people-from-texas

"The board still writes those, and we have fairly good, sound standards."

"Elected board members are beholden to the voters, unlike bureaucratic state agency employees."

"You don’t have true representation without fair elections."

"If we don’t have free and fair elections, then we’ve lost our nation."

"I think we can move to a consumption tax over a 10 -year period and phase out property taxes and appraisal boards need to be elected not appointed."

"My daughters tease me about my shrine to them."

"We are just very happy to have made the move."

"There’s so many things to do from rallies to great restaurants."

"I stood up for the person being bullied back when I was little."

"It just was the way things were."

"Blacks should not have to experience the difficulties I have faced," Coleman said. "So I decided to open a flying school and teach other Black women to fly. For accidents may happen and there would be someone to take my place"

"I read everything I could get my hands on about aviating," she later recalled. "Some of the libraries wouldn't let black girls who picked cotton borrow books, but the books I wanted were about piloting, and folks were so surprised they let me have them anyway."

"Every no takes me closer to a yes."

"That’s it… You just called it for me!"

"I was black, I was female, and I wanted to fly. We used to pick cotton in Texas, and I'd look up and think, If we're going to better ourselves, we've got to get above these cotton fields."

"That experience taught me about making decisions and to just keep going but to always maintain your dignity."

"And, today, I’m grateful to Miss Ann, for showing me a direction I didn’t want to take."

"I knew how to get out because I could read and I had to get out because the environment was dangerous."

"I am not going into hiding: rather I will press the FBI and let them know what it is like to become the hunted. Doing so it is only logical to assume that my days on this planet are rapidly drawing to a close. Even so, I have no fear. For the reality of my life is death, and the worst the enemy can do to me is shorten my tour of duty in this world. I will leave knowing that I have made the ultimate sacrifice to ensure the future of my children."

"It is now a dark and dismal time in the history of our race. All about us lie the green graves of our sires, yet, in a land once ours, we have become a people dispossessed... By the millions, those not of our blood violate our borders and mock our claim to sovereignty. Yet our people only react with lethargy. A great sickness has overcome us. Why do our people do nothing? What madness is this? Has the cancer of racial masochism consumed our very will to exist?"

"All about us the land is dying. Our cities swarm with dusky hordes. The water is rancid and the air is rank. Our farms are being seized by usurious leeches and our people are being forced off the land. The Capitalists and the Communists pick gleefully at our bones while the vile hook-nosed masters of usury orchestrate our destruction. What is to become of our children in a land such as this? Yet still our people sleep!"

"In Metaline Falls, we have a saying. Defeat never, victory forever."

"By ones and by twos, by scores and by legions we will drive the enemy into the sea. Through our blood and God's will, the land promised to our fathers of old will become the land of our children to be."

"My knowledge of ancient European history started to awaken a wrongfully suppressed emotion buried deep within my soul, that of racial pride and consciousness. The stronger my love for my people grew, the deeper became my hatred for those who would destroy my race, my heritage, and darken the future of my children. By the time my son had arrived, I realized that White America, indeed my entire race, was headed for oblivion unless White men rose and turned the tide. The more I came to love my son the more I realized that unless things changed radically, by the time he was my age, he would be a stranger in his own land, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryan in a country populated mainly by Mexicans, Mulattoes, Blacks and Asians. His future was growing darker by the day."

"For the past decade I have been a resident of Northern Pend Oreille County. When I first arrived in Metaline Falls, I had only twenty-five dollars to my name, a desire to work hard and be left alone, and the dream of someday acquiring my own small farm."

"Sergeant Matthew O. Williams distinguished himself by acts of gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty on April 6, 2008, while serving as a Weapons Sergeant, Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha 3336, Special Operations Task Force-33, in support of Operation ENDURING FREEDOM. Sergeant Williams was part of an assault element inserted by helicopter into a location in Afghanistan. As the assault element was moving up a mountain toward its objective, it was engaged by intense enemy machine gun, sniper, and rocket-propelled grenade fire. The lead portion of the assault element, which included the ground commander, sustained several casualties and became pinned down on the sheer mountainside. Sergeant Williams, upon hearing that the lead element had sustained casualties and was in danger of being overrun, braved intense enemy fire to lead a counter-attack across a valley of ice-covered boulders and a fast-moving, ice cold, and waist-deep river. Under withering fire, Sergeant Williams and his local national commandos fought up the terraced mountainside to the besieged element. Arriving at the lead element’s position, Sergeant Williams arrayed his Afghan commandos to provide suppressive fire, which kept the insurgent fighters from overrunning the position. When the Team Sergeant was wounded, Sergeant Williams braved enemy fire once again to provide buddy-aid and to move the Team Sergeant down the sheer mountainside to the casualty collection point. Sergeant Williams then fought and climbed his way back up the mountainside to help defend the lead assault element that still had several serious casualties in need of evacuation. Sergeant Williams directed suppressive fire and exposed himself to enemy fire in order to reestablish the team’s critical satellite radio communications. He then assisted with moving the wounded down the near-vertical mountainside to the casualty collection point. Noting that the collection point was about to be overrun by enemy fighters, Sergeant Williams led the Afghan commandos in a counter-attack that lasted for several hours. When helicopters arrived to evacuate the wounded, Sergeant Williams again exposed himself to enemy fire, carrying and loading casualties onto the helicopters while continuing to direct commando firepower to suppress numerous insurgent positions. His actions enabled the patrol to evacuate wounded and dead comrades without further casualties. Sergeant Williams’ complete disregard for his own safety and his concern for the safety of his teammates ensured the survival of four critically wounded soldiers and prevented the lead element of the assault force from being overrun by the enemy. Sergeant Williams' actions are in keeping with the finest traditions of military service and reflect great credit upon himself, Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan, Special Operations Command Central, and the United States Army."

"My first mission will be village clearance with some older Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) personnel. I load up in the helicopter in Bagram and fly out. As we're hovering over the target, everything around me completely browned out, I look down at the dirt, half expecting the bad guys to rise up and attack. And that's when it hits me. I'm in Afghanistan, and this shit is for real."

"I sign in and meet my team. These guys have been training together for six months, and there aren't a lot of new guys in the room. It's scary enough meeting these guys for the first time, wondering if I'm going to fit in, how I can be a successful part of the team. "Get your stuff together," Team Sergeant Scott Ford tells me. "We're leaving." These guys, I discover, are great leaders and mentors. Staff sergeant and medica Ronald Shurer takes me under his wing very quickly. Everyone shows me the ropes."

"The team is awarded ten Silver Stars and one Air Force Cross. What still stands out for me that day, what I've learned, is that when everything hits the fan and it's game on, if you have trust and real camaraderie with a really well-trained team, your capabilities alone and together are pretty astounding. I know I'm going to constantly seek out this level of camaraderie and team building throughout the rest of my military career."

"Ten years later, Ron Shurer, our medic, and I get the call that our Silver Stars have been upgraded to the Medal of Honor. I'm over in 3rd Group and still a team sergeant on an ODA when I receive the award. My community is small and tight-knit and quiet. If somebody wants to ask questions or talk about the medal, I'm more than happy to discuss it, but more often than not, they don't. Everybody understands that I'm just a guy. I never really wanted to do anything other than be a Green Beret. I want to continue to serve. I've made it a point to just be "Matt" and separate myself from the award. Now I find myself in leadership positions that are extraordinarily fulfilling because I'm able to give back to the younger guys. Do I highlight the heritage and history of the regiment by using my story to engage with these kids so they can learn more about the history? Or do I stay hidden? Frankly, I still haven't decided."

"My father instilled hard work, integrity, selfless service, and other values in my upbringing. I've always had a willingness to serve, but the military wasn't something I thought much about until 9/11. After that, I went about my business, learning as much as I could about the different branches of the military. When I graduated college in 2005, our nation was at war. I settled on the US Army's 18X program, which allowed me to go to Special Forces assessment and selection right off the street. I liked the Green Berets, their mission and motto, De Oppresso Liber. It means "free the oppressed." Giving people the opportunity to fight for themselves is very important."

"A word is necessary on the relationship between military need and scientific feasibility in space technology. In the long haul, our safety as a nation may depend upon our achieving “space superiority.” Several decades from now, the important battles may not be sea battles or air battles, but space battles, and we should be spending a certain fraction of our national resources to insure that we do not lag in obtaining space supremacy."

"But the Sputnik did one thing that was very much a plus: it woke us up and it concerned the American people very much that they [Soviet Union] beat us to the draw in getting the first satellite into orbit. But we at our level, with the information that we had, and what we were doing, knowing that we could easily put something up in space, and we did do that, including putting a reconnaissance satellite, because it was given much higher priority really because of the Sputnik."

"Let's look now at the next ten or fifteen years in space and how it can impact policy, strategy and possibly force structure. I sincerely believe that space, from a military standpoint, is the new high ground. It hasn't arrived, but it will evolve into the new high ground. We've had predominance on land, on the sea, in the air, and now space is next in line. Land was predominant until a few centuries ago. Go back to Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan: it was land capability. The British took maximum advantage of seapower and were predominant for several centuries. I think World War I was an even split between land and sea. In my opinion, World War II could not have been won without air superiority. So airpower today, is the predominant means of applying military force. This was true even in Korea and Vietnam. We all know that from a military standpoint, they were not declared wars. They were a no win situation. They both could have been won with relative ease if we had applied the forces that were available--without need for nuclear weapons."

"Well, space overall has had a tremendous impact on national security. We haven't really gotten to the point yet that we understand just how much of a revolution warfighting is going to be, because a major war is very much different than what we're doing now over there in the Balkans [ Kosovo/Yugoslavia ]. I think that it's hard to compare that situation to one where you really have a war. Now, it's a war in the sense of the implements that are used, but the objectives are different. I think that we're in what we call a revolution in military affairs, and it's playing out now."

"We have to make investments in technologies that provide a positive asymmetry. And only the military, only the national security, warrants the expenditure of huge funds that have pay-offs in the far distant future."

"Space capabilities provide reconnaissance, surveillance, communications, weather and navigation. They greatly augment our warning and intelligence capabilities. If we fail to deter war, space systems will improve our ability to deliver weapons, and to assess damage."

"I think space has tremendous implications on national security policy, on strategy, on force structure, and perhaps even the survivability of the free world. Perhaps I might be accused of overemphasising what I consider to be policy implications on national security matters and specifically on space. But I contend that during the past twenty years, the progress we have made from the military standpoint, has been more limited by our national policy than it has been by availability of technology, or our ability to manage. I think the policy has been very inhibiting not only in space, but has also created what I consider to be today's strategic imbalance between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Just look back 20 years. At that time, we had unquestioned superiority. We were respected by both enemies and friends. We certainly were the leaders of the free world."

"We always talk about technology and what the capabilities are, but very seldom do we talk about the management that is necessary to do the job."

"You have Stealth technology. That's going to last for a long time, but there will be some breakthroughs on that on the other side from a defense standpoint. What they are, I don't know, but now we're talking about defense against ballistic missiles. We thought at one time that here was a weapon that could never be destroyed by the enemy, but I don't have that same feeling now. I think it can be. But I think you can take actions to counter the defenses that might be set up, too. So it's a game of offense, defense, defense, offense, and so forth, so therefore technology continues as long as we have the world that we're living in."

"I am deeply engrossed in man's first concerted attempt to penetrate outer space. The compelling motive for the development of space technology is the requirement for national defense."

"I've always felt that cooperative programs is one way to eliminate antagonisms and have a better understanding. I think Communism, that threat still exists, it exists in China, and we still have problems. But I think we have a period here where we do have such overawing capability that we can afford to try to get closer cooperation where you really have a trust, you know, and that this visibility—you know, if you don't trust somebody, you can't really ever make much headway, but the way you trust people is to get to know them, and the only way you really get to know them is work together. I think this period right now is one when if we can get Russia more Westernized, so to speak, I think would be a very major step forward in ensuring—it reduces the emotion that always goes with wars or getting close to a war situation. Well, let me put it this way. I think cooperation is a good thing, and we ought to try to do it to the maximum extent, but keep our guard up."

"I see a possibility of a Space Force coming into being, from an operational standpoint. I hope it doesn't, because I don't think we need one. But we need an organization that pushes very hard on space and fights the battle here in Washington [D.C.] for budget support and so forth. I think that sometimes I get the feel that there aren't enough people fighting for that piece of the pie, you know, that's necessary. Look how long it took the Army. I was in the Army Air Corps for more years than I think I was in the Air Force, because we didn't become an Air Force until 1947."

"Our development philosophy includes two elements: a philosophy of testing and a dual approach. Stated simply, the test philosophy requires a great deal of component reliability testing at the earliest possible test level in order to insure reliability of components before proceeding to subsystem testing, captive system testing, and on to launch."

"However, before man can be committed to space vehicles, a tremendous amount of human factors research will be necessary."

"When I started flying, when I was at Texas A&M [University], we still had horses pulling French 75s around. Now, mind you, this was 1931 when I graduated there. And look where we are today. So it's an awful lot to swallow, and I think we've done extremely well, but we still have a ways to go."

"From the standpoint of the Air Force as a service, I think we have to elevate the whole future, the future’s part of the—you need a four-star general who's looking in the future, who fights like hell, and that includes space, because that's the area that you're going to need the most advance in, in terms of operational applications. I can't name them all, but we need that four-star guy who sits at that decision table and says, "Damn it to hell, I need this and I'll argue with you until the cows come home." You know, you may not win, but you need that advocacy. I don't see it right now. Let me put it this way. I'd like to see it. There's a lot of it; it seems to be more words, and I'd like to see a little more action with the words. Because they're saying the right words, and they're fighting the battle, but I think they can still do better."

"Consequently, my prognoses … go from those which are reasonably firm to those which might be considered visionary. Fortunately, there is a considerable overlap between the advances in the state of the art which are required for firm and for visionary military needs."

"Schriever’s life spanned the 20th Century and the rise of air and space capability and power. From respectable but modest origins in Germany, he made a new life in the United States. His military career up to 1945, while honourable, would not have suggested the respect he eventually gained, though his technical qualifications might have been thought noteworthy. Rather, his renown arose from its latter half."

"Recognized as an unusually intelligent man, Bennie Schriever had a strong character and a precise, disciplined, but creative mind, determined to master any task he undertook, and willing to make hard decisions. These characteristics were at least in part a result of an extraordinary background."