Biographers From The United States

"How long must the church live before it will learn that strength is won by action, and success by work, and that all this immeasurable feeding without action and work is a positive damage to it — that it is the procurer of spiritual obesity, gout, and debility."

"The moment we recognize God as supreme in power and infinitely good and loving toward all His intelligent creatures, that moment we admit the doctrine of universal and special providence."

"Assertion of truths known and felt, promulgation of truth from the high platform of truth itself, declaration of faith by the mouth of moral conviction — this is the New Testament method, and the true one."

"All that has been done to weaken the foundation of an implicit faith in the Bible, as a whole, has been at the expense of the sense of religious obligation, and at the cost of human happiness."

"A life in any sphere that is the expression and outflow of an honest, earnest, loving heart, taking counsel only of God and itself, will be certain to be a life of beneficence in the best possible direction."

"Emotion, feeling — these are well enough if they feed the springs of power. Prayer, praise, preaching — these are all good and never to be dispensed with; but if the life to which they minister have no manifestation out of them, it is a failure."

"What do you think God gave you more wealth than is requisite to satisfy your rational wants for, when you look around and see how many are in absolute need of that which you do not need? Can you not take the hint?"

"Open your hands, ye Whose hands are full! The world is waiting for you! The whole machinery of the Divine beneficence is clogged by your hard hearts and rigid fingers. Give and spend, and be sure that God will send; for only in giving and spending do you fulfill the object of His sending."

"So I take my life as I find it, as a life full of grand advantages that are linked indissolubly to my noblest happiness and my everlasting safety. I believe that Infinite Love ordained it, and that, if I bow willingly, tractably, and gladly to its discipline, my Father will take care of it."

"Every man who becomes heartily and understandingly a channel of the Divine beneficence, is enriched through every league of his life. Perennial satisfaction springs around and within him with perennial verdure. Flowers of gratitude and gladness bloom all along his pathway, and the melodious gurgle of the blessings he bears is echoed back by the melodious waves of the recipient stream."

"Heaven is not reached at a single bound; But we build the ladder by which we rise From the lowly earth to the vaulted skies, And we mount to its summit, round by round."

"God give us men. The time demands Strong minds, great hearts, true faith, and willing hands; Men whom the lust of office does not kill; Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy; Men who possess opinions and a will; Men who have honor,—men who will not lie; Men who can stand before a demagogue And damn his treacherous flatteries without winking! Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog In public duty, and in private thinking."

"He could see naught but vanity in beauty, And naught but weakness in a fond caress, And pitied men whose views of Christian duty Allowed indulgence in such foolishness."

"Aspiration, worthy ambition, desires for higher good for good ends — all these indicate a soul that recognizes the beckoning hand of the good Father who would call us homeward towards Himself — all these are the ground and justification for a Christian discontent; but a murmuring, questioning, fault-finding spirit has direct and sympathetic alliance with nothing but the infernal."

"Housework is a breeze. Cooking is a pleasant diversion. Putting up a retaining wall is a lark. But teaching is like climbing a mountain."

"Show me a character whose life arouses my curiosity, and my flesh begins crawling with suspense."

"A passion for politics stems usually from an insatiable need, either for power, or for friendship and adulation, or a combination of both."

"There is, of course, a gold mine or a buried treasure on every mortgaged homestead. Whether the farmer ever digs for it or not, it is there, haunting his daydreams when the burden of debt is most unbearable."

"A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become."

"He weren't no saint—but at jedgment I'd run my chance with Jim. 'Longside of some pious gentlemen That wouldn't shook hands with him. He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing— And went for it thar and then; And Christ ain't a-going to be too hard On a man that died for men."

"At my door the Pale Horse stands To carry me to unknown lands."

"He never funked and he never lied I reckon he never knowed how."

"The people will come to their own at last,— God is not mocked forever."

"I think that saving a little child And bringing him to his own, Is a derned sight better business Than loafing around the throne."

"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish-American_War The Spanish-American War has been a splendid little war, begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that Fortune that loves the brave. It is now to be concluded, I hope, with that fine good nature, which is, after all, the distinguishing trait of the American character."

"Dealing with a government [Tsarist Russia] with whom mendacity is a science is an extremely difficult and delicate matter."

"Politics and nationalism often play far greater roles than conservation in the decision-making process."

"The Magnuson Fisheries Conservation and Management Act of 1976 had extended the exclusive U.S. fishing zone to 200 miles offshore and set up as regulators regional fishery management councils dominated by fishing interests. Fishermen never had been good regulators, but they were virtually encouraged not to be by loan guarantees and other financial incentives that led to a massive growth in the U.S. fishing fleet. In 1994, when the National Marine Fisheries Service counted fish stocks, it concluded that the fleet was about twice as large as the fish stocks could sustain."

"Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us."

"As long as fisherman can catch a fish, they resist the idea that the species is in trouble. But with cod, they all recognize that there is a problem."

"Canadian cod was not yet biologically extinct, but it was commercially extinct—so rare that it could no longer be considered commercially viable. Just three years short of the 500-year anniversary of the reports of Cabot’s men scooping up cod in baskets, it was over. Fishermen had caught them all."

"Commercially successful fish farms reduce operating costs by feeding pellets of pressed fish meal rather than wild bait fish. In the case of salmon they are also fit artificial coloring to give them the pink tin to the acquire in the wild from eating crustaceans. Gastronomically, a wild salmon and a farmed salmon have as much in common as a side of wild boar has with pork chops."

"It is harder to kill off fish than mammals. But after 1,000 years of hunting the Atlantic cod, we know that it can be done."

"Whatever steps are taken, one of the great obstacles to restoring cod stocks off of Newfoundland is an almost pathological collective denial of what has happened. Newfoundlanders seem prepared to believe anything other than that they have killed off nature’s bounty."

"All revolutions are to some degree about money."

"The ocean floor left behind is a desert. Any fish swimming in the vast area of these nets is caught. The only control is mesh size. Fish that are smaller than the holes in the net can escape. While mandating minimum mesh sizes has become a favorite tool of regulators, fisherman often point out that once the back wall of the cod end has a good crop of fish in it, few fish of any size can escape, regardless of how big the mesh. Millions of unwanted fish—undesirable species, fish that are undersized or over quota, even fish with a low market price that week—are tossed overboard, usually dead."

"The American Revolution was the first great anticolonialist movement. It was about political freedom. But in the minds of its most hard-line revolutionaries, the New England radicals, the central expression of that freedom was the ability to make their own decisions about their own economy."

"The 200-mile limit was not seen in Canada, the United States, or anywhere else as a conservation measure, but rather as a protectionist measure for the national fisheries."

"If ever there was a fish made to endure, it is the Atlantic cod—the common fish. But it has among its predators man, an openmouthed species greedier than cod."

"Salt is certainly a worthy successor to Kurlansky's phenomenally successful Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. Readers with a passion for cookery will love it just as much, especially as Kurlansky once again litters his narrative with ancient and modern recipes garnered from all over the world."

"In trade, it is an almost infallible natural law that a hungry low-end market, an eager dumping ground for the shoddiest work, is an irresistible market force."

"But while the new, offshore all-Canadian fishery was prospering, the inshore fisherman found their catch dropping off. They suspected the reason was that the offshore draggers were taking so many cod that the fish did not have a chance to migrate in the shore to spawn. The inshore fishermen complained to the regulatory agency, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, but the government had invested in offshore fishing, not inshore, and its political priority was to make its investment a success story."

"... explanation for the human obsession with this common compound is ... offered ... in the 1920s, by the Diamond Crystal Salt Company of , in a booklet, "One Hundred and One Uses for Diamond Crystal Salt." This list of uses included keeping the colors bright on boiled vegetables; ; whipping cream rapidly; getting more heat out of boiled water; removing rust; cleaning bamboo furniture; sealing cracks; stiffening white ; removing spots on clothes; putting out grease fires; making candles dripless; keeping fresh; killing poison ivy; and treating , s, s, and s. Far more than 101 uses for salt are well known."

"In 1968 called the "the first music born in the age of instant communication." In June 1967 the Beatles had performed the first live international concert broadcast by satellite."

"Without the music to shout over, few people bothered saying anything. (Remarking on a power cut while in a bar in the Dominican Republic)"

"The native s of the New York area and their residents, ', are believed to have first appeared about 10,000 B.C. The oldest Atlantic , in , has been carbon-dated to about 6950 B.C. give or take a hundred years—long before the arrival of the three thousand years ago. This marks the oldest evidence of humans ever found in the ."

"Most of the fish we commonly eat, most of the fish we know, could be gone in the next fifty years. This includes salmon, , , , and ."

"In spite of muzzling the press, imprisoning thousands, and engaging in torture, kidnapping and murder, the Gonzalez government was still vulnerable to the accusation of being "soft on Basques." To demonstrate the sincerity of its stance, the new government decided to have the entire twenty-three-person directorate of Herri Batasuna arrested."

"To a cod, ocean floors mean safety. That is why they were rendered commercially extinct by bottom draggers."

"There is no such thing as love at first sight, Bryan. There’s only sex at first sight."