Quotes About Struggle

The world is glutted with magnificent three-page starts, and the road to hell is paved with unfinished manuscripts.

Coates has effectively taken back this tarnished history and clarified the position of blacks in the fight against slavery. They are not passive victims waiting to be saved by enlightened whites. They are warriors, strategists and spies plotting their escape and struggling to remember everything. {from Charles' review of The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates]

Oh how blessed the young men are who have to struggle for a foundation and a beginning in life. I shall never cease to be grateful for the three and a half years of apprenticeship and the difficulties to be overcome, all the way along.

Finally, he flung his hat on the ground in disgust and fumed, "Are these the men with whom I am to defend America?

Cornwallis had grown so desperate that he infected blacks with smallpox and forced them to wander toward enemy lines in an attempt to sicken the opposing forces.

With a soil and climate scarcely equaled in the world," he protested, Mexico "has more poor and starving subjects who are willing and able to work than any country in the world. The rich keep down the poor with a hardness of heart that is incredible.

To survive, he continued to hawk firewood on the St. Louis streets and the time thus spent destroyed any chance of prospering as a farmer: "I regard every load of wood taken, when the services of both myself and team are required on the farm, is a direct loss of more than the value of the load."114

As his life steadily unraveled, he pawned his gold watch and chain for $20 on December 23, 1857, to purchase Christmas presents for his children—perhaps the symbolic nadir of his life.

He would smile at times, but I never heard him laugh aloud," said Louisa Boggs. "He was a sad man . . . he seemed almost in despair."124 Grant seemed to be staring into an abyss. "I don't think he saw a light ahead—not a particle. I don't think he had any ambition further than to educate and take care of his family.

The chief quartermaster on the West Coast, Robert Allen, an old friend of Grant's, learned he was holed up in a cheap miner's hotel called "What Cheer House." He found Grant in a spartan garret room furnished with a cot, a pine table, and a chair. "Why, Grant, what are you doing here?" Allen asked. "Nothing," Grant replied. "I've resigned from the army. I'm out of money, and I have no means of getting home.

Hamilton's life was so tumultuous that only an audacious novelist could have dreamed it up. He embodied an enduring archetype: the obscure immigrant who comes to America, re-creates himself, and succeeds despite a lack of proper birth and breeding.

He saw too clearly that greater freedom could lead to greater disorder and, by a dangerous dialectic, back to a loss of freedom. Hamilton's lifelong task was to try to straddle and resolve this contradiction and to balance liberty and order. The

Confederate forces were being whittled down and could not be replaced by the South's smaller population.

Wherever our flag floats, it is the flag of slavery

Since Coster's death the year before, Bacon knew he was in over his head and reeled under the responsibility. "My

From the outset, Rockefeller had to wrestle with the demons of pride and greed.

Only in such passages do we see that Hamilton, for all his phenomenal success in the Continental Army, still felt unlucky and unlovely, still cursed by his past.

Some states, such as Massachusetts and South Carolina, struggled with heavy debts and were glad to be relieved by the central government. Others, such as Virginia and North Carolina, had settled most of their debts and saw no reason to help. Such differences threatened to explode the brittle consensus that had been so arduous to reach at the Constitutional Convention.

Thomas Jones, a Loyalist judge in New York, wrote that not "a stick of wood, a spear of grass or a kernel of corn could the troops in New Jersey procure without fighting for it.

From boyhood, Washington had struggled to master and conceal his deep emotions. When the wife of the British ambassador later told him that his face showed pleasure at his forthcoming departure from the presidency, Washington grew indignant: "You are wrong. My countenance never yet betrayed my feelings!

Had he known what lay ahead, it seems doubtful that he would have persevered.

While Tarbell's articles were running, Rockefeller, his wife, his son, and two of his three daughters were afflicted by serious medical problems or nervous strain.

Understandably, the Rockefellers did not wish to broadcast their misfortunes to the world.

the tasks piled upon Coster had grown "far heavier than any one man ought to bear, or could bear with safety.