Entersection

Truck overloaded with bricks.
Image credit: TechEBlog - One Brick Too Many

Here are a few orphics that [Ali] Baba threw off while riding from the Battery to Union Square in a cable car:
All is not beautiful that aspires high.
A square tower of bricks is as beautiful as a square tower of bricks.
A gorgeous entrance over-dazzles a multitude of shams.
When the front of a structure is as the wall, the wall would do as the front.
In all this dazzle of brick a man must think in squares and oblongs.
Methinks the oblongs are of the long-green variety.
The honest craftsman loves what is green in nature.
The New York craftsman delights in the other green.
New York is machine-made.
I hear it is run by a machine.
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men.
No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
– Anson Blackman (Ali Baba) in The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest, edited by Elbert Hubbard, Volume 18, Number 1, (East Aurora, New York: The Society of Philistines, December 1903), p. 26. Cited in part in private email by Lee Graves (March 8, 2005).

The Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (Washington, D.C.: August 28, 1963).
Image credit: U. S. News and World Report, The Library of Congress, Wikipedia.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

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It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.

We cannot turn back.
– Martin Luther King, Jr. in his “I Have a Dream” speech delivered during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D. C.: August 28, 1963). Full text of speech available at American Rhetoric and Project Gutenberg. Full audio recordings of speech in many formats available at The Internet Archive.

Buffalo in Badlands National Park (Interior, South Dakota: May 19, 2005).
Photograph by: Gregory Foster

Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love! Every seed is awakened, and all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even to our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves to inhabit this vast land.

Yet hear me friends! we now have to deal with another people, small and feeble when our forefathers first met with them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possesions is a disease in them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not! They even take tithes of the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse. They compel her to produce out of season, and when sterile she is made to take medicine in order to produce again. All this is sacrilege.

This nation is like a spring freshet; it overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path. We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that from us also. My brothers, shall we submit? or shall we say to them: “First kill me, before you can take possession of my fatherland!”
– Tatanka Yotanka (Sitting Bull; Lakotah: Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake), Lakotah Sioux chief, speaking before a Native American council at Powder River, as related to Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa) “by men who were present,” (South Dakota: Spring 1877). Available in Charles Alexander Eastman’s Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains, (Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown, and Company, 1918), p. 119.

The intersection of Church Street and State Avenue.
Image credit: Project Tolerance - Political Philosophy

Liberalism privileges tolerance because it is committed to fallibilism, the idea that our opinions about the world, derived as they are from the local, limited perspectives in which we necessarily live, are likely to be in error when—again, especially when—we are wholly committed to them. If God or God’s representative is removed as the guarantor of right judgement, all that remains is the judgement of fallible men and women who will be pretending to divinity whenever they confuse what seems to them to be true for what is really true. Because this mistake is natural to us, because the beliefs we acquire always seem to us to be perspicuous and indubitable, it is necessary, liberalism tells us, to put obstacles in the way of our assenting too easily to what are finally only our opinions. One way to do this is to institutionalize [John Stuart] Mill‘s advice and to require, as a matter of principle, a diversity of views with respect to any question. The New York Times v. Sullivan decision quotes with approval Judge Learned Hand‘s declaration that in essence the First Amendment “presupposes that right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues, than through any kind of authoritative selection.” Typically, those who make pronouncements like this assume (without saying so) that the tongues making up the multitude will belong to persons who are committed to the protocols of rational inquiry; frivolous persons, persons who exploit those protocols or play with them to gain political ends, are not imagined. (When [Gerald] Graff counsels “teach the controversy,” he means the real controversy, not the manufactured ones.) But nothing in a statement like Hand’s rules them out, and once “authoritative selection” has been discounted and even rendered suspect because of its necessarily fallible origins, there is no reason at all for excluding any voice no matter how outlandish its assertions. After all, who’s to say?
– Stanley Fish in his essay “Academic Cross-Dressing: How Intelligent Design gets its arguments from the left” in Harper’s Magazine, (New York: Harper’s Magazine Foundation, December 2005), p. 71-72.

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Harry Houdini escaping a straitjacket while suspended upside down in Manhattan (Broadway and 46th Street, New York: 1907).
Image credit: Ephemeral New York - When Houdini hung upside-down over Broadway

My brain is the key that sets me free.
– Harry Houdini, a favorite saying frequently cited when signing books, photographs, playing cards, etc.

Dangerous Crossing: The Revolutionary Voyage of John Quincy Adams by Stephen Krensky with illustrations by Greg Harlin (New York: Dutton Children's Books, 2005).
Image credit: Amazon.com

Some author, that I have met with, compares a judicious traveller to a river, that increases its stream the further it flows from its source; or to certain springs, which, running through rich veins of minerals, improve their qualities as they pass along. It will be expected of you, my son, that, as you are favored with superior advantages under the instructive eye of a tender parent, your improvement should bear some proportion to your advantages. Nothing is wanting with you but attention, diligence, and steady application. Nature has not been deficient.

These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. Would Cicero have shone so distinguished an orator if he had not been roused, kindled, and inflamed by the tyranny of Catiline, Verres, and Mark Anthony? The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. All history will convince you of this, and that wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities, which would otherwise lie dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.
– Abigail Adams in a letter to her son John Quincy Adams (January 12, 1780). Available in Letters of Mrs. Adams, The Wife of John Adams. With an introductory memoir by her grandson, Charles Francis Adams, edited by Charles Francis Adams, Edition 4, (Boston, Massachusetts: Wilkins, Carter, and Company, 1848), p. 111.