Quotes by Samuel Gordon

“Joy is distinctly a Christian word and a Christian thing. It is the reverse of happiness. Happiness is the result of what happens of an agreeable sort. Joy has its spring deep down inside. And that spring never runs dry, no matter what happens. Only Jesus gives that joy.””

“In a sense, Joyce was Beckett's Don Quixote, and Beckett was his Sancho Panza. Joyce aspired to the One; Beckett encapsulated the fragmented many. But as each author accomplished his task, it was in the service of the other. Ultimately, Beckett's landscapes would resound with articulate silence, and his empty spaces would collect within themselves the richness of multiple shadows--a physicist would say the negative particles--of all that exists in absence, as in the white patches of an Abstract Expressionist painting. Becket would evoke, on his canvasses of vast innuendo and through the interstices of conscious and unconscious thought, the richness that Joyce had made explicit in words and intricate structure.””

“Yet we may constantly do more in what we are than in what we do. We may serve better in the lives we live than in the best service we ever give. The memory of that should bring rest to your spirit when a bit tired, and may be disheartened because tired.””

“Consequently, as Samuel Chase pointed out in the Maryland ratifying convention, the states would end up “without power, or respect and despised”

“When George Washington was inaugurated as president on April 30, 1789, he wore a simple brown suit with silver buttons, white stockings, and shoes with silver buckles. But he had taken care that the cloth was American made, woven in Hartford, Connecticut. Conscious of symbolism, as politicians always are, Washington wanted to encourage American manufactures, as industrial goods were then called, and virtually all cloth of good quality at that time had to be imported from England. But the industrialization of the British cloth industry in recent decades had given Britain an insuperable competitive advantage, and Britain was determined to keep it. The export of textile machinery was strictly forbidden. If the United States was to develop a textile industry of its own, therefore, it had only two choices. It could reinvent what was then high technology on its own, or it could steal it. The former was not very likely as the United States then lacked people familiar with the intricacies of textile manufacture. So it had to be stolen. Although British newspapers were forbidden to print them, clandestine advertisements”