Quotations Weblog

Summer is the time when a lot of people take their vacations. We started a travel weblog called Starling Travel that showcases the fun and inexpensive ways to enjoy your time off work.

If you agree with Henry J. Tillman and find travel to be unpleasant at times, come over to Starling Travel and enjoy the simple trips in life. Sometimes the best trip is when you become a tourist in your home town.

Visit Starling Travel and find out how to actually enjoy traveling again.

I am so grateful that I am a writer and not a public speaker. I feel like speeches lack the spontaneity of conversation, yet I had a speech performed on the fly. It leaves me in an awkward position whenever I have to speak publicly. I don’t want to have a canned speech AND I don’t want to be unprepared. It feels like a losing proposition every time.

In the end, I read from a paper and do my best to keep it real, but I know that my public speaking has been nominal at best. A horrid cross between the kind of stuff you see in a lay-lead church and an elementary school auditorium.

I’ll leave the public speaking to the professionals.

What have I long taken for granted?

America is land of the free and home of the brave.

Yeah, that’s a concept that I’ve believed for a long time and I don’t know if it’s true anymore. I know our soldiers out there fighting are brave, but I haven’t see much bravery from the leaders of our great country lately.

I also haven’t seen much freedom lately. It’s nearly impossible to buy pseudoephedrine (a mostly harmless decongestant – Sudafed) because of the war against drugs. Our leadership is more worried about a few meth labs than the comfort of their law-abiding citizens.

There are entire groups of people in our nation that are not allowed to marry. By some counts our nation is discriminating against ten percent of its population, witholding benefits and protection that is usually given to people automatically.

Health insurance is another method of discrimination that is running rampant in our nation. People who are self-employed pay four to five times what corporations pay for health insurance. This company was built of self-starters, but they are being edged out by lack of health coverage.

You want to see brave? You want to see freedom? How about a politician willing to support gay marriage, universal health coverage and end the “war on drugs”? I haven’t seen much of that in my hometown. In fact, I’ve seen the opposite. I’ve seen a lot of cowardice in this land of the free and home of the brave.

If America isn’t living up to its image as land of the free and home of the brave? Where will the world turn to?

As we add new quotations, we create pages for authors we had not previously quoted—or at least not previously quoted correctly. Here are some of the authors we added in the last week:

• Alan Bennett
• Aneurin Bevan (Welsh labor leader)
• John Randolph (US Politician)
• Archibald MacLeish (US administrator and poet)
• Konstantin Stanislavsky (Russian actor and director)
• Mary Todd Lincoln (Wife of Abraham Lincoln)
• Maxwell Anderson (US Playwright)
• Carlos Castaneda
• Grenville Kleiser
• Hugh Prather

As usual, the US celebrates Independence Day on July 4th. Here are some quotations for the occasion:

More 4th of July quotations:

• Quotes by Subject: Freedom
• Quotes by Subject: America
• Quotes by Subject: Patriotism