Quote of the Day (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on What It Takes ‘To Move the Masses’)

“I hold you will not compass your poor ends
Of barley-feeding and material ease,
Without a poet's individualism
To work your universal. It takes a soul,
To move a body: it takes a high-souled man,
To move the masses ... even to a cleaner stye:
It takes the ideal, to blow a hair's breadth off
The dust of the actual.–ah, your Fouriers failed,
Because not poets enough to understand
That life develops from within.”— English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), “Aurora Leigh” (1856)

Quote of the Day (H.L. Mencken, Defining ‘Idealist’)

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.”—American editor, essayist—and cynic—H.L. Mencken (1880–1956), A Little Book in C Major (1916)

Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, on the Limits Placed by ‘Inordinate Self-Love’)

“[N]o matter how wide the perspectives which the human mind may reach, how broad the loyalties which the human imagination may conceive, how universal the community which human statecraft may organize, or how pure the aspirations of the saintliest idealists may be, there is no level of human moral or social achievement in which there is not some corruption of inordinate self-love.” — American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense (1944)

Quote of the Day (Howard Thurman, on ‘What Makes You Come Alive’)

"Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” — American author, philosopher, theologian, educator and civil rights leader Howard Thurman (1899-1981), quoted in Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads (1996)

Quote of the Day (Eleanor Roosevelt, on Standing Up for Beliefs)

“I have never felt that anything really mattered but the satisfaction of knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.”—Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day” column, November 8, 1944

Quote of the Day (Woodrow Wilson, on Making a Living vs. Enriching the World)

“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and to impoverish yourself if you forget the errand."—Woodrow Wilson, “Address at Swarthmore College, October 25, 1913,” in The Politics of Woodrow Wilson: Selections from His Speeches and Writings, edited by August Heckscher (1970)

(Thanks to my friend Brian for the suggestion.)

Quote of the Day (Robert F. Kennedy, on a 'Tiny Ripple of Hope')

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”—Robert F. Kennedy, “Speech at the University of Capetown, South Africa, Day of Affirmation,” June 6, 1966

(Forty years ago on this date, Robert Kennedy died from an assassin’s bullet that wounded him the night before right after his greatest political triumph. Forty years ago…but I am not resigned to the possibilities lost by his death. I remain angry enough that I refuse even to name the non-entity whose only claim to fame is that he took the life of a man far better than he could ever hope to be. For all Bobby’s complex, at times deeply imperfect personality, we remember him not for his manner of death but for his achievements in life, and for his inspiration to young people to, as he liked to quote from Tennyson, “seek a newer world.”

Seldom was that inspiration given more eloquent life than in Kennedy’s speech in South Africa two years to the day before his untimely death. As you read it, recall the context of the times—a West embattled not just with Communism, but with its own internal divisions over the evil legacies of class, imperialism and racism; an apartheid-ridden South Africa off the radar screen, as far as many Americans were concerned—until the former Attorney General of the United States identified with the struggles of the black majority in its worst hours. As for myself, even with the cynicism and resignation wrought by middle age, something within awakens once again—a hope in the face of the worst the world offers—as I ponder his words.)