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Clarence Thomas

Clarence Thomas (born 23 June 1948) is an American judge who serves as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He is the second African American to serve on the nation's highest court.

1980s

 * These guys are sitting there watching the destruction of our race while arguing about Ronald Reagan
 * Ronald Reagan isn't the problem. Former president Jimmy Carter was not the problem. The lack of black leadership is the problem
 * "EEOC Chairman Blasts Black Leaders" (October 25, 1984)

1990s

 * This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.
 * Hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library (October 11, 1991).

 * [I disagree] that there is a racial paternalism exception to the principle of equal protection. I believe that there is a 'moral [and] constitutional equivalence,' between laws designed to subjugate a race and those that distribute benefits on the basis of race in order to foster some current notion of equality. Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law.
 * Concurring in Adarand v. Pena, 515 U.S. 200 (1995).

 * To define each of us by our race is nothing short of a denial of our humanity.
 * As quoted in "The New Republic Calls Out Harry Reid on Clarence Thomas" (December 2004), DinoCrat.

 * [I claim] my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I'm black.
 * Reported in Ellis Cose, "Justice: Still Keeping Score", Newsweek (April 30, 2007).

 * I can't see myself spending the rest of my life as a judge.
 * A Silent Justice Speaks Out.

I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

 * Speech given at the annual meeting of the National Bar Association (29 July 1998)

 * Mister Mayor, my fellow colleagues of both bench and bar, it's a pleasure to be here. And one advantage is that similar to being on the bench, I have heard all of the arguments, and will take them under advisement. I have been told recently that Judge Bailey does not take matters under advisement that frequently, so I will stay out of his court. But it is indeed a pleasure to be here.
 * A friend of mine who passed away some nine years ago was an active member of the NBA. And many of you may remember him, Gil Hardy. [Applause.] Probably one of the most painful tragedies for me of my confirmation was to see the name of one of the nicest, most decent human beings I had ever met, besmirched. And Gil was my best friend at both college and at Yale Law School. He was the best man at my wedding and he is the person to whom I went for solace.
 * For those of you with whom I do not share the same opinion and perhaps that is many I will take only 30 minutes of your time. And perhaps at least we can part company having known we at least visited for 30 minutes.
 * Thank you, Judge Keith, for your kind, warm words. As always, I deeply appreciate the manner in which you have made yourself available over the years for counsel and advice. And I appreciate your courteous and dignified example over the past 15 years. And I might add parenthetically here, I met Judge Keith in the early '80s when I was trying to figure out a way to distribute in excess of 10 million dollars to minorities for scholarships, and was being opposed by individuals who should have been supporting us. And it was his advice and counsel that bolstered us in that effort. We who are just commencing our tenures as judges can only hope to emulate your positive spirit and the strength of character that you've always demonstrated.
 * I'd also like to thank President Jones for his support, Justice Johnson for your strength and your courage and you stick-to-it-tivity, Judge Bailey - who I thought I had gotten into a mess, but having had dinner with him, he got me into a mess — but I have enjoyed your company and the opportunity to learn from you, to get to know you, and perhaps to develop a friendship over the years. And I would like to thank the other members of the Judicial Council for the National Bar Association who have been so courageous and forthright and kind to invite me to join you this afternoon.
 * As has become the custom, a wearisome one I admit, this invitation has not been without controversy. Though this unfortunate, this controversy has added little value in the calculus of my decision to be here.
 * Thirty years ago, we all focused intently on this city as the trauma of Dr. King's death first exploded, then sank into our lives. For so many of us who were trying hard to do what we thought was required of us in the process of integrating this society, the rush of hopelessness and isolation was immediate and overwhelming. It seemed that the whole world had gone mad.
 * I am certain that each of us has his or her memories of that terrible day in 1968. For me it was the final straw in the struggle to retain my vocation to become a Catholic priest. Suddenly, this cataclysmic event ripped me from the moorings of my grandparents, my youth and my faith, and catapulted me headlong into the abyss that Richard Wright seemed to describe years earlier.
 * It was this event that shattered my faith in my religion and my country. I had spent the mid-'60s as a successful student in a virtually white environment. I had learned Latin, physics and chemistry. I had accepted the loneliness that came with being "the integrator," the first and the only. But this event, this trauma I could not take, especially when one of my fellow seminarians, not knowing that I was standing behind him, declared that he hoped the S.O.B. died. This was a man of God, mortally stricken by an assassin's bullet, and one preparing for the priesthood had wished evil upon him.
 * The life I had dreamed of so often during those hot summers on the farm in Georgia or during what seemed like endless hours on the oil truck with my grandfather, expired as Dr. King expired. As so many of you do, I still know exactly where I was when I heard the news. It was a low moment in our nation's history and a demarcation between hope and hopelessness for many of us.
 * But three decades have evaporated in our lives, too quickly and without sufficient residual evidence of their importance. But much has changed since then. The hope that there would be expeditious resolutions to our myriad problems has long since evaporated with those years. Many who debated and hoped then, now do neither. There now seems to be a broad acceptance of the racial divide as a permanent state. While we once celebrated those things that we had in common with our fellow citizens who did not share our race, so many now are triumphal about our differences, finding little, if anything, in common. Indeed, some go so far as to all but define each of us by our race and establish the range of our thinking and our opinions, if not our deeds by our color.
 * I, for one, see this in much the same way I saw our denial of rights — as nothing short of a denial of our humanity. Not one of us has the "gospel," nor are our opinions based upon some revealed precepts to be taken as faith. As thinking, rational individuals, not one of us can claim infallibility, even from the overwhelming advantage of hindsight and Monday-morning quarterbacking.
 * This makes it all the more important that our fallible ideas be examined as all ideas are in the realm of reason, not as some doctrinal or racial heresy. None of us — none of us have been appointed by God or appointed God. And if any of us has, then my question is why hasn't he or she solved all these problems.
 * I make no apologies for this view now, nor do I intend to do so in the future. I have now been on the court for seven terms. For the most part, it has been much like other endeavors in life. It has its challenges and requires much of the individual to master the workings of the institution. We all know that. It is, I must say, quite different from what I might have anticipated if I had the opportunity to do so.
 * Unlike the unfortunate practice or custom in Washington and in much of the country, the court is a model of civility. It's a wonderful place. Though there have been many contentious issues to come before the court during these initial years of my tenure, I have yet to hear the first unkind words exchanged among my colleagues. And quite frankly, I think that such civility is the sine qua non of conducting the affairs of the court and the business of the country.
 * As such, I think that it would be in derogation of our respective oaths and our institutional obligations to our country to engage in uncivil behavior. It would also be demeaning to any of us who engages in such conduct. Having worn the robe, we have a lifetime obligation to conduct ourselves as having deserved to wear the robe in the first instance.
 * One of the interesting surprises is the virtual isolation, even within the court. It is quite rare that the members of the court see each other during those periods when we're not sitting or when we're not in conference. And the most regular contact beyond those two formal events are the lunches we have on conference and court days.
 * With respect to my following, or, more accurately, being led by other members of the Court, that is silly, but expected since I couldn't possibly think for myself. And what else could possibly be the explanation when I fail to follow the jurisprudential, ideological and intellectual, if not anti-intellectual, prescription assigned to blacks. Since thinking beyond this prescription is presumptively beyond my abilities, obviously someone must be putting these strange ideas into my mind and my opinions.
 * Though being underestimated has its advantages, the stench of racial inferiority still confounds my olfactory nerves.
 * As Ralph Ellison wrote more than 35 years ago, 'Why is it so often true that when critics confront the American as Negro, they suddenly drop their advanced critical armament and revert with an air of confident superiority to quite primitive modes of analysis?' Those matters accomplished by whites are routinely subjected to sophisticated modes of analysis. But the when the selfsame matters are accomplished by blacks, the opaque racial prism of analysis precludes such sophistication, and all is seen in black and white. And some who would not venture onto the more sophisticated analytical turf are quite content to play in the minor leagues of primitive harping. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
 * Of course there is much criticism of the court by this group or that, depending on the court's decisions in various highly publicized cases. Some of the criticism is profoundly uninformed and unhelpful. And all too often, uncivil second-guessing is not encumbered by the constraints of facts, logic or reasoned analysis.
 * On the other hand, the constructive and often scholarly criticism is almost always helpful in thinking about or rethinking decisions. It is my view that constructive criticism goes with the turf, especially when the stakes are so high and the cases arouse passions and emotions. And, in a free society, the precious freedom of speech and the strength of ideas, we at the court could not possibly claim exemption from such criticism. Moreover, we are not infallible, just final.
 * As I have noted, I find a thoughtful, analytical criticism most helpful. I do not think any judge can address a vast array of cases and issues without testing and re-testing his or her reasoning and opinions in the crucible of debate. However, since we are quite limited in public debate about matters that may come before the court, such debate must, for the most part, occur intramurally, thus placing a premium on outside scholarship.
 * Unfortunately, from time to time, the criticism of the court goes beyond the bounds of civil debate and discourse. Today it seems quite acceptable to attack the court and other institutions when one disagrees with an opinion or policy. I can still remember traveling along Highway 17 in south Georgia, the Coastal Highway, during the fifties and sixties, and seeing the 'Impeach Earl Warren' signs.
 * Clearly, heated reactions to the court or to its members are not unusual. Certainly, Justice Blackmun was attacked repeatedly because many disagreed, as I have, with the opinion he offered on behalf of the Court in Roe vs. Wade. Though I have joined opinions disagreeing with Justice Blackmun, I could not imagine ever being discourteous to him merely because we disagreed.
 * I've found during my almost twenty years in Washington that the tendency to personalize differences has grown to be an accepted way of doing business. One need not do the hard work of dissecting an argument. One need only attack and thus discredit the person making the argument. Though the matter being debated is not effectively resolved, the debate is reduced to unilateral pronouncements and glib but quotable cliches.
 * I, for one, have been singled out for particularly bilious and venomous assaults. These criticisms, as near as I can tell, and I admit that it is rare that I take notice of this calumny, have little to do with any particular opinion, though each opinion does provide one more occasion to criticize. Rather, the principal problem seems to be a deeper antecedent offense: I have no right to think the way I do because I'm black.
 * Though the ideas and opinions themselves are not necessarily illegitimate if held by non-black individuals, they, and the person enunciating them, are illegitimate if that person happens to be black. Thus, there's a subset of criticism that must of necessity be reserved for me, even if every non-black member of the court agrees with the idea or the opinion. You see, they are exempt from this kind of criticism, precisely because they are not black. As noted earlier, they are more often than not subjected to the whites-only sophisticated analysis.
 * I will not cataloge my opinions to which there have been objections since they are a matter of public record. But I must note in passing that I can't help but wonder if some of my critics can read.
 * One opinion that is trotted out for propaganda, for the propaganda parade, is my dissent in Hudson vs. McMillian. The conclusion reached by the long arms of the critics is that I supported the beating of prisoners in that case. Well, one must either be illiterate or fraught with malice to reach that conclusion. Though one can disagree with my dissent, and certainly the majority of the court disagreed, no honest reading can reach such a conclusion. Indeed, we took the case to decide the quite narrow issue, whether a prisoner's rights were violated under the 'cruel and unusual punishment' clause of the Eighth Amendment as a result of a single incident of force by the prison guards which did not cause a significant injury. In the first section of my dissent, I stated the following: 'In my view, a use of force that causes only insignificant harm to a prisoner may be immoral; it may be tortuous; it may be criminal, and it may even be remediable under other provisions of the Federal Constitution. But it is not cruel and unusual punishment.' Obviously, beating prisoners is bad. But we did not take the case to answer this larger moral question or a larger legal question of remedies under other statutes or provisions of the Constitution. How one can extrapolate these larger conclusions from the narrow question before the court is beyond me, unless, of course, there's a special segregated mode of analysis.
 * It should be obvious that the criticism of this opinion serves not to present counter-arguments, but to discredit and attack me because I've deviated from the prescribed path. In his intriguing and thoughtful essay on My Race Problem and Ours, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, a self-described social Democrat, correctly observes that 'If racial loyalty is deemed essentially and morally virtuous, then a black person's adoption of positions that are deemed racially disloyal will be seen by racial loyalists as a supremely threatening sin, one warranting the harsh punishments that have historically been visited upon alleged traitors.' Perhaps this is the defensive solidarity to which Richard Wright refers. If so, it is a reaction I understand, but resolutely decline to follow.
 * In the final weeks of my seminary days, shortly after Dr. King's death, I found myself becoming consumed by feelings of animosity and anger. I was disenchanted with my church and my country. I was tired of being in the minority, and I was tired of turning the other cheek. I, along with many blacks, found ways to protest and try to change the treatment we received in this country. Perhaps my passion for Richard Wright novels was affecting me. Perhaps it was listening too intently to Nina Simone. Perhaps, like Bigger Thomas, I was being consumed by the circumstances in which I found myself, circumstances that I saw as responding only to race.
 * My feelings were reaffirmed during the summer of 1968 as a result of the lingering stench of racism in Savannah and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. No matter what the reasons were, I closed out the sixties as one angry young man waiting on the revolution that I was certain would soon come. I saw no way out. I, like many others, felt the deep chronic agony of anomie and alienation. All seemed to be defined by race. We became a reaction to the 'man', his ominous reflection.
 * The intensity of my feelings was reinforced by other events of the late '60s: the riots, the marches, the sense that something had to be done, done quickly to resolve the issue of race. In college there was an air of excitement, apprehension and anger. We started the Black Students Union. We protested. We worked in the Free Breakfast Program. We would walk out of school in the winter of 1969 in protest.
 * But the questioning for me started in the spring of 1970 after an unauthorized demonstration in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to "free the political prisoners." Why was I doing this rather than using my intellect? Perhaps I was empowered by the anger and relieved that I could now strike back at the faceless oppressor. But why was I conceding my intellect and rather fighting much like a brute? This I could not answer, except to say that I was tired of being restrained.
 * Somehow I knew that unless I contained the anger within me I would suffer the fates of Bigger Thomas and Damon Cross. It was intoxicating to act upon one's rage, to wear it on one's shoulder, to be defined by it. Yet, ultimately, it was destructive, and I knew it.
 * So in the spring of 1970, in a nihilistic fog, I prayed that I'd be relieved of the anger and the animosity that ate at my soul. I did not want to hate any more, and I had to stop before it totally consumed me. I had to make a fundamental choice. Do I believe in the principles of this country or not? After such angst, I concluded that I did. But the battle between passion and reason would continue, although abated, still intense.
 * Ironically, many of the people who are critics today were among those we called half-steppers, who had co-opted by "the man" because they were part of the system that oppressed us. When the revolution came, all of the so-called Negroes needed to be dealt with.
 * It is interesting to remember that someone gave me a copy of Prof. Thomas Sowell's book, Education, Myths and Tragedies, in which he predicted much of what has happened to blacks and education. I threw it in the trash, unread, declaring that he was not a black man since no black could take the positions that he had taken, whatever they were, since I had only heard his views were not those of a black man.
 * I was also upset to hear of a black conservative in Virginia named Jay Parker. How could a black man call himself a conservative? In a twist of fate, they both are dear friends today, and the youthful wrath I visited upon them is now being visited upon me, though without the youth. What goes around does indeed come around.
 * The summer of 1971 was perhaps one of the most difficult of my life. It was clear to me that the road to destruction was paved with anger, resentment and rage. But where were we to go? I would often spend hours in our small efficiency apartment in New Haven pondering this question and listening to Marvin Gaye's then new album, "What's Going On?" To say the least, it was a depressing summer. What were we to do? What's going on?
 * As I think back on those years, I find it interesting that many people seemed to have trouble with their identities as black men. Having had to accept my blackness in the caldron of ridicule from some of my black schoolmates under segregation, then immediately thereafter remain secure in that identity during my years at all-white seminary, I had few racial identity problems. I knew who I was and needed no gimmicks to affirm my identity. Nor, might I add, do I need anyone telling me who I am today. This is especially true of the psycho-silliness about forgetting my roots or self-hatred. If anything, this shows that some people have too much time on their hands.
 * There's a rush today to prescribe who is black, to prescribe what our differences, or to ignore what our differences, are. Of course, those of us who came from the rural South were different from the blacks who came from the large northern cities, such as Philadelphia and New York. We were all black. But that similarity did not mask the richness of our differences. Indeed, one of the advantages of growing up in a black neighborhood was that we were richly blessed with the ability to see the individuality of each black person with all its fullness and complexity. We saw those differences at school, at home, at church, and definitely at the barbershop on Saturday morning.
 * Intra-racially, we consistently recognized our differences. It is quite counter-factual to suggest that such differences have not existed throughout our history. Indeed, when I was on the other side of the ideological divide, arguing strenuously with my grandfather that the revolution was imminent and that we all had to stick together as black people, he was quick to remind me that he had lived much longer than I had and during far more difficult times, and that, in any case, it took all kinds to make a world.
 * I agree with Ralph Ellison when he asked, perhaps rhetorically, why is it that so many of those who would tell us the meaning of Negro, of Negro life, never bothered to learn how varied it really is. That is particularly true of many whites who have elevated condescension to an art form by advancing a monolithic view of blacks in much the same way that the mythic, disgusting image of the lazy, dumb black was advanced by open, rather than disguised, bigots.
 * Today, of course, it is customary to collapse, if not overwrite, our individual characteristics into new, but now acceptable stereotypes. It no longer matters whether one is from urban New York City or rural Georgia. It doesn't matter whether we came from a highly educated family or a barely literate one. It does not matter if you are a Roman Catholic or a Southern Baptist. All of these differences are canceled by race, and a revised set of acceptable stereotypes have been put in place.
 * Long gone is the time when we opposed the notion that we all looked alike and talked alike. Somehow we have come to exalt the new black stereotype above all and to demand conformity to that norm. It is this notion — that our race defines us -- that Ralph Ellison so eloquently rebuts in his essay, "The World and the Jug." He sees the lives of black people as more than a burden, but also a discipline, just as any human life which has endured so long is a discipline, teaching its own insights into the human condition, its own strategies of survival. There's a fullness and even a richness here. And here despite the realities of politics, perhaps, but nevertheless here and real because it is human life.
 * Despite some of the nonsense that has been said about me by those who should know better, and so much nonsense, or some of which subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge, despite this all, I am a man, a black man, an American. And my history is not unlike that of many blacks from the deep South. And in many ways it is not that much different from that of many other Americans.
 * It goes without saying that I understand the comforts and security of racial solidarity, defensive or otherwise. Only those who have not been set upon by hatred and repelled by rejection fail to understand its attraction. As I have suggested, I have been there.
 * The inverse relationship between the bold promises and the effectiveness of the proposed solutions, the frustrations with the so-called system, the subtle and not-so-subtle bigotry and animus towards members of my race made radicals and nationalists of many of us. Yes, I understand the reasons why this is attractive. But it is precisely this -- in its historic form, not its present-day diluted form that I have rejected. My question was whether as an individual I truly believed that I was the equal of individuals who were white. This I had answered with a resounding "yes" in 1964 during my sophomore year in the seminary. And that answer continues to be yes. Accordingly, my words and my deeds are consistent with this answer.
 * Any effort, policy or program that has as a prerequisite the acceptance of the notion that blacks are inferior is a non-starter with me. I do not believe that kneeling is a position of strength. Nor do I believe that begging is an effective tactic. I am confident that the individual approach, not the group approach, is the better, more acceptable, more supportable and less dangerous one. This approach is also consistent with the underlying principles of this country and the guarantees of freedom through government by consent. I, like Frederick Douglass, believe that whites and blacks can live together and be blended into a common nationality.
 * Do I believe that my views or opinions are perfect or infallible? No, I do not. But in admitting that I have no claim to perfection or infallibility, I am also asserting that competing or differing views similarly have no such claim. And they should not be accorded a status of infallibility or any status that suggests otherwise.
 * With differing, but equally fallible views, I think it is best that they be aired and sorted out in an environment of civility, consistent with the institutions in which we are involved. In this case, the judicial system.
 * It pains me deeply, or more deeply than any of you can imagine, to be perceived by so many members of my race as doing them harm. All the sacrifice, all the long hours of preparation were to help, not to hurt. But what hurts more, much more, is the amount of time and attention spent on manufactured controversies and media sideshows when so many problems cry out for constructive attention.
 * I have come here today not in anger or to anger, though my mere presence has been sufficient, obviously, to anger some. Nor have I come to defend my views, but rather to assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I'm black. I come to state that I'm a man, free to think for myself and do as I please.
 * I've come to assert that I am a judge and I will not be consigned the unquestioned opinions of others. But even more than that, I have come to say that isn't it time to move on? Isn't it time to realize that being angry with me solves no problems? Isn't it time to acknowledge that the problem of race has defied simple solutions and that not one of us, not a single one of us can lay claim to the solution? Isn't it time that we respect ourselves and each other as we have demanded respect from others? Isn't it time to ignore those whose sole occupation is sowing seeds of discord and animus? That is self-hatred. Isn't it time to continue diligently to search for lasting solutions? I believe that the time has come today. God bless each of you, and may God keep you.

2000s

 * [My] approach recognizes the basic principle of a written Constitution. We "the people" adopted a written Constitution precisely because it has a fixed meaning, a meaning that does not change. Otherwise we would have adopted the British approach of an unwritten, evolving constitution. Aside from amendment according to Article V, the Constitution’s meaning cannot be updated, or changed, or altered by the Supreme Court, the Congress, or the President. Of course, even when strictly interpreted as I believe it should be, the Constitution remains a modern, "breathing" document as some like to call it, in the sense that the Court is constantly required to interpret how its provisions apply to the Constitutional questions of modern life. Nevertheless, strict interpretation must never surrender to the understandably attractive impulse towards creative but unwarranted alterations of first principles.
 * Speech to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 2 February 2001.

 * A white person is free to think whatever they want to think, but a black person has to think a certain way. Why do you think I get in so much controversy? People have a model of what they think a black person should think.
 * Justice Thomas to Diane Brady, 2007.

 * It's fascinating that people, there's so many people now who will make judgments based on what you look like. I'm black, so I'm supposed to think a certain way? I'm supposed to have certain opinions? I don't do that. You don't create a box and put people in and then make a lot of generalizations about them.
 * Interview with Steve Kroft (September 2007).

Kelo v. New London (2005)

 * Something has gone seriously awry with this Court's interpretation of the Constitution.
 * Dissenting Kelo v. New London.

 * Those incentives have made the legacy of this Courts public purpose test an unhappy one. In the 1950s, no doubt emboldened in part by the expansive understanding of public use this Court adopted in Berman, cities rushed to draw plans for downtown development. Of all the families displaced by urban renewal from 1949 through 1963, 63 percent of those whose race was known were nonwhite, and of these families, 56 percent of nonwhites and 38 percent of whites had incomes low enough to qualify for public housing, which, however, was seldom available to them. Public works projects in the 1950s and 1960s destroyed predominantly minority communities in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Baltimore, Maryland. In 1981, urban planners in Detroit, Michigan, uprooted the largely lower-income and elderly Poletown neighborhood for the benefit of the General Motors Corporation. Urban renewal projects have long been associated with the displacement of blacks; [i]n cities across the country, urban renewal came to be known as Negro removal. Over 97 percent of the individuals forcibly removed from their homes by the slum-clearance project upheld by this Court in Berman were black. Regrettably, the predictable consequence of the Court’s decision will be to exacerbate these effects.
 * Dissenting Kelo v. New London.

(2008)

 * For a time we wondered why our real father didn't come and rescue us, but we had long since accepted our fate by the time we finally met him.
 * Page 12

 * Long after the fact, it occurred to me that this was a metaphor for life- blisters come before calluses, vulnerability before maturity- but not even the thickest of skins could have spared us the lash of Daddy's tongue.
 * Pages 25-26

 * I began to suspect that Daddy had been right all along: the only hope I had of changing the world was to change myself first.
 * Page 60

 * The black people I knew came from different places and backgrounds- social, economic, even ethnic- yet the color of our skin was somehow supposed to make us identical in spite of our differences. I didn't buy it. Of course we had all experienced racism in one way or another, but did that mean that we had to think alike?
 * Page 62

 * I often had occasion to remind myself in years to come that self-interest isn't a principle- it's just self-interest.
 * Page 101

 * The popular political answers of the day, I saw, had hardened into dogma, making anyone who questioned them a heretic. Having turned my back on religion, I saw no reason to accept mere political opinions as gospel truth. Years later these same dogmatists would walk away from the wreckage of their failed policies, like children tossing aside a broken toy. But the victims they left behind were real people- my people.
 * Page 105

 * All I cared about was finding answers, no matter who had them. When, later on, I began to associate with conservatives, it was because their ideas were closer to mine than liberals' ideas, not because I saw myself as one of them. I'd already noticed that it was liberals, not conservatives, who were most likely to condescend to blacks, but I assumed, like the good radical I once was, that liberals and conservatives were simply two different breeds of snake, one stealthy, the other openly hostile.
 * Pages 107-108

 * How often had he longed to hold us, hug us, grant our every wish, but held himself back for fear of letting us see his vulnerability, believing as he did that real love demanded not affection but discipline?
 * Page 112

 * Even then, though, I cared about people, not theories. I had no wish to spin individual cases into some grandiose, ideologically driven legal theory. I no longer believed in utopian solutions, or the cynical politicians who used them to sucker voters, claiming to care about the poor while actually exploiting them. Not only was I sure that such solutions were doomed to failure, but I also feared that once they failed, the resulting disillusionment would make matters even worse. Yet it was taken for granted in the seventies that the purveyors of these elaborate nostrums were doing the right thing, and anyone who dared to challenge their effectiveness was hooted down. That prospect intimidated me, especially when it came to racial matters.
 * Page 115

 * I knew that until I was ready to tell the truth as I saw it, I was no better than a politician- but I didn't know whether I would ever be brave enough to break ranks and speak my mind.
 * Page 116

 * I had manufactured artificial goals as a means of motivating myself, using my longing for money, cars, and other material possessions to create a false sense of purpose. They had worked on me like spoonfuls of sugar- a jolt of energy that soon faded, leaving behind the pangs of a deeper hunger. I had cut myself off from the transcendent hope of religion, and now a vast and frightening expanse of uncertainty lay before me.
 * Pages 116-117

 * I could feel the golden handcuffs of a comfortable but unfulfilling life snapping shut on my wrists.
 * Page 119

 * I could only choose between being an outcast and being dishonest.
 * Page 133

 * An education is meaningless unless it equips students to have a better life.
 * Page 142

 * I was seized with a guilt that I knew would never leave me, and I knew I didn't deserve to be free of it. I hadn't quite reached the end of my rope, but I was close enough.
 * Page 145

 * Then, as always, I felt morally obligated to advocate our official position, even when it conflicted with my personal views.
 * Page 177

 * I recalled the ants I had watched as a child on the farm, building their hills one grain of sand at a time, only to have them senselessly destroyed in an instant by a passing foot. I'd pieced my life together the same way, slowly and agonizingly. Would it, too, be kicked callously into dust?
 * Page 214

 * The important thing was that I had never behaved inappropriately toward any woman, and I had no intention of letting my enemies hang that age-old charge of sexual impropriety around my neck. Those who wished only to exploit my past failings, not forgive them, would get no help from me.
 * Page 229

 * As for the matter of my judicial philosophy, I didn't have one- and didn't want one. A philosophy that is imposed from without instead of arising organically from day-to-day engagement with the law isn't worth having. Such a philosophy runs the risk of becoming an ideology, and I'd spent much of my adult life shying away from abstract ideological theories that served only to obscure the reality of life as it's lived.
 * Page 238

 * I had sworn to administer justice "faithfully and impartially." To do otherwise would be to violate my oath. That meant I had no business of imposing my personal views on the country. Nor did I have the slightest intention of doing so.
 * Page 238

 * Perhaps the fires through which I had passed would have a purifying effect on me, just as a blast furnace burns the impurities out of steel.
 * Page 279

 * Thanks to God's direct intervention, I had risen phoenixlike from the ashes of self-pity and despair, and though my wounds were still raw, I trusted that in time they, too, would heal.
 * Page 282

2010s

 * Tillman was from South Carolina, and as I hear the story he was concerned that the corporations, Republican corporations, were favorable toward blacks and he felt that there was a need to regulate them.
 * As quoted in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (February 2010).

 * The Court's decision today is at odds not only with the constitution, but with the principles upon which our Nation was built. Since well before 1787, liberty has been understood as freedom from government action, not entitlement to government benefits. The framers created our constitution to preserve that understanding of liberty. Yet the majority invokes our Constitution in the name of a 'liberty' that the framers would not have recognized, to the detriment of the liberty they sought to protect. Along the way, it rejects the idea—captured in our Declaration of Independence—that human dignity is innate and suggests instead that it comes from the Government. This distortion of our Constitution not only ignores the text, it inverts the relationship between the individual and the state in our Republic. I cannot agree with it.
 * Obergefell v. Hodges (26 June 2015).

 * The majority's decision today will require States to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and to recognize same-sex marriages entered in other States largely based on a constitutional provision guaranteeing 'due process' before a person is deprived of his 'life, liberty, or property'. I have elsewhere explained the dangerous fiction of treating the Due Process Clause as a font of substantive rights. It distorts the constitutional text, which guarantees only whatever 'process' is 'due' before a person is deprived of life, liberty, and property. Worse, it invites judges to do exactly what the majority has done here.
 * Obergefell v. Hodges (26 June 2015).

 * By straying from the text of the Constitution, substantive due process exalts judges at the expense of the People from whom they derive their authority. Petitioners argue that by enshrining the traditional definition of marriage in their State Constitutions through voter-approved amendments, the States have put the issue 'beyond the reach of the normal democratic process'. But the result petitioners seek is far less democratic. They ask nine judges on this Court to enshrine their definition of marriage in the Federal Constitution and thus put it beyond the reach of the normal democratic process for the entire Nation. That a 'bare majority' of this Court is able to grant this wish, wiping out with a stroke of the keyboard the results of the political process in over 30 States, based on a provision that guarantees only 'due process' is but further evidence of the danger of substantive due process.
 * Obergefell v. Hodges (26 June 2015).

 * Even if the doctrine of substantive due process were somehow defensible, it is not, petitioners still would not have a claim. To invoke the protection of the Due Process Clause at all, whether under a theory of 'substantive' or 'procedural' due process, a party must first identify a deprivation of 'life, liberty, or property'. The majority claims these state laws deprive petitioners of 'liberty', but the concept of 'liberty' it conjures up bears no resemblance to any plausible meaning of that word as it is used in the Due Process Clauses.
 * Obergefell v. Hodges (26 June 2015).

 * As used in the Due Process Clauses, 'liberty' most likely refers to 'the power of loco-motion, of changing situation, or removing one's person to whatsoever place one's own inclination may direct; without imprisonment or restraint, unless by due course of law'. That definition is drawn from the historical roots of the Clauses and is consistent with our Constitution’s text and structure. Both of the Constitution’s Due Process Clauses reach back to Magna Carta. Chapter 39 of the original Magna Carta provided ',No free man shall be taken, imprisoned, disseised, outlawed, banished, or in any way destroyed, nor will We proceed against or prosecute him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land'. Although the 1215 version of Magna Carta was in effect for only a few weeks, this provision was later reissued in 1225 with modest changes to its wording as follows: 'No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or be disseised of his freehold, or liberties, or free customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any otherwise destroyed; nor will we not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land'. In his influential commentary on the provision many years later, Sir Edward Coke interpreted the words 'by the law of the land' to mean the same thing as 'by due proces of the common law'.
 * Obergefell v. Hodges (26 June 2015).

 * After Magna Carta became subject to renewed interest in the 17th century, William Blackstone referred to this provision as protecting the 'absolute rights of every Englishman'. And he formulated those absolute rights as 'the right of personal security', which included the right to life; 'the right of personal liberty'; and 'the right of private property'. He defined 'the right of personal liberty' as 'the power of loco-motion, of changing situation, or removing one's person to whatsoever place one’s own inclination may direct; without imprisonment or restraint, unless by due course of law'. The Framers drew heavily upon Blackstone's formulation, adopting provisions in early State Constitutions that replicated Magna Carta's language, but were modified to refer specifically to 'life, liberty, or property'. State decisions interpreting these provisions between the founding and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment almost uniformly construed the word 'liberty' to refer only to freedom from physical restraint. Even one case that has been identified as a possible exception to that view merely used broad language about liberty in the context of a habeas corpus proceeding—a proceeding classically associated with obtaining freedom from physical restraint.
 * Obergefell v. Hodges (26 June 2015).

 * In enacting the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, the Framers similarly chose to employ the 'life, liberty, or property' formulation, though they otherwise deviated substantially from the States' use of Magna Carta's language in the Clause. When read in light of the history of that formulation, it is hard to see how the 'liberty' protected by the Clause could be interpreted to include anything broader than freedom from physical restraint. That was the consistent usage of the time when 'liberty' was paired with 'life' and 'property'. And that usage avoids rendering superfluous those protections for 'life' and 'property'. If the Fifth Amendment uses 'liberty' in this narrow sense, then the Fourteenth Amendment likely does as well.
 * Obergefell v. Hodges (26 June 2015).

 * Human dignity has long been understood in this country to be innate. When the framers proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that 'all men are created equal' and 'endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights', they referred to a vision of mankind in which all humans are created in the image of God and therefore of inherent worth. That vision is the foundation upon which this nation was built. The corollary of that principle is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity, any more than they lost their humanity, because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.
 * Obergefell v. Hodges (26 June 2015), pp. 16-17.

 * No good comes from being in the woods.
 * On the occasion of his 25th anniversary as a Supreme Court Justice; reported in Robert Barnes, "For 25 years, it has been Clarence Thomas v. Controversy", Washington Post (October 30, 2016).

before 2019

 * Lying takes the form of mass media creating the myth that feminist movement has completely transformed society, so much so that the politics of patriarchal power have been inverted and that men, particularly white men, just like emasculated black men, have become the victims of dominating women. So, it goes, all men (especially black men) must pull together (as in the Clarence Thomas hearings) to support and reaffirm patriarchal domination.
 * bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994)

 * One fact lay embedded in the center of the Clarence Thomas controversy: We have lost a great American jurist, Thurgood Marshall. No one can replace him. The very thought of replacing him insults the brilliance of his career and the exceptional humanity of his intelligence as he reflected upon our most extreme and consequential public debates. And yet someone new had to be appointed to take his seat. The President made his move. He nominated a man as different from Marshall as George Bush differs from Mahatma Gandhi. He nominated a man whose most striking characteristic seems to be that of satisfied self-hatred, a man whose public condemnation of his sister strikingly revealed his attitude toward the poor and the weak. For some, the issue became Black manhood or the sentimentalized biography of Clarence Thomas. They focused upon who the candidate was rather than what he has done and will do. This was identity politics taken to its lowest level. On the American Right, however, there was more clarity. Among those who detested Thurgood Marshall and who generally despise Black men there was a willingness to promote Clarence Thomas because Clarence Thomas was not the point: The point is to homogenize the Supreme Court. If someone with Black skin will serve that purpose, then fine! But we, the people, must not yield to judgment without representation. If we yield, there will be no justice. And without justice, believe me, there will be no peace.
 * June Jordan "Thomas was not the Point" (1991) in Affirmative Acts(1998)

 * Richard Epstein's book, Takings: Private Property and the Power of the Eminent Domain, is the bible of the "ownership society" of the cowboy capitalists of the 21st century. It is also the bible of judges like Clarence Thomas and Antonio Scalia who have used Epstein's philosophy of takings to undo the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and alter laws based on the public trust doctrine.
 * Vandana Shiva Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (2005)

 * My history with the Thomas case is a long one. In the early 1990s, along with my then-colleague at The Wall Street Journal Jane Mayer, I spent almost three years re-reporting every aspect of the Hill-Thomas imbroglio for a book on the subject, Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas. Quickly, we uncovered a pattern: Clarence Thomas had, in fact, a clear habit of watching and talking about pornography, which, while not improper on its face, was at the heart of Hill's allegations of sexual harassment. She testified that at the Department of Education and the EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission], where she worked for Thomas, he had persisted in unwelcome sex talk at work. Often, he'd called her into his office to listen to him describe scenes from porn films featuring Long Dong Silver and women with freakishly large breasts.
 * [After denying Anita Hill's testimony, Thomas challenged the Senate committee considering his Supreme Court appointment to investigate further] His bluff wasn't called. Many individuals we uncovered who knew about Thomas's habitual, erotically charged talk in the workplace were never contacted by the Senate Judiciary Committee or called as witnesses. We found three other women who had experiences with Thomas at the EEOC that were similar to Hill's, and four people who knew about his keen interest in porn but were never heard from publicly. The evidence that Thomas had perjured himself during the hearing was overwhelming.
 * Jill Abramson "Do You Believe Her Now?", New York (February 19, 2018)
 * Online, this article appears in the "Intelligencer" section of the magazine's website.

 * He is a clown in blackface sitting on the Supreme Court. He gets me that angry. He doesn't belong there. Ande saw the movie 12 Years as a Slave, you know, they were raped. And he says they had dignity as slaves or— My parents lost everything that th middle of their lives, in their thirties. His business, my father's business, our home, our freedom and we're supposed to call that dignified? Marched out of our homes at gun point. I mean, this man does not belong on the Supreme Court. He is an embarrassment. He is a disgrace to America.
 * George Takei, Fox 10 News (Phoenix) interview,.

 * US Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas in particular has critiqued the complexity of federal Indian law several times. But as at least one commentator noted, when court justices critique the "complexity" of federal Indian law, it seems to precede a restriction on tribal authority.
 * Dina Gilio-Whitaker As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock (2019)

 * For the evangelical left, those who suffer largely exist as mechanisms for others’ salvation, but not as beings with consciences of their own—or more precisely, they are allowed to have their own conscience if and only if it fits into their salvation model. Else, they can be considered as corrupted. The black man loses his “blackness,” which is a state of grace and nothing to do with skin color. Clarence Thomas isn’t “really” black but Bill Clinton is, in the same way that the Eucharist literally becomes the body of Christ.
 * Michael Malice, The New Right: A Journey into the Fringe of American Politics (2019)

 * If the Framers had wanted a constitution that evolved by judicial ruling, Thomas says, they could have stuck with the unwritten British constitution that governed the American colonists in just that way for 150 years before the Revolution. But Americans chose a written constitution, whose meaning, as the Framers and the state ratifying conventions understood it, does not change—and whose purpose remains, as the Preamble states, to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."
 * Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution for Imprimus, a publication of Hillsdale College(September 2019)

 * Bush's choice of Thomas caught most black leaders off guard. Few had the courage to say publicly that this was an act of cynical tokenism concealed by outright lies about Thomas being the most qualified candidate regardless of race. Thomas had an undistinguished record as a student (mere graduation from Yale Law School does not qualify one for the Supreme Court); he left thirteen thousand age discrimination cases dying on the vine for lack of investigation in his turbulent eight years at the EEOC; and his performance during his short fifteen months as an appellate court judge was mediocre. The very fact that no black leader could utter publicly that a black appointee for the Supreme Court was unqualified shows how captive they are to white racist stereotypes about black intellectual talent.
 * Cornel West Race Matters (1993)

2020s

 * One wonders what this Court waits for. We failed to settle this dispute before the election, and thus provide clear rules. Now we again fail to provide clear rules for future elections. The decision to leave election law hidden beneath a shroud of doubt is baffling. By doing nothing, we invite further confusion and erosion of voter confidence. Our fellow citizens deserve better and expect more of us. I respectfully dissent.
 * Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Veronica Degraffenreid (22 February 2021), Adam Liptak, “Supreme Court Won’t Hear Pennsylvania Election Case on Mailed Ballots, New York Times  (Feb. 22, 2021)

 * The difference between me, along with most Black folks, and Clarence Thomas is that Thomas has decided to take his hurt feelings out on one of the most effective social justice policies in American history, while most Black people just learn to step over the low-account white folks clawing at our ankles. Most Black people strive to overcome racial injustice; Thomas was broken by it. Instead of blaming the white folks doing the oppressing, Thomas has decided to ally with them and blame the policy meant to break their exclusive access to power. He’s almost a tragic figure: a man who has adopted the white narrative about Black people so completely that he’s curdled into a mere spokesperson for that white narrative.
 * Elie Mystal, following the Supreme Court's decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina, which prohibits race from being considered in college admissions "The Supreme Court Has Killed Affirmative Action. Mediocre Whites Can Rest Easier.", The Nation (June 29, 2023)

It is not COVID related.
 * [Thomas admitted to Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, DC], after experiencing flu-like symptoms.
 * Supreme Court’s public information office Justice Clarence Thomas hospitalized 'after experiencing flu-like symptoms’ (March 21, 2022)

 * Clarence doesn't discuss his work with me, and I don't involve him in my work
 * Virginia Thomas, wife of Justice Thomas according to Clarence Thomas was the lone dissent in the Supreme Court's January order rejecting Trump's bid to withhold documents from the January 6 panel (March 24, 2022)
 * followup: Lawrence: A Supreme Court Justice Violated The Law In Plain Sight Today

title: Clarence Thomas


text:
Robert McNamara

Robert Strange McNamara (June 9, 1916 – July 6, 2009) was an American business executive and the eighth Secretary of Defense, serving from 1961 to 1968 under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. During his tenure time he played a major role in deescalating the Cuban Missile Crisis and escalating the United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Following that, he served as President of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981. McNamara was responsible for the institution of systems analysis in public policy, which developed into the discipline known today as policy analysis.

 * See also
 * Fog of War

Quotes

 * I must say I don't object to its being called McNamara's War. I think it is a very important war and I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can to win it.
 * In: United States. Congress. Senate (1964) Hearings, Vol. 4, p. 177: Of the Vietnam War

 * Management is the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed change in every direction, is diffused through society.
 * Robert McNamara (1967); quoted in: Bruce Rich (1994) Mortgaging the Earth: The World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment and the Crisis of Development, p. 83

 * You can never substitute emotion for reason. I still would allow a place for intuition in this process, but not emotion. They say I am a power gabber. But knowledge is power, and I am giving them knowledge, so they will have more power. Can't they see that?
 * In: Henry L. Trewhitt (1971) McNamara, p. 119

 * It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it, necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives.
 * In: Herbert Y. Schandler (1975), US Policy on the Use of Nuclear Weapons, 1945-1975. p. 55

 * Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong. Lesson #8: Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning. Lesson #9: In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil. Lesson #10: Never say never. Lesson #11: You can't change human nature...
 * Robert S. McNamara (2004), Official Teacher's Guide for The Fog of War, p. 5

 * I would rather have a wrong decision made than no decision at all.
 * Quoted in: Charles A. Stevenson (2006), SECDEF: The Nearly Impossible Job of Secretary of Defense, p. 28

 * Neither conscience nor sanity itself suggests, that the United States is, or should or could be the global gendarme.
 * In: Charles E. Miller (2010) Conscience, Denied, p. 21

Quotes about Robert McNamara

 * McNamara became a strong advocate of a Keynesian approach to government, using mathematical models and statistical approaches to determine troop levels, allocation of funds, and other strategies in Vietnam. His advocacy of "aggressive leadership" became a hallmark not only of government managers but also of corporate executives. It formed the basis of a new philosophical approach to teaching management at the nation's top business schools, and it ultimately led to a new breed of CEOs who would spearhead the rush to global empire...As we sat around the table discussing world events, we were especially fascinated by McNamara's role as president of the World Bank, a job he accepted soon after leaving his post as secretary of defense. Most of my friends focused on the fact that he symbolized what was popularly known as the military-industrial complex. He had held the top position in a major corporation, in a government cabinet, and now at the most powerful bank in the world. Such an apparent breach in the separation of powers horrified many of them; I may have been the only one among us who was not in the least surprised...I see now that Robert McNamara's greatest and most sinister contribution to history was to jockey the World Bank into becoming an agent of global empire on a scale never before witnessed. He also set a precedent. His ability to bridge the gaps between the primary components of the corporatocracy would be fine-tuned by his successors.
 * John Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,p. 78 Part II: 1971-1975  (2004)
 * In early July, Alain Enthoven had arranged for me to have a brief luncheon with McNamara, to discuss my work on the guidance to the JCS on the war plan, which he had already approved and sent to the Chiefs. We ate at his desk, in his office. It was scheduled to last only half an hour, but it went on nearly an hour longer. I told him about the astonishing answers the JCS had given to the questions I had drafted in the name of the president, in particular about the effects they anticipated on our own European allies from their planned attacks on the Sino-Soviet bloc. I’d had no prior intention to bring up my own strongly heretical view on first use, but midway through our talk, he raised the issue himself. There was no such thing as limited nuclear war in Europe, he said. “It would be total war, total annihilation, for the Europeans!” He said this with great passion, belying his reputation as a cold, computer-like efficiency expert. Moreover, he thought it was absurd to suppose that a supposedly “limited use” would remain limited to Europe, that it would not quickly trigger general nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union, to disastrous effect. I’ve never had a stronger sense in another person of a kindred awareness of this situation and intensity of his concern to change it. Thirty years later, McNamara revealed in his memoir In Retrospect that he had secretly advised President Kennedy, and after him President Johnson, that under no circumstances whatever should they ever initiate nuclear war. He didn’t tell me that, but it was implicit in everything he had said at this lunch. There is no doubt in my mind that he did give that advice, and that it was the right advice. Yet it directly contradicted the mad “assurances” on U.S. readiness for first use he felt compelled to give repeatedly to NATO officials (including speeches I drafted for him) throughout his years in office, as the very basis for our leadership in the alliance.
 * Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions from a Nuclear War Planner (2017)
 * McNamara, characteristically, transformed this reliance on irrationality into a new kind of rationality in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis. He now repudiated his earlier ideas of targeting only military facilities: instead each side should target the other’s cities, with a view of causing the maximum number of casualties possible. The new strategy became known as “Mutual Assured Destruction”—its acronym, with wicked appropriateness, was MAD. The assumption behind it was that if no one could be sure of surviving a nuclear war, there would not be one. That, however, was simply a restatement of what Eisenhower had long since concluded: that the advent of thermonuclear weapons meant that war could no longer be an instrument of statecraft—rather, the survival of states required that there be no war at all.
 * John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (2005), pp. 80-81
 * We're also here to ask -- We are here to ask and we're here to ask vehemently, Where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're here to ask: Where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatric, and so many others. Where are they now that we the men whom they sent off to war have returned? These are commanders who have deserted their troops and there is no more serious crime in the law of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The Marines say they never leave even their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their reputations, bleaching behind them in the sun in this country.
 * John Kerry, Statement Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, delivered 22 April 1971, Washington, D.C.
 * [...]Mắc Na-ma-ra Mày trốn đâu? Giữa bãi tha ma Của toà nhà năm góc Mỗi góc một châu Mày vẫn chui đầu Trong lửa nóng Như đà điểu rúc đầu trong cát bỏng.[...]
 * Translate: [...]McNamara Where are you hiding? In the burial yard Of The Pentagon Each corner, a continent You still squeeze your head Inside hot flames Like the ostrich buries its head in the scorching sands[...]
 * Ê-mi-ly, con...(Emily, Child...), Tố Hữu, print in Ra trận (1972). (Go to war)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Robert McNamara


text:
C. A. R. Hoare

Charles Antony Richard Hoare (Tony Hoare or C.A.R. Hoare, born January 11, 1934) is a British computer scientist, and winner of the 1980 Turing Award. He is best known for his fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages, and for the development of Quicksort, the world's most widely used sorting algorithm.

Quotes

 * [About Algol 60] Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.
 * Hints on Programming Language Design, December 1973.

 * Programming languages on the whole are very much more complicated than they used to be: object orientation, inheritance, and other features are still not really being thought through from the point of view of a coherent and scientifically well-based discipline or a theory of correctness. My original postulate, which I have been pursuing as a scientist all my life, is that one uses the criteria of correctness as a means of converging on a decent programming language design—one which doesn’t set traps for its users, and ones in which the different components of the program correspond clearly to different components of its specification, so you can reason compositionally about it. [...] The tools, including the compiler, have to be based on some theory of what it means to write a correct program.
 * Oral history interview by Philip L. Frana, 17 July 2002, Cambridge, England; Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.

 * "The real value of tests is not that they detect bugs in the code, but that they detect inadequacies in the methods, concentration, and skills of those who design and produce the code."
 * How Did Software Get So Reliable Without Proof? Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol 1051 1996 pp. 1-17 : FME '96: Industrial Benefit and Advances in Formal Methods, Third International Symposium of Formal Methods Europe, Co-Sponsored by IFIP WG 14.3, Oxford, UK, March 18-22, 1996, Proceedings.

 * "The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intentions of its user."
 * An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming, vol 12 n. 10, Communications of the ACM, October 1969.

The Emperor's Old Clothes
1980 Turing Award Lecture; Communications of the ACM 24 (2), (February 1981): pp. 75-83.

 * There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. It demands the same skill, devotion, insight, and even inspiration as the discovery of the simple physical laws which underlie the complex phenomena of nature.

 * [About Fortran] On October 11, 1963, my suggestion was to pass on a request of our customers to relax the ALGOL 60 rule of compulsory declaration of variable names and adopt some reasonable default convention such as that of FORTRAN. […] The story of the Mariner space rocket to Venus, lost because of the lack of compulsory declarations in FORTRAN, was not to be published until later.

 * [About Algol 60] Due credit must be paid to the genius of the designers of ALGOL 60 who included recursion in their language and enabled me to describe my invention [Quicksort] so elegantly to the world.

 * [About Algol 60 subset implementation] [E]very occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array. Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to - they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980, language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law.

 * [About Algol W] It was not only a worthy successor of ALGOL 60, it was even a worthy predecessor of PASCAL […] I was astonished when the working group, consisting of all the best known international experts of programming languages, resolved to lay aside the commissioned draft on which we had all been working and swallow a line with such an unattractive bait.

 * [About Algol 68] The best we could do was to send with it a minority report, stating our considered view that, "… as a tool for the reliable creation of sophisticated programs, the language was a failure."

 * [About PL/I] At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way — and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.

 * [About Pascal] That is the great strength of PASCAL, that there are so few unnecessary features and almost no need for subsets. That is why the language is strong enough to support specialized extensions--Concurrent PASCAL for real time work, PASCAL PLUS for discrete event simulation, UCSD PASCAL for microprocessor work stations.

 * [About Ada] For none of the evidence we have so far can inspire confidence that this language has avoided any of the problems that have afflicted other complex language projects of the past. [...] It is not too late! I believe that by careful pruning of the ADA language, it is still possible to select a very powerful subset that would be reliable and efficient in implementation and safe and economic in use.

 * I have learned more from my failures than can ever be revealed in the cold print of a scientific article. [...] [Failures] are much more fun to hear about afterwards; they are not so funny at the time.

 * I have regarded it as the highest goal of programming language design to enable good ideas to be elegantly expressed.

 * One fine morning, when the emperor felt hot and bored, he extricated himself carefully from under the mountain of clothes and is now living happily as a swineherd in another story. The tailor is canonized as the patron saint of all consultants, because in spite of the enormous fees he extracted, he was never able to convince his clients of his dawning realization that their clothes have no Emperor.

Attributed

 * Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
 * Quote due to Donald Knuth, "Structured Programming with Goto Statements", Computing Surveys 6:4 (December 1974), pp. 261–301, §1. Knuth refers to it as "Hoare's Dictum" 15 years later in "The Errors of TeX", Software—Practice & Experience 19:7 (July 1989), pp. 607–685. However, the attribution to Hoare is doubtful.

title: C. A. R. Hoare


text: User:Geocachernemesis~enwikiquote

title: User:Geocachernemesis~enwikiquote


text:
Dinah Craik

Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (20 April 1826 – 12 October 1887) was an English novelist and poet. Born Dinah Maria Mulock, the name under which her first works were published, her work has also been presented as by Dinah Craik, Dinah Maria Craik, Dinah Mulock Craik, and simply Miss Mulock or Mrs. Craik.

Quotes

 * Sweet April-time — O cruel April-time! Year after year returning, with a brow Of promise, and red lips with longing paled, And backward-hidden hands that clutch the joys Of vanished springs, like flowers.
 * "April", in Poems (1859)

 * The irrevocable Hand That opes the year's fair gate, doth ope and shut The portals of our earthly destinies; We walk through blindfold, and the noiseless doors Close after us, for ever. Pause, my soul, On these strange words — for ever — whose large sound  Breaks flood-like, drowning all the petty noise Our human moans make on the shores of Time. O Thou that openest, and no man shuts; That shut'st, and no man opens — Thee we wait!
 * "April", in Poems (1859)

 * Awakener, come! Fiing wide the gate of an eternal year, The April of that glad new heavens and earth Which shall grow out of these, as spring-tide grows Slow out of winter's breast. Let Thy wide hand Gather us all — with none left out (O God! Leave Thou out none!) from the east and from the west. Loose Thou our burdens: heal our sicknesses; Give us one heart, one tongue, one faith, one love. In Thy great Oneness made complete and strong — To do Thy work throughout the happy world — Thy world, All-merciful, Thy perfect world.
 * "April", in Poems (1859)

 * When faith and hope fail, as they do sometimes, we must try charity, which is love in action. We must speculate no more on our duty, but simply do it. When we have done it, however blindly, perhaps Heaven will show us why.
 * Christian's Mistake (1865). p. 64

 * Immortality alone could teach this mortal how to die.
 * "Looking Death in the Face", Miss Mulock's Poems (1866)

 * There never was night that had no morn.
 * "The Golden Gate", Mulock's Poems, New and Old (1888), this has sometimes been misquoted as There was never a night that had no morn.

 * Oh my son's my son till he gets a wife, But my daughter's my daughter all her life.
 * "Young and Old"

 * Two hands upon the breast, And labour’s done; Two pale feet crossed in rest, The race is won.
 * Now and Afterwards; there exists a similar Russian proverb: "Two hands upon the breast, and labour is past".

 * Down in the deep, up in the sky, I see them always, far or nigh, And I shall see them till I die — The old familiar faces.
 * "Magnus and Morna", in Thirty Years, Poems New and Old (1880)

 * And all day long, so close and near, As in a mystic dream I hear Their gentle accents kind and dear — The old familiar voices. They have no sound that I can reach — But silence sweeter is than speech;
 * "Magnus and Morna", in Thirty Years, Poems New and Old (1880)

 * Drink, my jolly lads, drink with discerning, Wedlock's a lane where there is no turning; Never was owl more blind than a lover, Drink and be merry, lads, half seas over.
 * "Magnus and Morna", in Thirty Years, Poems New and Old (1880)

 * The buttercups across the field Made sunshine rifts of splendor.
 * "A Silly Song"

 * To-morrow is — ah, whose?
 * "Between Two Worlds"

 * Autumn to winter, winter into spring, Spring into summer, summer into fall, — So rolls the changing year, and so we change; Motion so swift, we know not that we move.
 * "Immutable"

 * Oh, if I could live four weeks longer! but no matter, no matter!
 * Last words, after suffering a heart attack, while in a period of preparation for her adopted daughter Dorothy's wedding. (12 October 1887)

 * We never know through what Divine mysteries of compensation the great Father of the universe may be carrying out His sublime plan; but those three words, "God is love" ought to contain, to every doubting soul, the solution of all things.
 * Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 270

John Halifax, Gentleman (1857)

 * Full text online at Wikisource

 * "Get out o' Mr. Fletcher's road, ye idle, lounging, little — " "Vagabond," I think the woman (Sally Walkins, once my nurse,) was going to say, but she changed her mind.
 * First lines

 * "I am but as others: I am but what I was born to be." "Do you recognize what you were born to be? Not only a nobleman, but a gentleman; not only a gentleman, but a man — man, made in the image of God. How can you, how dare you, give the lie to your Creator?" "What has He given me? What have I to thank Him for?" "First, manhood; the manhood His Son disdained not to wear; worldly gifts, such as rank, riches, influence, things which others have to spend half an existence in earning; life in its best prime, with much of youth yet remaining — with grief endured, wisdom learnt, experience won. Would to Heaven, that by any poor word of mine I could make you feel all that you are — all that you might be!" A gleam, bright as a boy's hope, wild as a boy's daring, flashed from those listless eyes — then faded. "You mean, Mr. Halifax, what I might have been. Now it is too late."  "There is no such word as 'too late,' in the wide world — nay, not in the universe. What! shall we, whose atom of time is but a fragment out of an ever-present eternity — shall we, so long as we live, or even at our life's ending, dare to cry out to the Eternal One, 'It is too late!'"
 * Chapter 36

A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)

 * These "Thoughts," a portion of which originally appeared in "Chambers' Journal," are, I wish distinctly to state, only Thoughts. They do not pretend to solve any problems, to lay down any laws, to decide out of one life's experience and within the limits of one volume, any of those great questions which have puzzled generations, and will probably puzzle generations more. They lift the banner of no party; and assert the opinions of no clique. They do not even attempt an originality, which, in treating of a subject like the present, would be either dangerous or impossible. In this book, therefore, many women will find simply the expression of what they have themselves, consciously or unconsciously, oftentimes thought; and the more deeply, perhaps, because it has never come to the surface in words or writing. Those who do the most, often talk — sometimes think — the least: yet thinkers, talkers, and doers, being in earnest, achieve their appointed end. The thinkers put wisdom into the mouth of the speakers, and both strive together to animate and counsel the doers. Thus all work harmoniously together; and verily
 * "Was never good work wrought, Without beginning of good thought."

 * Preface

 * What on earth should we do if we had no matches to make, or mar; no "unfortunate attachments" to shake our heads over; no flirtations to speculate about and comment upon with knowing smiles; no engagements "on" or "off" to speak our minds about, nosing out every little circumstance, and ferreting out our game to their very hole, as if all their affairs, their hopes, trials, faults, or wrongs, were being transacted for our own private and peculiar entertainment! Of all forms of gossip — I speak of mere gossip, as distinguished from the carrion-crow and dunghill-fly system of scandal-mongering — this tittle-tattle about love-affairs is the most general, the most odious, and the most dangerous. Every one of us must have known within our own experience many an instance of dawning loves checked, unhappy loves made cruelly public, happy loves embittered, warm, honest loves turned cold, by this horrible system of gossiping about young or unmarried people...
 * Ch. 8

 * There can be — there ought to be — no medium course; a love-affair is either sober earnest or contemptible folly, if not wickedness: to gossip about it is, in the first instance, intrusive, unkind, or dangerous; in the second, simply silly.
 * Ch. 8

 * Gossip, public, private, social — to fight against it either by word or pen seems, after all, like fighting with shadows. Everybody laughs at it, protests against it, blames and despises it; yet everybody does it, or at least encourages others in it: quite innocently, unconsciously, in such a small, harmless fashion — yet we do it. We must talk about something, and it is not all of us who can find a rational topic of conversation, or discuss it when found.
 * Ch. 8

 * Let every one of us cultivate, in every word that issues from our mouth, absolute truth. I say cultivate, because to very few people — as may be noticed of most young children — does truth, this rigid, literal veracity, come by nature. To many, even who love it and prize it dearly in others, it comes only after the self-control, watchfulness, and bitter experience of years.
 * Ch. 8

 * "Believe only half of what you see, and nothing that you hear," is a cynical saying, and yet less bitter than at first appears. It does not argue that human nature is false, but simply that it is human nature. How can any fallible human being with two eyes, two ears, one judgment, and one brain — all more or less limited in their apprehensions of things external, and biased by a thousand internal impressions, purely individual — how can we possibly decide on even the plainest actions of another, to say nothing of the words, which may have gone through half-a-dozen different translations and modifications, or the motives, which can only be known to the Omniscient Himself?
 * Ch. 8; Craik is sometimes credited with originating the proverb "Believe only half of what you see, and nothing that you hear" — but in this passage she appears to be merely quoting it

 * Do your neighbour good by all means in your power, moral as well as physical — by kindness, by patience, by unflinching resistance against every outward evil — by the silent preaching of your own contrary life. But if the only good you can do him is by talking at him, or about him — nay, even to him, if it be in a self-satisfied, super-virtuous style — such as I earnestly hope the present writer is not doing — you had much better leave him alone.
 * Ch. 8

 * The world! It is a word capable of as diverse interpretations or misinterpretations as the thing itself — a thing by various people supposed to belong to heaven, man, or the devil, or alternatively to all three.
 * Ch. 9

 * Society, in the aggregate, is no fool. It is astonishing what an amount of "eccentricity" it will stand from anybody who takes the bull by the horns, too fearless or too indifferent to think of consequences.
 * Ch. 9

 * It is hardly possible to over-calculate the evils accruing to individuals and to society in general from this custom, gradually increasing, of late and ultra-prudent marriages. Parents bring up their daughters in luxurious homes, expecting and exacting that the home to which they transfer them should be of almost equal ease; forgetting how next to impossible it is for such a home to be offered by any young man of the present generation, who has to work his way like his father before him. Daughters, accustomed to a life of ease and laziness, are early taught to check every tendency towards "a romantic attachment" — the insane folly of loving a man for what he is, rather than for what he has got; of being content to fight the worldly battle hand-in-hand — with a hand that is worth clasping, rather than settle down in comfortable sloth, protected and provided for in all external things. Young men … But words fail to trace the lot of enforced bachelorhood, hardest when its hardship ceases to be consciously felt.
 * Ch. 10

 * Nevertheless, taking life as a whole, believing that it consists not in what we have, but in our power of enjoying the same; that there are in it things nobler and dearer than ease, plenty, or freedom from care — nay, even than existence itself; surely it is not Quixotism, but common-sense and Christianity, to protest that love is better than outside show, labour than indolence, virtue than mere respectability

 * Happiness! Can any human being undertake to define it for another?
 * Ch. 10

 * I fear, the inevitable conclusion we must all come to is, that in the world happiness is quite indefinable. We can no more grasp it than we can grasp the sun in the sky or the moon in the water. We can feel it interpenetrating our whole being with warmth and strength; we can see it in a pale reflection shining elsewhere; or in its total absence, we, walking in darkness, learn to appreciate what it is by what it is not.
 * Ch. 10

 * Happiness is not an end — it is only a means, and adjunct, a consequence. The Omnipotent Himself could never be supposed by any, save those who out of their own human selfishness construct the attributes of Divinity, to be absorbed throughout eternity in the contemplation of His own ineffable bliss, were it not identical with His ineffable goodness and love.
 * Ch. 10

 * It is not the smallest use to try to make people good, unless you try at the same time — and they feel that you are trying — to make them happy. And you rarely can make another happy, unless you are happy yourself.
 * Ch. 10

 * A lost love. Deny it who will, ridicule it, treat it as mere imagination and sentiment, the thing is and will be; and women do suffer therefrom, in all its infinite varieties: loss by death, by faithlessness or unworthiness, and by mistaken or unrequited affection.
 * Ch. 10

 * To have loved and lost, either by that total disenchantment which leaves compassion as the sole substitute for love which can exist no more, or by the slow torment which is obliged to let go day by day all that constitutes the diviner part of love — namely, reverence, belief, and trust, yet clings desperately to the only thing left it, a long-suffering apologetic tenderness — this lot is probably the hardest any woman can have to bear.
 * Ch. 10

 * There is no sorrow under heaven which is, or ought to be, endless. To believe or to make it so, is an insult to Heaven itself.
 * Ch. 10

 * It is a curious truth — and yet a truth forced upon us by daily observation — that it is not the women who have suffered most who are the unhappy women. A state of permanent unhappiness — not the morbid, half-cherished melancholy of youth, which generally wears off with wiser years, but that settled, incurable discontent and dissatisfaction with all things and all people, which we see in some women, is, with very rare exceptions, at once the index and the exponent of a thoroughly selfish character.
 * Ch. 10

 * Though it is folly to suppose that happiness is a matter of volition, and that we can make ourselves content and cheerful whenever we choose — a theory that many poor hypochondriacs are taunted with till they are nigh driven mad — yet, on the other hand, no sane mind is ever left without the power of self-discipline and self-control in a measure, which measure increases in proportion as it is exercised.
 * Ch. 10

 * What comfort there is in a cheerful spirit! how the heart leaps up to meet a sunshiny face, a merry tongue, an even temper, and a heart which either naturally, or, what is better, from conscientious principle, has learned to take all things on their bright side, believing that the Giver of life being all-perfect Love, the best offering we can make to Him is to enjoy to the full what He sends of good, and bear what He allows of evil!
 * Ch. 10

 * We have not to construct human nature afresh, but to take it as we find it, and make the best of it.
 * Ch. 11

 * This is practically the language used to fallen women, and chiefly by their own sex: "God may forgive you, but we never can!" — a declaration which, however common, in spirit if not in substance, is, when one comes to analyse it, unparalleled in its arrogance of blasphemy. That for a single offence, however grave, a whole life should be blasted, is a doctrine repugnant even to Nature's own dealings in the visible world.
 * Ch. 11

 * It may often be noticed, the less virtuous people are, the more they shrink away from the slightest whiff of the odour of un-sanctity. The good are ever the most charitable, the pure are the most brave.
 * Ch. 11

 * No virtue ever was founded on a lie. The truth, then, at all risks and costs — the truth from the beginning. Make a clean breast to whomsoever you need to make it, and then — face the world.
 * Ch 11

 * The only way to make people good, is to make them happy.
 * Ch 11

 * A finished life — a life which has made the best of all the materials granted to it, and through which, be its web dark or bright, its pattern clear or clouded, can now be traced plainly the hand of the Great Designer; surely this is worth living for? And though at its end it may be somewhat lonely; though a servant's and not a daughter's arm may guide the failing step; though most likely it will be strangers only who come about the dying bed, close the eyes that no husband ever kissed, and draw the shroud kindly over the poor withered breast where no child's head has ever lain; still, such a life is not to be pitied, for it is a completed life. It has fulfilled its appointed course, and returns to the Giver of all breath, pure as He gave it. Nor will He forget it when He counteth up His jewels.
 * Ch 12

A Life for a Life (1859)

 * Thus ended our little talk: yet it left a pleasant impression. True, the subject was strange enough; my sisters might have been shocked at it; and at my freedom in asking and giving opinions. But oh! the blessing it is to have a friend to whom one can speak fearlessly on any subject; with whom one's deepest as well as one's most foolish thoughts come out simply and safely. Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away. Somebody must have done a good deal of the winnowing business this afternoon; for in the course of it I gave him as much nonsense as any reasonable man could stand ...
 * A part of this passage appeared in The Best Loved Poems of the American People (1936) with the title "Friendship":
 * Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.
 * Another variant apparently derived from this one is:
 * Friendship is the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person having neither to weigh thoughts or measure words, but pouring all right out just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful friendly hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping and, with a breath of comfort, blow the rest away.
 * This quotation, and the derived paraphrases, are often misattributed to another more famous woman writer of the 19th century, George Eliot, and sometimes only the phrase "Keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away" is quoted, which can give a far different impression of intent than is evident by the larger passage.

Poems (1866)

 * Full text online

 * Lo! all life this truth declares, Laborare est orare; And the whole earth rings with prayers.
 * "Labour is Prayer"

 * Forgotten? No, we never do forget: We let the years go; wash them clean with tears, Leave them to bleach out in the open day, Or lock them careful by, like dead friends' clothes, Till we shall dare unfold them without pain, — But we forget not, never can forget.
 * "A Flower of a Day"

 * Nothing but a speck we seem In the waste of waters round, Floating, floating like a dream, — Outward bound.
 * "Outward Bound"; Poems Since 1860

 * Mine to the core of the heart, my beauty! Mine, all mine, and for love, not duty: Love given willingly, full and free, Love for love's sake — as mine to thee. Duty's a slave that keeps the keys, But Love, the master, goes in and out Of his goodly chambers with song and shout, Just as he please — just as he please.
 * "Plighted"

Our Father's Business

 * Full title: "Our Father's Business : Holman Hunt's Picture of "Christ In The Temple."

 * This, this is Thou. No idle painter's dream Of aureoled, imaginary Christ, Laden with attributes that make not God; But Jesus, son of Mary; lowly, wise, Obedient, subject unto parents, mild, Meek — as the meek that shall inherit earth, Pure — as the pure in heart that shall see God.

 * O infinitely human, yet divine! Half clinging childlike to the mother found, Yet half repelling — as the soft eyes say, "How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not That I must be about my Father's business?"

 * All that we know of Thee, or knowing not Love only, waiting till the perfect time When we shall know even as we are known — O Thou Child Jesus, Thou dost seem to say By the soft silence of these heavenly eyes (That rose out of the depths of nothingness Upon this limner's reverent soul and hand) We too should be about our father's business — O Christ, hear us!

The Little Lame Prince and his Travelling Cloak (1875)

 * The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak : A Parable for Young and Old (Illustrated online text)

 * It seemed as if she had given these treasures and left him alone — to use them or lose them, apply them or misapply them, according to his own choice. That is all we can do with children, when they grow into big children, old enough to distinguish between right and wrong, and too old to be forced to do either.
 * Ch 7

 * One cannot make oneself, but one can sometimes help a little in the making of somebody else. It is well.
 * Ch 10

 * Thus King Dolor's reign passed, year after year, long and prosperous. Whether he was happy — "as happy as a king" — is a question no human being can decide. But I think he was, because he had the power of making everybody about him happy, and did it too; also because he was his godmother's godson, and could shut himself up with her whenever he liked, in that quiet little room in view of the Beautiful Mountains, which nobody else ever saw or cared to see. They were too far off, and the city lay so low. But there they were, all the time. No change ever came to them; and I think, at any day throughout his long reign, the King would sooner have lost his crown than have lost sight of the Beautiful Mountains.
 * Ch 10

Misattributed

 * A vision without a task is but a dream. A task without vision is but drudgery. A vision with a task is the hope of the world.
 * The task of definitely sourcing this quote is thus far but a vision. It is most commonly not attributed to Craik or to any author, but is cited as having been inscribed on a wall, on a window, or on a plaque, in a chapel, or town church, or cathedral somewhere in Sussex, England (or sometimes Surrey) most commonly with a date of 1730, but sometimes dated as early as c. 1640, or as late as 1886. It has also sometimes been cited as having been inscribed on an anonymous gravestone in Sussex. The attribution of this to Craik has only seldom occurred and might have begun with its posting in proximity to quotes by her in some internet quote collections.
 * Variants:
 * A vision without a task is but a dream, A task without a vision is drudgery, But a vision and a task — that is the hope of the world.

 * A vision without a task is but a dream. A task without vision is but drudgery. A vision and a task are the hope of the world.

title: Dinah Craik


text:
User talk:128.175.66.14

Amin Maalouf
I see you just created Amin Maalouf as a redirect to Abu'l-`Ala' al-Ma`arri, which was deleted based on the lack of quote content after more than six weeks. There's a good chance this will be deleted as well. If you could contribute some quotations from this person, it would greatly improve the chances of keeping an article on Wikiquote. Adding sources for the quotes also improves the likelihood of retention. Thank you for your assistance. — Jeff Q (talk) 03:59, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

 * You added something to my talk page about this. I was only trying to fix and synchronize things with wikipedia, I failed and wasn't sure how to do a VfD here, sorry for  the inconvenience. -- 128.175.66.14 05:11, 28 Apr 2005

 * My main concern was to get any useful quotes from Amin Maalouf before the article was deleted for lack of content. If you don't have any yet and would just like to get it deleted for now, I'd be happy to do that. (It can always be recreated later when quotes are available.) If I don't hear from you before 30 April, I'll assume that deletion is acceptable. In the future, if you want to request deletion, you can post it at Votes for deletion, which has some instructions. You can also ask an administrator like myself and we can take care of it. — Jeff Q (talk) 10:14, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Don't so worry, but your assistance will be greatly appreciated by us, Wikiquote community, by the way Welcome to Wikiquote, the free compendium of quotations! You don't have to log in to read or edit articles on Wikiquote, but creating an account is quick, free and non-intrusive, requires you to provide no personal information, and gives you many benefits, including:
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Click here to create an account. --Aphaia 16:32, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:128.175.66.14


text:
User talk:69.197.107.164

(RE: 22 April 2005 edit of Category:Animated TV shows) — Jeff Q (talk) 04:07, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:69.197.107.164


text:
User talk:69.248.78.111

(RE: 22 April 2005 edit of Ali ibn Abi Talib) — Jeff Q (talk) 04:07, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:69.248.78.111


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User talk:84.65.118.185

(RE: 22 April 2005 edits of Family Guy) — Jeff Q (talk) 04:10, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:84.65.118.185