People From New York State

"Right knows no boundaries and justice no frontiers; the brotherhood of man is not a domestic institution."

"What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it… What is this liberty that must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not the freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check on their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few — as we have learned to our sorrow. What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest."

"The day has clearly gone forever of societies small enough for their members to have personal acquaintance with one another, and to find their station through the appraisal of those who have first hand knowledge of them. Publicity is an evil substitute and the art of publicity is a black art; but it has come to stay, every year adds to its potency and to the finality of its judgments. The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country whether we like it or not, we must learn to accept it."

"You may ask what then will become of the fundamental principles of equity and fair play which our constitutions enshrine; and whether I seriously believe that unsupported they will serve merely as counsels of moderation. I do not think that anyone can say what will be left of those principles; I do not know whether they will serve only as counsels; but this much I think I do know — that a society so riven that the spirit of moderation is gone, no court can save; that a society where that spirit flourishes, no court need save; that in a society which evades its responsibility by thrusting upon the courts the nurture of that spirit, that spirit in the end will perish. What is the spirit of moderation? It is the temper which does not press a partisan advantage to its bitter end, which can understand and will respect the other side, which feels a unity between all citizens—real and not the factitious product of propaganda—which recognizes their common fate and their common aspirations—in a word, which has faith in the sacredness of the individual."

"Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us."

"Like John Stuart Mill, he would often begin by stating the other side better than its advocate had stated it himself."

"With the courage which only comes of justified self-confidence, he dared to rest his case upon its strongest point, and so avoided that appearance of weakness and uncertainty which comes of a clutter of arguments. Few lawyers are willing to do this; it is the mark of the most distinguished talent."

"The law, being an inherited accumulation, imposes itself on each generation willy-nilly. Any society whose members enter and leave it severally must for very convenience, to say nothing of deeper reasons, proceed by tradition; the neophyte must adopt existing habits and ways of acting, if for no better reason, through inexperience and diffidence. Mere custom will do the rest as he proceeds. And so the rule is canonized, its origins, and therefore its meaning, are ignored. But genuine learning is quite different."

"Yet the whole structure of the common law is an obvious denial of this theory; it stands as a monument slowly raised, like a coral reef, from the minute accretions of past individuals, of whom each built upon the relics which his predecessors left, and in his turn left a foundation upon which his successors might work."

"It is of course true that any kind of judicial legislation is objectionable on the score of the limited interests which a Court can represent, yet there are wrongs which in fact legislatures cannot be brought to take an interest in, at least not until the Courts have acted."

"The mid-day sun is too much for most eyes; one is dazzled even with its reflection. Be careful that too broad and high an aim does not paralyze your effort and clog your springs of action."

"We like rather to dream of a body of young men as a live thing, as a tree where all the branches are nourished by a single sap, and where each part is meaningless and incomplete except in connection with its fellows. You may lop away the dead branches, you may bend the trunk, you may dig about it and water it; but leave it to assume its own form, do not constrain the peculiar roots, or you will have a crippled, gnarled monster, and no tree."

"Life is not a thing of knowing only — nay, mere knowledge has properly no place at all save as it becomes the handmaiden of feeling and emotion."

"People know what they love … Even those whose lives are floundering. If they're directionless, it's not because they lack knowledge of what they want. It's because they lack the courage to acknowledge that they want it."

"Capitalism is the greatest benefactor man has ever had. It is time for the thinking men and women of every nation to recognize that fact and to fully embrace the system of the mind and of individual rights. Men and women of all countries unite - in your support of capitalism. You have a world of joyous achievement to win."

"The weakness of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis... the impossibility of generalizing about entire cultures and then attributing these generalizations to the language spoken ...is to leave numerous facts about culture unexplained. The great religions of the world... have flourished among diverse peoples who speak languages with sharply different grammars. ...Cultures as diverse as the Aztec Empire of Mexico and the Ute hunting bands of the Great Basin spoke very closely related tongues."

"Whorf asked... Do the Hopi and European cultures... conceptualize reality in different ways? And his answer was that they do. Whereas European cultures are organized in terms of space and time, the Hopi culture, Whorf believed, emphasizes events. To speakers of European languages, time is a commodity that occurs between fixed points and can be measured. Time is said to be wasted or saved... their economic systems emphasize wages paid for the amount of time worked, rent for the time a dwelling is occupied, interest for the time money is loaned. Hopi culture... instead thinks... The span of time the growing takes is not the important thing, but rather the way in which the event of growth follows the event of planting. The Hopi is concerned that the sequence of events in the construction of a building be in the correct order, not that it takes a certain amount of time to complete the job."

"About 1932 one of Sapir's students at Yale, Benjamin Lee Whorf drew on Sapir's ideas and began an intensive study of the language of the Hopi Indians of Arizona. Whorf's brilliant analysis... seemed to support the view that man is a prisoner of his language. Whorf emphasized grammar—rather than vocabulary, which had previously intrigued scholars—as an indicator of the way a language can direct a speaker into certain habits of thought."

"Wilhelm von Humboldt... stated that the structure of language expresses the inner life of its speakers: "Man lives with the world about him, principally, indeed exclusively, as language presents it.""

"The colors that a speaker "sees" often depend very much on the language he speaks, because each language offers its own high-codability color terms."

"Experiments... have shown that at least one aspect of human thought—memory—is strongly influenced by language."

"Each language encourages its speakers to tell certain things and to ignore other things."

"For tens, and perhaps hundreds, of thousands of years, people regarded language as a holy instrument that let them look out upon the world... Only in the last few decades have people suspected that their window on the world has a glass that gives a distorted view."

"This inseparableness of everything in the world from language has intrigued modern thinkers, most notably Ludwig Wittgenstein... If its limits—that is, the precise point at which sense becomes nonsense—could somehow be defined, then speakers would not attempt to express the inexpressible. Therefore, said Wittgenstein, do not put too great a burden upon language. Learn its limitations and try to accommodate yourself to them, for language offers all the reality you can ever hope to know."

"Thinking is language spoken to oneself. Until language has made sense of an experience, that experience is meaningless."

"Freedom of speech does not exist anywhere, for every community on earth forbids the use of certain sounds, words, and sentences in various speech situations. ...the habitual liar faces social sanctions ...Speakers are not allowed to misrepresent... to defame other people in public, to maliciously shout "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater, or to utter obscenities on the telephone."

"To do nothing now is to let our children lament that they never knew the magnificent diversity of humankind because our generation let disappear those cultures that might have taught it to them."

"Perhaps we, who for so long regarded ourselves as bringers of light to the shadowy recesses of North America, will finally admit that there is much about which the Indians can illuminate us."

"Millions of dollars have been expended to excavate and transport to museums the tools, weapons, and other artifacts of Indians—but scarcely a penny has been spent to save the living descendents of those who made them. Modern man is prompt to prevent cruelty to animals, and sometimes even to humans, but no counterpart of the Humane Society or the Sierra Club exists to prevent cruelty to entire cultures."

"Today's American bemoans the extermination of the passenger pigeon and the threatened extinction of the whooping crane and the ivory billed woodpecker; he contributes to conservation organizations that seek to preserve the Hawaiian goose, the sea otter of the Aleutian Islands, the lizard of the Galapágos Islands... But who ever shed a tear over the loss of the native American cultures?"

"A central assumption of this book has been that to examine the experience of humans throughout their 25,000 years on this continent is to hold up a mirror to the culture of Modern America."

"All routinized religions today (including the Native American Church, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity) are successful descendents of what originated as messianic movements—that is, the vision of a new way of life for a culture under extreme stress."

"As this cultural inadequacy becomes apparent even to the most conservative of its members, the culture may deteriorate to such an extent that it literally dies.<!-- p. 271->"

"The Indians have not only refused to vanish, but have... managed to salvage a part of their native culture through revitalization and messianic movements. ...they are of further interest to anthropologists for the light they shed on such movements in general.<!-- p. 271->"

"The Ghost Dance made its unfulfillable promises at a time when the Indians were ready to rebel. The teachings of the Native American Church spread at a time when the Indians were ready to admit defeat. ...The problem they had to solve was the same as any messianic movement: how to exist with an alien culture yet remain spiritually autonomous. The solution had been to borrow freely from White culture while salvaging what is considered important in Indian religious thought."

"What most impresses the people around the prophet is the personality change he has undergone. ...when stress reaches a certain intensity in the culture, only certain individuals feel called forth to become prophets while most do not. In any event, the prophet has emerged in a new cultural role, and his personality is liberated from the stress that called his response into being in the first place. Immune to the stress under which his brethren still suffer, he must appear to them supernatural."

"Invariably the prophet emerges from his hallucinatory vision bearing a message from the supernatural that makes certain promises: the return of the bison herds, a happy hunting ground, or peace on earth and good will to men. Whatever the specific promises, the prophet offers a new power, a revitalization of the whole society."

"Almost every messianic movement in the world came into being as a result of hallucinatory visions of a prophet. One point must be emphasized about the prophet of a messianic movement: He is not a schizophrenic, as was so long assumed. A schizophrenic with religious paranoia will state that he is God, Jesus, the Great Spirit, or some other supernatural being. The prophet, on the other hand, never states that he is supernatural—only that he has been in contact with supernatural powers. (Of course, after his death, his disciples tend to deify him or at least give him saintly status.)"

"Every Messianic movement known to history has arisen in a society that has been subjected to severe stress of contact with an alien culture—involving military defeat, epidemic, and acculturation"

"The Sioux had been forced to submit to a series of land grabs and to indignities that are almost unbelievable when read about today. ...they were being systematically starved into submission—by the White Bureaucracy—on the little that was left of their reservation in South Dakota. ...From Rosebud, the Ghost Dance spread like prairie fire to the Pine Ridge Sioux and finally to Sitting Bull's people at Standing Rock. The Sioux rebelled; the result was the death of Sitting Bull and the massacre of the Indians (despite their ghost shirts) at Wounded Knee in 1890."

"In 1830... Joseph Smith... prophesied that a New Jerusalem would arise in the wilds... The Mormons sent emissaries to the Indians, whom he renamed the Lamanites, inviting them to join the Mormon colonies and to be baptized. Joseph Smith was also to have prophesied in 1843 that if he... lived until 1890—the messiah would appear in human form. ...It was in 1890 that... Wovoka appeared and began teaching the [revitalized] Ghost Dance religion."

"The movement known as the Ghost Dance first appeared around 1870... soon after the Union Pacific Railroad completed its first transcontinental run. ...that event inspired the vision of the prophet Wodziwob, who declared that a big train was coming to bring back dead ancestors... a cataclysm would swallow up all the whites and leave behind their goods for his followers."

"Inspired by the teachings of Smohalla, Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé in Idaho rebelled in 1877. Before he was trapped only thirty miles short of refuge in Canada, he had consistently outwitted and outfought a superior United States Army... although he forbade his warriors to scalp or to torture, the Whites massacred his women and children."

"A Delaware Indian prophet appeared [1762] in Michigan and preached a doctrine that he said had been revealed to him in a vision. He called for the cessation of strife by Indian against Indian, and a holy war against the Whites... finally a practical man, an Algonkian named Pontiac, arose to lead them. He formed a confederation and attacked English forts all along the Great Lakes until he was ambushed and his forces utterly defeated. ...Forty years later the Shawnee Prophet ... twin brother of Chief Tecumseh, repeated the promises of the Delaware Prophet... Tecumseh established the greatest Indian alliance that ever existed north of Mexico. He and his emissaries visited almost every band, tribe, and chiefdom from the headwaters of the Missouri River in the Rocky Mountains to as far south and east as Florida. Indians everywhere were arming themselves for the right moment to attack the Whites when, in 1811, Tecumseh's brother, the Shawnee Prophet, launched a premature attack at Tippecanoe... the Indians were defeated by General William Henry Harrison... Tecumseh rallied his remaining forces and joined the British in the War of 1812. He fought bravely in battle after battle, but in 1813 his 2,500 warriors from the allied tribes were defeated decisively, once again by General Harrison."

"In 1680 the Pueblo Indians, led by a prophet named Popé who had been living in Taos, expelled the Spaniards. ..The god of the Spaniards was declared dead, and the religious ways came out into the open again. ...But when Popé attempted to become the unchallenged leader of all the Pueblo Indians, the movement collapsed. ...The Pueblo confederation soon broke apart and the people warred among themselves. In 1692 the Spaniards marched back to victory."

"There are strong parallels between the hope for salvation of the Jews and the hopes of the Indians who followed native prophets, between the early Christian martyrs and the Indian revolts against United States authority, between the Hebrew and the [native American] Indian prophets. ...the Jews and early Christians have served as models for oppressed peoples from primitive cultures... Almost everywhere the White missionary has penetrated, primitive people have borrowed from his bible those elements in which they saw a portrayal of their own plight...They regard the arrest and execution of a native on charges of being a rebel against White authority in the same terms as the trials undergone by the Hebrew prophets or the passion of Jesus."

"A culture that is in the process of being swamped by another often reacts by physically grappling with the outsiders. But it may wage a cultural war as well. Such defensive actions have been given various labels by anthropologists: nativism, revivalism, revitalization, and messianism. All are deliberate efforts to erect a better culture out of the defeat or decay of an older one. ...The reactions of primitive peoples overpowered by Eurasian colonial empires have usually been much more extreme. Their lands appropriated, their social system ripped apart, their customs suppressed, and their holy places profaned—they tried to resist physically but they were inevitably defeated by the superior firepower and technology of the Whites. As hopelessness and apathy settled over these people, the ground was prepared for revivalistic and messianic movements that promised the return of the good old days."

"In 1863, Colonel Kit Carson was ordered to clear the country of Navajo Indians and to resettle any survivors at Fort Sumner in eastern New Mexico, where they could be "civilized." Carson's strategy was the same as that applied against the Plains Indians a little later: He destroyed the Navajo food base by systematically killing their livestock and by burning their fields. Carson's "Long Knives" (his soldiers so named because of their bayonets) also cut off the breast of Navajo girls and tossed them back and forth like baseballs. ...Ultimately, about 8,500 Navajos made what they still call the "Long Walk" to captivity at Fort Sumner, three hundred miles away. After they had been there for four years, the Navajo signed a peace treaty that entitled them to a reservation of about 3,500,000 acres, much less than they had held previously."

"By the time the United States took possession of the Southwest in 1848, after the Mexican War, the Navajo had become the dominant military force in the area. ...The American soldiers who marched into Santa Fe had no trouble with the Mexicans, but the Navajo stole several head of cattle from the herd of the commanding general himself, not to mention thousands of sheep and horses from settlers in the vicinity."

"After the Spaniards settled the Southwest, the Navajo began another burst of cultural borrowing—or, more actually, stealing. Spanish ranches and villages were so depleted of horses—not to mention sheep—that by 1775 the Spaniards had to send to Europe for 1,500 additional horses. After the Pueblo Rebellion against the Spaniards was put down in 1692, many Pueblo took refuge with their Navajo neighbors—and taught them how to weave blankets, a skill for which the Navajo are still noted, and to make pottery. During this time the Navajo probably absorbed many Pueblo religious and social ideas and customs as well, such as ceremonial paraphernalia and possibly the Pueblo class system."