Natashia Waitkus

“When the fighter steps into the ring, she knows deep in her heart when she looks out into the crowd that there are people who wish to see her fall. Win or loose the fighter...will always get back up again.”
― Judy Prescott Marshall, Be Strong Enough

“Much of [John Hanning] Speke's Journal of the Discovery of the Source of Nile is devoted to descriptions of the physical and moral ugliness of Africa's "primitive races," in whose condition he found "a strikingly existing proof of the Holy Scriptures." For his text, Speke took the story in Genesis 9, which tells how Noah, when he was just six hundred years old and had safely skippered his ark over the flood to dry land, got drunk and passed out naked in his tent. On emerging from his oblivion, Noah learned that his youngest son, Ham, had seen him naked; that Ham had told his brothers, Shem and Japheth, of the spectacle; and that Shem and Japheth had, with their backs chastely turned, covered the old man with a garment. Noah responded by cursing the progeny of Ham's son, Canaan, saying, "A slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers." Amid the perplexities of Genesis, this is one of the most enigmatic stories, and it has been subjected to many bewildering interpretations--most notably that Ham was the original black man. To the gentry of the American South, the weird tale of Noah's curse justified slavery, and to Spake and his colonial contemporaries it spelled the history of Africa's peoples. On "contemplating these sons of Noah," he marveled that "as they were then, so they appear to be now.”
― Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

“Sadly, in most cases, the Church has not grown into her inheritance. We are like the child who owns the entire estate but still takes orders and direction from the help.”
― Tolulope Oyewole, The Spirit of Prayer: The Believer's Authority on the Earth

“I was thinking of that old expression: Those who fail to repeat history are doomed to learn it.”
― Steve Bates, Back To You