Quotes About Adversity

la naturaleza es un lugar despiadado, al que le traen sin cuidado las esperanzas y anhelos de los viajeros. «Los

Asked whether history had ever seen anything like the Depression, John Maynard Keynes replied: "Yes. It was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted four hundred years.

The world is full of illegitimate children. The world is full of folk whose taste was educated in the gutter. The world is full of people born hating and despising their fellows. To these I love to say: See this man. He was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln.

Douglass understood history and the men who made it. Perfection was impossible; greatness was reserved for those who managed to move forward in an imperfect world:

The task of history was to secure advances in a universe that tends to disappoint. Goodness would not always be rewarded. The innocent would suffer. Violence would at times defeat virtue. Such was the way of things, but to Lincoln the duty of the leader and of the citizen was neither to despair nor to seek solace and security with the merely strong, but to discern and to pursue the right.

tag from Virgil: "Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis." The line means "Carry on, and preserve yourselves for better times."59

A revealing, oft-cited detail: Mississippi earmarked 20 percent of its entire state budget in 1866 for wooden limbs.)

As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.1 —THOMAS JEFFERSON, July 5, 1775

Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights—then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward; that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.

We shall go on and we shall fight it out, here or elsewhere, and if at last the long story is to end, it were better it should end, not through surrender, but only when we are rolling senseless on the ground.

At Naval Air Station Grosse Ile in Michigan, he and Barbara took a room in town for fourteen dollars a week, but without kitchen privileges. "It is sort of a lonely existence for poor Bar," Bush wrote home to Greenwich, "but she doesn't complain at all, and I am just in heaven having her here.

conceived and held up to the angry

under all conditions. There is little

his other hand. Sensitive to his guest's affliction, Churchill realized that "every step" was

Unless he convinced himself that no great life was without its mishaps and its mistakes, he would not be able to return to the arena.

Ask a victim to look at the positive things and she'll say, 'I can't. My eyes are swollen

For all our mythologizing, the margins can be painful and some people are there because they have no choice.

if you get between the lawyer and his goal, you're going to get hurt.

He was one man screaming at 10,000 people screaming at him. He berated and scolded and called his attackers hypocrites at first, all this made them even more incensed. But he didn't budge. He was a tireless defender of himself.

People ask, "Why is there poverty in the world?" It's a silly question. Poverty is the default human condition. It is the factory preset of this mortal coil.

From love arises hatred of those things which are contrary to what we love, or which oppose and thwart us in those things that we delight in.

I respect only those who stand up to me, but I find such people intolerable.

It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.

But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.