Hampton Sides Quotes

The Navajos were another matter. Theirs was a sprawling nation, wealthy in stock, obdurate in its ways, open to change but only on its terms.

The privilege isn't given to everyone. ... You must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge. In that way your eyes are opened to it. - Henry James, 1881

most viable path toward the North Pole, Petermann insisted. "Perhaps I am wrong," he told the Herald reporter, "but the way to show that is to give me the evidence. My idea is that if one door will not open, try another. If one route is marked with failures, try a new one. I have no ill will to any plan or expedition that means honest work in the Arctic regions." But make no mistake, Petermann said, an Arctic voyage was dangerous work. He always underscored that point. "A great task must be greatly conceived," he had written before one of the German polar expeditions. "For such tasks, one must be a great man, a great character. If you have doubts or scruples, back out now." Petermann pledged to give Bennett's expedition a full set of charts and maps of the Arctic and to help the expedition any other way he could. But beneath his enthusiasm for Bennett's new

I've sort of been an anthropologist of modern America, in a non-academic way. Whether it's Marines or Tupperware salesladies, high end audiophiles or bike couriers, I'm fascinated by the hallmarks of the American tribe.

The forties are the time when you begin to take notice of certain aches and pains. Your body and brain behave in inexplicable ways: Less hair on your head, more in your ears and nostrils. More memories in the bank, less synaptic firepower with which to access them. Gravity has started to show its inexorable pull.

The exodus of this whole people from the land of their fathers is a touching sight," Carleton wrote. "They have fought us gallantly for years on years; they have defended their mountains and their stupendous canyons with heroism; but at length, they found it was their destiny, too, to give way to the insatiable progress of our race.

to plan for a return to the Arctic. One

For poverty is miserable. It is ugly, disorganized, rowdy, sick, uneducated, violent, afflicted with crime. Poverty demeans human dignity. The demanding tone, the inarticulateness, the implied violence deeply offended us. We didn't want to see it on our sacred monumental grounds. We wanted it out of sight and out of mind.

I love Memphis, I guess you could say, in the way that you love a brother even if he does sometimes puzzle and sadden and frustrate you. Say what you want about it, it's an authentic place. I was born and raised in Memphis, and no matter where I go, Memphis belongs to me, and I to it.

These men suffered enough for a hundred lifetimes, and no one in this country should be allowed to forget it.

By the age of nine or ten, I knew that I loved history and writing. It got hold of me and never turned loose.

The FBI's search for MLK's killer began, a manhunt that would become the largest in American history,

I felt as we floundered aimlessly about in the snow that it made little difference to me whether I lived or died. It seemed to me that the terrible journey would have no end. I was awake and aware of all that was transpiring around me, but had lost all feeling and power of speech, and existed like an animated dead man.

The thing about Memphis is that it's pleasingly off-kilter. It's a great big whack job of a city. The anti-Atlanta. You go there, and you can't believe the things people will say, the way they think, the wobbling orbits of their lives. There's an essential otherness.

The Tea Party has very close affinities with independent third-party movements like the George Wallace movement. The Tea Party is still inchoate, still trying to figure out what it's going to become.

From his legs like an untethered weight. In their thousands the parasites

The surly orphan of American politics ... the grim joker in the deck, whose nightrider candidacy [is] a rough approximation of the potential for an American fascism. People

I find there's a thin, permeable membrane between journalism and history, and though some academic historians take a dim view of it, I gather a lot of strength and professional inspiration from passing back and forth across it.

America is an archipelago of tribes, a land where people form national families of kindred spirits.

When De Long arrived in California with Emma that May, he went straight down to the yard and feasted his eyes upon his new ship. He was smitten by the transformation that had taken place during his absence. "I am perfectly satisfied with her," he wrote. "She is everything I want.

Sometimes it takes a brush with eternity - a crash, an illness, some shock to the system - to get you really thinking about what you want to do with your limited time here, and why you're living on this wobbling dirt clod in the first place.

We do not want to go to the right or left, but straight back to our own country!

Then she spoke with Yolanda, her eldest child, with whom she'd been shopping all afternoon for an Easter dress. "Mommy, I'm not going to cry," Yoki said resolutely. "I'll see him again in heaven."
But something was bothering her, something clearly nagged at her young conscience. "Should I hate the man who killed my father?" she asked.
Coretta shook her head. "No, darling, your daddy wouldn't want you to do that.

As he saw it, the central issue had shifted from the purely racial to the economic. King likened the situation to a lifelong prisoner who is released from jail after the warden discovers that the man was falsely accused all along. "Go ahead, you're free now," the jailer says. But the prisoner has no job skills, no prospects, and the jailer doesn't think to give him money for the bus fare into town.

I think of America not so much as a single country but as a constellation of groups out there competing for air time, energetically expressing themselves and luxuriating in their right to govern themselves. Freedom is that great vaunted word that's always applied to our country - and rightly so.