Quotes from James A. Michener

At the Quarterly Meeting in December 1777 the Quakers of the Choptank became the first important religious group in the south to outlaw slavery among its members.

He tested his scales as carefully as Saint Peter is supposed to test his while weighing souls.

Any segment of land . . . can be interesting of itself, but its greater significance must always lie in the life it sustains.

The relationship of a man to his land is never easy. It is perhaps the noblest relationship in the world, after the family, and certainly the most rewarding.

The abuses stemmed from the fact that the owners of the railroads never saw themselves as servants to an expanding nation; they were men trying to squeeze the last penny of profit from a good thing, and to accomplish this, they subverted legislatures, perverted economic law and persecuted anyone who tried to hold them to a more honest discharge of their duties.

You preserve nothing without encountering some disadvantages. If we keep this [prairie] dog town, horses will break their legs and rattlers will come back. But in the large picture, things balance out, as they did two thousand years ago. The trick is to preserve the balance and pay whatever price it costs.

It was the year in which the two races approached a state of equilibrium: the Indians still owned the land and still controlled it, the buffalo were plentiful, and white soldiers had not yet begun to shoot at Indians they were fearful of, and peace was still possible.

Year after year one black in four throughout the general population was arrested for some trivial offense or other, and it was fortunate for them that not all police were as determined and sadistic as the team of Krause and Krog. Their like could be found in most countries; Russia, East Germany, Iran, Argentina, Brazil, all had such interrogators. But the majority of South African policemen tried to be law-abiding officers of justice; Krause and Krog were officers of terror.

why not a beauty like Murcia near the Mediterranean, or Jaén in the mountains, or Oviedo, where the relics of Christ were kept? "Why Badajoz?

if a nation is totally geared to the waging of war, it had better ensure that war keeps occurring somewhere;

The criminals at the North make us sell our wheat and cotton to Europe at cheap prices, but will not permit us to buy our manufactures cheaply from England. No, they pass a high tariff, keep out cheap European products and force us to buy from Massachusetts and New York at extremely high prices.

That's how it gonna be all your life," Julia Cater told her son, and she was preaching old black wisdom, for through the generations that was how black women enabled their sons to survive so that they could grow into black men. Hiram

Detritus, that's the word. The awful accumulation of wrong decisions, improper terms. You scrape away the excrescences of history...and maybe you get down to the bedrock of human society, where diamonds hide. God of my fathers, how I wish we could bring in the psychological drills and probe down to bedrock.

with that insight which comes to a man only once or twice in his lifetime, allowing him to see ahead into the structure of the years.

The Platte!" I gasped. "None other," Leeds said. "That's the sorriest river in America. You've heard all the jokes about the Platte. 'Too thick to drink, too thin to plow.' That's a nothing river.

Because when men ignite in their hearts a religious fury, they inflict at the same time a blindness upon their eyes.

Frikkie said, "Van der Merwe had a flagpole lying on the ground. He propped it in its hole, got a ladder and a tape measure and tried to climb up to measure it, but the flagpole fell down. Twice again he propped it up and tried to climb it. Finally a Kaffir said, 'Baas, why don't you measure it when it's on the ground?' and Van der Merwe said, 'Stupid Kaffir, I want to know its height, not its width.' Ã¢â'¬Â Jopie said

QUAKER: Since God maintains direct accessibility with every human life and offers instant and uncomplicated guidance, the intervention of priests and ministers is unnecessary. The intercession of saints is not required. Musical chanting and pretentious prayers fulfill no need. God is not attracted by incense or ostentation or robes or colorful garments or hierarchies. CATHOLIC: You pretty well abolish my church. QUAKER

Never ask such a question!" Rhodes exploded. "Anything can be done if men of good principle determine that it shall be done. Have you the courage to strike for immortal goals?" In

And all were told repeatedly: "If the magnate is left free to accumulate his great wealth, you can be sure that some of it will sift down to you.

Chesapeake Bay is like a beautiful woman. There's no humiliation from which she cannot recover.

crested waves leaping and tossing white spume into the air.

The chief character in this narrative is the Caribbean Sea, one of the world's most alluring bodies of water, a rare gem among the oceans, defined by the islands that form a chain of lovely jewels to the north and east.

He thought of this statement a long time and wondered why people so attached to God should take such positive delight in crucifying a man who had precisely the same love for God, but with a different manner of expressing it. He