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The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three-headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three-headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites.
~ in a letter to his nephew Peter Carr

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than no to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.
~ in a letter to Abigail Adams, 1787)

I hold it, that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
~ in a letter to James Madison after Shay’s rebellion

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is their natural manure.
~ in a letter to Col. William S. Smith, 1787

No man can bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it.
~ in a letter to Rutledge, 1795

I have said and always will say, that the studious perusal of the Sacred Volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands.
~ Quoted by A.W. Pink in What Follows from Divine Inspiration

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others.

To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.

Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever. (in reference to slavery)

God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?

As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.

I have sworn upon the alter of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

No man can bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it. ( in a letter to Rutledge, 1795)

There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned – this is the sum of good government.

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.

Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

An injured friend is the bitterest of foes.

Be polite to all, but intimate with few.

Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.

Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.

I find that he is happiest of whom the world says least, good or bad.

Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.

I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.

It is our duty still to endeavor to avoid war; but if it shall actually take place, no matter by whom brought on, we must defend ourselves. If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.

War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.

No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.

A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned — this is the sum of good government.

I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

Determine never to be idle. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.

__________

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__________

(Share your answers in the comments below.)

Biographies are bu the clothes and buttons of the man–the biography of the man himself cannot be written.
~ Mark Twain

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.
~ Oscar Wilde

Biographies are bu the clothes and buttons of the man–the biography of the man himself cannot be written.
~ Mark Twain

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.
~ Oscar Wilde

(Share your answers in the comments below.)

Confessions

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I make it a point to read a book of poetry at least once each year. I know that I probably didn’t like cabbage the first time that I ate it, but I love it now. So, I am hoping that through continued exposure I will develop the same kind of taste for poetry.

Thus, it was that I came to Carl Sandburg’s book Harvest Poems: 1910-1960. Sandburg, an American film critic, poet, historian, novelist, balladeer, folklorist, journalist, historian, biographer, and autobiographer, won two Pulitzer Prizes during his lifetime. One Pulitzer was awarded for his biography of Abraham Lincoln, which I read as a teenager and thoroughly enjoyed. The other, for The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg.

If I am going to ever come to love poetry, surely the work of a Pulitzer Prize Winner in the field is a good place to invest myself. So, did I come away from Harvest Poems with a greater love and appreciation for the poetry genre? No. I am such a Philistine.

While I may not have enjoyed Sandburg’s poetry, I did enjoy his Nine Tentative (First Model) Definitions of Poetry.

1. Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.

2. Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.

3. Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.

4. Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration.

5. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.

6. Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.

7. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

8. Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

9. Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words.

No doubt I come away from Harvest Poems a changed person, as we are changed by all our experiences in life. Nevertheless, I remain a lover of the idea of poetry but not a lover of poetry.

Here is a poem that I wrote about a year ago on this topic.

I Wish That I Liked Poetry
by Kevin Stilley

I wish that I liked poetry,
With all its cool and class;
I wish that I could yearn to read,
Tennyson and not the vinasse.

But the truth remains that I don’t live verse,
I run from it and its adherents,
But I guess that all said it could be much worse,
I could read it just for appearance.

__________

A Select Bibliography of Carl Sandburg’s Works

Collections of Poetry

* In Reckless Ecstasy (Asgard Press, 1904).
* Incidentals (Asgard Press, 1904).
* The Plaint of the Rose (Asgard Press, 1908).
* Chicago Poems (Henry Holt, 1916).
* Cornhuskers (Henry Holt, 1918).
* Smoke and Steel (Harcourt Brace, 1920).
* Slabs of the Sunburst West (1922).
* Selected Poems (Harcourt Brace, 1926).
* Good Morning, America (Crosby Gaige, 1928).
* The People, Yes (Harcourt Brace, 1936).
* Bronze Wood (Grabhorn Press, 1941).
* Poems of the Midwest (World Publishing, 1946).
* The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (Harcourt Brace, 1950).
* Harvest Poems: 1910-1960 (Harcourt Brace, 1960).
* Six New Poems and a Parable (University of Kentucky Press, 1961).
* Honey and Salt (Harcourt Brace, 1963).
* A Sandburg Treasury (Harcourt Brace, 1970).
* Breathing Tokens (Harcourt Brace, 1978).
* Fables, Foibles and Foobles (University of Illinois Press, 1989).
* Arithmetic (Harcourt, 1993).
* Billy Sunday and Other Poems (Harcourt Brace , 1993).
* Selected Poems of Carl Sandburg (Harcourt Brace, 1996).

History, Biographies, Autobiographies, and More

* You and Your Job (Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1908).
* Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (Harcourt Brace, 1926).
* The American Songbag (Harcourt Brace, 1927).
* Mary Lincoln: Wife and Widow (Harcourt Brace, 1932).
* Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (Harcourt Brace, 1939).
* Storm over the Land (Harcourt Brace, 1942).
* Home Front Memo (Harcourt Brace, 1943).
* Remembrance Rock (Harcourt Brace, 1948).
* Lincoln Collector (Harcourt Brace, 1949).
* The New American Songbag (Broadcast Music, 1950).
* Always the Young Strangers (Harcourt Brace, 1953).
* A Lincoln Preface (Harcourt Brace, 1953).
* Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years (Harcourt Brace, 1954).
* The Letters of Carl Sandburg (Harcourt Brace, 1968).
* The Chicago Race Riots of 1919 (Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1969).
* Ever the Winds of Chance (University of Illinois Press, 1983).
* Carl Sandburg at the Movies (Scarecrow Press, 1985).
* The Poet and the Dream Girl: The Love Letters of Lilian Steichen & Carl Sandburg (University of Illinois Press, 1987).
* The Movies Are: Carl Sandburg’s Film Reviews and Essays (Lake Claremont Press, 2000).
* The Sandburg Range (Harvest Books, 2001).

Children’s Books

* Rootabaga Stories (Harcourt Brace, 1922).
* Rootabaga Pigeons (Harcourt Brace, 1923).
* Abe Lincoln Grows Up (Harcourt Brace, 1928).
* Early Moon (Junior Literary Guild, 1930).
* Potato Face (Harcourt Brace, 1930).
* Prairie-Town Boy (Harcourt Brace, 1955).
* Wind Song (Harcourt Brace, 1960).
* The Wedding Procession of the Rag doll and the Broom Handle and Who Was in It (Harcourt Brace, 1967).
* The Sandburg Treasury (Harcourt Brace, 1970).
* Rainbows Are Made (Harcourt Brace, 1982).
* More Rootabagas (Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).

__________

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Words About Words

— “The Immigration Solution” is an excellent new book that discusses illegal immigration without the political rhetoric, spin, demagoguery, and unsubstantiated claims that have become all too common in the media and among politicians.

– “Mugged by Reality” by John Agresto is an eyewitness account of life inside Iraq by someone who does not take either the Bush administration line or the Congressional Democrats’ line. Nor does he hesitate to admit that what he saw in Iraq changed the opinions with which he first entered the country.

– “The Prince of Darkness” by Robert Novak is a big book detailing half a century of his experiences in Washington, dealing with both political figures and other members of the print and broadcast media. He names names.

– For those who like history, there is a new history of one of the most decisive decades in American history — the decade of the Great Depression of the 1930s — titled “The Forgotten Man” by Amity Shlaes.

– For those who want more in-depth analysis of the economic consequences of New Deal policies, Jim Powell’s book “FDR’s Folly” would make an excellent supplement to Amity Shlaes’ book.

– “Until Proven Innocent” by Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson is an account of the Duke University “rape” case that goes far beyond the misdeeds of the disgraced District Attorney Michael Nifong.

– An excellent present for those parents and students who want to find academic institutions that have not succumbed to the ideological corruption found at Duke and other colleges and universities would be the book “Choosing the Right College.“

– A very moving account of the life of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas can be found in his very readable and insightful memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son,” which has been on the best-seller list for eight weeks thus far.

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