Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils. The unhappy man who has been treated as a brute animal, too frequently sinks bene...
Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty s...
When your children arrive, the best you can hope for is that they break open everything about you. Your mind floods with oxygen. Your heart becomes a room with wide-open windows. You laugh hard every day. You think about the future and read about glo...
In war," answered the weaver, "the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffer...
After you are here, I will try not to become one of those parents who brag incessantly about their children, who force them to recite the alphabet backward or sing the Lord's Prayer in German to horrified dinner guests. One of those parents who tell ...
What was behind this smug presumption that what pleased you was bad or at least unimportant in comparison to other things? … Little children were trained not to do “just what they liked’ but … but what? … Of course! What others liked. And w...
Please, help me. Young werewolves in love. I turned to walk into the house, moving carefully. I had never much believed in God. Well, that's not quite true. I believed that there was a God, or something close enough to it to warrant the name if there...
As much as he loathed himself for it, he couldn't stop thinking about Abigail. If he hadn't met her, he might be married to someone else. Some nice woman who didn't throw dishes at him. He'd be asleep right now, lying on his side with her warm body s...
For a while parents seemed to forget that their responsibility as parents did not cease when the child turned on the radio; rather it increases. In the August, 1938, issue of , Mary Linton has this to say to the parent who is blaming everyone but him...
He was in Guanajuato, Mexico, he was a writer, and tonight was the Day of the Dead ceremony. He was in a little room on the second floor of a hotel, a room with wide windows and a balcony that overlooked the plaza where the children ran and yelled ea...
Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a gen...
While the bodies of young children are usually relaxed and flexible, if experiences of fear are continuous over the years, chronic tightening happens. Our shoulders may become permanently knotted and raised, our head thrust forward, our back hunched,...
I have always regarded as one of the greatest of all Americans. ... It was my good fortune to encounter 's works in my boyhood ... it was, indeed, a revelation to me to read that great thinker's views on political and theological subjects. Paine educ...
It seems to me that the greatest triumph of any human rights movement, be it fighting for racial, religious, sexual or gender equality – is to achieve that moment where eyes are opened so wide that a sort of blindness sets in. I don’t care if som...
As she looked in the full-length mirror in her dressing room, she added a few ropes of pearls, pinned a white silk camellia, and draped the Chantilly lace shawl. In that moment, Dana thought of fashion's most enduring icon who created this elegant an...
In your life, right here and now, things like mermaids, fairies, witches and monsters are nothing but fairytales told to your grandchildren and stories you heard from your own grandparents as children. They exist only in your imagination. Did you eve...
Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years' War and the Opium Wars and the Dirty War, the ideas of Simone Weil and Lao-Tzu, inform...
True love is not: A person’s looks A person’s career or accomplishments Longevity of a relationship Children together Memories made Words spoken or declared Chance meetings you feel are fate Hobbies and interests shared Or, Religious beliefs in c...
In a universe where all life is in movement, where ever fact seen in perspective is totally engaging, we impose stillness on lively young bodies, distort reality to dullness, make action drudgery. Those who submit - as the majority does - are conditi...
We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voice...
On Living Living is no laughing matter: You must take it seriously. So much so and to such a degree that, for example, your hands tied behind your back, your back to the wall or else in a laboratory in your white coat and safety glasses, you can die ...
