“Our world is in turmoil. It is aging toward senility. It isvery ill. Long ago it was born with brilliant prospects. Itwas baptized by water, and its sins were washed away. Itwas never baptized by fire, for that is still to come. It hashad shorter periods of good health, but longer ones ofailing. Most of the time there have been pains and achesin some parts of its anatomy, but now that it is growingold, complications have set in, and all the ailments seemto be everywhere.The world has been ‘cliniced,’ and the complexdiseases have been catalogued. The physicians have hadsummit consultations, and temporary salve has beenrubbed on afflicted parts, but it has only postponed thefatal day and never cured it. It seems that while remedieshave been applied, staph infection has set in, and thepatient’s suffering intensified. His mind is wandering. Itcannot remember its previous illnesses nor the curewhich was applied. The political physicians through theages have rejected suggested remedies as unprofessionalsince they came from lowly prophets. Man being whathe is with tendencies such as he has, results can beprognosticated with some degree of accuracy.”

“The great question which, in all ages, has disturbed mankind, and brought on them the greatest part of their mischiefs ... has been, not whether be power in the world, nor whence it came, but who should have it.”

“This magnificent poem [Exodus 15:1-21] has been much analyzed, dissected, scanned, and compared with an array of supposed precedent and counterpart works. It has been variously attributed and dated, and forced into a wide variety of forms and Sitze im Leben. There have been attempts to determine some parts of it as early and some parts as late, and to describe therefrom an evolution of both its form and its content. None of these attempts has been entirely successful. The best of them have amounted to no more than helpful suggestions, while the worst of them have been fiction bordering fantasy.”

“The American story has never been about things coming easy. It has been about rising to the moment when the moment is hard. About rejecting panicked division for purposeful unity. About seeing a mountaintop from the deepest valley. That is why we remember that some of the most famous words ever spoken by an American came from a president who took office in a time of turmoil: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

“If too much has been made of the symptoms of Plath’s mental illness, so too little attention has been paid to its possible causes. Sylvia Plath was an angry young woman born in a country and at a time that only exacerbated and intensified her fury.”

“Because the Romans did in these instances what all prudent princes ought to do, who have to regard not only present troubles, but also future ones, for which they must prepare with every energy, because, when foreseen, it is easy to remedy them; but if you wait until they approach, the medicine is no longer in time because the malady has become incurable; for it happens in this, as the physicians say it happens in hectic fever, that in the beginning of the malady it is easy to cure but difficult to detect, but in the course of time, not having been either detected or treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to detect but difficult to cure. This it happens in affairs of state, for when the evils that arise have been foreseen (which it is only given to a wise man to see), they can be quickly redressed, but when, through not having been foreseen, they have been permitted to grow in a way that every one can see them, there is no longer a remedy”