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TCS: The Heat Is Too Intense For It
“Poetry is a sort of homecoming.”
“What matters most is how well
“August is nearly over – the month
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TCS: To Cherish In Their Souls A Reverence For Truth
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“The fact that a great many people believe
something is no guarantee of its truth.”
― W. Somerset Maugham
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“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, opening line
of Their Eyes Were Watching God
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The truth is incontrovertible. Panic
may resent it; ignorance may deride
it; malice may distort it, but there it is.
― Winston Churchill, from
Memoirs of the Second World War
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TCS: We Should Be Careful of Each Other … While There Is Still Time
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“It is horrifying that we have to fight our
own government to save the environment.”
― Ansel Adams
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“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?
In small places, close to home – so close and so small
that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world …
Unless these rights have meaning there, they have
little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen
action to uphold them close to home, we shall look
in vain for progress in the larger world.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt, Chair of the first
UN Commission on Human Rights,
which developed the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights
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“Man is endowed with reason and the power to create,
so that he may increase that which has been given him,
but until now he has not created, but demolished.
The forests are disappearing, the rivers are running dry,
the wild life is exterminated, the climate is spoiled,
and the earth becomes poorer and uglier every day …”
– Dr. Astrov, in Uncle Vanya,
written by Anton Chekhov
and first performed in 1899
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TCS: Men Are Too Emotional to Vote – Women Will Rise and Become Strong
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“The problem in America isn’t
so much what people don’t know;
the problem is what people think
they know that just ain’t so.”
– Will Rogers, humorist
and social commentator
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“Don’t listen to me. Listen to yourself …
People often ask me at this age, ‘Who am
I passing the torch to?’ First of all, I’m not
giving up my torch, thank you! I’m using my
torch to light other people’s torches … If we
each have a torch, there’s a lot more light.”
Gloria Steinem, feminist icon
who turned 90 in 2024
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TCS: In This Moment of Hatred Before Time on Earth Runs Out
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“Before a nation can be rebuilt, the citizens need to
understand how it was destroyed in the first place; how
its institutions were undermined, how the language
was twisted, how its people were manipulated.”
– Anne Applebaum, author of
Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive
Lure of Authoritarianism
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Maurice Lindsay, Scottish poet, at age 88
in 2006, when asked if he was a pacifist:
“No. I was in the army. Nevertheless, in my opinion,
the two worst inventions of mankind are religion and war.
Once you get certainties, once people become convinced that
they are right and only they are right and they’ll kill for it,
human beings reduce themselves to insignificance.
Although I’m temperamentally a happy person, at this point
in my life I’m a bit disillusioned with humanity. The way
that we carry on is pretty terrible.”
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TCS: Today We Are Lions Who Roar Their Fury
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“Liberty cannot be preserved without
a general knowledge among the people,
who have a right … and a desire to know.”
— John Adams,
Founding Father and 2nd U.S. President
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“My country, I will build you again.
If need be, with bricks made from my life …
I will wash again the blood off your body
With torrents of my tears.
Once more, the darkness will leave this house …”
— Simin Behbahani,
‘the Lioness of Iran’ – from
“My Country, I Will Build You Again”
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“The public welfare demands that constitutional
cases must be decided according to the terms of
the Constitution itself, and not according to judges’
views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice. I have
no fear of constitutional amendments properly
adopted, but I do fear the rewriting of the Constitution
by judges under the guise of interpretation.”
— Hugo L. Black, Associate Justice
of the U.S. Supreme Court (1937-1971)
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TCS: I Didn’t Know and Nobody Told Me
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“Truth, when not sought after,
rarely comes to light.”
– Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
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“In a time of deceit, telling the
truth is a revolutionary act.”
– George Orwell, author of
1984 and Animal Farm
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“The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn
how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what
you really think.” … “As a child I was taught that to tell
the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned
that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the
fear of telling the truth – whatever the truth may be –
that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.”
― June Jordan, Black American poet and activist,
1991 PEN-West Freedom to Write Award honoree
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TCS: In My Invincible Summer
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“Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.”
― from “Nothing Twice”
by Wislawa Szymborska
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“… what had we tried to do? Defiantly tell the truth.
For what purpose? To keep some truth alive in a
world full of lies. And what was the good of that?
I don’t know. But I was glad I had taken part
in that act of defiant truth-telling.”
– Floyd Dell, in 1917
editor of The Masses, banned for
opposing U.S. entry into WWI
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“… In the midst of chaos, I found there was,
within me, an invincible calm …
In the midst of winter, I found there was,
within me, an invincible summer …”
― Albert Camus,
awarded the 1957 Nobel
Prize in Literature
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TCS: Restoring Compassion to the Nation
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“If you see someone without
a smile, give them yours.”
― Dolly Parton
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“Learning to stand in somebody else’s
shoes, to see through their eyes, that’s
how peace begins. And it’s up to you to
make that happen. Empathy is a quality
of character that can change the world.”
— Barack Obama, 44th U.S. President
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“One of the criticisms I’ve faced over the
years is that I’m not aggressive enough or
assertive enough or maybe somehow because
I’m empathetic, it means I’m weak. I totally
rebel against that. I refuse to believe that you
cannot be both compassionate and strong.”
— Jacinda Ardern,
40th New Zealand Prime Minister
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TCS: The Light That Without Darkness You Could Not See
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“… freedom cannot be legislated into existence,
so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be
censored into existence.”
― Dwight David Eisenhower, 1953
– 34th U.S. President
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“Words are sacred. They deserve respect.
If you get the right ones, in the right order,
you can nudge the world a little.”
― Tom Stoppard,
Czech-born UK playwright
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“A poet’s work … to name the unnameable, to
point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments,
shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep.”
― Salman Rushdie, Indian-born UK novelist,
target of an Islamic fatwah (death order) after
his book The Satanic Verses was published
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Joy of Fishes
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Flowers For Socrates 