people-from-missouri

"An interviewer once asked him whether he had any advice for young writers starting out. "No," he answered, "if a writer is going to get anywhere, he doesn't listen to anybody.""

"Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing."

"The censors are going to stop crime by censoring the films. Why don't they put an end to diseases by burning the medical books which describe them?"

"When an actor loses control of himself he loses control of his audience."

"Horace said: "He who would make others weep, must first have wept himself." Every motion picture director should have that on his wall."

"We could make some very fine motion pictures if we didn't have to bother with cameras and lights."

"We movie people should not be afraid of what people will say of our work. We should not allow a word or a theory to drive us into anything or away from anything without some strong inner reason. Most of all, we should not be afraid of popularity and of financial success. Success is like posterity brought within our immediate vicinity. To have pleased millions of people with comedy, pathos or a well-constructed story is to have done a glorious thing. You can call it art, merchandise, trash or wooden nutmegs, but you cannot rob it of its noble mission—to cast light into dark places."

"Of course they put communist propaganda in the movies! They paint a rich man as a fiend. They make every rich man in a play look like a fat boy in a museum, and every poor boy is made out as a skeleton. Actually, the only millionaires I've ever known were skinny dyspeptics—look at Rockefeller."

"Ever since I was six years old people have been prophesying that I was going to kill myself with overwork. All the prophets are now dead."

"You can't use imitation silk before the motion picture camera. The lens is even quicker to detect imitation emotion."

"Woman's intuition is the result of millions of years of not thinking."

"Today, Wallace’s work feels like a whisper from a deeper source. It invites us to slow down, tune in, and consider the possibility that consciousness is not confined to the brain and that art can be a form of spiritual technology. For audiences drawn to esoterica, mysticism, and the aesthetics of the unseen, Wallace offers a rare synthesis: the rigor of a journalist, the imagination of a mystic, and the hand of a visionary. His drawings are portals to another world. And though the Ricco/Maresca exhibition has closed, Wallace’s psychic radio is still broadcasting. All you have to do is listen."

"It's weird how people think that you know a person just because you see them online and you listen to the art they make."

"Drag is like a spa for my soul."

"I know that I stand on the shoulders of the women in the industry that came before me, and my shoulders are broad enough to have the women that come after me to stand on mine … the little kid in me still believes that rock n’ roll can save the world."

"We want liberty, justice and freedom for all. When you do that, that’s when I’ll come."

"I pushed down the gay part of myself so deep because I was like, that can’t possibly be me."

"I was so desperate to feel understood"

"I encourage people to use your critical thinking skills, use your vote – vote small, vote for what’s going on in your city."

"It’s awesome to say no to things, even though they’re offering a lot of money. I have the power to say no."

"Education is, however, an extremely interesting and complex institution provided because society has discovered that, if it is to preserve itself and advance, it must spare the time and the people necessary to provide our young people with an understanding of their heritage. But education doesn't take place within institutions. It takes place only within individuals. It is something we cannot buy. It is something that records in the registrar's office do not measure."

"Basic to a free society is the belief in a golden rule. Just as you feel you have the right to your opinion, you must feel that everyone else, in turn has a right to his."

"If any one thread runs through the UVM story, it is the continual belief that higher education should be pre-occupied with the progress of mankind."

"We can all join that most worthwhile of all wars—the fight for tolerance, the fight for wisdom, the fight for freedom. Above all else, continue to develop your tastes—material and spiritual—so that you may learn to choose the best values from life's many alternatives."

"There assembled in St. Louis, Missouri, a "Constitutional Convention" composed of individuals, most of whom were unknown outside of the localities in which they claimed to reside. They had been chosen by a fraction of the voters, as people of voting age were generally in either the Confederate or Federal Army, or in the guerilla companies then abounding, or were fugitives from their homes, in order to save their lives. The "Constitution" made by this convention was put in force on July, 1865, no one being allowed to vote on it unless he first took the test oath it provided. A reign of terror, accompanied by arson, robbery, and murder, in many parts of the state followed."

"Those [natural] laws cannot be circumvented by any amount of piety or cleverness, but they can be understood. Uncovering them should be the highest goal of a civilized society. Not...because scientists have any claim to greater intellect or virtue, but because the scientific method transcends the flaws of individual scientists. Science is the only way we have of separating the truth from ideology, or fraud, or mere foolishness."

"[T]he uniquely American myth of the self-educated genius fighting against a pompous, close-minded establishment."

"For a million years, our species was confronted with a world we could not hope to understand. Now, within a span of a single human lifetime, the book of nature has been opened wide. On its pages we are finding, if not a simple world, at least an orderly world in which everything from the birth of stars to falling in love is governed by the same natural laws."

"America's astronauts have been left stranded in low-Earth orbit, like passengers waiting beside an abandoned stretch of track for a train that will never come, bypassed by the advance of science."

"The integrity of science is anchored in the willingness of scientists to test their ideas and results in direct confrontation with their scientific peers."

"Few scientists or inventors set out to commit fraud. In the beginning, most believe they have made a great discovery. But what happens when they finally realize that things are not behaving as they believed?"

"Every step taken by science claims territory once occupied by the supernatural."

"They are betting against the laws of thermodynamics. No one has ever won that wager."

"I came to realize that many people choose scientific beliefs the same way they choose to be Methodists, or Democrats, or Chicago Cubs fans. They judge science by how well it agrees with the way they want the world to be."

"Two hundred years ago, educated people imaged that the greatest contribution of science would be to free the world of superstition and humbug. It has not happened. Ancient beliefs in demons and magic still sweep across the modern landscape, but they are now dressed in the language and symbols of science: a best-selling health guru explains that his brand of healing is grounded in quantum theory; half the population believes Earth is being visited by space aliens who have mastered faster-than-light travel; and educated people wear magnets in their shoes to draw energy from the Earth. This is pseudoscience."

"It is not so much knowledge of science that the public needs as a scientific worldview—an understanding that we live in an orderly universe, governed by physical laws that cannot be circumvented."

"What may begin as an honest error...has a way of evolving through almost imperceptible steps from self-delusion to fraud. The line between foolishness and fraud is thin. Because it is not always easy to tell when that line is crossed, I use the term voodoo science to cover them all: pathological science, junk science, pseudoscience and fraudulent science."

"Everybody around me was going crazy about the war. I was under age- eighteen- but with as bad a case of war fever as the next fellow. Worse, probably. Because when America went into the war I'd made up my mind that for once I was going to do the same thing everybody else was doing."

"Ever since I'd learned to talk- or tried to learn- my stuttering had made a barrier between me and other people. It hit me harder, too, because that morning word had come that one of our neighbor boys had enlisted and I'd heard my father say he "guessed the Barkleys were petering out." From Revolutionary days on, whenever America got into trouble there'd always been a Barkley in on the fight."

"Among the most decorated American soldiers of World War I- in all, he would receive six medals for bravery, each conferred by a different Allied nation- Barkley was also a talented storyteller. In 1930, with the help of a friend who served as an unacknowledged collaborator, and with the assistance of several professional wordsmiths at a New York publishing house, he recounted his wartime adventures, which reached their climax in the action for which he received the Congressional Medal of Honor, in a vivid memoir titled No Hard Feelings! (here reprinted as Scarlet Fields). With its matter-of-fact, even self-deprecating description of heroics no less impressive than those of Alvin York, the legendary Tennesseean later played on screen by Gary Cooper, or Charles Whittlesey, the leader of the famed Lost Battalion, Barkley's book should have been a hit. However, reviews of No Hard Feelings! were small in number and mixed in their appraisal, not because Barkley's memoir was poorly written or insincere, but because its vision of war experience perhaps reached the public too late, at the tail end of a wave of books such as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929), and Robert Graves' Good-Bye to All That (1929), that for a time set the tone for literature about the Great War."

"At last General Pershing finished his speech and climbed down from his platform. He came straight toward Lieutenant Hays. I kept my eyes glued to the front, but I knew what he was doing. He stopped before the lieutenant, plopped his heels, and did something with his hands. I heard him speak to the lieutenant. Then he was standing in front of me. He saluted, and I almost snapped my right arm off in answering. But I did it automatically. My head had about quit functioning. The general stepped up close to me, did something with the front of my blouse- and a pin went straight through the blouse into the flesh on my chest! He shook hands with me and congratulated me, and said something about a "fellow Missourian." Then he knocked his heels together, gave a low, snappy salute, sidestepped to the right, and began decorating the next fellow."

"A tall officer mounted a little platform that had been set up to our front. I'd never seen him before, but I knew him at once. It was "Black Jack"- General Pershing. I heard him say something about decorating as brave soldiers as the world has ever known- but that was all I could get. It wasn't that I couldn't hear. I had a ringside seat as far as hearing was concerned. But I couldn't get used to standing up there with a bunch of generals and colonels, while three divisions stood at attention behind me. I hoped they'd make it snappy."

"General Sladen told me then that I could stand at ease, and I was altogether more comfortable physically than I'd been before. But I was still upset in my mind. I kept thinking how awful it would be if there'd been some mistake, and they'd picked out the wrong fellow to decorate. I still didn't know what it was General Pershing had pinned on me, so as soon as I dared I squinted alng my nose. I couldn't see anything but a little blue ribbon with white stars. I knew that the medal beneath it was the Congressional Medal of Honor. There'd been two of those in our family before. The first one had been given to a major-general who was related to my mother's family."

"That afternoon we took Le Charmel. There weren't many of us left."

"I didn't like those intervals between fighting. They gave me too much time to think. And my thoughts were getting pretty black."

"When the decorating part of the ceremony was over they marched us around and placed us on the reviewing line behind General Pershing. That review was the grandest sight I've ever seen. The First Division went by with its scarlet "One." The Second with its Indian Head. Jesse had been given the D.S.C. and was somewhere in the reviewing line, and i wondered what he thought of that head. Last came our own Third Division, with its blue and white bars. Infantry, line after line, poured past us, machine-guns, engineer and special troops- clicking like a machine. Caterpillar tractors kicking up the dirt. Seventy-fives traveling in a cloud of dust. I looked at General Pershing. It seemed to me he was growing taller and straighter all the time. He'd rare up on his shoes, as he watched, then come down on his heels again. He was a soldier from the ground up! And I didn't blame him for being proud of our outfits that day. When I looked back at the lines of men, marching and marching past us, at the flags and the artillery and the horses, I felt cold chills running over me. I felt stirred up and warlike inside. I was almost sorry the war was over."

"Pfc. Barkley, who was stationed in an observation post half a kilometer from the German line, on his own initiative repaired a captured enemy machine gun and mounted it in a disabled French tank near his post. Shortly afterward, when the enemy launched a counterattack against our forces, Pfc. Barkley got into the tank, waited under the hostile barrage until the enemy line was abreast of him and then opened fire, completely breaking up the counterattack and killing and wounding a large number of the enemy. Five minutes later an enemy 77-millimeter gun opened fire on the tank point-blank. One shell struck the drive wheel of the tank, but this soldier nevertheless remained in the tank and after the barrage ceased broke up a second enemy counterattack, thereby enabling our forces to gain and hold Hill 25."

"Unlike the authors of these now-familiar narratives, Barkley sometimes relished combat, and he made no apology for having dispatched scores of enemy soldiers. in short, his perspective did not line up with accepted wisdom (at least among artists and intellectuals) about how the soldiers of the Great War were supposed to remember their experience. Like Germany's Ernst Jünger, whose controversial memoir Storm of Steel (1921) shares many similarities with No Hard Feelings!, Barkley was something of a war lover- or, as the dust jacket for the first edition of his memoir put it, one of those "warriors... who fight and like it." Other literary commentators on the Great War- like Richard Aldington, Siegfried Sassoon, William March, and Thomas Boyd- emphasized the powerlessness of soldiers on the modern battlefield, as poison gas, high explosives, and machine guns reduced battle to a senseless lottery. In contrast, while acknowledging lost comrades, Barkley celebrated toughness and aggression. And based on his own experience, he remained convinced that individual effort had made a difference even in this most industrialized and seemingly impersonal of conflicts. His chronicle of battlefield endurance and will come as something of a surprise to readers today- a precursor to Audie Murphy's To Hell and Back (1949), set during a war that if we are to believe the canonical literature offered only impersonal carnage."

"Early in April we drew extra equipment. At one o'clock the next morning we were waked up and ordered to pack. Then we stood around until nine when we were marched up the gangplanks, and they didn't let us up from below decks until two in the afternoon. It was a good thing for the Kaiser he couldn't hear what we had to say about him by that time. When at last we got up on deck the shoreline was just a low cloud on the horizon. It was lucky for us that we didn't know how many of that company would never see America again. As for me I wasn't very much bothered by what was ahead of me. I was only nineteen and I'd never really been away from home before. I couldn't think about anything but the distance was getting greater every minute between me and the people in Missouri."

"On the afternoon of October 7, 1918, while serving as a reconnaissance observer far ahead of American lines near Cunel, France, Private John Lewis Barkley climbed into an abandoned French tank and single-handedly held off a German force of perhaps several hundred men as it advanced toward positions held by the American Third Division. Because the tank's crew had removed the vehicle's cannon, Barkley armed himself with a captured German light machine gun, which he pointed through a dangerously wide aperture in the turret. Deafened by the sound of his weapon, which he fired until the gun became super-heated, and surrounded by ricocheting bullets, some of which landed inside the tank, Barkley probably killed more than a hundred enemy soldiers and completely disrupted the Germans' advance. Even an enemy 77mm cannon, which targeted the tank from ust a few hundred yards away, could not drive Private Barkley from his personal fortress. He held off one wave of attackers, then another. Finally, after enemy bullets and stick grenades stopped striking the tank and a detachment of American troops appeared on the scene, he slipped away to rejoin his unit. He told no one what he had done."