Holly

“The American dream of the Horatio Alger success story is completely meaningless to the Indian. To him it is simply an indication of a struggle for material values. what we have failed to take to him is our spiritual values. We must show by our behavior that we believe in equality and in justice and that our religion teaches faith and love and charity to our fellow men. Here is where each of us has a job to do that must be done at home, because we can lose the battle on the soil of the United States just as surely as we can lose it in any one of the other countries in the world.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt

“All human beings have failings, all human beings have needs and temptations and stresses. Men and women who live together through long years get to know one another's failings; but they also come to know what is worthy of respect and admiration in those they live with and in themselves. If at the end one can say, "This man used to the limit the powers that God granted him; he was worthy of love and respect and of the sacrifices of many people, made in order that he might achieve what he deemed to be his task," then that life has been lived well and there are no regrets.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt

“I’m a man of hate. But I didn’t feel much hatred; I had called other people hysterical, but my own words were overcharged. I could detect their insincerity. What I chiefly felt was less hate than fear. For if this God exists, I thought, and if even you—with your lusts and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell—can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all: if you are a saint, it’s not so difficult to be a saint. It’s something He can demand of any of us, leap.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“I know that history is supposed to be written by the winners, but it seems to me that is not a good approach. Take the Bible. It’s the first history, but it’s actually told by the losers, since in the end the Israelites are expelled from their own land and they have to go to Babylon, as in, by the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept (psalm whatever), and I think it’s because they’re so weepy that the writing is so good. Take the story of David. The way poor King Saul gets written about, it’s like he’s an idiot and a maniac, because you think, well, it was written by David’s guys. But by the end, David looks more like the idiot and maniac, even though he’s supposed to be the hero. Point: there comes a time in everyone’s life when only the truth will do, and you have to look reality square in the eyes. This is one of those times. Also, when you look into the past, you see the future. This is physics.”
― Michael Lavigne, The Wanting