People From Alabama

"when we focus our attention on the southern struggles of the 1950s and '60s, specifically when we think about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, we inevitably evoke Dr. Martin Luther King. We also think about Rosa Parks, but we should be focusing on Jo Ann Robinson as well, who wrote the book The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It. As many times as I've spoken during Black History Month, I never tire of urging people to remember that it wasn't a single individual or two who created that movement, that, as a matter of fact, it was largely women within collective contexts, Black women, poor Black women who were maids, washerwomen, and cooks. These were the people who collectively refused to ride the bus."

"I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear."

"Since I have always been a strong believer in God, I knew that He was with me, and only He could get me through that next step."

"Every day before supper and before we went to services on Sundays my grandmother would read the Bible to me, and my grandfather would pray. We even had devotions before going to pick cotton in the fields. Prayer and the Bible, became a part of my everyday thoughts and beliefs. I learned to put my trust in God and to seek Him as my strength."

"I would like to be known as a person who is concerned about freedom and equality and justice and prosperity for all people."

"From my upbringing and the Bible I learned people should stand up for rights just as the children of Israel stood up to the Pharaoh."

"God has always given me the strength to say what is right... I had the strength of God and my ancestors with me."

"I do the very best I can to look upon life with optimism and hope and looking forward to a better day, but I don't think there is anything such as complete happiness. It pains me that there is still a lot of Klan activity and racism. I think when you say you're happy, you have everything that you need and everything that you want, and nothing more to wish for. I haven't reached that stage yet."

"We didn't have any civil rights. It was just a matter of survival, of existing from one day to the next. I remember going to sleep as a girl hearing the Klan ride at night and hearing a lynching and being afraid the house would burn down."

"I'd see the bus pass every day... But to me, that was a way of life; we had no choice but to accept what was the custom. The bus was among the first ways I realized there was a black world and a white world."

"I did not get on the bus to get arrested. I got on the bus to go home."

"Thank you very much. I honor my late husband Raymond Parks, other Freedom Fighters, men of goodwill who could not be here. I'm also honored by young men who respect me and have invited me as an elder. Raymond, or Parks as I called him, was an activist in the Scottsboro Boys case, voter registration, and a role model for youth. As a self-taught businessman, he provided for his family, and he loved and respected me. Parks would have stood proud and tall to see so many of our men uniting for our common man and committing their lives to a better future for themselves, their families, and this country. Although criticism and controversy has been focused on in the media instead of benefits for the one million men assembling peacefully for spiritual food and direction, it is a success. I pray that my multiracial and international friends will view this [some audio unclear] gathering as an opportunity for all men but primarily men of African heritage to make changes in their lives for the better. I am proud of all groups of people who feel connected with me in any way, and I will always work for human rights for all people. However, as an African American woman, I am proud, applaud, and support our men in this assembly. I would a lot like to have male students of the Pathways to Freedom to join me here and wave their hands, but I don't think they're here right now. But thank you all young men of the Pathways to Freedom. Thank you and God bless you all. Thank you."

"I did not want to be mistreated, I did not want to be deprived of a seat that I had paid for. It was just time... there was an opportunity for me to take a stand to express the way I felt about being treated in that manner. I had not planned to get arrested. I had plenty to do without having to end up in jail. But when I had to face that decision, I didn't hesitate to do so because I felt that we had endured that too long. The more we gave in, the more we complied with that kind of treatment, the more oppressive it became."

"People always said that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

"Mrs. Rosa Parks is a very fine person. And, since it had to happen, I'm happy that it happened to a person like Mrs. Parks, for nobody can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity. Nobody can doubt the height of her character nobody can doubt the depth of her Christian commitment and devotion to the teachings of Jesus. And I'm happy since it had to happen, it happened to a person that nobody can call a disturbing factor in the community. Mrs. Parks is a fine Christian person, unassuming, and yet there is integrity and character there. And just because she refused to get up, she was arrested."

"She sparked a prairie fire that continues to blaze brightly in the hearts of freedom-loving people in all nations; and the non-violent revolution she set in motion continues to reverberate in nation after nation as an inspiration to human liberation movements everywhere. Rosa Parks provided us with a beautiful example of the power of one. How one courageous person can make a great difference in advancing human freedom. She showed us the power of humility and disciplined nonviolence in winning hearts and minds to support our freedom struggle; and she set for the entire world a vibrant example of African American womanhood fully engaged in the work of building a more just and decent society. b king"

"If the common soldiers of each army could just get together by a river bank and talk things over calmly, no war could possibly last as long as a week."

"You can always tell an old battlefield where many men have lost their lives. The next Spring the grass comes up greener and more luxuriant than on the surrounding countryside; the poppies are redder, the corn-flowers more blue. They grow over the field and down the sides of the shell holes and lean, almost touching, across the abandoned trenches in a mass of color that ripples all day in the direction that the wind blows. They take the pits and scars out of the torn land and make it a sweet, sloping surface again. Take a wood, now, or a ravine: In a year's time you could never guess the things which had taken place there. I repeated my thoughts to my wife, but she said it was not difficult to understand about battlefields: The blood of the men killed on the field, and the bodies buried there, fertilize the ground and stimulate the growth of vegetation. That was all quite natural she said. But I could not agree with this, too-simple, explanation: To me it has always seemed that God is so sickened with men, and their unending cruelty to each other, that he covers the places where they have been as quickly as possible."

"...man...is a frail, lost creature, too weak to walk unaided."

"The time comes in the life of each of us when we realize that death awaits us as it awaits others, that we will receive at the end neither preference nor exemption. It is then, in that disturbed moment, that we know life is an adventure with an ending, not a succession of bright days that go on forever. Sometimes the knowledge comes with the repudiation and quick revolt that such injustice awaits us, sometimes with fear that dries the mouth and closes the eyes for an instant, sometimes with servile weariness, an acquiescence more dreadful than fear. The knowledge that my own end was near came with pain, and afterwards astonishment, with the conventional heart attack, from which, I've been told, I've made an excellent recovery."

"...Far beyond the confines of a novel; at a single stroke he invented and perfected a new form. No man could write the gigantic story that lies behind Company K, but William March, by a brilliant refinement of form, has given us its essence and its broad sweep, flashes of its intensity and rich variety."

"It's queer about this book — it suddenly made me wonder whether any other book about the War has been written in this country. It's a book of extra-ordinary courage — not the courage of hope but the quiet courage of despair. It will make patriots and romanticists angry — yet it is the kind of patriotism that is hardest and toughest. It ranks at once with the few great cries of protest. It is a selected, partial, bitter picture, but a picture we need. It will live. None of the acts of bravery for which the author was decorated during the War was as brave as this anthology of dismay."

"His book has the force of a mob-protest; an outcry from anonymous throats. The wheel turns and turns and it does not matter, one hardly notices that the captain of the company, killed on page 159, is alive again a hundred pages later. It does not matter that every stock situation of the war, suicide, the murder of an officer, the slaughter of prisoners, a vision of Christ, is apportioned to Company K, because the book is not written in any realistic convention. It is the only War-book I have read which has found a new form to fit the novelty of the protest. The prose is bare, lucid, without literary echoes, not an imitation but a development of eighteenth-century prose."

"The unrecognized genius of our time."

"The most underrated of all contemporary American writers of fiction."

"Everybody must seem crazy if you see deep enough into their minds."

"In the sight of my beloved, I am like iron that the smith has heated at his furnace: iron whose surface gives heat. I am a bar that is rigid and will not bend."

"People are born in sorrow and move about the earth in patterns of sorrow without sense and without plan. Why should I take myself so seriously? I am no more important to the Creator than the trees or the vegetation which live with me on His earth. There is no eye to watch over me nor a hand to direct me, and there will be no preferred fate for me at the end, no matter what I am, or what I do with my life."

"I saw much during my thirty years as a professional soldier, and I have watched the reactions of many men to pain, hunger and death, but all I have learned is that no two men react alike, and that no one man comes through the experience unchanged. I have never ceased to wonder at the thing we call human nature, with its times of beauty and its times of filthiness, or at the level of calm stupidity that lies in between the two. I have no theories and no remedies to offer."

"All we know is that life is sweet and that it does not last long. Why should people be envious of each other? Why do we hate each other? Why can't we live at peace in a world that is so beautiful and so wide?"

"I may go down in history as the guy who killed Pluto."

"Praying as a public function, particularly when led by a clergyman, is a vulgar display of an exclusively personal matter."

"I think T.O. is the ultimate right now in the league as far as being able to make plays. Every time he touches the ball, he is capable of doing something special with it."

"He's definitely a character. But he's his own marketing tool, and he does it very well. He's real laid-back and subdued most times. Real down-to-earth guy. And when it's lights-camera-action -- different person."

"He's a coach's dream. He's been really wonderful for the other guys I coach. Why? His work ethic, he has a great passion for playing the game; he's made my job easier."

"T.O., he's a phenomenal player and a good leader. A lot of people in the media try to make him to be a bad guy, which he's really not. He's a team player. He works hard."

"Yes, I am a narcissist. The best, too."

"I've always been pretty much a quiet person. When I was little, I got picked on a lot. After I went through all that, I pretty much kept to myself."

"People have doubted me and criticized me my whole life, and that's why I'm the way I am."

"Once I step on the field, by the things I do in practice and the way I practice, you can't tell that I don't love the game. But I just know it deep down."

"I'm content where I am. I know I am going to be a Cowboy for life."

"It is because of the Biblical curse on man's search for knowledge, which has so paralyzed his mind during the past ages, and its detrimental effect upon progress, that makes the Bible the most wicked, the most detestable, the most pernicious, and the most obnoxious book ever published. ... We will never achieve intellectual liberty until the wickedness of this book has been discarded with the belief in the flatness of the earth."

"The Bible is not a divine revelation from God. It is not inspired; on the contrary, it is a wicked book .... It has been responsible for more suffering and torture than any other volume ever printed……”"

"With this recognition of the finality of death, no one should willingly withhold acts that would bring benefits, joy or happiness to others."

"Religion is all profit. They have no merchandise to buy, no commissions to pay, and no refunds to make for unsatisfactory service and results.... Their commodity is fear. They blackmail their parishioners with threats of hell and damnation. These poor deluded people give them their hard earned money to save them from a hell that does not exist, and from eternal torment that was invented by the perverted minds of priests to rob the living and in addition, they are exempt from taxation! Insult to injury! Let me tell you that religion is the cruelest fraud ever perpetrated upon the human race. It is the last of the great scheme of thievery that man must legally prohibit so as to protect himself from the charlatans who prey upon the ignorance and fears of the people. The penalty for this type of extortion should be as severe as it is of other forms of dishonesty."

"Changing a rod into a serpent and the serpent back into a rod may be clever magic, but how does such a demonstration prove that Moses spoke to God? If the only thing necessary to prove the truth of an extraordinary claim were to demonstrate an ability to bewilder, there would be no more mysteries to solve. If a person claims that he can bring the dead back to life, and in proof of that power pulls a rabbit out of a hat, that is hardly a demonstration of the truth of his claim; it is merely an example of his ability in the art of deception. If he claims that he can fly without wings and without the use of mechanical help of any kind, and in proof of his ability pulls another rabbit out of another hat, that is not proof of his ability to fly, but of his ability to lie, and he will without much hesitation be condemned as a faker. The demonstration of one thing has absolutely no bearing in proving the truth of the other, when there is no relationship between them."

"On too many occasions, especially in matters concerning purported conversations and messages from gods, mystery has been employed by charlatans to hoodwink the people."

"When the tyranny of the state is combined with the hypocrisy of the church, you have a modern example of the twin vultures that have devoured man, and his rights, throughout the ages."

"Imagine using as an authority in the matter of marriage the opinion of a celibate priest!"

"Of the ten crimes which Biblical Hebrew law punished by stoning, nine have ceased to be offenses in modern society."