Quotations by
Massachusetts Writers
PART ONE
Compiled and Edited
by Carol Dingle
Books by Carol Dingle
Abigail Smith Adams
(1744-1818)
First Lady, Letter Writer
Birthplace: Weymouth
How often are the laurels worn by those who have had no share in earning them!
Power, whether vested in many or a few, is ever grasping, and like the grave, cries, "Give, give!"
Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.
Henry B. Adams
(1838-1918)
Historian
Birthplace: Boston
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
He saw Mr. Lincoln but once; at the melancholy function called an Inaugural Ball. Of course he looked anxiously for a sign of character. He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism, but rather the same painful sense of becoming educated and of needing education that tormented a private secretary, above all a lack of apparent force. Any private secretary in the least fit for his business would have thought, as Adams did, that no man living needed so much education as the new President but that all the education he could get would not be enough.
Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
A friend in power is a friend lost.
Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.
American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.
John Adams
(1735-1826)
U.S. President, Writer
Birthplace: Quincy
The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illustrations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore.
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations. . . . This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.
Samuel Adams
(1722-1803)
Speech Writer, Massachusetts Governor
Birthplace: Boston
Freedom of thought and the right to private judgment, in matters of conscience, driven from every corner of the earth, direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum. Let us cherish the noble guests, and shelter them under the wings of universal toleration.
Susan B. Anthony
(1820-1906)
Suffragette, Editor, Writer
Birthplace: Adams
It's too bad that our bodies wear out while our interests are just as strong as ever.
Suffrage is the pivotal right.
The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball--the further I am rolled the more I gain.
The true Republic: men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.
William Cullen Bryant
(1794-1878)
Poet, Editor
Birthplace: Cummington
Difficulty, my brethren, is the nurse of greatness--a harsh nurse, who roughly rocks her foster-children into strength and athletic proportion.
All that tread,
The globe are but a handful to the tribes,
That slumber in its bosom.
Emily Dickinson
(1830-1886)
Poet
Birthplace: Amherst
A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King.
A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
After great pain, a formal feeling comes.
Death is a Dialogue between,
The Spirit and the Dust.
Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate.
"Hope" is the thing with feathers--
That perches in the soul--
And sings the tunes without the words--
And never stops--at all--.
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Into his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
The distant strains of triumph
Break agonized and clear.
Truth is such a rare thing, it is delightful to tell it.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
(1868-1963)
Civil-rights Leader, Author
Birthplace: Great Barrington
The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the shadowy and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.
Is a civilization naturally backward because it is different? Outside of cannibalism, which can be matched in this country, at least, by lynching, there is no vice and no degradation in native African customs which can begin to touch the horrors thrust upon them by white masters. Drunkenness, terrible diseases, immorality, all these things have been gifts of European civilization.
An American, a Negro . . . two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
We black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
The music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.
There are certain books in the world which every searcher for truth must know: the Bible, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Origin of Species, and Karl Marx's Capital.
Histories of the world omitted China; if a Chinaman invented compass or movable type or gunpowder we promptly "forgot it" and named their European inventors. In short, we regarded China as a sort of different and quite inconsequential planet.
No people can more exactly interpret the inmost meaning of the present situation in Ireland than the American Negro. The scheme is simple. You knock a man down and then have him arrested for assault. You kill a man and then hang the corpse.
If there is anybody in this land who thoroughly believes that the meek shall inherit the earth they have not often let their presence be known.
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
Today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of the majority of their fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line--the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War.
Books by Carol Dingle
Quotations by Massachusetts Writers
Part One
Quotations by Massachusetts Writers
Part Two
Quotations by Massachusetts Writers
Part Three
Quotations by Massachusetts Writers
Part Four
Quotations by Massachusetts Writers
Part Five
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