James > James 's Quotes

“What was it about fathers, Clay wondered, that compelled so many of them to test their children? To insist that a daughter, or a son, prove themselves worthy of a love their mother offered without condition?”
― Nicholas Eames, Kings of the Wyld

“and so he gave her his own truth in return. It was strange the way that people venerated truth. Everyone seemed to strive for it, as though it were some unalloyed good, a perfect gem of glittering rectitude. Women and men might disagree about its definition, but priests and prostitutes, mothers and monks all mouthed the word with respect, even reverence. No one seemed to realize how stooped the truth could be, how twisted and how ugly.”
― Brian Staveley, The Last Mortal Bond

“Sorlost. I did not wonder at the blank broken faces that came to me, laid themselves before my knife. I see it now in Tyrenae, and I begin to understand it. Blind children and madmen go begging in the streets here. The wealthy look at them and turn away and do not care.”
― Anna Smith Spark, The Tower of Living and Dying

“mountains, who can say what is out there, to take away our memories of pain? To give us new things. New life. The Emnelenethkyr, they are called. Which means, in Itheralik, the Empty Peaks. For we who are burdened by our pasts, surely a good name?”
― Anna Smith Spark, The Tower of Living and Dying

“kill you. But that … The god thing dived. Blazing golden. Pure pure perfect perfect life and hope. Marith killed it down with one blow.”
― Anna Smith Spark, The Tower of Living and Dying

“who’s-the-biggest-cunt contest, wouldn’t you say?” Shivers slowly nodded. “A real arsehole’s parade.” “But then the arseholes tend to win, don’t they?”
― Joe Abercrombie, A Little Hatred

“They knew that to put God in the constitution was to put man out. They knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought. They knew the terrible history of the church too well to place in her keeping, or in the keeping of her God, the sacred rights of man. They intended that all should have the right to worship, or not to worship; that our laws should make no distinction on account of creed. They intended to found and frame a government for man, and for man alone. They wished to preserve the individuality and liberty of all, to prevent the few from governing the many, and the many from persecuting and destroying the few.41”
― Andrew L Seidel, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

“Some Christian lawyers—some eminent and stupid judges— have said and still say, that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of all law. Nothing could be more absurd…all that man has accomplished for the benefit of man since the close of the Dark Ages—has been done in spite of the Old Testament.” — Robert G. Ingersoll, About the Holy Bible: A Lecture, 18941”
― Andrew L Seidel, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

“perfectly: “And I want to warn everyone in the press and all the voters out there: if you demand expressions of religious faith from politicians, you are just begging to be lied to…. And it will be the easiest lie they ever had to tell to get your votes.”14 Voters are not just asking to be lied to—they are demanding it. This is a voter-imposed religious test, an auto-da-fé for public office. Religious voters are willingly handing over the tools of their own manipulation, and they may come to regret it. Typically, the majority religion is content to let itself be corrupted by politics, so long as it is in the majority. But as soon as it becomes a minority it seeks to buttress the wall of separation. Christianity is declining in this country, so it will be interesting to see whether American Christians come to realize the value of state-church separation as they lose their majority.”
― Andrew L Seidel, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

“items. While Monster Hunter included a single-player mode, its appeal was its online play. The five-man crew who had worked with Capcom thought some the game's networking code looked awfully familiar. "Same network infrastructure, same style of gameplay [as the PS2 Diablo title]," Joe Morrissey said. [Return to Chapter]”
― David L. Craddock, Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II - Heaven, Hell, and Secret Cow Levels

“Mark Twain was neither an anarchist nor a radical. By 1900, at sixty-five, he was a world-acclaimed writer of funny-serious-American-to-the-bone stories. He watched the United States and other Western countries go about the world and wrote in the New York Herald as the century began: “I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiao-Chou, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

“For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.”
― Ulysses S. Grant, The Memoirs of General Ulysses S. Grant, Part 1.

“Yankee” in all three senses of the word: Americans; residents of northern states in particular; and New Englanders especially. Of 143 important inventions patented in the United States from 1790 to 1860, 93 percent came out of the free states and nearly half from New England alone—”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“all issues but one, antebellum southerners stood for state’s rights and a weak federal government. The exception was the fugitive slave law of 1850, which gave the national government more power than any other law yet passed by Congress. This irony resulted from the Supreme Court’s decision in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842). In the typical oblique”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“There are those at both ends of the social scale who would have us change direction!” Curnsbick was shouting. “Those who would not only try to dam the river of progress but have it flow uphill! Who would break, burn and murder in the name of dragging us back into a glorious past that never truly was. A place of ignorance, superstition, squalor and fear. A place of darkness! But there will be no going”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Trouble with Peace

“Northmen kept him close. He liked to think he was looked on as some noble mixture of bodyguard, advisor and mentor. In truth, the role probably tended more towards jester. But what can you do but play the role you’re given?”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Trouble with Peace

“Pieces of a living city cannot be auctioned off without taking into consideration that there are indigenous traditions, even if they seem odd to foreigners … . But these are our traditions and our city. For a long time we lived under the dictatorship of the Communists, but now we have found out that life under the dictatorship of business people is no better. They couldn’t care less about what country they are in. —Grigory Gorin, Russian writer, 19931”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“You are wrong, both of you,’ Karsa said. ‘To be a god is to know the burden of believers. Did you protect? You did not. Did you offer comfort, solace? Were you possessed of compassion? Even pity? To the Teblor, T’lan Imass, you were slave-masters, eager and hungry, making harsh demands, and expecting cruel sacrifices—all to feed your own desires. You were the Teblor’s unseen chains.’ His eyes settled on ’Siballe. ‘And you, woman, ’Siballe the Unfound, you were the taker of children.”
― Steven Erikson, House of Chains

“Unfortunately, many give lip service to the concepts of diversity and inclusion but confuse the two and fail to implement them effectively. These are two different but related ideas. Diversity is the recognition that we are unique in our combination of physical attributes and our life experiences. Each of these differences matters because they help provide unique perspectives for problem-solving. Diverse perspectives, versus a homogeneous group, will bring forward a broader range of potential solutions and more “out of the box” thinking. Inclusion is proactively bringing a diverse population together—whether a community or business organization—and enabling these differences to coalesce in a positive way. Making a diverse group feel welcome and valued is the essence of inclusion.”
― Reggie Fils-Aimé, Disrupting the Game: From the Bronx to the Top of Nintendo

“The former Sabbath school leader among slaves seized upon his liberty and his new calling like a miner finding gold. At least by 1840, and perhaps as early as 1839, he registered to vote by paying his $1.50 poll tax. In Massachusetts in the late 1830s, men, including blacks, registered to vote by paying this small annual tax. In the sweep of America’s racist and discriminatory history with voting rights, it is remarkable that the most famous black man of the nineteenth century, shortly after escaping from slavery, while living with a new, assumed name, with no other identification and certainly no proof of birth in the United States, and while still “illegal” as a fugitive from Southern justice and the property rights of his owner, could instantly become a voter by paying $1.50 and having his name placed on the tax rolls.14 Approximately”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“At that first meeting in Springfield, Brown and Douglass conversed long into the night at a table in candlelight. Brown unfolded a large map of the United States and pointed to the Alleghenies. “These mountains,” Douglass recalled Brown asserting, “are the basis of my plan. God has given the strength of the hills to freedom; they were placed here for the emancipation of the Negro race.” For many years to come, decoding just what the elements of Brown’s “plan” were became a beguiling preoccupation”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“And in 1854, after Brown had moved to Akron, Ohio, he wrote an extraordinary epistle to Douglass in the voice of an Old Testament prophet chastising the evils of American leaders and their poisoned institutions. It was as though Brown wanted to join Douglass in condemning the Slave Power, but to do so with even more biblical rage. Worried about the fate of the American republic, Brown had no doubt about what stood in its path: the proslavery “extreme wickedness” of political and religious leadership at all levels, even the “marshals, sheriffs, constables and policemen.”6 We do not have Douglass’s direct response to this letter, but what he read in Brown’s condemnations of American perfidy was a denunciation, even beyond higher-law doctrine, that left only violence as an option. American leadership was taking the country into “anarchy in all its horrid forms,” Brown argued. Therefore, he had a ready answer”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“millennialist thought was a cluster of religious and secular ideas forged into a kind of national creed. In its more hopeful mode, it held that Christ would have a Second Coming in the “new Israel” of America, or at least that the country possessed a mission as a “redeemer nation” destined to perform a special role in history. Millennialism was an outlook on history, a disposition about”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“pay for Douglas paper.” In a remarkable letter to his eldest son, John Jr., in 1853, Brown expressed “pain and sorrow” at the young man’s loss of faith. Then John Sr. drew upon passages from the first five books of the Old Testament to warn his erring son with the words of Moses, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, and Samuel not to fall into the “same disposition in Israel to backslide.” Brown’s sons were devoted abolitionists; they followed their father for their own reasons, perhaps least of all because he had used Joshua to instruct them. John Jr. later experienced a mental breakdown in Kansas in 1856, captured, beaten, and imprisoned after fighting as a guerrilla warrior at his father’s side. Another son, Frederick, was killed in the Kansas war. John Brown’s personal holy war on slavery became an extended family disaster.10”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Southern resistance, had made the contest an “Abolition war.” Northern Democrats and white Southerners denounced “abolition war” as the inhumane path to sanguinary race war. Both sides felt something deeply sacred at stake, and no one more than Douglass. Yes, he acknowledged, the war was for Union and for the Constitution, but it must be a wholly new Union, and a new Constitution to replace the old one now torn and tattered. The country must not “put old wine in new bottles,” he argued, nor make “new cloth into old garments.” Douglass warned that liberal and open-minded people such as abolitionists themselves were rarely as unified as the forces of reaction and darkness. But in this historic moment, they had to be. “That old union,” he shouted, “whose canonized bones we saw hearsed in death and inurned under the frowning battlements of Sumter, we shall never see again while the world standeth.” Stop fighting for a “dead past,” Douglass urged his auditors, and instead fight “for the living present.”9 Here flowed a set of rebirth metaphors flaming, bloody, and much bolder than the succinct, if beautiful, suggestion in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. “Mission of the War” stood as Douglass’s radical”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“He believed the establishment of a new order in the South, especially the protection of the freedmen’s rights, had to be done by activist, interventionist federal power. Douglass advocated what he called “something like a despotic central government” to vanquish, as much as possible, the tradition of states’ rights. In a statement that went to the heart of the eternal American dilemma with federalism, the new doctrine of “human rights,” he maintained, could not prevail “while there remains such an idea as the right of each state to control its own local affairs.”13 This old radical”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“in successive elections, Douglass made the memory of emancipation his major preoccupation, pushing his readers to never forget what the war had been about. In the fall of 1870 he warned that Americans were by habit “destitute of political memory.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“than one hundred black Louisianans exercising political liberty. The duty of protecting citizens’ equal rights, the Court said, “rests alone with the States.” Such judicial conservatism and embrace of states’ rights doctrine, practiced by the justices, all of whom had been appointed by Republican presidents Lincoln and Grant, left a resounding imprint on what remained of Reconstruction.55 In the disputed election of 1876, Tilden in all likelihood won the popular vote by more than two hundred thousand votes and 3 percent, but did not become president. When election returns poured in, it appeared that Hayes had failed, but the three “unredeemed” Southern states of Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina were fiercely and violently contested. With 185 electoral votes needed for victory, without the three disputed states Tilden had 184 and Hayes 166. Both sides claimed they had won and accused their opponents of fraud in the disputed states, although most of the bloodshed and intimidation committed in those states had been against black Republican voters. To resolve this unprecedented situation, Congress established a fifteen-member electoral commission, balanced between Democrats and Republicans. Because Republicans held a majority in the overall Congress, they prevailed 8–7 on repeated attempts to “count” the confused returns. As the midwinter crisis dragged on in Washington, it appeared Hayes would become president. Democrats controlled the House and launched a filibuster to block action on the count.56”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“allow the president to get by with flouting the law and lying about it on television, while hiding behind his popularity in the polls.” If this precedent prevailed, Schlafly prophesied, “Americans can look forward to a succession of TV charlatans and professional liars occupying the White House.”
― Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

“These shifts started well before Luther nailed up his Ninety-Five Theses, so they were not launched by the Protestant Reformation per se. But the changing political and socioeconomic landscape of Europe found a supportive partner in Reformation theology. The language of God, argues Roper, married the gender hierarchy of early modern Europe, and subordinate wifedom became synonymous with being a godly woman. Biblical womanhood is rooted in human patriarchal structures that keep seeping back into the church, but the emphasis in biblical womanhood on being a wife was strengthened and reinforced during the social changes wrought by the sixteenth”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth