A Barak to America!

(barak, in the Swahili --Kiswahili-- language means blessing)

It would be difficult for an African-American to be elected president of this country. However, it is not difficult for an extraordinary individual who happens to be African-American to be elected president.

Cornell Belcher.
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Life Phylosophy: Sow what you Reap.

Only men who make Zeno and Pythagoras and Democritus and the other high priests of liberal studies their daily family, who cultivate Aristotle and Theophrastus, can properly said to be engaged in the duties of life... It is a common saying that a man's parents are not of his own choosing but alloted to them by chance. But we can choose our own genealogy... Here are families with noble endowments: choose whichever you wish to belong to. Your adoption will give you not only the name but actually the property, and this you need not guard in a mean or niggardly spirit: the more people you share it with, the greater it will become. These will open the path to eternity for you and will raise you to a height from which none can be cast down. This is the sole means of prolonging your mortality, or rather, of transforming it into immortality.

Seneca.
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Obituarium: Farewell, my man!

...it's been a hell of a ride.

Paul Newman
Jan. 26, 1925 - Sep. 26, 2008
---------------------------------- requiescat in pace, Paul. ----------

My Favorite Words 21: That's History!

There is more truth in the silliest romance than in the most elevated history.

Charles Palliser
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History never repeats itself, man always does.

Voltaire
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History, n. An account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

Ambroise Bierce
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History is a bucket of ashes.

Carl Sandburg
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The sum total of history is all the things they aren't telling us.

Don DeLillo
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History would be a wonderful thing--if it were only true.

Leo Tolstoy
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History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken.

James Joyce
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History repeats itself; that's one of the things that's wrong with history.

Clarence Darrow
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On the whole, history tends to be rather poor fiction--except at its best.

Gore Vidal
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We learn from history that we do not learn from History.

Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel
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History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Napoleon Bonaparte
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History shall not dare say anything false

Cicero
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History is bunk.

Henry Ford
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History is different from personal retrospection. The latter is individual, subjective, private, in many ways untestable: Its realm is memory. History, on the other hand, is social. It is public. Through debate, appeals to data, judgments about coherence and plausibility, history is in some sense testable. It is in its obligations to both evidence and testability that history as a discipline is scientific. Its relation to memory is thus different from that which memory shares with personal recollection, because history's realm is shared, public knowledge.

Paula Frediksen
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In history nothing happens too early or too late, nothing that has happened could have not, and nothing that has not happened could have been made happen. History only is, and it is so at its own time which is always the right one.

Hugo Pezzini
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If autocrats always acted wisely they would not furnish history with moral lessons.

Barbara Tuchman
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People think of history in the long term, but history, in fact, is a very sudden thing.

Philip Roth
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My Favorite Words 20: A Poet on The Poet's Poems

Homer´s poems were the elements of that social system which is the column upon which all succeeding civilization has reposed.

Percy Shelley
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My Favorite Words 19: On Text

The concept of a definitive text belongs to either religion or weariness.

Jorge Luis Borges
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Corageous Disagreement

No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it might lead.

John Stuart Mill

* * * *

Hippias: "I cannot agree with you."

Socrates: "Nor can I agree with myself, Hippias, and yet that seems to be the conclusion which, as far as we can see at present, must follow from our argument."

There speaks a man not afraid of allowing his thoughts absolute freedom to explore.

Alberto Manguel
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My Favorite Words 18: Mohawk Grill's Wisdom

"You're smarter than your old man," he said. " 'Course, you're younger too. You got all your dumb years ahead of you."

Richard Russo
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The Future:

We have: . . . the most diverse coalition of Americans we’ve seen in a long, long time. They are young and old; rich and poor. They are black and white; Latino and Asian. They are Democrats from Des Moines and Independents from Concord; Republicans from rural Nevada and young people across this country who've never had a reason to participate until now. . . . We are hungry for change, and we are ready to believe again.

Hope is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.

Yes we can change.
Yes we can heal this nation.
Yes we can seize our future.
Yes we can.

Barak Obama.
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