, another pause before a battle in which he was bound to play a leading, if not decisive, role. And today that battle is nearer than before. The forces are gathering, now deflected by the false prophets, now rallied, now re-assembling where the rank and file sense the worthiness of the issue and a glorious outcome; still unprepared, now confident, now hesitating, ready. But Floyd Olson is dead."

"He recognized that for unnumbered centuries the human race lived in a world which could not produce enough food and shelter to provide for the human family. It was an age when progress was advanced by individual explorers constantly in search of new lands, new inventions, and new methods for increasing our material resources. It was a period when the common welfare was promoted by individualistic activity. Within Governor Olson's generation all of this untold individual effort produced the machine age and mass production. The human family for the first time in its history lived in a world that could produce more than enough for all. Floyd Olson understood this basic change from an age of scarcity to an age of plenty. He understood that the social usefulness of selfish individualism was ended. He saw that there must be a new spirit of cooperation if this great power of production were to serve the common welfare. Floyd Olson and the movement of which he was the leader alined themselves with this great current of change—a change going on throughout the world. He supplied the function of leadership by giving constructive direction to the force of change in the period in which he lived."

"Floyd Olson died on the threshold to greater things. A seat in the United States Senate was just a step away. The Presidency of the United States was a possibility. In the event that he had achieved either, history would have recorded him, we believe, as among the great Americans. The idealistic policies he advanced will be accepted as commonplace in the next 10 years. The cause of progress and liberalism has received a heavy blow in his death. There are other leaders, perhaps, who saw as he saw. There are advanced thinkers, no doubt, who carry on from the point where Floyd Olson, because of his tragic death, left off. We know of none, however, who has the Olson combination of brains, humanity, personality, and energy—a combination necessary to the accomplishment of radical and essential changes in a society shown, during the past generation, to be sadly out of gear."

"In memoriam, 1891-1936, Floyd Bjornstjerne Olson, twenty-second governor of the State of Minnesota. Born in near poverty, schooled in adversity, intimate with hunger and want. Out of this crucible came pioneer leadership with purposeful direction and the indomitable courage to seek new frontiers of economic security for the underprivileged. To that which he wrought an enduring memorial is builded in the hearts of his people."

"Should not the government own all those industries which have to do with the obtaining of raw materials and transforming them into necessary products [...] mines, packing plants, grain elevators, oil fields, and iron mines? [...] I am speaking of these things as merely touching upon the ideals of this movement, of an ultimate cooperative commonwealth...."

"I look back at my three terms as Governor with one great regret. I did not have, on any occasion, a majority of the members of the legislature who agreed with the principles of this movement. To have had that, I say from my very heart—to have had that in any one session—would have been sufficient gratification so that I would have been willing thereafter to retire from public life."

"Our ultimate goal is a cooperative commonwealth wherein Government will stifle, as much as possible, the greed and avarice of the private profit system and will bring about more equitable distribution of the wealth produced by the hands and minds of the people."

"I cite you the fact that this movement sponsored and brought about the passage of the first compulsory old-age pension law; that this movement has always stood upon the principle of taxation based upon ability to pay. I cite you the fact that despite years of struggle in this State to bring about the passage of an income-tax law—it was not until the Farmer-Labor movement gained control of the executive branch of the government and the Farmer-Labor movement enlisted the aid of popular opinion and public sentiment—not until then, despite all those years of struggle—was there an income-tax law in the State of Minnesota."

"Now I am frank to say that I am not a liberal. I enjoy working on a common basis with liberals for their platforms, but I am not a liberal. I am what I want to be—I am a radical. I am a radical in the sense that I want a definite change in the system. I am not satisfied with tinkering, I am not satisfied with patching, I am not satisfied with hanging a laurel wreath upon burglars and thieves and pirates and calling them code authorities or something else. I am not satisfied with that. I want, however, an orderly, a sane, and a constructive change. I don't want any visionary things any more than the hardest Tory or Conservative wants them. But I know the transition can take place and that, of course, it must be gradual. It can't come overnight, but I want to do all I can to set it in motion and keep it going steady, not in jerks, or jumps, or in spurts, but going steadily ahead ...."

"Whose liberty? Liberty for what purpose? Liberty of the Citizens' Alliance to arm thugs to shoot defenseless strikers in the back? Liberty of promoters of spurious stocks to fleece widows and orphans? Liberty of millionaires to escape taxation? Liberty to make slaves of workers and serfs of farmers? These are the individual liberties that these people mean."

"It is the Republicans who have given us government that has been both corrupt and extravagant; aided the tax dodger and transferred his load to the taxpayer — you and me; made every function of state and national government subservient to the powerful special interests, and now they are shedding crocodile tears for the poor taxpayer."

"Never has the Republican party, both nationally and locally, been quite so low in morale and so bankrupt in ideas as today. It has stood like a man dazed, watching the parade go by, and not knowing what it is all about."

"Today we are endeavoring to save the system we call Capitalism, by attempting to curb selfish individualism, and the avaricious profit motive. [...] That there will be anything left of the so-called Capitalistic system, when the ultimate changes take place, is very doubtful, that there will be great change is certain."

"The Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota maintains that the present economic order is in need of very serious alterations—that to continue it as it now is constituted is criminal folly and stupidity. We charge that it fails utterly to meet the needs of our people; that the massive load of misery and suffering which we witness all about us is due to its inherent defects. Just why people are so reluctant to make changes in government—changes for the betterment—is somewhat puzzling. Certainly we cannot hope to solve our problems by continuing the very methods responsible for creating them. In almost every other field, we are prepared to take advantage of new ideas, of new improvements. In government, however, we become confused and frightened in the presence of suggested changes. Perhaps the reason for this can be found in the fact that almost from infancy we are taught, by the rankest kind of sophistry, that it is un-American to make changes in government. We are taught that persons who suggest changes are radicals, and that a radical is an arch enemy of society, a wild destructionist, a bomb thrower, an assaulter of women. The result has been a perversion of the public mind to an where the people fear their very birth-right,—independence of action—and self-determination. We believe in something that has not been tried as yet. We believe in restoring prosperity by restoring the purchasing power of the man at the bottom. Unless labor can receive wage to buy the farmers produce, the farmer can never be prosperous. Unless the farmer has cash to buy the goods that the laborer manufactures, the city worker can never be prosperous."

"This has got me. Don't worry; it must be all for the best."

"If I were asked to name the greatest tragedy that has followed in the wake of the depression, I would say that it has been the destructive effect upon the morale of our youth. If I were asked to name the chief victim of the present heartless order I would not hesitate to say "youth.""

"I am making a last appeal to the Legislature. If the Senate does not make provision for the sufferers in the State and the Federal Government refuses to aid, I shall invoke the powers I hold and shall declare martial law. [...] A lot of people who are now fighting [relief] measures because they happen to possess considerable wealth will be brought in by provost guard and be obliged to give up more than they would now. There is not going to be misery in this State if I can humanly prevent it. [...] Unless the Federal and State governments act to insure against recurrence of the present situation, I hope the present system of government goes right down to hell."

"The unorganized worker owes a debt of gratitude to his organized brother. If his living standard has not been beaten down to the level of the Russian peasant of the Czarist days, it is due to the demands the organized worker has been able to enforce. The former has benefited from the struggles and sacrifices of the latter."

"A nation cannot be preserved which does not preserve its citizens. Industry is retrenching, reducing wages, lowering the standard of living, destroying buying power, and throwing more and more men and women on the streets to shift for themselves. Just how that is going to solve our economic problems is beyond understanding."

"The freedom of speech and the press should remain inviolate and any law which constitutes an entering wedge into that inviolability is unsafe."

"We are assembled during the most crucial period in the history of our State and of our Nation. An army of unemployed, some 200,000 homeless and wandering boys, thousands of abandoned farms, an ever-increasing number of mortgage foreclosures, and thousands of people in want and poverty are evidences not only of an economic depression but of the failure of government and of our social system to function in the interest of the common happiness of the people."

"117. Q. Can you tell me the remedy? A. To dispel Ignorance and become wise (Prājña)."

"There are fewer potential adepts in an epoch than the superficial imagine. The fate of those who tread this dizzy precipice of wisdom with weak and faltering steps may be readily inferred. What happens to the dizzy-brained and slippery-footed alpine climber? His brain turns, and he falls headlong into the chasm, with a last shriek and a clutching at the air."

"Patanjali tells us that the "... local deities will assail such a Yogi [one who is only in the rudimentary stage], and will endeavor to divert him from the religious abstraction which he has attained, by bringing before him sensual gratifications, or by exciting in his mind thoughts of personal aggrandizement, but he should partake of these gratifications without interest, for if these deities succeed in exciting desire in the mind, he will be thrown back to all the evils...""

"118. Q. Why does ignorance cause suffering? A. Because it makes us prize what is not worth prizing, grieve when we should not grieve, consider real what is not real but only illusionary, and pass our lives in the pursuit of worthless objects, neglecting what is in reality most valuable."

"So long as one's perceptions are restricted to sensuous experiences, one's knowledge will be proportionately small; to become truly wise, one must burst the bonds of illusion, tear away the curtain of MAYA, break the chains of passion, learn the self and put it in command of our consciousness and our actions."

"119. Q. And what is that which is most valuable? A. To know the whole secret of man's existence and destiny, so that we may estimate at no more than their actual value this life and its relations; and so that we may live in a way to ensure the greatest happiness and the least suffering for our fellow-men and ourselves."

"The attainment of perfection is but postponed to a future birth. Every preliminary step in self-conquest and self-knowledge is so much experience and developed power, stored up psychic energy, for the use of the individuality in its next incarnation."

"The neophyte is never in greater danger of falling a victim to delusion than when he has subjected his grosser passions and begun to develop his psychic sight, hearing, and touch. He is like the newborn babe getting its first lessons of cisuterine life, grasping at the pretty silver moon, clutching at fire and lamp, miscalculating distances, tottering upon its feeble legs."

"The mention of religion leads me to a certain fact. While the Protestant Church has, in our time, ever resolutely denied the reality of such manifestations of occult agencies, the Church of Rome has always admitted them to be true. In her rubrics there are special forms of exorcism, and when Miss Laura Edmonds... one of the most remarkable mediums... united herself with the Catholic Church, her confessor, a Paulist Brother of New York, drove out her obsessing “devils” in due form, after - as he told me - a terrific struggle. Mediumship was anathematized by the late Pope himself, as a dangerous device of the Evil One, and the faithful warned against the familiars of the circle, as his agents for the ruin of souls... Though there is never a grain of religious orthodoxy in me, and I do not in the least sympathize with the demoniacal theory, yet I find, after learning what I have of Asiatic psychological science, that the Catholics are much nearer right in recognizing and warning against the dangers of mediumship, than the Protestants in blindly denying the reality of the phenomena. Mediumship is a peril indeed...and if mediumship is to be encouraged at all, it shall be under such protective restriction as the ancient Sybils enjoyed in the temple, under the watchful care of initiated priests. This is not the language of a Spiritualist, nor am I one: in the reality of the phenomena and the existence of the psychic force I do most unreservedly believe, but here my concurrence with the Spiritualists ends."

"The thoughtful student, in scanning the religious history of the race has one fact continually forced upon his notice, viz., that there is an invariable tendency to deify whomsoever shows himself superior to the weakness of our common humanity. Look where we will, we find the saint like man exalted into a divine personage and worshiped for a god. Though perhaps misunderstood, reviled and even persecuted while living, the apotheosis is almost sure to come after death: and the victim of yesterday’s mob, raised to the stage of an Intercessor in Heaven, is besought with prayer and tears, and placatory penances to mediate with God for the pardon of human sin. This is a mean and vile trait of human nature, the proof of ignorance, selfishness, brutal cowardice, and a superstitious materialism. It shows the base instinct to put down and destroy whatever or whoever makes men feel their own imperfections; with the alternative of ignoring and denying these very imperfections by turning into gods men who have merely spiritualized their natures, so that it may be supposed that they were heavenly incarnations and not mortal like other men."

"The lampooners and denunciators of our time have as little succeeded in shaking the faith of believers in the reality and value of mystical initiation, as did their precursors in the olden times that of their believing contemporaries. It has been simply the array of conjecture against experience, of surmise against knowledge. The wise have had but a feeling of contemptuous pity for the army of critics whose conclusions have rested upon wholly mistaken premises, and whose verdict has been colored by exaggerated prejudice and foolish mistrust."

"120. Q. What is the light that can dispel this ignorance of ours and remove all sorrows? A. The knowledge of the "Four Noble Truths," as the Buddha called them."

"2. Q. What is Buddhism? A. It is a body of teachings given out by the great personage known as the Buddha."

"Those who, in our own days, have been blessed with personal relations with the "Wise Men of the East," have found them teaching an identical philosophy, whether they were externally Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Jew, Parsi, or Mussulman as to social environment and nominal caste. And what they are now teaching is the same as that which was taught to students in all countries, at all preceding epochs."

"116. Q. When our Bōdhisattva became Buddha, what did he see was the cause of human misery? Tell me in one word. A. Ignorance (Avidyā)."

"The handbills announce me as the President of the Theosophical Society, and you gathered here to learn what Theosophy is and what are its relations with Spiritualism. Let me say then, that in the sense given to it by those who first used it, the word means divine wisdom, or the knowledge of divine wisdom, or the knowledge of divine things... Essentially, a Theosophical Society is one which favours man’s original acquisition of knowledge about the hidden things of the universe by the education and perfecting of his own latent powers."

"What is it then, which makes me say what in deepest seriousness and a full knowledge of its truth I have said? What is it that makes me not only content but proud to stand for the brief moment as the mouthpiece and figure-head of this movement, risking abuse, misrepresentation, and every vile assault? It is the fact that in my soul I feel that behind us, behind our little band, behind our feeble, newborn organization, there gathers a mighty power that nothing can withstand—the power of truth!"

"What the Society has hitherto done…is to make people think. No one can for long belong to the Theosophical Society without beginning to question himself. He begins to ask himself: “How do I know that?” “Why do I believe this?” “What reason have I to be so certain that I am right, and so sure that my neighbors are wrong?” “What is my warrant for declaring this action, or that practice, to be good, and their opposite bad?” The very air of Theosophy is charged with the spirit of enquiry. It is not the “skeptical” spirit, nor is it the “agnostic”. It is a real desire to know and to learn the truth…."

"If the tendency of Fellowship in the Society is to develop certain habits of philosophic thought, its tendency is even stronger to give rise to definite ethical views and moral principles. However much and bitterly the Fellows may disagree as to... [details concerning] occult doctrine, it would be hard to get up a dispute among the brethren as to the evil of intemperance, or the abomination of cruelty, or about any other of the crying sins of our times."

"40. Q. And how did he expect to learn the cause of sorrow in the jungle? A. By removing far away from all that could prevent his thinking deeply of the causes of sorrow and the nature of man... He went away into the forest near Uruvela, and spent six years in deep meditation, undergoing the severest discipline in mortifying his body... five Brāhman companions attended him."

"4. Q. Would you call a person a Buddhist who had merely been born of Buddha parents? A. Certainly not. A Buddhist is one who not only professes belief in the Buddha as the noblest of Teachers, in the Doctrine preached by Him, and in the Brotherhood of Arhats, but practises His precepts in daily life."

"121. Q. Name these Four Noble Truths? A. 1. The miseries of evolutionary existence resulting in births and deaths, life after life. 2. The cause productive of misery, which is the selfish desire, ever renewed, of satisfying one's self, without being able ever to secure that end. 3. The destruction of that desire, or the estranging of one's self from it. 4. The means of obtaining this destruction of desire."

"A great Brahmin Pandit of the Vedantin school came to see us that evening, evidently with the sole object of showing up our ignorance; but in us two old campaigners, especially in H. P. B., with her wit and sarcasm, he got more than he bargained for, and in a couple of hours we were able to expose to the company present his intense selfishness, vanity, and bigoted prejudices. Our victory cost us something, however, for I see a Postscriptum note in my Diary that he subsequently showed himself “our active enemy.” Good luck to him and to all the noble army of our “enemies”; their hatred never did them the least good nor the Society the least harm. Our ship does not sail on the wind of favor."