Women Authors From The United States

"I think there is a genetic factor involved [...] If there is a history of alcoholism in your family, watch it."

"At some point in life, she began giving her birth date as St. Patrick's Day 1918."

"You could be anything in front of that microphone, and that is what was expected of you."

"I believe we should learn to appreciate our loneliness, loneliness is marvelous."

"An honest look because one of the things a recovered alcoholic must learn is honesty. I have to live with myself."

"I really enjoy that sort of exploration in a community of people. That's what I really like. All those people come, and sit together, and then we all go through this experience, and some aspect of our humanity is touched."

"It is hard. And as you get older it's harder. Not to do the work, that's not the frustrating part. What's hard is raising the money, building the board, staying abreast of the current things that are happening that want to sabotage and submerge you."

"Because now I am a grandmother, and I love it. It's like a free ride. Your kids are doing all the worrying, and scrambling. Children and grandchildren can make you really happy. You walk in the room and there is like a glow. I often think about how fortunate we are as a family."

"Critics were surprised that I was convincing as the southern Clarey in Steel Magnolias. The bias is still there but not as much."

"Olympia speak about growing up in 2007."

"I believe that in the theater you really can't do anything that doesn't have some political consequence. My work has been about finding my own voice and a way to express myself."

"You know when you get to my age, it's nice to be intact. Physically surviving is important."

"If you are convinced this is what you want to do, don't be afraid, go forward. You have to know what you want and go for it. Don't let the money be an issue. You can always pay your bills if you're willing to work."

"Kaufman’s fault. He had not planned, had not seen far enough ahead. Failure of vision was a sin the universe did not forgive."

"History isn’t morality."

"Science should remain above politics, if it’s to do its job."

"By pure chance then, by pure chance now. Unfair. But he’d always known that was true of the universe."

"It takes two people to make a human tie. But only one to break it."

"She had to believe it; nothing else was bearable. Kaufman was looking at self-delusion in a character strong enough to elevate it to madness."

"Growing up I was always feeling like an outsider, being Greek in communities that were not very ethnic. I felt like an outsider in the Greek community, too, because women were expected to behave and socialize in a certain way, and I didn't. Also being an actor I felt like an outsider, because not many Greek American women were actors then. But once you realize that you are an outsider, there can be a freedom in that. You can find your own way."

"I feel the audience is very much there, It’s a big thing — to let an audience in, let them affect and move you."

"That’s not a hypothesis, Lyle. That’s sheer speculation, expressed in gibberish. It says nothing."

"When you don’t know what you’re doing, Kaufman reflected, you can easily recycle from other efforts where you also didn’t know what you were doing."

"In the military, it can be more fatal to admit you made a mistake than to actually make one."

"Do you always interfere in other people’s confrontations? Are you that most dangerous of all people, a peace-at-any-price meddler?"

"Every single war ever fought anywhere had spawned shadow battles between the warring governments and their own citizens. Black markets, war profiteering, blockade runners, quislings, conscientious objectors, organized crime and its less organized siblings. False government contracts, false traveling papers, false bills of lading, false passenger lists, and, for the really sophisticated, falsifying deebee programs. All it took were contacts and money."

"But it would be anecdotal evidence only, undocumentable and, by definition, unrepeatable. Therefore, not science."

"A conclusion is just the place where you got tired of thinking."

"An enormous amount of behavior grows out of genetic imperatives."

"He introduced Marbet as “project psychologist.” “I don’t believe in psychology,” Capelo said flatly. Marbet remain unruffled. “Even that based on physiology?” “If it’s based on chemistry, with replicable results from control experiments, then of course I believe in it. That’s science. Literary theories about the mind are not.” “Ah,” Marbet said. “Fairy tales, all. From Uncle Droselmeyer Freud to Lady Godiva Jennings, undressing some poor sap’s mind ‘consciousness layer’ by ‘consciousness layer.’ All for a large amount of money, of course.”"

"Cooperation was, in the long run, a more powerful evolutionary strategy than violence, once a species was high-tech."

"And wasn’t that a common pattern in human history! Greedy religious orders, wanting to keep power for themselves, using customs and myth and threats and murder to keep the people in line and then making them believe it was all for their own good so they wouldn’t challenge the supremacy of the priesthood. Some political thinker of a few centuries ago had nailed it exactly: “Religion is the opiate of the people.”"

"Judge not. No culture was better than another, no culture should be deemed in need of uplifting. Crap! It was the worst kind of moral laziness masquerading as cultural relativism."

"Amanda decided that if these people were God’s choice for instruments, then God was as crazy as Father Emil."

"She regarded boredom as a moral failing, the mark of a mind insufficiently stocked to occupy itself."

"I don’t know, you get old enough and your hair gets white and somebody notices and they give you a star."

"How to reasonably object to artificiality, when all of anthropology spotlighted how artificial all cultural institutions actually were?"

"To you, of the younger generation, what a marvel, what a world of meaning in those words — “I have been taught patience.” We, who fret and chafe because the whole world will not bend its will to our puny strivings, and turn its whole course that we might have our unripe desires fulfilled, should read and re-read of the man who could wait, because he knew that time and all eternity would be bent to meet his desires in time."

"Such a man was Livingstone, not afraid to be meek in order to be great; not afraid to “fear God and work bard;” not ashamed to stoop in order that he might raise others to his high estate. He gave the world a continent and a conscience; with the lavishness almost of Nature herself he bestowed cataracts and rivers, lakes and mountains, forests and valleys, upon his native land. He stirred the soul of the civilized world to the atrocities of the slave trade, and he made it realize that humanity may be found even in the breast of a savage. When he laid down his life in the forest he loved, he laid upon the altar of humanity and science the costliest and sweetest sacrifice that it had known for many a weary age."

"The life of service; the life of unselfish giving — this must Livingstone’s life mean to us. Unselfish, ungrudging lavishing of life and soul, even to the last drop of heart’s blood. Service that does not hesitate because the task seems small, or the waiting weary; service that does not fear to be of no account in the eyes of the world. Truly, indeed, might Wordsworth’s apostrophe to Milton be ascribed to him: “Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart;/Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea;/Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,/So didst thou travel on life’s common way/In cheerful godliness, and yet thy heart/The lowliest duties on itself did lay.”"

"One idea mastered him — to give Africa to the world."

"Hamilton Wright Mabie says that the question for each man to settle is not what he would do if he had means, time, influence, and educational advantages, but what he will do with the things he has. In all history there are few men who have answered this question. Among them none have answered it more effectively than he whom we have gathered to honor to-night — David Livingstone. The term “social service,” which is on every one’s lips now, was as yet uncoined when David Livingstone was born. But it was none the less true, that without overmuch prating of the ideal which is held up to the man of to-day as the only one worth striving for, the sturdy pioneers of Livingstone’s day and ilk realized to the highest the ideal of man’s duty to his fellow-man."

"who knew and understood them as human beings, and not as beasts, the slavery trade was, as he expressed it, “the open sore of Africa.” Over and again he voiced his belief that the Negro freeman was a hundred time more valuable than the slave. He repeatedly enjoined those who had the fitting out of his expeditions not to send him slaves to accompany him on his journeys, but freemen, as they were more trustworthy. He voiced the fundamental truth that he who is his own master is he who obeys and believes in his master. The slave trade in Africa was dealt its death-blow by Dr. Livingstone."

"I would spend whole weeks trying to untangle the lush foliage of bribes, kickbacks, nepotism, pride, religion, and mañana that is business in South America."

"Dear to his heart was Lincoln, the Emancipator, an ideal hero whom he consistently revered. Away to the southwest from Kamolondo is a large lake which discharges its waters by the important river, Lomami, into the great Lualaba. To this lake, known as the Chobungo by the natives, Dr. Livingstone gave the name of Lincoln, in memory of him for whom your noble institution was named. This was done because of a vivid impression produced on his mind by hearing a portion of Lincoln’s inauguration speech from an English pulpit, which related to the causes that induced him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. To the memory of the man whom Livingstone revered he has contributed a monument more durable than brass or stone."

"The Negro youth of the land recites the Gettysburg speech, and it is right that he should do so; but does he know Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” The Negro youth of the land admires Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address, but does he know Douglass’ splendid tribute to the man who wrote the Second Inaugural address, when the freedmen of this country erected the Lincoln monument at Washington? The Negro youth rolls over his tongue the witty epigrams of the mighty Lincoln, but has he been made familiar with some of the pithy aphorisms of his own Douglass?"

"Abraham Lincoln does not need the tribute we give him today; the world is paying him tributes greater than ours, more glorious and resounding. But the sweeter praise which we pay him is that of a race, profiting by the lesson of a life. Fame has written Lincoln’s name with the greatest men of the world with the statesmen, with the wisest of monarchs, with the prince of republicans — and placed his laurel wreath higher than the rest. But it remains for the descendants of slaves to give him what no man in history has ever had — the divine breath of gratitude, the determination to make the world see, centuries hence, that he was not mistaken in his greatest deed, his life work, his martyrdom."

"Every school boy in the nation knows Abraham Lincoln — his gaunt figure, his seamed and pain lined face, with its sweetness and patience, are familiar to their eyes. His life, with its romance of poverty and toil, its tragic sorrow and tragic end, are as close to the heart of the nation as the stories of the Bible and the Christ-child. The utterances of Lincoln, the anecdotes of his life, the whimsical stories of his early days and his quaint humor furnish a never ending theme of interest to the American school boy. His sublime speeches; the delicate pathos of his first inaugural address; the splendid, stern, yet tender beauty of the second inaugural address are recited from thousands of school platforms annual, while the Gettysburg speech is as well known in America as the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes, and I deem it no sacrilege to say that in point of literary beauty it stands with them. It is graven in bronze in the national cemeteries, on school walls, in the halls of colleges and universities. It is recited semi-annually by the majority of the school boys in the country, and it is right that it should be, for is not Lincoln the nation’s idol, the American ideal?"

"Yet how many Negro youths in the land know as much of the ideal of Negro manhood, Frederick Douglass? If Lincoln is the American idol, so is Douglass the Negro’s idol. If Lincoln’s was a romance of life, with its toilsome youth culminating in a splendid manhood, attaining the highest gift which the nation could be stow, how much more is Douglass’ life a romance? The slave, beaten, starved, stripped, fleeing from slavery at the most deadly peril, to become in his later manhood the guest of nobles and kings, the cynosure of the nation’s eyes, the friend of this same Lincoln, the great man of the century? If Lincoln’s utterances are inspiring, calling in clarion notes for right and justice and truth, so much more are Douglass’ inspiring to us, calling for manhood and strength and power. For he was no soft-tongued apologist,/He spoke straightforward, fearlessly, uncowed;/The sunlight of his truth dispelled the mist,/And set in bold relief each dark-hued cloud;/To sin and crime he gave their proper hue,/And hurled at evil what was evil’s due."

"But Frederick Douglass, whom we honor equally, has not yet had the full meed of his praise, and we celebrate the passing of his natal day with a finer appreciation of what he has done for us, and of what his life will mean, not only to the men who were his contemporaries, nor yet to us of a later generation, but to the race of the future; to the children yet unborn. History has not yet given him his rightful place on its pages, but the history of. tomorrow will place him where he should be — with the courageous, the wise, the far-seeing. It remains for us, his own people, to pour out at his altar the incense he deserves, the praise he merits; to let his life be a beacon to light us to that higher, truer patriotism — the fearlessness of real manhood."