Schlatter Family Site

  Summary.   We all have favorite quotes and here are some of mine.  I will add to this page as I find new quotes or remember an old one.  We need to be careful, though, when we deal with quotations.

First, we need to avoid a "bumper sticker" approach to things.  Life is too complicated to be reduced to a few sound bites, quotes, and whatever will fit on to a bumper sticker.

Second, we need to recognize that quotes were made in context and we must be careful to apply a quote in the same context from which it came.

Finally, if we are going to quote, we need to get it right.

So, with all that philosophy dispensed, let's get on with it.  Listed below are some of the quotes that I like.

"Leap and the net will appear."
Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way

" The best things in life are not things."
I saw this one on a T-shirt worn by a high school student who was working on a summer mission project in Buchanan County, Virginia.
 

"Freedom's just another word
for nothing left to lose. . ."
Me and Bobby McGee, by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster
(My favorite version of this song is by Janis Joplin.)
 

"Tell the truth.  There is less to remember."
 Not certain where this one came from.

"The question is not if we should be extremists,
but what type of extremists we should be."
Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter From Birmingham Jail"

"As night does not come at once, neither does
oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight
when everything remains unchanged. And it is in that
twilight that we must be most aware of the change in
the air, however slight; lest we become unwitting
victims of the darkness." -
US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
 

"The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
Theodore Parker, 1810 - 1860

"The naming of cats is a difficult matter,
    It isn't just one of your holiday games;
. . . "
From "The Naming of Cats", in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, by T. S. Eliot.
 

"Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines -- you are forced into direct experience.  Such direct experience inevitably makes it aware of who it is that is having the experience.  That is not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating."
Michael Crichton
 

"There is but one race, the human race, and we are all made in God's image."
Joe Schlatter

"He was a hard-headed man,
He was brutally handsome.
She was terminally pretty . . ."
The Eagles, Life in the Fast Lane

"The finger that points to the moon
is not the moon."
If anyone knows the original source of this quote, please let me know.

"But let justice roll on like a river,
        righteousness like a never-failing stream."
Amos 5:14
 

"Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees."
Last words of Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, Lt. General, CSA

"What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each other?"
George Eliot

". . . Oh, my children, where air (are) we going on this mighty river of earth, a-borning,
begetting, and a-dying -- the living and the dead riding the waters?  Where air (are)
it sweeping us?"
Quoted from sermon by Brother Sam Mobberly
River of Earth, James Still

"And I've been walking 'round with memories way too long . . . "
Iris Dement, "Letter to Mom"
 

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother."
Shakespeare, Henry V, IV, iii, 40
   

"If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live."
M. L. King, Jr.
 

"You can check out any time you want --
But you can never leave. . ."
The Eagles, Hotel California

"War is at best barbarism. . . . Its glory is  all moonshine.  It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation.  War is hell."
William T. Sherman
 

"It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it."
Robert E. Lee
 

"In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up."
Martin Niemoeller(1892-1984)

"Our chiefs are killed. . . .  The old men are all dead. . . .  The little children are freezing to death.  My people, some of them have run away to the hills and have no blankets, no food.  No one knows where they are, perhaps freezing to death.  I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find.  Maybe I can find them among the dead.  Hear me, my chiefs.  My heart is sick and sad.  From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever."
Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, October, 1877
   
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
     -Blaise Pascal (Pensees, 1670)
 
"I've seed  de first en de last. . . .  I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin."
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, April Eighth, 1928
 
"But there never seems to be enough time
To do the things you want to do
Once you find them . . ."
Jim Croce, Time in a Bottle