I feel myself the inheritor of a great background of people. Just who, precisely, they were, I have never known. I might be part Negro, might be part… - James A. Michener

the burden of the thinking man is to calculate the probable good against the possible bad and to decide whether the change will be worth the risk.

I live for the few minutes I can talk with a sensible human being, but every time I do, I feel worse than before.

John Whipple did not allow his anger at such treatment to obscure his judgment. In years of trading around the Pacific he had often met obstinate men and the cruel situations which they produce, and he had learned that in such confrontations his only chance of winning lay in doing exactly what in conscience ought to be done. It was by reliance upon this conviction that he had quietly made his way in such disparate jungles as Valparaiso, Batavia, Singapore and Honolulu.