Miss Marple was an attractive old lady, tall and thin, with pink cheeks and blue eyes, and a gentle, rather fussy manner. Her blue eyes often had a little twinkle in them.
“children equally well for success in all other cultures. If we want to improve outcomes for immigrants and the poor in a free-market, service-oriented capitalist economy such as ours, Wax and Alexander argued, it would be useful to talk about bourgeois culture.”
― The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
― The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“The Weaver”
“My life is but a weaving
Between my God and me.
I cannot choose the colors
He weaveth steadily.
Oft’ times He weaveth sorrow;
And I in foolish pride
Forget He sees the upper
And I the underside.
Not ’til the loom is silent
And the shuttles cease to fly
Will God unroll the canvas
And reveal the reason why.
The dark threads are as needful
In the weaver’s skillful hand
As the threads of gold and silver
In the pattern He has planned
He knows, He loves, He cares;
Nothing this truth can dim.
He gives the very best to those
Who leave the choice to Him.”
―
“My life is but a weaving
Between my God and me.
I cannot choose the colors
He weaveth steadily.
Oft’ times He weaveth sorrow;
And I in foolish pride
Forget He sees the upper
And I the underside.
Not ’til the loom is silent
And the shuttles cease to fly
Will God unroll the canvas
And reveal the reason why.
The dark threads are as needful
In the weaver’s skillful hand
As the threads of gold and silver
In the pattern He has planned
He knows, He loves, He cares;
Nothing this truth can dim.
He gives the very best to those
Who leave the choice to Him.”
―
“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
―
―
“Lee’s reference to Missouri as a “country” hints at another widely shared conception of his time. The United States was not yet a solidified nation. It lacked a truly national identity. Other than through its post offices, the federal government had little presence in the lives of most Americans. Rather, the state evoked a person’s primary loyalty. One was a Virginian or a Georgian or a Minnesotan before one was an American. Indeed, a common name for the country was plural—these United States—rather than singular—the United States. It took a civil war to forge the thirty-two states into one nation. As a former Union general reminisced, “We must emphasize this one statement which was ever on the lips of many good men in 1860 and ’61, to wit: ‘My first allegiance is due to my State!’” Only after the country added the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 did the Constitution affirm the preeminence of national over state citizenship.27”
― The Religious Life of Robert E. Lee (Library of Religious Biography
― The Religious Life of Robert E. Lee (Library of Religious Biography
“My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved that ignorance, idleness, and vice are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which in its original might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It doth not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required towards the procurement of any one station among you; much less that men are ennobled on account of their virtue, that priests are advanced for their piety or learning, soldiers for their conduct or valor, judges for their integrity, senators for the love of their country, or counsellors for their wisdom. As for yourself, continued the king, who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
― Gulliver's Travels
― Gulliver's Travels
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