Daniel Flanagan > Daniel's Quotes

“Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said: 'We don't serve colored people here.' "I said: 'that's all right, I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.”
― Dick Gregory

“Makes you wonder. When I left St. Louis, I was making five dollars a night. Now I'm getting $5,000 a week — for saying the same things out loud I used to say under my breath.”
― Dick Gregory, From the Back of the Bus

“When you have a good mother and no father, God kind of sits in. It’s not good enough, but it helps. But I got tired of hearing Momma say, God, fix it so I can pay the rent; God, fix it so the lights will be turned on; God, fix it so the pot is full. I kind of felt it really wasn’t His job.”
― Dick Gregory, Nigger: An Autobiography

“Last time I was down South, I walked into this restaurant. This white waitress came up to me and said, 'We don't serve colored people here.' I said, 'That's all right, I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.' About that time, these three cousins came in. You know the ones I mean, Ku, Klux and Klan. They said, 'Boy, we're givin' you fair warnin. Anything you do to that chicken, we're gonna do to you.'

"So I put down my knife and fork, picked up that chicken, and kissed it.”
― Dick Gregory, Nigger

“Never measure the height of a mountain, until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

“Why must we fight for the right to live, over and over, each time the sun rises?”
― Leon Uris, Exodus

“If you're lucky enough to fall in love, that's one thing. Otherwise all that was ever truly beautiful to me was boyhood. It's the meal we sup on for the rest of our lives. Love puts the icing on life. But if you don't find it...you must call on your childhood memories over and over till you do.”
― Leon Uris, Trinity

“Talent isn't enough. You need motivation-and persistence, too: what Steinbeck called a blend of faith and arrogance. When you're young, plain old poverty can be enough, along with an insatiable hunger for recognition. You have to have that feeling of "I'll show them." If you don't have it, don't become a writer”
― Leon Uris

“Life hinges on many factors we cannot control. Two of the most important factors, we can control. We can manage our relationships-and what is life but a series of relationships?-and we can correct our mistakes, here on earth within our life span.”
― Leon Uris, Redemption

“Value time!!! It's only when we lack time for ourselves that we start valuing it.”
― Leon Uris

“Look at me, man, look at me and tell me I don't know what I'm about. I'm Conor Larkin. I'm an Irishman and I've had enough.”
― Leon Uris, Trinity

“To be homeward bound, no matter what tragic memories you have harbored, is unlike any voyage a man can ever make.”
― Leon Uris, Redemption

“Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.”
― Bernard Malamud

“The library never closed.”
― Harrison E. Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad

“The librarians sent books to the hospitals. They answered a thousand questions put to them by the military and civil authorities: How could Leningrad make matches? How could flint and steel lighters be manufactured? What materials were needed for candles? Was there any way of making yeast, edible wood, artificial vitamins? How do you make soap? The librarians found recipes for candles in old works of the eighteenth century.”
― Harrison E. Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad

“DSM-5 pathologized those who hold on to their stuff for too long, who clutter their homes too much, who do not clean that often, and who harbor too many things. The manual labeled these activities “hoarding disorder” (HD, as it is sometimes called) and gave them an International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9-CM, to be precise) code of 300.3. Legitimized as a psychiatric disease and categorized under Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders, this diagnosis rendered unsound certain relations to certain personal property. Hoarding, it seems, had arrived.”
― Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture

“Prior to the HD diagnosis, instances of hoarding have also been referred to as Collyer Brothers syndrome, chronic disorganization, pack rat syndrome, messy house syndrome, pathological collecting, clutter addiction, Diogenes syndrome, squalor syndrome, senile recluse syndrome, and syllogomania (stockpiling rubbish). Some of these terms remain in use.”
― Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture

“the acquisition of, and failure to discard, possessions which appear to be useless or of limited value.”4”
― Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture

“Intrigued by how people became intrigued by this topic, The Hoarders is a book about how some people’s things unsettle some accepted conceptions of material culture, why documentaries, articles, and websites dedicate themselves to eradicating this activity.”
― Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture

“Over the seven years that I chipped away at this topic, I found hoarding to be a historically intricate lattice of worry about the unsuitable roles that household furnishings, mass-produced whatnots, curiosa, keepsakes, and clutter play in our daily lives. The majority of these apprehensions over the stuff of normal life originated in the twentieth century, and they are not so far removed from other cultural anxieties. As much as a hoard might be about depression and impulsivity and loss and misplaced stacks of paper, it is also about fears of working-class blacks in 1930s Harlem, post-1960s New Christian Right literatures, and emerging models of appropriate aging in the 1940s and 1950s. Though neglected in the current rhetoric of chronic savers, these unlikely sources each fed into definitions of HD.”
― Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture

“What counts as too much stuff? When do overflowing cardboard boxes spill into insanity? What is useless trash and what is valuable treasure?”
― Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture

“Since the late 1990s, scholars in disciplines as diverse as literary studies, anthropology, sociology, museum studies, and marketing have raised collective eyebrows at hoarding’s pathologization. Together they concentrate on the diagnostic politics of material deviance, the social constructions of an aberrant relationship with your things. One finds extreme accumulation to be “a psychiatric concern with deviance in terms of material culture.”
― Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture

“Half a decade after Frost and Gross’s “The Hoarding of Possessions,” an article in Comprehensive Psychiatry found that “the disorder belongs to a similar category of social deviance as homelessness, which does not necessarily represent mental illness.”9 In their efforts to puzzle out the phenomenon, the authors approached hoarding as less of a mental illness located in the brain and more of a socialized phenomenon located in the world-at-large—the inverse of its current reception.”
― Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture

“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley

“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not. It is the first lesson that ought to be learned and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley, Collected Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley

“There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life.”
― T.H. Huxley

“I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!”
― Rudyard Kipling, If: A Father's Advice to His Son

“Class never runs scared.
It is sure-footed and confident.
It can handle anything that comes along.
Class has a sense of humor.
It knows a good laugh is the best lubricant for oiling the machinery of human relations.

Class never makes excuses.
It takes its lumps and learns from past mistakes.
Class knows that good manners are nothing more than a series of small, inconsequential sacrifices.

Class bespeaks an aristocracy that has nothing to do with ancestors or money.
Some wealthy “blue bloods” have no class, while individuals who are struggling to make ends meet are loaded with it.

Class is real.
It can’t be faked.

Class never tried to build itself by tearing others down.
Class is already up and need not strive to look better by making others look worse.

Class can “walk with kings and keep it’s virtue and talk with crowds and keep the common touch.” Everyone is comfortable with the person who has class because that person is comfortable with himself.

If you have class, you’ve got it made.

If you don’t have class, no matter what else you have, it doesn’t make any difference.”
― Ann Landers

“JUST FOR TODAY, I will live through this day only. I will not brood about yesterday or obsess about tomorrow. I will not set far-reaching goals or try to overcome all of my problems at once.

I know that I can do something for 24 hours that would overwhelm me if I had to keep it up for a lifetime.

JUST FOR TODAY, I will be happy. I will not dwell on thoughts that depress me. If my mind fills with clouds, I will chase them away and fill it with sunshine.

JUST FOR TODAY, I will accept what is. I will face reality. I will correct those things that I can correct and accept those I cannot.

JUST FOR TODAY, I will improve my mind. I will read something that requires effort, thought and concentration. I will not be a mental loafer.

JUST FOR TODAY, I will make a conscious effort to be agreeable. I will be kind and courteous to those who cross my path, and I'll not speak ill of others. I will improve my appearance, speak softly, and not interrupt when someone else is talking. Just for today, I will refrain from improving anybody but myself.

JUST FOR TODAY, I will do something positive to improve my health. If I'm a smoker, I'll quit. If I'm overweight, I will eat healthfully -- if only for today. And not only that, I will get off the couch and take a brisk walk, even if it's only around the block.

JUST FOR TODAY, I will gather the courage to do what is right and take the responsibility for my own actions.”
― Abigail Van Buren