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Introduction Commentary on "A More Perfect Union" Speech on Race in America

While this short commentary regarding Barack Obama's speech might appear to be political, that is not my intent. And the recommendation I’ll make shortly is based on appreciation for some newfound insights that I gained by clicking the link that follows and listening for yourself.

We all have thoughts, beliefs and experiences around issues of race and ethnicity. The recent controversy surrounding.... More Commentarty and Obama Quotes Here

 

“For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism...But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.”

- Barack Obama (1961- )

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George Washington

George Washington was the first President of the United States after leading the Continental Army to victory over the Kingdom of Great Britain in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783). Washington is seen as a symbol of the United States for both his leadership in our war of independence and for his devotion to civic virtue, making him an exemplary historical American figure.

He was chosen to be the commander-in-chief of the American revolutionary forces in 1775 and following the end of the war in 1783; Washington retired to his plantation home on Mount Vernon. His farewell address was a primer on taking care to protect our own republic and a stern warning against involvement in foreign wars.

In his funeral oration, Henry Lee said that of all Americans, he was “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”  Washington has been consistently ranked by scholars as one of the greatest U.S. Presidents and as early as 1778 was lauded as the “Father of His Country.” One of the most enduring myths about George Washington involves him as a young boy chopping down his father’s cherry tree and, when asked about it, using the famous line “I cannot tell a lie, I did it with my little hatchet.”  In fact, there is no evidence that this ever occurred. Even so, his reputation of virtue serves as a template for exemplary leadership.

“A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of friends.”

“I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct, which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.”

“If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”

“It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.”

“It is our true policy to steer clear of entangling alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”

                            

“Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for it is better to be alone than in bad company.”

“Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.”

“Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.”

“Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

“Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”

- George Washington  (1732-1799)

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Abraham Lincoln

Although Abraham Lincoln had only 18 months of formal education, through his avid devotion to reading he became highly educated. While a young man, his involvement in local politics grew, and he became interested in law, studied for and was admitted into Illinois bar in 1837. Physically, he was very tall (6’4”), strong and had a reputation for being a good wrestler as well as having skill with an ax. It was said that he avoided hunting because he didn’t like killing animals, even for food and is now noted as one of our country’s most famous vegetarians.

While only 23, Lincoln began his political career in 1832, by running for a seat in the Illinois General Assembly. He lost. He was elected captain of an Illinois militia company and said of his experience that he had not had “any such success in life which gave him so much satisfaction.” After a brief stint as a country store manager, he made his living practicing law and concurrently was involved in Illinois politics, at various times serving in legislative positions. 

He spoke out against injustice for many years prior to being elected the sixteenth President of the United States, from 1861 until his assassination in 1865. Like President George Washington, he was also gifted as the leader of the nation's military. A good deal of credit for the victory of the northern states and preservation of the Union was due to his strategic involvement in military decisions and his wise selection of generals, including the surprising decisions which gave General Ulysses S. Grant so much autonomy and authority, despite Grant’s checkered reputation.

Another novel aspect of how Lincoln chose his leadership team was reflected in his presidential cabinet appointments, which included people from opposing political persuasions and, on some issues, were outspoken critics of Lincoln. In our own time, we can see the wisdom of working as Lincoln did, by observing the results of not doing so, and of only having “yes people” involved in the decision-making process.  Commonly, in our own time, those with differing viewpoints are not chosen to be a part of the President’s cabinet. Even so, some cabinet members still arrive at differing conclusions, which seem not to have been heeded, depriving us as citizens from the possibility of having wiser decisions from our executive branch due to a diversity of opinion. Instead, those with divergent viewpoints are rewarded for their differing perspective by being offered an opportunity to resign. And ultimately, the loss for not proceeding more as Abraham Lincoln did, is shared by all of us as citizens.

          Lincoln is credited of preserving our United States both by the victory in the ‘War of the States’ and the measures he took, (many of them were not followed after his death), which were aimed at reconciliation of the issues stemming from the many years of allowing slavery as well as the national wounds from the Civil War itself. His leadership resulted in the abolition of slavery, by issuing his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and promoting the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. We can appreciate the eloquence of Lincoln’s writing as well as his philosophy through these quotations.

“Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.”

“I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crises. The great point is to bring them the real facts.”

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”

                      

“Whenever I hear any one arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”  

“Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose - and you allow him to make war at pleasure.”

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”

 “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

“How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

“I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.”

“The ballot is stronger than the bullet.”

“There are no accidents in my philosophy. Every effect must have its cause. The past is the cause of the present, and the present will be the cause of the future. All these are links in the endless chain stretching from the finite to the infinite.”

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

- Abraham Lincoln  (1809-1865)

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Sandra Day O’Connor

The first woman to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Sandra Day O’Conner served from 1981 to 2006. Although she was considered a strict constructionist, her case-by-case approach to jurisprudence and her moderate political views made her the crucial swing vote of the Court for many of her final years on the bench. Growing up on a cattle ranch in southeastern Arizona, she wrote about her childhood in her book, The Lazy B: Growing up on a Cattle Ranch on the American Southwest. As a young woman, she attended Stanford University, where she received her B.A. in economics in 1950 and continued at the Stanford Law School, serving on the Stanford Law Review, and graduating toward the top of her class.

In spite of her accomplishments at law school, no law firm in California was willing to hire her as a lawyer, although one firm did offer her a position as a legal secretary. She therefore turned to public service, taking a position as Deputy County Attorney of San Mateo County, California and thus began a successful career in the Southwest legal system. In 1981, President Reagan, who had pledged during his 1980 presidential campaign to appoint the first woman to the Supreme Court, nominated her as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. On July 1, 2005, she announced her retirement. In 2006, Arizona State University named its law school the ‘Sandra Day O’Conner College of Law’. O’Conner is presently the chancellor of the College of William and Mary.

“Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time. No one learns more about a problem than the person at the bottom.”

“We don’t accomplish anything in this world alone…and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one's life and all the weavings of individual threads form one to another that creates something.”

“It matters enormously to a successful democratic society like ours that we have three branches of government, each with some independence and some control over the other two. That's set out in the Constitution.”

“The framers of the Constitution were so clear in the federalist papers and elsewhere that they felt an independent judiciary was critical to the success of the nation.”

                           

“It matters enormously to a successful democratic society like ours that we have three branches of government, each with some independence and some control over the other two. That's set out in the Constitution.”

“The framers of the Constitution were so clear in the federalist papers and elsewhere that they felt an independent judiciary was critical to the success of the nation.”

“We pay a price when we deprive children of the exposure to the values, principles, and education they need to make them good citizens.”

“Young women today often have very little appreciation for the real battles that took place to get women where they are today in this country. I don’t know how much history young women today know about those battles.”

“I was asked in my Senate confirmation hearing about how I’d like to be remembered. I called it the tombstone question. And I said, “I hope the tombstone might read ‘here lies a good judge.’”

“Yes, I will bring the understanding of a woman to the Court, but I doubt that alone will affect my decisions. I think the important thing about my appointment is not that I will decide cases as a woman, but that I am a woman who will get to decide cases.”

“The power I exert on the court depends on the power of my arguments, not on my gender.”

“A moment of silence is not inherently religious.”

“Despite the encouraging and wonderful gains and the changes for women which have occurred in my lifetime, there is still room to advance and to promote correction of the remaining deficiencies and imbalances.”

- Sandra Day O’Connor  (1930-)

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Martin Luther King Jr.

One of the main leaders of the American civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights and other basic civil rights. A Baptist minister by training, King became an activist early in his career, leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott and helping to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Taking inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi, King utilized nonviolent civil disobedience to raise consciousness. Between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, providing what he called a coalition of conscience and inspiring his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, a manifesto of the black revolution. He planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of African-Americans as voters and his monumental 1963 March on Washington, DC in which Dr. King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, electrifying the crowd.

This speech is regarded, along with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, as one of the finest speeches in the history of American oratory.  King conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson. He was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963, and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure. In 1964, King became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end segregation and racial discrimination through civil disobedience and other non-violent means. On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter in 1977. Martin Luther King Day was established as a national holiday in the United States in 1986. In 2004, King was posthumously awarded a Congressional Gold Medal.

“A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.”

“All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”

“If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.”

“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically... Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.”

            

“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”

“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

“We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

“Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam.
I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted.
I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam.
I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.”

- Martin Luther King Jr.  (1929-1968)

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More History & Society Quotes Here

 

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