Born on June 22 — Quotes

(About the Council of Trent) Roman Catholic Church’s ability to purify itself [with the] guidance of the Holy Spirit. When all the decrees (of the Council) were implemented, order was restored to the Church.

When the government grants preferences on the basis of race, it teaches the people that discrimination is acceptable. Our laws must reflect the principle that the government discrimination on the basis of race or sex is not to be tolerated. Americans look to our government to exemplify what is right and just. So long as the federal government recognizes people as unequal under the law, we cannot achieve the fundamental truth the American people already know: we are all entitled to equal protection of the law. This legislation will ensure that the federal government leads the way in respecting this basic American principle.

Force a hand, and it will fight you. But convince and mind to think as you want it to think, an you have an ally

. . . little in the world is pretty, except the world itself.

If you talk to quite a lot of people around the world, whether it’s in an camp or in an emergency disaster they often say the UK is a UN Security Council member, a leading member of the European Union, a leading member of , you can make a massive difference and they want us to act.

There are, in fact, certain roads that one may follow. Simplification of life is one of them.

The artist knows he must be alone to create; the writer, to work out his thoughts; the musician, to compose; the saint, to pray. But women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves: that firm strand which will be the indispensable center of a whole web of human relationships. She must find that inner stillness which Charles Morgan describes as 'the stilling of the soul within the activities of the mind and body so that it might be still as the axis of a revolving wheel is still.'
This beautiful image is to my mind the one that women could hold before their eyes. This is an end toward which we could strive — to be the still axis within the revolving wheel of relationships, obligations, and activities. Solitude alone is not the answer to this; it is only a step toward it, a mechanical aid, like the 'room of one's own' demanded for women, before they could make their place in the world. The problem is not entirely in finding a room of one's own, the time alone, difficult and necessary as that is. The problem is more how to still the soul in the midst of its activities. In fact, the problem is how to feed the soul.

[Zurich,] where the students, even the most capable among them, ... are accustomed to get everything spoon-fed.

"Founded by President Truman at 12:01 A.M. on November 4, 1952, the NSA had been the most clandestine intelligence agency in the world for almost fifty years. The NSA's seven-page inception doctrine laid out a very concise agenda: to protect U.S. government communications and to intercept the communications of foreign powers.
"The roof of the NSA's main operations building was littered with over five hundred antennas, including two large radomes that looked like enormous golf balls. The building itself was mammoth — over two million square feet, twice the size of CIA headquarters. Inside were eight million feet of telephone wire and eighty thousand square feet of permanently sealed windows.

I never really grew up being political or Labour. It kind of came at Cambridge where it was just a realisation that where you were born mattered. That how you spoke mattered... who you knew mattered. I didn’t really speak right or knew the right people. I spent the summers packing toothpaste at a factory working where my dad worked and everyone else had gone on a gap year! To be honest my experience at Cambridge really knocked me for about five years.

To speculate without facts is to attempt to enter a house of which one has not the key, by wandering aimlessly round and round, searching the walls and now and then peeping through the windows. Facts are the key.

My favorite collection of slave narratives was a nineteen-volume set called The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. It was assembled in the 1930s by the Writer's Project [of the Works Progress Administration], and these people interviewed the slaves who were left, the very last ones. It was depressing reading not only because bad things happened to slaves, but because slavery could become so pedestrian when you read enough of it, so ordinary. I remember someone telling me that they'd read the Harriet Jacobs narrative, and they said it was mild compared to other slave narratives. And, horribly enough, it was, but that doesn't make her any less a slave. It wasn't something you'd want to undergo. (2003)

We were snatched away and given alone into the hands of people who believed that it was their duty to break us and remake us in the Christian American image. And, of course, breaking people is much easier than putting them together again.
So much agony caused, so much evil done in God’s name.

it is said that in death, all things become clear

on tolerance of gays: "You always have to remember - no matter what you're told - that God loves all the flowers, even the wild ones that grow on the side of the highway."