Quotes about drop
page 11

Sri Aurobindo photo
Michelle Obama photo

“Right now, one in three African American students are dropping out of high school. Only one in five African Americans between the ages of 25 and 29 has gotten a college degree; one in five.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2010s
Context: But today, more than 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, more than 50 years after the end of 'separate but equal', when it comes to getting an education, too many of our young people just can’t be bothered. Today, instead of walking miles every day to school, they're sitting on couches for hours playing video games, watching T. V. Instead of dreaming of being a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they're fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper. Right now, one in three African American students are dropping out of high school. Only one in five African Americans between the ages of 25 and 29 has gotten a college degree; one in five.

Remarks at Bowie State University ceremony (17 May 2013) http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/17/remarks-first-lady-bowie-state-university-commencement-ceremony

Elizabeth Gilbert photo

“I am alone, I am all alone, I am completely alone.
Grasping this reality, I let go of my bag, drop to my knees, and press my forehead against the floor. There I offer up to the universe a fervent prayer of thanks.”

Eat, Pray, Love (2006)
Context: I walk up the stairs to my fourth-floor apartment, all alone. I let myself into my tiny little studio, all alone. I shut the door behind me. Another early bedtime in Rome. Another long night's sleep ahead of me, with nobody and nothing in my bed except a pile of Italian phrase books and dictionaries.
I am alone, I am all alone, I am completely alone.
Grasping this reality, I let go of my bag, drop to my knees, and press my forehead against the floor. There I offer up to the universe a fervent prayer of thanks.
First in English.
Then in Italian.
And then — just to get the point across — in Sanskrit. 
And since I am already down there in supplication on the floor, let me hold that position as I reach back in time three years earlier to the moment where this entire story began — a moment that also found me in this exact same posture: on my knees, on a floor, praying.

Harry Truman photo

“The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

Report on the Potsdam Conference (1945)
Context: The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and, unfortunately, thousands of civilian lives will be lost. I urge Japanese civilians to leave industrial cities immediately, and save themselves from destruction.

Alan Watts photo
P. J. O'Rourke photo
Henry David Thoreau photo

“A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.”

Final lines
Civil Disobedience (1849)
Context: Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.

Alvin C. York photo

“I didn't want the rear ones to see me touching off the front ones. I was afraid they would drop down and pump a volley into me.”

Alvin C. York (1887–1964) United States Army Medal of Honor recipient

Account of 8 October 1918.
Diary of Alvin York
Context: There were over thirty of them in continuous action, and all I could do was touch the Germans off just as fast as I could. I was sharpshooting. I don't think I missed a shot. It was no time to miss.
In order to sight me or to swing their machine guns on me, the Germans had to show their heads above the trench, and every time I saw a head I just touched it off. All the time I kept yelling at them to come down. I didn't want to kill any more than I had to. But it was they or I. And I was giving them the best I had.
Suddenly a German officer and five men jumped out of the trench and charged me with fixed bayonets. I changed to the old automatic and just touched them off too. I touched off the sixth man first, then the fifth, then the fourth, then the third and so on. I wanted them to keep coming.
I didn't want the rear ones to see me touching off the front ones. I was afraid they would drop down and pump a volley into me. — and I got hold of the German major, and he told me if I wouldn't kill any more of them he would make them quit firing. So I told him all right, if he would do it now. So he blew a little whistle, and they quit shooting and come down and gave up.

Steve Jobs photo

“It'll make your jaw drop.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

On the first NeXT Computer, as quoted in The New York Times (8 November 1989)
1980s

“I had a little Bloody Mary when I got there, and dropped a few more Placidyls. With my tolerance, nothing should have happened, but I suddenly went into a coma. My eyes rolled back in my head.”

Edie Sedgwick (1943–1971) Socialite, actress, model

On her near-death experience and final days in New York
Edie : American Girl (1982)
Context: "The Siege of the Warwick Hotel." I was left alone with a substantial supply of speed. I started having strange, convulsive behavior. I was shooting up every half-hour... thinking that with each fresh shot I'd knock this nonsense out of my system. I'd entertain myself hanging on to the bathroom sink with my hind feet stopped up against the door, trying to hold myself steady enough so I wouldn't crack my stupid skull open. I entertained myself by making a tape... a really fabulous tape in which I made up five different personalities. I realized that I had to get barbiturates in order to stop the convulsions, which lasted either hours. Something was spinning in my head.... I just kept thinking that if I could pop enough speed I'd knock the daylights out of my system and none of this nonsense would go on. None of this flailing around and moaning, sweating like a pig, and whew! It was a heavy scene. When I finally cooled down to what I thought was pretty good shape, I slipped on a little muumuu, ran down the stairs of the Warwick, barefoot to the lobby. My eye caught a mailman's jacket and a sack of mail hanging across the back of a chair in the hall way entrance, and before I knew what I was doing, I whipped on the jacket, flipped the bag over my shoulder, and flew out the door, whistling a happy tune. Suddenly I thought: "My God! This is a federal offense. Fooling around with the mail." So I turned around and rushed back and BAM! the manager was waiting for me. He ordered me into the back office. They telephoned an ambulance from Bellevue and packed me into it. Five policemen. I was back into convulsions again, which was really a drag, and I tried to tell the doctors and the nurses and the student interns that I'd run out of barbiturates and overshot speed.... I could speak sanely, but all my motor nerves were going crazy wild. It looked like I was out of my mind. If you had seen me, you wouldn't have bothered to listen, and none of them did. Oh, God, it was a nightmare. Finally six big spade attendants came and held me down on a stretcher. They terrified me... their force against mine. I got twice as bad. I just flipped. I told them if they'd just let go of me, I would calm down and stop kicking and fighting. But they wouldn't listen and they started to tell each other what stages of hallucinations I was in... how I imagined myself an animal. All these things totally unreal to my mind and just guessed on their part. Oh, it was insane. Then they plunged a great needle into my butt and BAM! out I went for two whole days. When I woke up, wow! Rats all over the floor, wailing and screaming. We ate potatoes with spoons. The doctors at Bellevue finally contacted my private physician, and after five days he came and got me out. They sent me back to Gracie Square, a private mental hospital that cost a thousand dollars a week. I was there for five months. Then I ran away with a patient and we went to an apartment in the Seventies somewhere which belonged to another patient in the hospital, who gave us the keys. The guy I ran away with was twenty, but he'd been a junkie since the age of nine, so he was pretty emotionally retarded and something of a drag. I didn't have any pills, so, kind of ravaging around, I went to see a gynecologist and a pretty well-off one. He asked me if I would like to shoot up some acid with him. I hadn't much experience with acid, but I wasn't afraid. He closed his office at five, and we took off in his Aston Martin and drove up the coast... no, what's the name of that river? The Hudson. We stopped at a motel and he gave me three ampules of liquid Sandoz acid, intravenously, mainlining, and he gave himself the same amount and he completely flipped, I was hallucinating and trying to tell him what I was seeing. I'd say, "I see rich, embroidered curtains, and I see people moving in the background. It's the Middle Ages and I am a princess, " and I told him he was some sort of royalty. We made love from eight in the evening until seven in the morning with ecstatic climax after climax, just going insane with it, until he realized it was seven and he had to get back to his office to open it at eight-thirty. He gave me a shot to calm me down, and because I couldn't come down, I took about fourteen Placidyls. On the way back something very strange happened. I didn't realize I was going to say it, but I said out loud, "I wish I was dead"... the love and the beauty and the ecstasy of the whole experience I'd just gone through were really so alien. I didn't even know the man... it had been a one-night jag... he was married and had children... and I just felt lost. It hardly seemed worth living any more because once again I was alone. He dropped me off at the apartment where I was staying with the runaway patient. I had a little Bloody Mary when I got there, and dropped a few more Placidyls. With my tolerance, nothing should have happened, but I suddenly went into a coma. My eyes rolled back in my head. It was lucky... I had called an aide, Jimmy, at the hospital - he had been a good friend - I had called him anonymously and asked him to come and visit us. He happened to turn up just as I went into the coma. He and the heroin addict tried to wake me up. They slapped me and pumped my chest and they put me in a bathtub full of really cold water. Jimmy began to call hospitals - not psychiatric but medical - and one of them actually told them to let me sleep it off. But Jimmy just flipped. He knew I was dying, and he was right. He called Lenox Hill Hospital, and the police finally came. Jimmy and the heroin addict were taken into custody, and I was rushed to the hospital. I was actually declared dead. My mother was called... and then BAM! I started breathing again. I was pretty shaken up by what happened because I didn't understand how I could have almost gone out on just fifteen Placidyls when I used to live on thirty-five three-grain Tunials a day, plus alcohol. They released Jimmy and the junkie, but of course I was still in the trap. I thought I was fine and that I could leave. But a psychiatrist came to interview me and I was put in the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital - committed on the grounds of unintentional, unconscious suicide. It was a pretty devastating experience. They put me on eight hundred milligrams of Thorazine four times a day plus six hundred milligrams at bedtime - an ugly-tasting liquid, but it took quick effect and you couldn't hide the pills or spit them out later. I had all kinds of bad reactions from it - I'd get bad tremors and all itchy and wormy. I said I wasn't going to take the stuff any more, no matter what, so they finally took me off it one day. I had a seizure, vomited all over the floor, and I couldn't get tremendous dosages of Thorazine, but they accused me of importing drugs and taking them there in the hospital. My doctor was young... a resident... and I just told him, "You think I've taken drugs. There's no point in even reasoning with you. I'll just go to some other hospital." I expected to go to some plush, tolerable hospital, but I was not accepted in any private hospital with the record they gave me. They committed me to Manhattan State on Ward's Island, in the middle of the East River, next to the prison. It was one of the most unpleasant experiences I've ever been through. Really terrifying. I lived in a big dormitory on a ward with about sixty to eighty women. We did all the mopping, cleaning, making beds, scrubbing toilets. And the people there were just so awful. Really pathetic. Some of them were mean. The staff completely ignored you except to administer medication. I thought it was never going to end. In Manhattan State, even in there, there were pushers. One girl who lived in a smaller dormitory - there were two with about ten beds in them - was pushing speed and heroin. And because I'd been warned that if ever you were caught using drugs in a state hospital you'd be criminally punished, I didn't touch any drugs during the three months I was there.

Upton Sinclair photo

“I say if Germany be allowed to win this war — then we in America shall have to drop every other activity and devote the next twenty or thirty years to preparing for a last-ditch defence of the democratic principle.”

Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) American novelist, writer, journalist, political activist

Letter of resignation from the Socialist Party (September 1917) http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAsocialismP.htm
Context: I have lived in Germany and know its language and literature, and the spirit and ideals of its rulers. Having given many years to a study of American capitalism, I am not blind to the defects of my own country; but, in spite of these defects, I assert that the difference between the ruling class of Germany and that of America is the difference between the seventeenth century and the twentieth.
No question can be settled by force, my pacifist friends all say. And this in a country in which a civil war was fought and the question of slavery and secession settled! I can speak with especial certainty of this question, because all my ancestors were Southerners and fought on the rebel side; I myself am living testimony to the fact that force can and does settle questions — when it is used with intelligence.
In the same way I say if Germany be allowed to win this war — then we in America shall have to drop every other activity and devote the next twenty or thirty years to preparing for a last-ditch defence of the democratic principle.

Rumi photo

“Every object and being in the universe is
a jar overflowing with wisdom and beauty,
a drop of the Tigris that cannot be contained
by any skin.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

"The Gift of Water" Ch. 18 : The Three Fish, p. 200
The Essential Rumi (1995)
Context: Every object and being in the universe is
a jar overflowing with wisdom and beauty,
a drop of the Tigris that cannot be contained
by any skin. Every jarful spills and makes the earth
more shining, as though covered in satin.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning photo

“And having in thy life-depth thrown
Being and suffering (which are one),
As a child drops his pebble small
Down some deep well, and hears it fall
Smiling — so I. THY DAYS GO ON.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) English poet, author

St. 23 -24.
De Profundis (1862)
Context: p>I praise Thee while my days go on;
I love Thee while my days go on:
Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost,
With emptied arms and treasure lost,
I thank Thee while my days go on.And having in thy life-depth thrown
Being and suffering (which are one),
As a child drops his pebble small
Down some deep well, and hears it fall
Smiling — so I. THY DAYS GO ON.</p

Patrick Rothfuss photo

“On the rare occasion I miss the news and feel the need to absorb some fearmongering bullshit, I just drop a tab of acid and read a Lovecraft story. There's less pretense that way.”

Patrick Rothfuss (1973) American fantasy writer

On his Interesting times….(3 February 2010) http://www.patrickrothfuss.com/blog/2010/02/interesting-times.html
Official site
Context: I really don't go in for talking about current events on the blog. The main reason for this is the fact that I am profoundly out of touch with the outside world. I don't have cable and I don't watch the news. On the rare occasion I miss the news and feel the need to absorb some fearmongering bullshit, I just drop a tab of acid and read a Lovecraft story. There's less pretense that way.

Vannevar Bush photo

“Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.”

As We May Think (1945)
Context: Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by its patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.

Bernard of Clairvaux photo

“To reach this state is to become deified. As a drop of water poured into wine loses itself, and takes the color and savor of wine; or as a bar of iron, heated red-hot, becomes like fire itself, forgetting its own nature; or as the air, radiant with sun-beams, seems not so much to be illuminated as to be light itself; so in the saints all human affections melt away by some unspeakable transmutation into the will of God. For how could God be all in all, if anything merely human remained in man? The substance will endure, but in another beauty, a higher power, a greater glory.”

Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) French abbot, theologian

From, On Loving of God, Paul Halsall trans., Ch. 10
Context: Seeing that the Scripture saith, God has made all for His own glory (Isa. 43.7), surely His creatures ought to conform themselves, as much as they can, to His will. In Him should all our affections center, so that in all things we should seek only to do His will, not to please ourselves. And real happiness will come, not in gratifying our desires or in gaining transient pleasures, but in accomplishing God’s will for us: even as we pray every day: ‘Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven’ (Matt. 6.10). O chaste and holy love! O sweet and gracious affection! O pure and cleansed purpose, thoroughly washed and purged from any admixture of selfishness, and sweetened by contact with the divine will! To reach this state is to become deified. As a drop of water poured into wine loses itself, and takes the color and savor of wine; or as a bar of iron, heated red-hot, becomes like fire itself, forgetting its own nature; or as the air, radiant with sun-beams, seems not so much to be illuminated as to be light itself; so in the saints all human affections melt away by some unspeakable transmutation into the will of God. For how could God be all in all, if anything merely human remained in man? The substance will endure, but in another beauty, a higher power, a greater glory. When will that be? Who will see, who possess it? ‘When shall I come to appear before the presence of God?’ (Ps. 42.2). ‘My heart hath talked of Thee, Seek ye My face: Thy face, Lord, will I seek’ (Ps. 27.8). Lord, thinkest Thou that I, even I shall see Thy holy temple?

Vitruvius photo

“In felling a tree we should cut into the trunk of it to the very heart, and then leave it standing so that the sap may drain out drop by drop throughout the whole of it.”

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter IX, Sec. 3
Context: In felling a tree we should cut into the trunk of it to the very heart, and then leave it standing so that the sap may drain out drop by drop throughout the whole of it.... Then and not till then, the tree being drained dry and the sap no longer dripping, let it be felled and it will be in the highest state of usefulness.

Lucretius photo

“Custom renders love attractive; for that which is struck by oft-repeated blows however lightly, yet after long course of time is overpowered and gives way. See you not too that drops of water falling on rocks after long course of time scoop a hole through these rocks?”
Consuetudo concinnat amorem; nam leviter quamvis quod crebro tunditur ictu, vincitur in longo spatio tamen atque labascit. Nonne vides etiam guttas in saxa cadentis umoris longo in spatio pertundere saxa?

Lucretius (-94–-55 BC) Roman poet and philosopher

Book IV, lines 1283–1287 (tr. Munro)
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)

Nikos Kazantzakis photo

“I thank God that this refreshing childhood vision still lives inside me in all its fullness of color and sound. This is what keeps my mind untouched by wastage, keeps it from withering and running dry. It is the sacred drop of immortal water which prevents me from dying.”

"The Son", Ch. 4, p. 49
Report to Greco (1965)
Context: I thank God that this refreshing childhood vision still lives inside me in all its fullness of color and sound. This is what keeps my mind untouched by wastage, keeps it from withering and running dry. It is the sacred drop of immortal water which prevents me from dying. When I wish to speak of the sea, woman, or God in my writing, I gaze down in my breast and listen carefully to what the child within me says. He dictates to me; and if it sometimes happens that I come close to these great forces of the sea, woman, and God, approach them by means of words and depict them, I owe it to the child who still lives within me. I become a child again to enable myself to view the world always for the first time, with virgin eyes.

Woody Guthrie photo

“I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood.
I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.”

Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) American singer-songwriter and folk musician

Statement quoted in Prophet Singer: The Voice And Vision of Woody Guthrie (2007) by Mark Allan Jackson. There are a few slight variants of this statement, which seems to have originated in a performance monologue.
Context: I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. … I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood.
I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.
And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think you've not any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.

Michael Savage photo

“Your job is to struggle until you drop dead. That's it. Stop trying to be happy. The day you stop trying to be happy you might have a chance to live.”

The Savage Nation, The Savage Nation (1995- ), 2011(?) (Audio: Michael Savage – Suicide Is Never An Option https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oIjOjPW2OM&feature=youtu.be&t=1m29s)
2011
Context: Just remember, it's not heroic to kill yourself, and it's a violation of God's Laws.... The way it was explained to me in my tradition is... you are not your own property. You are God's property.... You have no right to commit suicide, don't even think– it's not an option. See, like in America, everything is "choice". "It's your choice." It's NOT your choice. You have no choice, so don't even think about it. It's not your choice to make. Soon enough, God will come for you, okay? Leave it at that. And every time you have a suicidal ideation, just push it away, it's not you. It's the devil trying to put something inside your head. We live in such a sick society, that the demented people who run the mind games on our heads like you to believe that it's your choice whether to commit suicide or not. It's NOT your choice. It's immoral, and that's the end of it. You don't have to ponder everything like it's a choice. You have children, that's all you need to know. What would the world be like for them if you committed suicide, do you have any idea? What you've gotta do is just get back on the road and keep walking, and don't stare at the chasm. That's all. You stand on the edge of a road, look down at the chasm and you'll get dizzy and fall in. So stop staring at the chasm. Get back on the road, and go back down to the meadow, and be with your family. And go on continue the struggle. That's all there is to it. That's your job. Your job is to struggle until you drop dead. That's it. Stop trying to be happy. The day you stop trying to be happy you might have a chance to live.

Axel Munthe photo
Axel Munthe photo
George Adamski photo
Lucy Parsons photo
Alex Grey photo
Helena Roerich photo
Maximilien Robespierre photo
Maximilien Robespierre photo

“Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts. If it is for their salvation that they take arms against their oppressors, how can they be made to adopt a way of punishing them that would pose a new danger to themselves?”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

Speech on the Trial of Louis XVI (Dec. 3, 1792)
Original: (fr) Les peuples ne jugent pas comme les cours judiciaires ; ils ne rendent point de sentences, ils lancent la foudre ; ils ne condamnent pas les rois, ils les replongent dans le néant : et cette justice vaut bien celle des tribunaux. Si c’est pour leur salut qu’ils s’arment contre leurs oppresseurs, comment seraient-ils tenus d’adopter un mode de les punir qui serait pour eux-mêmes un nouveau danger?

John Quincy Adams photo

“America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet on her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.... Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.”

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) American politician, 6th president of the United States (in office from 1825 to 1829)

Independence Day address (1821)

Charles Stross photo
Vladimir Lenin photo
Vladimir Lenin photo
J. Howard Moore photo

“Kinship is universal. The orders, families, species, and races of the animal kingdom are the branches of a gigantic arbour. Every individual is a cell, every species is a tissue, and every order is an organ in the great surging, suffering, palpitating process. Man is simply one portion of the immense enterprise. He is as veritably an animal as the insect that drinks its little fill from his veins, the ox he goads, or the wild-fox that flees before his bellowings. Man is not a god, nor in any imminent danger of becoming one. He is not a celestial star-babe dropped down among mundane matters for a time and endowed with wing possibilities and the anatomy of a deity. He is a mammal of the order of primates, not so lamentable when we think of the hyena and the serpent, but an exceedingly discouraging vertebrate compared with what he ought to be. He has come up from the worm and the quadruped. His relatives dwell on the prairies and in the fields, forests, and waves. He shares the honours and partakes of the infirmities of all his kindred. He walks on his hind-limbs like the ape; he eats herbage and suckles his young like the ox; he slays his fellows and fills himself with their blood like the crocodile and the tiger; he grows old and dies, and turns to banqueting worms, like all that come from the elemental loins. He cannot exceed the winds like the hound, nor dissolve his image in the mid-day blue like the eagle. He has not the courage of the gorilla, the magnificence of the steed, nor the plaintive innocence of the ring-dove. Poor, pitiful, glory-hunting hideful! Born into a universe which he creates when he comes into it, and clinging, like all his kindred, to a clod that knows him not, he drives on in the preposterous storm of the atoms, as helpless to fashion his fate as the sleet that pelts him, and lost absolutely in the somnambulism of his own being.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"Conclusion", p. 101
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Physical Kinship

Assata Shakur photo
Giovanni Morassutti photo

“A great many a drop of water will create a creek.”

Giovanni Morassutti (1980) Italian actor, theatre director and cultural entrepreneur.

Broadcast interview, min 9.51 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVwuaHbbd4s, in "Obiettivo Friuli - Reportage da Pordenone" by Claudia Brugnetta, Rai Friuli Venezia Giulia http://www.rai.it/dl/portali/site/page/Page-2331f91a-cc95-4c68-87d7-67c9afd83529.html?refresh_ce (September 26, 2018).

Nasser Khalili photo
Tulsi Gabbard photo
Enoch Powell photo
I. F. Stone photo

“The press, which dropped an Iron Curtain weeks ago on the anti-war speeches of Morse and Gruening, ignored this one, too.”

I. F. Stone (1907–1989) American investigative journalist and author

NPR: Excerpt: The Best of I.F. Stone (5 September 2006)

Johann Most photo
Fyodor Dostoyevsky photo
Samuel T. Cohen photo

“As you can well imagine, any nuclear bombing study that neglected to target Moscow would be laughed out of the room. (That is, no study at that time; 10 or 15 years later senior policy officials were debating how good an idea this might be. If you wiped out the political leadership of the Soviet Union in the process, who would you deal with in arranging for a truce and who would be left to run the country after the war?) Consequently, two of RAND’s brightest mathematicians were assigned the task of determining, with the help of computers, in great detail, precisely what would happen to the city were a bomb of so many megatons dropped on it. It was truly a daunting task and called for devising a mathematical model unimaginably complex; one that would deal with the exact population distribution, the precise location of various industries and government agencies, the vulnerability of all the important structures to the bomb’s effects, etc., etc. However, these two guys were up to the task and toiled in the vineyards for some months, finally coming up with the results. Naturally, they were horrendous.”

Samuel T. Cohen (1921–2010) American physicist

Harold Mitchell, a medical doctor, an expert on human vulnerability to the H-bomb’s effects, told me when the study first began: “Why are they wasting their time going through all this shit? You know goddamned well that a bomb this big is going to blow the fucking city into the next county. What more do you have to know?” I had to agree with him.
F*** You! Mr. President: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb (2006)

Zakir Hussain (politician) photo
Victor Villaseñor photo
Jeff Buckley photo

“Jeff Buckley was a pure drop in an ocean of noise.”

Jeff Buckley (1966–1997) American singer, guitarist and songwriter

Bono of U2 from Mojo Magazine, August 1997

Karl Rove photo
Alan Keyes photo
Anthony Burgess photo
Harlan Ellison photo
W. H. Auden photo

“And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss, O show us
History the operator, the
Organiser, Time the refreshing river."”

<p> And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror:
"Did you not found the city state of the sponge,<p>"Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?
Intervene. Descend as a dove or
A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend."
Source: Spain (1937), Lines 33–44

Dennis Prager photo

“If you drop desires, you'll never have a Salk vaccine.”

Dennis Prager (1948) American writer, speaker, radio and TV commentator, theologian

Dennis Prager: A Profile/David Margolis.com http://www.davidmargolis.com/article.php?id=41, 1992.
1990s

“DESOLATE are the mansions of the fair, the stations in Minia, where they rested, and those where they fixed their abodes! Wild are the hills of Goul, and deserted is the summit of Rijaam.
The canals of Rayaan are destroyed: the remains of them are laid bare and smoothed by the floods, like characters engraved on the solid rocks.
Dear ruins! Many a year has been closed, many a month, holy and unhallowed, has elapsed, since I exchanged tender vows with their fair inhabitants!
The rainy constellations of spring have made their hills green and luxuriant: the drops from the thunder-clouds have drenched them with profuse as well as with gentle showers:
Showers, from every nightly cloud, from every cloud veiling the horizon at day-break, and from every evening cloud, responsive with hoarse murmurs.
Here the wild eringo-plants raise their tops: here the antelopes bring forth their young, by the sides of the valley: and here the ostriches drop their eggs.
The large-eyed wild-cows lie suckling their young, a few days old—their young, who will soon become a herd on the plain.
The torrents have cleared the rubbish, and disclosed the traces of habitations, as the reeds of a writer restore effaced letters in a book;
Or as the black dust, sprinkled over the varied marks on a fair hand, brings to view with a brighter tint the blue stains of woad.
I stood asking news of the ruins concerning their lovely habitants; but what avail my questions to dreary rocks, who answer them only by their echo?”

Labīd (560–661) Sahabah and poet

Translated by C. J. Lyall, quoted in Arabian Poetry, p. 41-42. First Stanza, lines 1-10 https://archive.org/details/arabianpoetryfo00clougoog/page/n127/mode/2up
The Poem of Labīd (translated by C. J. Lyall in 1881)

T.S. Eliot photo
Ram Prasad Bismil photo
Warren Buffett photo

“Brands have to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to diversity…Don’t hire a black woman or a trans woman or a disabled woman and then get cross if they have opinions about their colour or their gender or their disability. The danger is if you’re hired just to be pretty but then you start having opinions about abortion, then you’re gonna get dropped. And of course you should be able to do both.”

Juno Dawson (1981) British youth fiction author

On hiring and diversity in “Juno Dawson on the darker side of fashion in Meat Market and why 'people have a snippy vibe about Young Adult fiction'” https://inews.co.uk/culture/books/juno-dawson-meat-market-interview-new-book-release-635361 in i Newsletter (2019 Aug 3)

Robert Graves photo
Kenneth Arrow photo
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay photo
Stephen Vincent Benét photo
Mashrafe Mortaza photo

“I do not know how long I can continue my game with this team. But I can assure you that when I realize that my skills and willpower are decreasing, then I will drop myself.”

Mashrafe Mortaza (1983) Bangladeshi international cricketer and politician

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&u=https%3A%2F%2Fbani.com.bd%2F402%2F1996%2F

Eminem photo
Mashrafe Mortaza photo
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh photo

“Bits are beginning to drop off.”

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921) member of the British Royal Family, consort to Queen Elizabeth II

Source: On approaching his 90th birthday, 2011

William Ewart Gladstone photo

“I am not slow to claim the name of Scotchman, and undoubtedly, even if I were slow to claim it, there is the fact staring me in the face that not a drop of blood runs in my veins except what is derived from a Scottish ancestry.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Dundee (29 October 1890), quoted in The Times (30 october 1890), p. 4
1890s

Lucretius photo
Gautama Buddha photo

“A jug fills drop by drop.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism
Neal Stephenson photo
Richard Lovelace photo
Chigozie Obioma photo

“If I could talk face to face with the pilot who dropped the bomb, I could tell him we cannot change history. But we should try to do good things for the present and for the future to promote peace.”

Phan Thi Kim Phuc (1963) Child depicted in the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph taken during the Vietnam War on June 8, 1972

"`Time To Heal, Time For Peace'" in Chicago Tribune https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6VPc2Y8SsL4J:https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1996-11-12-9611120185-story.html+&cd=21&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us (12 November 1996)

Mwanandeke Kindembo photo
Viktor Yanukovych photo

“My principles which I always follow are that no authority, no power is worth a drop of blood.”

Viktor Yanukovych (1950) Ukrainian politician who was the President of Ukraine

Source: "Yanukovych: 'I Was Wrong' To Ask Russian Troops Into Crimea" in NPR https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/02/298385578/yanukovych-i-was-wrong-to-ask-russian-troops-into-crimea (2 April 2014)

Cary Grant photo

“I often think my life has been a failure. But whenever I drop into a theater and hear women laugh at one of my films, I think, well, if I brightened their day before they went home and did the dishes, maybe my life wasn't wasted, after all.”

Cary Grant (1904–1986) British-American film and stage actor

Source: As quoted in "They Changed Their Careers and Became Famous; Cary a Failure?" https://www.newspapers.com/clip/87358421/the-boston-globe/ by Jack Harrison Pollack, Parade (November 16, 1969), p. 7; and The Filmgoer's Book of Quotes (1978) by Leslie Halliwell, p.229

Ken Paxton photo

“We won’t even know if they've done anything, and so, they'll be dropped wherever the federal government wants to drop them, and they'll disappear into our society. We'll never know, until something bad happens, if we have a terrorist.”

Ken Paxton (1962) American politician

Source: Exclusive — TX AG Ken Paxton on Afghan Refugees: ‘We Don’t Know Whether They’re Vetted’ or ‘Terrorists’ https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/09/09/exclusive-tx-ag-ken-paxton-afghan-refugees-we-dont-know-whether-theyre-vetted-terrorists/ (9 September 2021)

Bob Casey Sr. photo

“The pro-life Republicans drop the children at birth and do nothing for them after that.”

Bob Casey Sr. (1932–2000) American politician (1932-2000)

Source: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/no-violence/civil/hentoff_casey.html

Gilbert O'Sullivan photo

“Where to begin?
The pain I am in,
hard to know when to stop.
Out of the blue
a dream came true,
only to see it drop.
I'm no genius where love's concerned,
more fool me to pretend.
Whatever it takes, while my heart aches
I'll never love again.”

Gilbert O'Sullivan (1946) Irish singer-songwriter

"I'll Never Love Again" (song)
Gilbert O'Sullivan, "I'll Never Love Again" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IIlAUIwQdc (song on YouTube)
Song lyrics

John Wesley photo
Rumi photo

“Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

https://twitter.com/wise_chimp/status/1488946174321205253?s=21

Eminem photo

“The rules would seem to indicate, that if you start a war you really can’t complain when people drop bombs on you.”

Jack Cady (1932–2004) American writer

Source: Kilroy Was Here (1996), p. 141

Nicolas Cage photo

“As a film actor, my job is to facilitate the director’s vision. If there’s something I’m doing that they don’t agree with, I drop it.”

Nicolas Cage (1964) American actor

"Nicolas Cage on his legacy, his philosophy of acting and his metaphorical — and literal — search for the Holy Grail." in The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/07/magazine/nicolas-cage-interview.html (7 August 2019)

Aimee Mann photo

“You lie so well
I could never even tell
what were facts in your artful rearranging But I came back for more
and you laughed in my face and you rubbed it in
cause I’m a Labrador
and I run
when the gun
drops the dove again”

Aimee Mann (1960) American indie rock singer-songwriter (born 1960)

"Labrador" · Video (a shot for shot recreation of scenarios from her first hit video with 'Til Tuesday, "Voices Carry") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA1cX-wgMdM
Song lyrics, Charmer (2012)

Viktor Yanukovych photo

“I don't want to drop salt on the wound, as it already hurts.”

Viktor Yanukovych (1950) Ukrainian politician who was the President of Ukraine

Speaking of the proposed increases of utility prices
Source: [Янукович взялся за старое, хоть и не хочет “капать соль на рану”, http://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2009/05/28/4487095/, 2022-06-12, Украинская правда, ru, 2009-05-28]

Alexis Karpouzos photo