People From Missouri

"More and more as we come closer and closer in touch with nature and its teachings are we able to see the Divine and are therefore fitted to interpret correctly the various languages spoken by all forms of nature about us."

"Although Professor Carver impresses every one who meets him with the extent of his knowledge in the matter of plant life, he is quite the most modest man I have ever met."

"Professor Carver, like the other men I have mentioned, is of unmixed African blood, and is one of the most thoroughly scientific men of the Negro race with whom I am acquainted. Whenever anyone who takes a scientific interest in cotton. Whenever any one who takes a scientific interest in cotton growing, or in the natural history of this part of the world, comes to visit Tuskegee, he invariably seeks out and consults Professor Carver."

"His work was his life, and by not diluting it with wrathful forays against the ignorance of prejudice he was able to make his own unique and most vital contribution to racial amity."

"If we were asked what living man had the worst start and the best finish, we would say, Dr. Carver. It's a great loss to us that we have no one like him in England."

"Dr. George Washington Carver was one of the wonders of this age... Those who believe and teach that a man's heritage determines his spiritual, mental and physical traits will be hard put to explain the source of Dr. Carver's amazing intellect."

"Dr. Carver left a legacy of hope and beacon light pointing to opportunities of the future... This Negro scientist who was born of slave parents succeeded by hard work and exalted vision to the stature of one of the most outstanding agricultural research scientists in the world.""

"The price of empire is America's soul, and that price is too high."

"When I first got there I spotted Senator Fulbright, and I said to somebody who was with me, "I don't know if he remembers me-we met once-and I ought to go over and say hello." But, at that point, Fulbright came over to me. "I wanted to say hello," he said. "There isn't a day I don't read about you in the papers. You're doing a great job." It was good to hear him say that. I've always admired him."

"There are two Americas. One is the America of Lincoln and Adlai Stevenson; the other is the America of Teddy Roosevelt and the modern superpatriots. One is generous and humane, the other narrowly egotistical; one is self-critical, the other self-righteous; one is sensible, the other romantic; one is good-humored, the other solemn; one is inquiring, the other pontificating; one is moderate, the other filled with passionate intensity; one is judicious and the other arrogant in the use of great power."

"A pre-emptive war in 'defense' of freedom would surely destroy freedom, because one simply cannot engage in barbarous action without becoming a barbarian, because one cannot defend human values by calculated and unprovoked violence without doing mortal damage to the values one is trying to defend."

"In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not its taste, but its effect, ..."

"Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations — to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God's work."

"The operation was wildly out of proportion to the threat. It would compromise our moral position in the world and make it impossible for us to protest treaty violations by the Communists."

"We would be deliberately violating the fundamental obligations we assumed in the Act of Bogota establishing the Organization of American States."

"To give this activity even covert support is of a piece with the hypocrisy and cynicism for which the United States is constantly denouncing the Soviet Union in the United Nations and elsewhere. This point will not be lost on the rest of the world-nor on our own consciences."

"During a single week of July 1967, 164 Americans were killed and 2100 were wounded in city riots in the United States. We are truly fighting a two-front war and doing badly in both. Each war feeds on the other and, although the President assures us that we have the resources to win both wars, in fact we are not winning either."

"In these ways the war in Vietnam is poisoning and brutalizing our domestic life. Psychological incompatibility has proven to be more controlling than financial feasibility, and the Great Society has become a sick society."

"The citizen who criticizes his country is paying it an implied tribute."

"The Soviet Union has indeed been our greatest menace — not so much because of what it has done, but because of the excuses it has provided us for our own failures."

"It seems to me that it is these extremists who are advocating a soft approach. Their oversimplifications and their baseless generalizations reflect the softness of those who cannot bear to face the burdens of a continuing struggle against a powerful and resourceful enemy. A truly tough approach, in my judgment, is one which accepts the challenge of communism with the courage and determination to meet it with every instrumentality of foreign policy—political and economic as well as military, and with the willingness to see the struggle through as far into the future as may be necessary. Those who seek to meet the challenge—or, in reality, to evade it—by bold adventures abroad and witch hunts at home are the real devotees of softness—the softness of seeking escape from painful realities by resort to illusory panaceas."

"To me, the irony of this involvement with size, as I observed earlier, is the unwillingness or inability of so many Americans to identify themselves with something as vast as the United States. Bigger cars, bigger parking lots, bigger corporate structures, bigger farms, bigger drug stores, bigger supermarkets, bigger motion-picture screens. The tangible and the functional expand, while the intangible and the beautiful shrink. Left to wither is the national purpose, national educational needs, literature and theater, and our critical faculties. The national dialogue is gradually being lost in a froth of misleading self-congratulation and cliche. National needs and interests are slowly being submerged by the national preoccupation with the irrelevant."

"It is not our affluence, or our plumbing, or our clogged freeways that grip the imagination of others. Rather, it is the values upon which our system is built. These values imply our adherence not only to liberty and individual freedom, but also to international peace, law and order, and constructive social purpose. When we depart from these values, we do so at our peril."

"The junior Senator from Wisconsin, by his reckless charges, has so preyed upon the fears and hatred of uninformed and credulous people that he has started a prairie fire, which neither he nor anyone else may be able to control."

"Nature—pitiless in a pitiless universe—is certainly not concerned with the survival of Americans or, for that matter, of any of the two billion people now inhabiting this earth. Hence, our destiny, with the aid of God, remains in our own hands."

"When public men indulge themselves in abuse, when they deny others a fair trial, when they resort to innuendo and insinuation, to libel, scandal, and suspicion, then our democratic society is outraged, and democracy is baffled."

"It is amazing how soon one becomes accustomed to the sound of one's voice, when forced to repeat a speech five or six times a day. As election day approaches, the size of the crowds grows; they are more responsive and more interested; and one derives a certain exhilaration from that which, only a few weeks before, was intensely painful. This is one possible explanation of unlimited debate in the Senate."

"The legislator is an indispensable guardian of our freedom. It is true that great executives have played a powerful role in the development of civilization, but such leaders appear sporadically, by chance. They do not always appear when they are most needed. The great executives have given inspiration and push to the advancement of human society, but it is the legislator who has given stability and continuity to that slow and painful progress."

"What a curious picture it is to find man, homo sapiens, of divine origin, we are told, seriously considering going underground to escape the consequences of his own folly. With a little wisdom and foresight, surely it is not yet necessary to forsake life in the fresh air and in the warmth of the sunlight. What a paradox if our own cleverness in science should force us to live underground with the moles."

"Airing anti-Rush Limbaugh commercials during the Rush Limbaugh show would only conflict with the listeners who have chosen to listen to Rush Limbaugh."

"[In the period after the Gulf War (1990–1991) ended] Around the same time, [[Timothy McVeigh|[Timothy] McVeigh]] began listening to Limbaugh, who was just coming into his own as a best-selling author, television performer, and talk radio megastar. "As they say, 'Rush is right,' (double meaning)," McVeigh wrote to a friend, "and many people (opponents) consider his views extreme." He became an ardent fan."

"I couldn’t sit through some of it, and we ended up leaving, especially when they just went just full-out applause when they put that medal around Rush. And then — I know. I know. Do you know there was a 97-year-old man who was a guest of another colleague, who has been working really hard to try to get the Medal of Freedom for this man, who survived Nazi Germany? And he invented something to do with solar, profound accomplishments, profound strength, things that we need to be celebrating in our country. And he watched in the gallery to see somebody like that get the Medal of Freedom, when he’s sitting there, asking — you know, when he’s sitting there, just like, “I’ve done all these things in my life. I’ve survived all this.” And he did it from — you know, in this beautiful, gracious way, even after all that he’s been through."

"Trump created his MAGA coalition based on fear of “the other,” which has historically been a potent political move (think Richard Nixon’s perfection of the Southern strategy and Ronald Reagan’s aggressive race-baiting with his fictional Chicago welfare queen, among many other dog whistles). After America elected and then re-elected Barack Obama, not only a Black man but a constitutional scholar and an intellectual, to the presidency, the Republicans in Congress completely lost their minds and pledged to make him fail as president. They began to do all they could to shut down government and to excoriate Democrats, using the list of pejorative terms former House Speaker Newt Gingrich cribbed from conservative shock-jock Rush Limbaugh. The hard turn in Congress away from collegiality and compromise had begun."

"data about the demographics of COVID-19 victims began to trickle out. On April 7, major outlets began reporting that preliminary data showed that black and Latino Americans were being disproportionately felled by the coronavirus. That afternoon, Rush Limbaugh complained, "If you dare criticize the mobilization to deal with this, you're going to be immediately tagged as a racist"... The nationwide death toll that day was just 13,000 people; it now stands above 70,000, a mere month later. (p 235-6)"

"You have to give him credit — he works hard at getting his facts right."

"Everyone knows that Rush Limbaugh and I don't agree on everything in life, and maybe that is kind of an understatement … I strongly believe when we can put our differences aside, even Harry Reid and Rush Limbaugh, we should do that and try to accomplish good things for the American people."

"Limbaugh hasn't had a natural erection since the Nixon Administration; think he's compensating for something? Now, I wouldn't pick on him for any of this stuff, not his blubbiness, not his man-boobs, not his inability to have a natural erection -- none of that stuff -- to me, off limits until! until! -- Mr. Limbaugh, you turn that sort of gun on somebody else -- once you start doing that, you're fair game, fat boy. Absolutely, you jiggly pile of mess. You're just fair game, and you're going to get it, too. [Laughs] You'd better watch what you say, Limbaugh, because it can come back the other way."

"You know, if you played a drinking game where you did a shot every time Rush Limbaugh attacked someone for being elite, you'd almost be as wasted as Rush Limbaugh."

"Who’s off his meds and is exaggerating the effects of his illness? Comedian Rush Limbaugh, that’s who!"

"My initial reaction is disgust. How someone can sit in that chair and say that I am a car bomber or — excuse me, a suicide bomber — is disgusting. I have seen the after-effects of a suicide bomb. I have friends that were hurt by suicide bombs. It makes me mad down to a place where I can"t even think to describe. It's just repugnant."

"Yes, I have heard them for myself. I have read the transcripts. I have heard the audio. I was asked if I would be interested in doing an ad. I told them I would be as long as I agreed with the language of the ad. I read the language of the ad and agreed with it. It's something that I stand by and stick by. I do believe it and I can think for myself. And for Rush Limbaugh to say that an American soldier like me can't think for myself because I speak out against the Iraq war is preposterous.... A lot of veterans and troops don't believe in the war. What he is really saying is that a growing, large number of veterans can't think for themselves."

"Through the ups and downs of two decades, his message — always delivered with optimism, civility, and good humor — has been faithful to two core convictions: the power of freedom and the power of American exceptionalism."

"Given Mr. Limbaugh’s history of support for our soldiers, it would be unfair for me to assume his statements were intended to personally indict combat soldiers simply because they didn’t share his own views on the war in Iraq."

"He epitomizes what we all aspire to be, both as citizens and individuals."

"What's so special about Rush? Besides his remarkable talent and the fact that Rush not only shared political principles with WFB, but Rush also has his graciousness and humility?"

"What [Limbaugh] clearly has become over the last two or three years is something of an icon to millions of conservative listeners around the country. I think it would be too easy to dismiss him as being irrelevant to the shaping of opinion in this country today. He's very smart. He does his homework. He is well-informed. And you ignore him at your peril."

"We have no intention of prosecuting Rush Limbaugh because lying through your teeth and being stupid isn't a crime."

"Those thoughts are made more compelling both by Rush's long track record of accurate predictions and analyses, and by his unique form of exposition — leaping from A to D, then backing up to explain how he got to his seemingly unrelated conclusion, holding the audience enthralled."

"Rush is by far the most articulate, defining voice of conservatism in America today, the most articulate voice of raging conservatism in the country. Rush is a powerful voice. I would argue that Rush is the leader of the conservative movement in the country."

"The picture of this grieving mother demanding answers from a war president was too much for Bill O'Reilly of Fox News. He and Rush Limbaugh launched a relentless right-wing smear campaign against her...Limbaugh dismissed Sheehan's protests as "the latest effort made by the coordinated left.""