People From Pennsylvania

"A few days since Charles Lindauer, who was committed to the Essex county jail, New Jersey, for two years, for passing counterfeit money, was taken to the Fishing Banks on an excursion trip, one of the wardens of the institution being his escort. The Newark (N.J.) Advertiser says that it is not usual to treat prisoners to pleasure excursions, but in this instance an assistant warden thought it would "do the convict good," and therefore ventured to make the experiment. Essex, N.J., is a nice place to go to jail."

"The wonder of spontaneous, tough-hearted, uncalculated, discipline, and unexpected love, that's living. True kindness never stops for one moment to calculate the cost of time, of money, of inconvenience, or even danger, but jumps to the aid of a neighbor, even an enemy. Love for neighbor is ever ready. And once we get it going, it keeps going and going and going."

"Now honest down-to-earth tough love is the only virtue that I know of that's guaranteed never to fail. We often fail loving, but love never fails."

"Now if the greatest single power in a democratic republic is the power of a single vote, then the greatest power any human being has on this earth is love. Love for God. Certainly, love for self. And love for our neighbor. And when I talk of love today, I'm not talking of that simple, sentimental, otherworldly, ethereal kind of love. I'm thinking of a kind of love with which God loves every last one of us. It's the kind of love that transforms the human personality. It addresses the will. And it molds the human mind. And the love of which I speak today actually instills holy habits even in the least of us."

"Good neighborliness is really the common denominator by which we can all live together in harmony in a world of difference. Love is the only thing that tears down those walls that tend to separate us neighbor from neighbor, and bridges all the gaps between religions, races, cultures, and economies."

"Mr. Truman excised the best of the Good Neighbor policy when he sent the very first civil rights message to the Congress of the United States and desegregated the Armed Forces. Folks, I think on this day in honoring Mr. Truman with that civil rights move, we need to all acknowledge the fact that we do have our prejudices, systemic prejudices, within each one of us. When we will honestly acknowledge those prejudices that we have, when we're in touch with those feelings, then it is that we can begin to discipline ourselves to love our neighbors with different pigments, and cultures, and races, and yes economics."

"We must reclaim a sense of reverence for the earth and a recognition of our essential relatedness to the earth."

"If we love God, we can't help but love our neighbors because we're going to respect them as our brothers and sisters. In fact, folks, if you stop to think about it, the only way in this world any of us has of loving God is by loving our neighbors."

"And who is it that always suffers from the affluent people's overkill and superfluity but the poor again. You are making a wider and wider gap on the earth between the rich and the poor. And that is always a far greater threat to our national and international security than any nuclear arms race."

"Crises get our attention, but only love for God and his earth will hold our attention and move us to saving action."

"You Christians ought to be most highly motivated to practice environmental stewardship. If you are accountable to God for every idle word you speak, do you think you are going to be held any less accountable for everything you waste and all that depletes God's good creation?"

"Unless you allow the world of nature to flourish, you will perish."

"You Christians are called upon to balance your quest for personal salvation with reverence for nature. Either you live for the common good of all, or you live for no good or God at all!"

"You and I are destroying God's good earth that sustains us - biting the hand that feeds us. We are fighting God's natural systems in our determination to keep increasing our gross national product. In order to be comfortable, make as much money as we can, have it as easy as possible, and enjoy more pleasures now, we are leaving our children's children a wilderness that will not sustain them."

"Secular environmentalists have grounds to blame the Christian forces for the idea of life that will be good after death that they have ignored the consequences of people's irresponsibility with earth."

"Until we Christians see that the Gospel's good news of redemption applies to the earth, as well as the earthling, we will proliferate the sin of raping God's good earth. God's work of redemption in Jesus Christ encompasses the whole of creation and provides the grounds for restoring the brokenness in the relationship of humankind to creation, and the relationship of both to God."

"Only love for God and God's good earth will keep our attention and move us to commitment. Nature is rising up to judge us Nature is striking back to call us to repentance."

"Healing and saving the creation is God's work, and he calls faithful persons to be co-creators with him."

"Would God be concerned with saving a soul, only to have that reborn person live in an impoverished and unhealthy environment? Salvation is a word that means "wholeness." Christ claimed that he came so that everyone might have life more abundantly. Christ's salvation includes the wholeness of the creature and the creation."

"The deepest religious concern on this earth today is being a good neighbor. The most crucial political issue in the world today is learning how to do rightly neighbor-with-neighbor. The greatest social urgency is learning how to be a good neighbor to one another. And certainly the most crucial concern of our global economy, call it economic justice, is caring about our neighbors simply the same way we care about ourselves."

"Aspiring to be President of the United States, televangelist Pat Robertson preaches, "The Constitution of the United States, for instance, is a marvelous document for self-government by the Christian people. But the minute you turn the document into the hands of non-Christian people and atheistic people they can use it to destroy the very foundation of our society. And that's what's been happening." If any statement is more anti-American and more contrary to the Christian gospel, I have yet to hear it."

"You know, if you and I would really want to make a real difference in this world today, to make a real difference for God and good, all we need to do is to learn how, and to begin to discipline ourselves, to treat our neighbors just the way we treat ourselves, would want to be treated. It's that simple and it's that difficult."

"Hear a statement by the founder of the Moral Majority, and now a new movement, the so-called Liberty Movement, the Reverend Mr. Jerry Falwell, "The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country." People, the very foundation and fabric of our nation is really being threatened more by these popular religious voices, mesmerizing millions by way of television, than any threat of communism has ever presented us."

"This is your Mother Earth speaking today on behalf of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood-sisterhood of our common family. I am speaking to you Christian Americans in particular. You along with other citizens are raping me. There is not one among you who is altogether innocent, no not one. You have become so accustomed to abusing me for profit, jobs, luxuries, conveniences, and pleasures that it has become a natural way of life for you. It isn't that you intend to be malicious; it is only that you are thoughtless. But thoughtlessness doesn't clear you in a court of justice."

"The ruination of your environment respects no human-drawn borders nor any family's fenced in private property ... All of you, my citizens, are very interdependent. Each must learn to care for all, and all must learn to care for each. Not to love your neighbor as yourself is to surely perish."

"Roving was good for the writer; to have been a reporter undoubtedly informed Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane. To know far more than he may ever use is imperative for the writer."

"Guilt is real, it is serious, but when it becomes also a fashion, there is corruption."

"We are not only what we are today but what we were yesterday and if you burn your immediate past there is nothing left but ashes which are all very well for those heads that like nothing better than to be sprinkled with ashes. But are these ash-covered heads really the spokesmen of our conscience?"

"It takes a true writer to show us what has been missing in our lives. No one can give the writer an assignment that his own impulse has not bespoken but more than his security should inform him. "The pen," said Kafka to Janouch, "is not an instrument but an organ of the writer's.""

"Writing should be dangerous: as dangerous as Socrates. There should be no refuge for the writer either in the Ivory Tower or the Social Church."

"Literary epochs come and go but this wave seems to have frozen in the cold war."

"The great authors to come up since the Second World War have mostly been dead a long time. Kafka, Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James should be with us always but their resurgence in the forties presaged more than recognition of their stature. It signified also a genteel retreat from a period too complicated to confront easily. The writings of the detached past became a kind of smokescreen to conceal the present dilemma, and the ruins. But a ruin can be as good a point of departure as any. There is usually new life in the ruins as anyone who ever saw a population react from a bombing can testify. But the picker-uppers are not trying to salvage tender mementos only. They usually are looking for bricks and firewood."

"There is no such thing as a writer untouched by his time. Even the most inner experience is a response to some outside."

"Every period takes stock of the one preceding it and the past that was good enough for the fathers never seems good enough for the children no matter how idyllic it may seem to the great-grandchildren."

"My great hope and desire is that I can continue to serve as a diocesan priest, because a diocesan priest is in the community and with the people. The Diocese of Greensburg is a hidden gem — I always believed that, and I want to give back to the region."

"The idea which I carried out in the boys [sic] books was to give facts, interspersed by thrills and sensations, which would give the reader a comprehensive idea of the development of aviation. The thrills and sensations filled the boy's desire in that direction while he absorbed the facts."

"We tried to learn how to secure quantity production of airplanes the hard way. We never accepted the fundamental principle that an air-plane building program must be supervised by men who know how to design and construct airplanes.... Certainly, World War I definitely proved that trained aviation personnel can be turned out much faster than we can turn out airplanes. The truth is, the foundation for any workable production plan for aircraft must be built up in time of peace."

"A modern, autonomous, and thoroughly trained Air Force in being at all times will not alone be sufficient, but without it there can be no national security."

"Offense is the essence of air power."

"The technical genius which could find answers was not cooped up in military or civilian bureaucracy, but was to be found in universities and in the people at large."

"Our Air Force belongs to those who come from ranks of labor, management, the farms, the stores, the professions and colleges and legislative halls...Air Power will always be the business of every American citizen"

"Strategic air attack is wasted if it is dissipated piecemeal in sporadic attacks between which enemy has an opportunity to readjust defenses or recuperate."

"As a nation we were not prepared for World War II. Yes, we won the war, but at a terrific cost in lives, human suffering, and material, and at times the margin was narrow. History alone can reveal how many turning points there were, how many times we were near losing, and how our enemies’ mistakes pulled us through. In the flush of victory, some like to forget these unpalatable truths."

"To win a war, one must try and kill as many men and destroy as much property as you can. If you can get mechanical machines to do this, then you are saving lives at the outset."

"I saw this propellerless plane taxiing around the air field and making short flights. I knew then and there I must get the plans and specifications of that jet plane back to the United States."

"America owes its present prestige and standing in the air world in large measure to the money, time and effort expended in aeronautical experimentation and research. Our future supremacy in the air depends on the brains and efforts of our engineers."

"I think the only thing that has a broader range of scales than geology is astronomy. Geologists really look at things from the atomic scale to the solar system scale, and we potentially think about planets beyond the solar system."

"Our collective work in the geosciences has made, and must continue to make, a difference in how humans interact with our planet."

"One of the things I discovered in writing my book, The Dynamics of Disaster, was the thrill of learning about completely new things that my research would never ever have taken me into."

"I think the basic motivation for my research and publishing papers in the conventional media is curiosity."