James Polk Quotes

In the nineteenth century, cholera struck the most modern, prosperous cities in the world, killing rich and poor alike, from Paris and London to New York City and New Orleans. In 1836, it felled King Charles X in Italy; in 1849, President James Polk in New Orleans; in 1893, the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in St. Petersburg. ~ Sonia Shah

In the White House now was James Polk, a Democrat, an expansionist, who, on the night of his inauguration, confided to his Secretary of the Navy that one of his main objectives was the acquisition of California. His order to General Taylor to move troops to the Rio Grande was a challenge to the Mexicans. It was not at all clear that the Rio Grande was the southern boundary of Texas, although Texas had forced the defeated Mexican general Santa Anna to say so when he was a prisoner. The traditional border between Texas and Mexico had been the Nueces River, about 150 miles to the north, and both Mexico and the United States had recognized that as the border. However, Polk, encouraging the Texans to accept annexation, had assured them he would uphold their claims to the Rio Grande. Ordering troops to the Rio Grande, into territory inhabited by Mexicans, was clearly a provocation. ~ Howard Zinn

I hug him tightly. "I can't imagine my life without you, Christian. I love you so much it frightens me." "Me, too," he breathes. "My life would be empty without you. I love you so much. ~ E.L. James

I love you," she said softly.
Jason's arms tightened around her. He grinned sleepily. "I know."
Taylor drifted off contentedly. Until through the darkness, she heard a low, sneaky whisper.
"Mrs. Taylor Andrews ... "
She didn't bother to open her eyes.
"Still not gonna happen. ~ Julie James

In the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively. ~ James Schuyler

Instead of seeing ourselves as people trying to connect with people, let's see the church as people trying to connect with God and help others do the same. ~ James MacDonald

Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it. ~ James Baldwin

I used up most of my passions and energies during the years I've mentioned, and though I don't talk much about it, the chief thing I've asked from the world since then is to leave me alone. ~ James Hilton

To encounter oneself is to encounter the other: and this is love. If I know that my soul trembles, I know that yours does, too: and if I can respect this, both of us can live. Neither of us, truly, can live without the other: a statement which would not sound so banal if one were not so endlessly compelled to repeat it, and act on that belief. ~ James Baldwin

I'm not stonewalling; I'm just not into talking about religion, I told you that. ~ James L. Rubart

If the social order and the processes of commodification are not transformed in relation to the body through salvation, then salvation becomes hyperlocalized to a single relationship: God and the one being saved.64 ~ Willie James Jennings

One [event] is the discovery of the anesthetic properties of chloroform [in 1847] by James Simpson of Scotland. Following the reports of [William] Morton's demonstration [1846], he tried ether but, dissatisfied, searched for a substitute and came upon chlorophorm. He was an obstetrician. His use of anesthesia to alleviate the pains of childbirth was violently opposed by the Scottish clergy on the ground that pain was ordained by the scriptural command, "In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children", and that it was impious to attempt to avert it by anesthetic agents. And it was Simpson who stilled this opposition by his own famous quotation from scripture; he pointed out that when Eve was born, God cast Adam into deep sleep before performing upon him the notable costalectomy. Anesthesia was thus permissible by scriptural precedent. ~ Howard Wilcox Haggard

Sometimes people can be guilty of not working at relationships and if it's not working, oof, that's it. ~ Rob James-Collier

(On stoicism) "As a matter of fact, the experiment has already started. Yesterday at lunch I had a smaller piece of pecan pie than usual, and I passed up the scoop of vanilla ice cream entirely. It's like I said in my essay. 'Just as nature abhors a vacuum, a Stoic abhors satiety.' What's more, as you may have noticed, I've stopped smoking."
"But not swearing."
"I'm working on it."
...
"The stoics believed that in bearing pain without complain, a mortal might transcend the mundane world and enter the eternal matrix of divine thought. ~ James K. Morrow

The Supreme Court justices are able to decide fewer than 1 percent of all the appeals ~ James Duane

Sometimes a happy delusion is better than grim reality. ~ James Patterson

The commercialization of dubstep isn't something I'm part of. ~ James Blake

American musicians, instead of investigating ragtime, attempt to ignore it, or dismiss it with a contemptuous word. But that has always been the course of scholasticism in every branch of art. Whatever new thing the 'people' like is poohpoohed; whatever is 'popular' is spoken of as not worth the while. The fact is, nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best that he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius. ~ James Weldon Johnson

If you don't fill your days with love, you are wasting your life. ~ James Broughton

to be all the way across the country. "Dad was on the air in the middle of a radio show broadcast live from Hollywood ~ James Kaplan

Balance hangs in the fingers of Peace ~ James Butler

An essential part of teaching children to be disciplined and responsible is to have them learn to work. ~ James E. Faust

If you want to curry favor with a politician, give him credit for something someone else did. ~ James Abourezk

Magnus did not take such suffering lightly, but even mortals did not die of broken hearts. No matter how cruel Grace had been, he told himself, James would heal. Even though he was a Herondale. ~ Cassandra Clare

The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and what could be again. ~ James Earl Jones

In framing a system which we wish to last for ages, we shd. not lose sight of the changes which ages will produce. [James Madison in the U.S. Constitutional Convention, June 26, 1787. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Max Farrand (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 1:422.] ~ James Madison

Sometimes he seems like a droid
or a drone. Fang of Nine. Fang2-D2. ~ James Patterson

I love the process of being alone in a room. ~ James Frey

The problem with experiments has always been that human beings make the decisions on whether or not the animals have benefitted from the treatment. ~ James Randi

Admit to yourself women are equal. In fact go ahead and say it. They're superior. Nuff said. ~ Dennis James

If the choice is given to us of liberty or security, we must scorn the latter with the proper contempt of free man and the sound judgment of wise men who know that liberty and security are not incompatible in the lives of honest men. ~ James Farley

I always feel honored to meet people who ever met my mum. It means a lot to me. ~ James McCartney

What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us. ~ James Russell Lowell

When I started working, I didn't have a clue what I was doing, in that I was just wandering around, hoping that I could succeed. Then after I got a little under my belt, it took me about 25 years to feel like I knew what I was doing. ~ James Garner

If you want to cry. cry in front of me.
I should know - Cristian Grey ~ E.L. James

In How Fiction Works, James Wood says,

A great deal of nonsense is written every day about characters in fiction - from the side of those who believe too much in character and from the side of those who believe too little. Those who believe too much have an iron set of prejudices about what characters are: we should get to "know" them; . . . they should "grow" and "develop"; and they should be nice. So they should be pretty much like us.
Wood is correct, in part, but the ongoing question of character likability leaves the impression that what we're looking for in fiction is an ideal world where people behave in ideal ways. The question suggests that characters should be reflections not of us, but of our better selves.
Wood also says, "There is nothing harder than the creation of fictional character." I can attest to this difficulty, though with perhaps less hyperbole. I have, indeed, found several other tasks harder over the years. Regardless, characters are hard to create because we need to develop people who are interesting enough to hold a reader's attention. We need to ensure that they are some measure of credible. We need to make them distinct from ourselves (and, in the best of all words, from those in our lives, unless of course there is a need to settle scores). Somehow they need to be well developed enough to carry a plot, or carry a narrative without a plot, or endure the tribulations we writers tend to throw at them with alacrity. It's no wonde ~ Roxane Gay

... the germ of the dilemma ... is trapped in the room with me, always has been, and always will be, and it is yet more foreign to me than those foreign hills outside. ~ James Baldwin

Those evangelicals who have been raised and shaped by forms of Christianity that are roughly "fundamentalist" will either: a. become taken with the modern moral order and thus sort of replay the excarnational development of modernity, just now a few centuries later, sort of catching up with the wider culture; so under the guise of the "emerging church" or "progressive" evangelicalism, we'll be set on a path to something like Protestant liberalism, a new deism; or b. recognize the disenchantment and excarnation of evangelical Protestantism, and also reject the Christianized subtraction stories of liberal Christianity, and feel the pull of more incarnational spiritualities, and thus move toward more "Catholic" expressions of faith - and these expressions of faith will actually exert more pull on those who have doubts about their "closed" take on the immanent frame. ~ James K.A. Smith

But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place. ~ James Baldwin

Abide with me, fleshling, and I shall teach you to run with the fluxions. ~ James K. Morrow