Hometown baseball in the [1890s] was rough and rowdy and hugely popular. A keg of beer sometimes stood just to the side of third base for encouragement. It was called a German Disturber, and any man who made it to third was entitled to a dipperful.

can't page through random books at amazon like you can at real bookstores. and in that world, you would not now have "german disturber" in your lexicon.

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

If there has to be a choice between injustice and disorder, said Goethe, the German prefers injustice.

i've been struggling to not quote this source for some time as it will make an appearance in my year-end "favorite things" list/rant; however this line was particularly good regardless of its missing 1900s european context.

In early May Washington wrote to his mother from the frontier town of Winchester. Probably because she had so hotly opposed his taking the post, he stressed his pleasure in serving on Braddock's staff: "I am very happy in the general's family, being trated with a complaisant freedom which is quite agreeable to me, and have no reason to doubt the satisfaction I hope for in making the campaign." Washington ended his formal note with the words, "I am Honored Madam Your most Dutiful and Obedient Son."

Mary Ball Washington [George Washington's mom]...replied to George's letter by asking him to retain a Dutch servant for her and buy her some butter.

even after becoming general and president, george washington's mom did not approve.

When justice does not succeed in being a form of memory, memory alone can be a form of justice.

I gave my love a chain of gold 
 Around her neck to bind;
She keeps me in a faster hold, 
 And captivates my mind.

Methinks that mine's the harder part: 
 Whilst, 'neath her lovely chin, 
She carries links outside her heart, 
 My fetters are within.

A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.

...

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.

...

The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

don't become a cynic and don't fall into disdain for "the other."

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

and because hemingway was a smartass...

The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how some one had said to Scott Fitzgerald, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott Fitzgerald. He thought they were a special glamourous race and when he found they weren't it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.

f. scott fitzgerald complained to the publisher and subsequent versions of the hemignway story replaced "Scott Fitzgerald" with "Julian".

You have a magic carpet
That will whiz you through the air,
To Spain or Maine or Africa,
If you just tell it where.
So will you let it take you
Where you've never been before?
Or will you buy some drapes to match
And use it
On your
Floor?

She was a lovely lady, with a romantic mind and such a sweet mocking mouth. Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover there is always one more; and her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss on it that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the right-hand corner.

There will be no war, it will all be arranged. I will drink all the blood shed in the war.

620,000 soldiers died in the resulting Civil War, which was more than the combined US deaths of both World Wars, Vietnam and Korea.

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?"

And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?”

"What kind of mother would I be if I let you run around looking like a goth? I mean, that kind of lifestyle might fly in Europe, but it's not going to get you very far here in Rosewood."

"Not everyone dreams of making it in Rosewood, Mom. Some people dream of making it out."

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. An informed citizenry is at the heart of a dynamic democracy.

". . . I must not allow myself to dwell on the personal - there is no room for it here. Also it is demoralising. But I do not want to die. Not that I mind it for myself. If it be that I am to go, I am ready. But the thought that I may never see you or our darling baby again turns my bowels to water. I cannot think of it with even the semblance of equanimity.

My one consolation is the happiness that has been ours. Also my conscience is clear that I have always tried to make life a joy for you. I know at least that if I go you will not want. That is something. But it is the thought that we may be cut off from each other which is so terrible and that our Babe may grow up without my knowing her and without her knowing me. It is difficult to face. And I know your life without me would be a dull blank. Yet you must never let it become wholly so. For to you will be left the greatest charge in all the world; the upbringing of our baby. God bless that child, she is the hope of life to me. My darling, au revoir. It may well be that you will only have to read these lines as ones of passing interest. On the other hand, they may well be my last message to you. If they are, know through all your life that I loved you and baby with all my heart and soul, that you two sweet things were just all the world to me.

I pray God I may do my duty, for I know, whatever that may entail, you would not have it otherwise."

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.

“Well, Doctor, what have we got: a Republic or a Monarchy?”

“A Republic, if you can keep it.”

The response is attributed to BENJAMIN FRANKLIN— at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when queried as he left Independence Hall on the final day of deliberation—in the notes of Dr. James McHenry, one of Maryland’s delegates to the Convention.

"You just want me to become a beautiful memory, the sooner the better!"

"Who said anything about beautiful?"

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.