I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.
James Russell LowellRead
The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.
Interpretation
Only the foolish and the dead refuse to change their views or opinions.
This quote suggests that change is an inherent part of life and intellectual growth. Those who are alive and wise are open to learning and shifting their perspectives, while only those who are foolish or no longer alive remain unyielding in their beliefs.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of adaptability in business.
I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.
Not failure, but low aim, is crime.
Good luck is the willing handmaid of upright, energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty.
Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.
Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
Old events have modern meanings; only that survives of past history which finds kindred in all hearts and lives.
We shall strike. We shall organize boycotts. We shall demonstrate and have political campaigns. We shall pursue the revolution we have proposed. We are sons and daughters of the farm workers' revolution, a revolution of the poor seeking bread and justice.
Now that Arab women are pouring into the streets by the million, men discover with dismay that they, not women, were the captives of the harem dream.
'Movement is life;' and it is well to be able to forget the past, and kill the present by continual change.
We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn't have to be white, and the other one doesn't have to be the ethnic sidekick. We're way over that. And I think it's happening in society, too.
I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.
When we uncovered the Hinkley case, there were so many other cases like it, and they're just catching up. And we're just starting to see the damage. I was hoping by now there would be more transparency and less defeat and cover-up. I haven't seen much of that change.
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