Quotes About Struggle

Historians of the twenty-first century," Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote, "will no doubt struggle to explain how nine-tenths of the American people, priding themselves every day on their kindliness, their generosity, their historic consecration to the rights of man, could so long have connived in the systematic dehumanization of the remaining tenth—and could have done so without not just a second but hardly a first thought.

that no trumpets could totally drown out the uncertain notes of the boy who doubted his place in the world.

Yet Lincoln could not rest. He could not stop. He ran the race. He could do no other.

The saga of race in America is a tragic one—and it unfolds still. In Lincoln's hour upon the stage, many hoped he would go farther along the road toward equality than he did; many feared any step at all. But on he walked.

It would not take much to have the throats of every Abolitionist cut. —Preston Brooks of South Carolina, 1856 Judge Taney can do many things, but he cannot perform impossibilities….He cannot change the essential nature of things—making evil good, and good evil. —Frederick Douglass, on the Dred Scott decision, 1857 I clearly see, as I think, a powerful plot to make slavery universal and perpetual in this nation. —Abraham Lincoln, 1858

God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.

Wine, furniture, music, horses, and linen consumed Jefferson's resources. "For the articles of household furniture, clothes, and a carriage Ã¢â'¬Â¦ I have been obliged to anticipate my salary from which however I shall never be able to repay it," Jefferson wrote to Monroe.21 "I will pray you to touch this string, which I know to be a tender one with Congress, with the utmost delicacy. I'd rather be ruined in my fortune, than in their esteem." He

And the tragedy of America is that we can imagine justice but cannot finally realize it.

America has always been torn between the ideal and the real, between noble goals and inevitable compromises. So was Jefferson. In his head and in his heart, as in the nation itself, the perfect warred with the good, the intellectual with the visceral.

George Washington and Patrick Henry had resorted to arms to win their liberty—so, Malcolm X argued, why shouldn't African Americans be able to draw on that example in the face of fear, intimidation, and brutality?

And you know, my friends," King said, "there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July, and left standing amid the piercing chill of an Alpine November.

the enslaved "would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness.

Thou seest, not only the stains and scars of past sins, but the mutilations, the deep cavities, the chronic disorders which they have left in my soul. Thou seest the innumerable living sins…living in their power and presence, their guilt, and their penalties, which clothe me….Yet Thou comest. Thou seest most perfectly….Yet Thou comest.

while whites built and dreamed, people of color were subjugated and exploited by a rising nation that prided itself on the expansion of liberty. Those twin tragedies shaped us then and ever after.

For all of our darker impulses, for all of our shortcomings, and for all of the dreams denied and deferred, the experiment begun so long ago, carried out so imperfectly, is worth the fight. There is, in fact, no struggle more important, and none nobler, than the one we wage in the service of those better angels who, however besieged, are always ready for battle.

The magnitude of the job dwarfs every man who aspires to it," Johnson recalled in his memoirs. "Every man who occupies the position has to strain to the utmost of his ability to fill it.

Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people," Lincoln told a delegation of blacks in August 1862. "But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race….I

For Lewis, the civil rights struggle always centered on whether the best of the American soul (the grace and the love, the godliness and the generosity) could finally win out over the worst (the racism and the hatred, the fear and the cruelty).

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.

But they always stayed in the arena, grappling with each other and with Stalin to find a way to win. Had they failed, or truly fallen out with each other, we could be living in a different world.

conceived and held up to the angry

And so while whites built and dreamed, people of color were subjugated and exploited by a rising nation that prided itself on the expansion of liberty. Those twin tragedies shaped us then and ever after.

History, then, mattered enormously, for it could repeat itself at any time in any generation.12 And if that history brought tyranny, it was to be fought at all costs.

Life will never be what we want it to be, and the best we can do, in the end, is to endure, seeking love in a fallen world that's destined to disappoint us.