“How can we know who we are and where we are going if we don't know anything about where we have come from and what we have been through, the courage shown, the costs paid, to be where we are?”

“Curiosity is what separates us from the cabbages. It's accelerative. The more we know, the more we want to know.”

“History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are. ”

“She was particularly curious about the Viginians, wondering if, as slaveholders, they had the necessary commitment to the cause of freedom. "I have," she wrote, "sometimes been ready to think that the passions for liberty cannot be equally strong in the breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow creature of theirs." What she felt about those in Massachusetts who owned slaves, including her own father, she did not say, but she need not have--John knew her mind on the subject. Writing to him during the First Congress, she had been unmistakably clear: "I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in the province. It always seemed a most iniquitous scheme to me--[to] fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”

“Scars show us where we have been, they do not dictate where we are going.”

“I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.”

“The source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think....Let us dare to read, think, speak, write.”