
During a speech before the U.S. Congress, April 19, 2007
[DC Vote, CBS Evening News, 1 June 2006]
As quoted in Biopolymers, Polyamides and Complex Proteinaceous Materials I (2003) by Stephen R. Fahnestock, Alexander Steinbüchel, p. 395
Attributed from posthumous publications
During a speech before the U.S. Congress, April 19, 2007
[DC Vote, CBS Evening News, 1 June 2006]
“A hundred and fifty years proved the cure to be necessary but not sufficient.”
2015, Commemoration of the 150th Anniversary of the 13th Amendment (December 2015)
Context: At its heart, the question of slavery was never simply about civil rights. It was about the meaning of America, the kind of country we wanted to be –- whether this nation might fulfill the call of its birth: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” that among those are life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. President Lincoln understood that if we were ever to fully realize that founding promise, it meant not just signing an Emancipation Proclamation, not just winning a war. It meant making the most powerful collective statement we can in our democracy: etching our values into our Constitution. He called it “a King’s cure for all the evils.” A hundred and fifty years proved the cure to be necessary but not sufficient. Progress proved halting, too often deferred. Newly freed slaves may have been liberated by the letter of the law, but their daily lives told another tale. They couldn’t vote. They couldn’t fill most occupations. They couldn’t protect themselves or their families from indignity or from violence. And so abolitionists and freedmen and women and radical Republicans kept cajoling and kept rabble-rousing, and within a few years of the war’s end at Appomattox, we passed two more amendments guaranteeing voting rights, birthright citizenship, equal protection under the law.
Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 51
“Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.”
Montaigne; or, The Skeptic
1850s, Representative Men (1850)
we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil — when we reply to the Negro by asking, "Patience."
1960s, Memorial Day speech (1963)
“Better to live one year as a tiger, than a hundred as sheep.”
Madonna: 50 Years Of Wit And Wisdom, The Insider http://www.theinsider.com/news/1130430_Madonna_50_Years_Of_Wit_And_Wisdom,
“Poor Little Warrior!” p. 78
Short fiction, Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)