Henry Cabot Lodge
(1850-1924)
Historian, US. Senator
Birthplace: Boston
The American idea is a free church in a free state, and a free and unsectarian
public school in every ward and every village with its door wide open to children
of all races and every creed.
Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance, this great land of ordered
liberty, for if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin.
Let every man honor and love the land of his birth and the race from which he
springs and keep their memory green. If a man is going to be an American at
all, let him be so without any qualifying adjectives; and if he is going to
be something else, let him drop the word American from his personal description.
Amy Lawrence Lowell
(1874-1925)
Poet, Critic
Birthplace: Brookline
A man must be sacrificed now and again
To provide for the next generation of men.
All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words.
Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his
personality to the world he lives in.
For books are more than books, they are the life
The very heart and core of ages past,
The reason why men lived and worked and died,
The essence and quintessence of their lives.
Happiness, to some, elation;
Is, to others, mere stagnation.
Moon!
Moon!
I am prone before you.
Pity me,
And drench me in loneliness.
My words are little jars
For you to take and put upon a shelf.
Time! Joyless emblem of the greed
Of millions, robber of the best
Which earth can give.
Youth condemns; maturity condones.
Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world
weigh less than a single lovely action.
James Russell Lowell
(1819-91)
Poet, Editor
Birthplace: Cambridge
As life runs on, the road grows strange
With faces new,--and near the end
The milestones into headstones change,
'Neath every one a friend.
They talk about their Pilgrim blood,
Their birthright high and holy!
A mountain-stream that ends in mud
Methinks is melancholy.
There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available
with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.
Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticized for us!
Compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor roof.
Freedom is the only law which genius knows.
Sorrow, the great idealizer.
Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed
Confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued,
And cries reproachful: "Was it then my praise,
And not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth;
I claim of thee the promise of thy youth."
The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts, and
dwell a hermit anywhere.
I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only
effective weapons against the bowie-knife.
It is mediocrity which makes laws and sets mantraps and spring-guns in the
realm of free song, saying thus far shalt thou go and no further.
Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to
bear are those which never come.
There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby
Rudge,
Three-fifths of him genius, and two-fifths sheer
fudge.
Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,
In a way to make people of common sense damn
metres,
Who has written some things quite the best of
their kind,
But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by
the mind.
What men prize most is a privilege, even if it be that of chief mourner at a funeral.
A reading machine, always wound up and going,
He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing.
There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder
at the cruelty of pirates.
Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole being, and the pretense
of it saps the very foundation of character.
If we see light at the end of the tunnel,
It's the light of the oncoming train.
Wendell Phillips
(1811-84)
Abolitionist, Orator, Speechwriter
Birthplace: Boston
We live under a government of men and morning newspapers.
What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.
Sylvia Plath
(1932-63)
Writer, Poet
Birthplace: Boston
A couple of poems I like a year look like a lot when they come out, but in
fact are points of satisfaction separated by large vacancies.
How frail the human heart must be--
a mirrored pool of thought.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just
because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted
each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and,
as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and,
one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.
If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time,
then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually
exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.
Is there no way out of the mind?
Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing, which remark I guess shows
I still don't have a pure
motive (O it's-such-fun-I-just-can't-stop-who-cares-if-it's-published-or-read)
about writing.
Sunday--the doctor's paradise! Doctors at country clubs, doctors at the
seaside, doctors with mistresses, doctors with wives, doctors in church,
doctors in yachts, doctors everywhere resolutely being people, not doctors.
The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way.
Widow. The word consumes itself.
Lucy Stone
(1818-93)
Feminist, Editor, Lecturer
Birthplace: West Brookfield
I know not what you believe of God, but I believe He gave yearnings and
longings to be filled, and that He did not mean all our time should be
devoted to feeding and clothing the body.