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May 19 - May 27, 2025
He is the author of some of the most consequential words in world history: the Preamble of the new United States Constitution.
They are those who know that one becomes great because of who they lift up, not who they put down.
The text of the Preamble imagined America at its finest: Just. Peaceful. Good. And free. With astonishing regularity, Americans have held fast to these ideals, despite the clickbait stories that portend calamity.
When asked if she bore any resentment toward those who wronged her, those who had enslaved her and stolen her money, she simply replied: “My little sufferings was nothing, honey, and the Lord, He gave me strength to bear up under them. I can’t complain.”
There was a map of the United States fashioned from pickles
We must not cease loving and working, we who sorrow, for our Beloveds are pressing on in bright new paths of service, and it will never do for us to be left too far behind.”[18]
The enduring appeal of the song, she said, “is clearly due to the fact that Americans are at heart idealists, with a fundamental faith in human brotherhood.”
Humans aren’t so much afraid of failure as they are of having people watch them fail.
“While a monument of marble would serve to perpetuate her memory, far richer monuments are the churches she has fostered, the schools she has founded, the libraries she has opened, the Sunday schools she has established, and men and women who are better men and women for having come in contact with her influence.”
“We are not for Names, nor Men, nor Titles of Government, nor are we for this Party, nor against the other, because of its Name and Pretence; but we are for Justice and Mercy, and Truth and Peace, and true Freedom, that these may be exalted in our Nation.”
Miss Anna T. Jeanes asked herself what she could do to bring more justice, more mercy, more truth, more peace, and more freedom to the world. Instead of spending $5 million on fancy furnishings and luxury cruises, she decided to give it all away.
Hope, which attorney and author Bryan Stevenson told me is not a feeling but an orientation of the spirit. Hope is a choice that we make each morning, and we do not have the luxury of hopelessness if we want to see progress.
None of us can do it all. But all of us can do something. And it might as well be the next needed thing.
As a child, Booker was not permitted to go to school, but he walked the daughters of the family who owned him to their one-room schoolhouse, feeling that he would give anything to be able to step inside. Instead, he waited by the door, overcome by the notion that going to school would be “about the same as getting into paradise.”
“There is no problem which faces the American people that has more importance than this problem of how to have these two races live congenially and try to uplift each other.”
Booker believed in JR’s philosophy that people appreciate gifts more when they are required to contribute. Much of JR’s philanthropy throughout his lifetime was made in the form of matching grants.
JR may be out here getting maximum credit, but those small gifts mattered. That fifty cents was a sacrifice for some. The widow who pushed five dollars into the collection basket deserves just as much respect as the millionaire.
Japanese Americans living in Hawaii largely escaped incarceration, thanks to some local officials who stood up to U.S. military generals. One was a police captain who said, “I have complete confidence in Hawaii’s Japanese Americans.”
“I tried to depoliticize my cabinet. I didn’t want people in there serving the Republican Party, I wanted people in there serving their country. There is no better servant for America than Norm Mineta,” Bush recalled.[14]
Bush said that “one of the important things about Norm’s experience is that it reminds us that sometimes we lose our soul as a nation. That the notion of all equal under God sometimes disappears. And 9/11 certainly challenged that premise. I didn’t want our country to do to others what had happened to Norm.”[19]
No one ever doubted that Danny Inouye had such integrity at his core that he would meet any obligation thrust upon him with absolute steadiness and objectivity.
it’s not the cynics who emerge the heroes, but the people who spent their lives in service to others. It’s those that fight for justice for someone whose reflection they don’t see in the mirror.
Education wasn’t only liberation, she came to realize; education was self-sufficiency. It was independence. It reduced your vulnerability, because it was much harder to cheat someone who could read and do basic sums. It was connection, allowing you to read and send letters to your loved ones. It was faith, because it let you read your scriptures.
“How can our enemies have a change of heart if we don’t work with them? How can they be convinced that they’re on the wrong path if we cut them out of our lives? How can we possibly hope to influence someone with whom we have no relationship?”
“The hope that change is always possible if we refuse to give up on people!”
“I’m not going to be the teacher. We’re going to learn together. You’re going to teach me something, and maybe there are a few things I might be able to teach you, but I don’t consider myself a teacher, I just feel that I’m here to learn with you. We’ll learn things together.”
None of them could do it all, but they all could do something. These are the small and the mighty. And we can be too.
We should let the complicated truth of their lives wash over us and orient our spirits toward hope.
I’d want you to know that the American experiment is full of ill-equipped people, people with the “wrong” faces and the “wrong” life circumstances, who just went for it. They just tried something no one had done before. They were willing to let other people watch them fail. They just did the next right thing.
I’d want you to know that there will come a moment in your life, a moment when you will be asked to choose: will I retreat, or will I move forward with courage? You’ll realize, just like the people in the pages of this book, that every experience you’ve had, every setback and heartbreak, every triumph and joy, will all be used. The character that you’ve been cultivating will be called upon, and when that moment comes, whenever it is, I hope you’ll rise to it.
