The Fathers Of Our Land Quotes

Founders never leave our memories for they leave indelible footprints on our minds. They give us the reasons to look back and ponder. They give us the reasons to look forward with the hope and aspirations to beating their footprints of distinctiveness. Their mistakes are our lessons and the reasons to reason. ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

It's time we stand up and demand more of the fathers of this world. It's time we stop buying into their rationalizations and their sorry explanations. It's time we give our kids a fighting chance. ~ Dan Pearce

The act of our creation is equal for all of us. The results of our creation are not. The goal of our Founding Fathers was to treat everyone equally under the law, and as such, provide for equality of opportunity, not results. ~ A.E. Samaan

The cheerful trumpet strains of Purcell's "Prince of Denmark March" sang out as Prince Charles, flanked by Princes Andrew and Edward, strode confidently up the aisle, smiling and nodding to his friends in the congregation. He seemed very much at ease as he took his place to await his bride.
Then . . . we heard the trumpet fanfare that heralded Diana's entrance. We could not see her arrival from our seats to the side. Very clearly, though, we could hear the murmurs and gasps of approval inside the church along with the cheers and applause outside, as the entire world first glimpsed the bride in her fairy-tale dress.
Diana looked an absolute vision in her cloud of tulle, taffeta, and lace, with the Spencer diamond tiara sparkling above her veil. Lovely, innocent, and demure, she more than met her subjects' expectations that glorious morning.
Holding her father's arm, Diana progressed slowly and beautifully up the aisle to the rustle of silk and the scrutiny of the congregation. I recognized the processional march as Jeremiah Clarke's "Trumpet Voluntary" from my own wedding. She appeared outwardly composed, almost deadly calm, with an endearing tentative quality to her smile. I felt certain she was trembling inside. I was quaking in sympathy for her.
It may have been simply the effect of the artificial light, but I thought Diana looked rather pale and tense under her veil. Even Pat noticed. He turned to me and whispered, "She looks as nervous as you did, almo ~ Mary Robertson

This is a very painful and delicate subject, I know, but I dare not turn away from it. It has long been my sorrowful conviction that the standard of daily life among professing Christians in this country has been gradually falling. I am afraid that Christ-like charity, kindness, good temper, unselfishness, meekness, gentleness, good nature, self denial, zeal to do good and separation from the world are far less appreciated than they ought to be and than they used to be in the days of our fathers.

Into the causes of this state of things I cannot pretend to enter fully and can only suggest conjectures for consideration. It may be that a certain profession of religion has become so fashionable and comparatively easy in the present age that the streams which were once narrow and deep have become wide and shallow, and what we have gained in outward show we have lost in quality. It may be that our contemporary affluence and comfortable lifestyles have insensibly introduced a plague of worldliness and self indulgence and a love of ease. What were once called luxuries are now comforts and necessities, and self denial and "enduring hardness" are consequently little known. It may be that the enormous amount of controversy which marks this age has insensibly dried up our spiritual life. We have too often been content with zeal for orthodoxy and have neglected the sober realities of daily practical godliness. Be the causes what they may, I must declare my own belief that the r ~ J.C. Ryle

Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions - adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers - none can equal the Internet. ~ Adam Gopnik

The straight and narrow, so beloved of our founding fathers and all fathers thereafter, is now obviously and irrevocably bent. What is God trying to tell us ... ? ~ Larry Kramer

Maybe. Maybe there's more we all could have done," he says, "but we just have to let the guilt remind us to do better next time." I frown and pull back. That is a lesson that members of Abnegation learn - guilt as a tool, rather than a weapon against the self. It is a line straight from one of my father's lectures at our weekly meetings. ~ Veronica Roth

We have overcome economic devastation, defeated mighty oppressors, and lifted up generation after generation of Americans. We can - and we will - do it again. For that is our birthright as members of the American family - white, black, Hispanic, Asian, immigrant, or descendant of the Founding Fathers themselves. ~ Brian Sandoval

Varys appeared not long after Lord Jacelyn had left. "Men are such faithless creatures," he said by way of greeting. Tyrion sighed. "Who's the traitor today?" The eunuch handed him a scroll. "So much villainy, it sings a sad song for our age. Did honor die with your fathers? ~ George R R Martin

Can anyone be a father without beginning to be one? Yes, one who did not begin his existence. What begins to exist begins to be a father - God the Father did not begin at all. He is Father in the true sense, because He is not a son as well. Just as the Son is son in the true sense, because He is not a father as well. In our case, the word 'father' cannot be truly appropriate, because we must be fathers and sons ... ~ Gregory Of Nazianzus

[L]iberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood. ~ John Adams

And if we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women and if people aren't involved in helping godly men in getting elected than we're going to have a nation of secular laws. That's not what our founding fathers intended and that's certainly isn't what God intended. ~ Katherine Harris

Many guilty consciences have been created by the slave trade. Europeans know that they carried on the slave trade, and Africans are aware that the trade would have been impossible if certain Africans did not cooperate with slave ships. To ease their guilty consciences, Europeans try to throw the major responsibility for the slave trade on to the Africans. One major author on the slave trade (appropriately titled Sins of Our Fathers) explained how many white people urged him to state that the trade was the responsibility of African chiefs, and that Europeans merely turned up to buy captives- as though without European demand there would have been captives sitting on the beach by the millions! Issues such as those are not the principal concern of this study, but they can be correctly approached only after understanding that Europe became the center of a world-wide system and that it was European capitalism which set slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in motion. Pg. 82 ~ Walter Rodney

Raising our sons is among the most important social imprints we will leave on the world, for they will become the partners, husbands, fathers, friends, lovers, creators, and leaders of tomorrow. ~ Melia Keeton Digby

Fathers…it's vital to exhibit a thoughtful balance between being a tough as nails disciplinarian and compassionate gentle patriarch to our families. Too much of one devastates relationships and too much of the other emasculates our ability to effectively lead. Our wives and children need the security and assurance of knowing that we can be both tough and tender. One side steel…the other side velvet. ~Jason Versey ~ Jason Versey

As he grew older, which was mostly in my absence, my firstborn son, Alexander, became ever more humorous and courageous. There came a time, as the confrontation with the enemies of our civilization became more acute, when he sent off various applications to enlist in the armed forces. I didn't want to be involved in this decision either way, especially since I was being regularly taunted for not having 'sent' any of my children to fight in the wars of resistance that I supported. (As if I could 'send' anybody, let alone a grown-up and tough and smart young man: what moral imbeciles the 'anti-war' people have become.) ~ Christopher Hitchens

The world of our fathers resides within us. Ten thousand generations and more. A form without a history has no power to perpetuate itself. What has no past can have no future. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

There were some children round him playing in the dust on the paths. They had long fair hair, and with very earnest faces and solemn attention were making little mountains of sand so as to stamp on them and squash them underfoot.
Pierre was going through one of those gloomy days when one looks into every corner of one's soul and shakes out every crease.
'Our occupations are like the work of those kids,' he thought. Then he wondered whether after all the wisest course in life was not to beget two or three of these little useless beings and watch them grow with complacent curiosity. And he was touched by the desire to marry. You aren't so lost when you're not alone any more. At any rate you can hear somebody moving near you in times of worry and uncertainty, and it is something anyway to be able to say words of love to a woman when you are feeling down.
He began thinking about women.
His knowledge of them was very limited, as all he had had in the Latin Quarter was affairs of a fortnight or so, dropped when the month's money ran out and picked up again or replaced the following month. Yet kind, gentle, consoling creatures must exist. Hadn't his own mother brought sweet reasonableness and charm to his father's home? How he would have loved to meet a woman, a real woman!
He leaped up, determined to go and pay a little visit to Mme Rosémilly.
But he quickly sat down again. No, he didn't like that one! ~ Guy De Maupassant

Forgiveness is a choice. It is not a feeling– don't try and feel forgiving. It is an act of the will. 'Don't wait to forgive until you feel like forgiving,' wrote Neil Anderson. 'You will never get there. Feelings take time to heal after the choice to forgive is made.' We allow God to bring the hurt up from the past, for 'if your forgiveness doesn't visit the emotional core of your life, it will be incomplete,' said Anderson. We acknowledge that it hurt, that it mattered, and we choose to extend forgiveness to our fathers, our mothers, those who hurt us. This is not saying, 'It didn't really matter'; it is not saying, 'I probably deserved part of it anyway.' Forgiveness says, 'It was wrong. Very wrong. It mattered, hurt me deeply. And i release you. I give you to God. ~ Stasi Eldredge

Think about it. Before the creation of the world, before anything or anyone existed, there was a living, loving God. There is not chaos at the centre. There is a Father.

The emptiness our earthly fathers have left in us should not be a deterrent from God but rather an invitation to have our needs fulfilled by him in the deepest part of our being. ~ Jon Morrison

Our revelation is for the sons and daughters of God, realizing now that the greatest manifestation of the Spirit in our lives is love - the kind that holds no record of wrong - without which everything else we do is worthless, as Paul made so plain to the Corinthians. The Spirit of truth comes to show us the Father's love and our union with and in Christ, because only in this awareness can we love as He loves and so show ourselves and the world the love of the Father. ~ Ted Dekker

I listened, I understood and I didn't understand. Long ago she had threatened Marcello with the shoemaker's knife simply because he had dared to grab my wrist and break the bracelet. From that point on, I was sure that if Marcello had just brushed against her she would have killed him. But toward Stefano, now, she showed no explicit aggression. Of course, the explanation was simple: we had seen our fathers beat our mothers from childhood. We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they liked, out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us. As ~ Elena Ferrante

My pacifism came after I joined the army and was shipped over to Korea. There was a little one-room orphanage there called Song-do. There were 180 babies in there, and they were GI babies. The U.S. government would not acknowledge this, and the Korean government had nothing to do with them. They were living on a 100-pound bag of rice a month. Some of those kids, when they were old enough, would go out and shine shoes. They would show up at the gate of our compound to shine shoes, and you'd swear they were looking for their fathers. ~ Utah Phillips

In a private room down the hall, a tired but delighted Cecily was watching her husband with his brand-new son. Cecily had thought that the expression on Tate's face at their wedding would never be duplicated. But when they placed the tiny little boy in his father's gowned arms in the delivery room, and he saw his child for the first time, the look on his face was indescribable. Tears welled in his eyes. He'd taken the tiny little fist in his big, dark hand and smoothed over the perfect little fingers and then the tiny little face, seeking resemblances.
"Generations of our families," he said softly, "all there, in that face." He'd looked down at his wife with unashamedly wet eyes. "In our son's face."
She wiped her own tears away with a corner of the sheet and coaxed Tate's head down so that she could do the same for him where they were, temporarily, by themselves.
Now she was cleaned up, like their baby, and drowsy as she lay on clean white sheets and watched her husband get acquainted with his firstborn. "Isn't he beautiful?" he murmured, still awed by the child. "Next time, we have to have a little girl," he said with a tender smile, "so that she can look like you."
Her heart felt near to bursting as she stared up at that beloved face, above the equally beloved face of their firstborn.
"My heart is happy when I see you," she whispered in Lakota.
He chuckled, having momentarily forgotten that he'd taught her how to say it. "Mine is equally happy ~ Diana Palmer

Thomas Jefferson understood the greater purpose of the liberty that our Founding Fathers sought during the creation of our Nation. Although it was against the British that the colonists fought for political rights, the true source of the rights of man was clearly stated in the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson wrote that all humans are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights ... It was self-evident to him that denying these rights was wrong and that he and others must struggle to win what was theirs. ~ William J. Clinton

This is thought to be Jesus's best-loved parable, usually because our eyes are on the prodigal and his father. But as with jokes, so with parables: there is a principle in both of "end stress." The "punch line" comes at the end. That being the case the alarming message here is that the spirit of the elder brother, the legalist, is more likely to be found near the father's house than in the pig farm - or in concrete terms, in the congregation and among the faithful. And sometimes (only sometimes?), it appears in the pulpit and in the heart of the pastor. ~ Sinclair B. Ferguson

Two weeks ago, Aaron and Isaac, I learned your mother Laura has breast cancer. My heart feels impaled. These words, so useless and feeble. Laura is only thirty-five years old. Her next birthday will be in only three days. I write this letter to you, my sons, with the hope that one day in the future you will read it and understand what happened to our family.

Together, your mother and I have created and nurtured an unbreakable bond that has transformed us into an unlikely team. A Chicano from El Paso, Texas. A Jew from Concord, Massachusetts. I want you to know your mother. She has given me hope when I have felt none; she has offered me kindness when I have been consumed by bitterness. I believe I have taught her how to be tough and savvy and how to achieve what you want around obstacles and naysayers.

Our hope is that the therapies we are discussing with her doctors will defeat her cancer. But a great and ominous void has suddenly engulfed us at the beginning of our life as a family. This void suffocates me. ~ Sergio Troncoso

The Bible and its teachings helped form the basis for the Founding Fathers' abiding belief in the inalienable rights of the individual, rights which they found implicit in the Bible's teachings of the inherent worth and dignity of each individual. This same sense of man patterned the convictions of those who framed the English system of law inherited by our own Nation, as well as the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. ~ Ronald Reagan

One full wall was given over to Father's stamp albums, fat leather volumes whose colors indicated the reign of each monarch: black for Queen Victoria, red for Edward the Seventh, green for George the Fifth, and blue for our present monarch, George the Sixth. ~ Alan Bradley

something's knocking at the door

a great white light dawns across the
continent
as we fawn over our failed traditions,
often kill to preserve them
or sometimes kill just to kill.
it doesn't seem to matter: the answers dangle just
out of reach,
out of hand, out of mind.


the leaders of the past were insufficient,
the leaders of the present are unprepared.
we curl up tightly in our beds at night and wait.
it is a waiting without hope, more like a prayer for unmerited grace.


it all looks more and more like the same old movie.
the actors are different but the plot's the same:
senseless.


we should have known, watching our fathers.
we should have known, watching our mothers.
they did not know, they too were not prepared to teach.
we were too naive to ignore their counsel and now we have embraced their ignorance as our own.
we are them, multiplied.
we are their unpaid debts.
we are bankrupt in money and in spirit.


there are a few exceptions, of course, but these teeter on the
edge
and will
at any moment
tumble down to join the rest
of us,
the raving, the battered, the blind and the sadly
corrupt.


a great white light dawns across the
continent,
the flowers open blindly in the stinking wind,
Charles Bukowski

Our Founding Fathers were proud that Americans were trusted with arms because they knew that only when people are armed could they truly be thought of as free citizens. And that's where the circle closes. Those who want to deprive you of your right to keep and bear arms are intending to deprive you of your freedom, period. Like the criminals their policies encourage, these elitists know that it is always best to disarm victims before you enslave them. ~ Charley Reese

It goes without saying that you could not vanquish the ignorant masses around you; little by little, as you advance in life, you will be obliged to yield and to be swallowed up in the crowd of a hundred thousand human beings; life will stifle you, but you will all the same not have disappeared without having exerted an influence; of women like you, there will be after you perhaps only six, then twelve, and so on, until finally you will become the majority. In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, amazing, astonishing. Man has need of that life and if it doesn't yet exist, he must sense it, wait for it and dream of it, prepare to receive it, and to achieve that he must see and know more than our grandfathers and fathers saw or knew. ~ Anton Chekhov

Our Founding Fathers were the first to articulate the reasons for their First Amendment, the same reasons given by Learned Hand, and by Justice Brennan in New York Times v. Sullivan . It is a lesson we keep forgetting and must relearn in each succeeding generation. ~ Gilbert S. Merritt, Jr.

I believe that only through a truly educated citizenry can the ideals that inspired the Founding Fathers of our nation be preserved and perpetuated. ~ David O. McKay

I freely admit that the best of my fun, I owe it to Horse and Hound - Whyte Melville (1821-1878)


"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call'd fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of ~ Whyte Melville

So let us not worry, and look instead as it has been taught us to do, as the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, keeping complete faith in Our Father's goodness. ~ Franz Liszt