Mark Twain's Letter to His Wife - November 22, 1888

Transcription:

Hartford, Nov. 27/88

Livy Darling, I am grateful — gratefuler than ever before — that you were born, & that your love is mine & our two lives woven & welded together!

SLC.

Theodore Roosevelt's Worst Valentine's Day - February 14, 1884

On this day in 1884, Theodore Roosevelt's mother and wife died. His wife, Alice Lee, had given birth to their daughter, Alice, two days prior to her passing.

The Other Gettysburg Addresses

Seven score and ten years ago, Abraham Lincoln delivered a Gettysburg Address he thought the world would little note nor long remember.

The President's prediction could not have been more inaccurate; his 272-word speech reverberates through American political rhetoric endlessly as his stature casts the most difficult shadow in which any speaker can tread.

While nearly every president has visited Gettysburg, only a handful of Presidents have spoken at the hallowed ground.

With Lincoln’s scribe John Hay as his Secretary of State, Theodore Roosevelt appropriately became the first president bold enough to follow Lincoln’s remarks.

In the Soldier’s National Cemetery on Memorial Day 1904, Roosevelt tied Lincoln to the current struggle for the expansion of civil rights and national supremacy of law.

Roosevelt called the Civil War “a great war for righteousness; a war waged for the noblest ideals, but waged also in thoroughgoing, practical fashion.” 

When Roosevelt summarized the battle, he connected soldiers’ sacrifices for a cause to an audience mostly too young to remember Gettysburg. 

He revered Lincoln’s words not only for voicing ideals but compelling a country to act upon them. He evoked Lincoln’s spirit without trying to mimic his speech.

Delivering a transcript to a journalist of a speech to be given at Lincoln’s birthplace in 1909, Teddy Roosevelt wrote of his desire to avoid direct comparison:

Thank Heaven that it can not be printed beside the Gettysburg address. A speech may be a pretty good speech of the hour, or of the day, or even of the year, and yet be ruined if put side by side with one of the two or three great classics of human eloquence—of that eloquence which shows forth its human soul.

However, Roosevelt fearlessly evoked Lincoln for political gain. Running for a third term as president, he spoke softly at a campaign luncheon on Memorial Day 1912 at the battlefield but used Lincoln as a big stick.

His speech mostly marveled at national unity between the North and the South as he divided the Republican Party and sought to build a Progressive coalition with southern Democrats. However, Roosevelt ricocheted questions about his imperialistic policies and unprecedented pursuit of a third-term by reminding reporters that Lincoln had been described as a dictator in his time.

Wilson beat Roosevelt in the 1912 election but he echoed the Bull Moose’s sentiments about unity at a July 4, 1913 reunion.

Fifty years after the battle, before the first audience of Union and Confederate veterans assembled at Gettysburg, Wilson opens with a promise: “I need not tell you what the Battle of Gettysburg meant.” He delivers a cloud of fine words (“splendid valor,” “manly devotion,” “benign and majestic”) and makes no mention of Lincoln or the cause for which the soldiers fought. Wilson simply asks to commit a wartime spirit to times of peace, because “War fitted us for action, and action never ceases.” Only a little more than a year later, the world will remind Wilson that words of peace do not always cause war to cease.

When war came, Roosevelt would describe Woodrow Wilson as “unmanly,” comparing him unfavorably to Washington and Lincoln, who he said did not escape action by hiding “behind clouds of fine words.” 

Like his distant cousin, Franklin Roosevelt spoke twice at Gettysburg. During his first visit in 1934, his campaign speech would not mention Lincoln until his closing putting him alongside Washington, Jefferson, and Wilson.

More famously, as President, FDR spoke at the Eternal Peace Light dedication on July 3, 1938, unveiling a monument to “men who wore the blue and men who wore the gray.” He noted that we turn to the Civil War and Lincoln because “the fundamental conflict which events forced upon his Presidency invite us ever to turn to him for help.”

Foreshadowing the future conflict in Europe, Roosevelt told his audience Lincoln’s greatness came from understanding that sometimes “a fight must be fought through to a decision so clear that it is accepted as being beyond recall.”

However, the most surreal and haunting decision surrounding presidential speeches at Gettysburg involved Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Eisenhower.

That year on Memorial Day, Vice President Lyndon Johnson spoke at Gettysburg, connecting the Civil War to the fight for civil rights. He solemnly said the “heroic deeds” at Gettysburg should encourage freed men to persevere. He called to the country’s conscience, remarking, “Our nation found its soul in honor on these fields of Gettysburg one hundred years ago. We must not lose that soul in dishonor now on the fields of hate.” 

Just as the North and South had united, Johnson urged that Americans to listen to "the voice of those who died here and the great man who spoke here" to come together to fulfill emancipation as fact rather than just proclamation.

That following fall, President Eisenhower, the first soldier turned president since Colonel Teddy Roosevelt, became the last president to speak at Gettysburg, where he had been living in retirement:

We read Lincoln's sentiments, we ponder his words - the beauty of the sentiments he expressed enthralls us; the majesty of the words holds us spellbound - but we have not paid to his message its just tribute until we - ourselves - live it. For well he knew that to live for country is a duty, as demanding as is the readiness to die for it.

No matter how eloquently delivered, horrific actions days later overshadowed Eisenhower’s speech in the cemetery on November 19, 1963.

Though he had visited Gettysburg that year in March, President Kennedy declined park service guide an invitation to speak at the 100^th anniversary of the speech. He sent this note as he settled a political dispute in Dallas:

Let us remember those thousands of American patriots whose graves at home, beneath the sea and in distant lands are silent sentries of our heritage.

With clear parallels to Lincoln’s tragedy, Jacqueline Kennedy requested to consecrate her husband’s gravesite with an eternal flame in Arlington modeled after the Gettysburg monument he visited with his family.

Park Service Pamphlet

Jerry Bennett's Days of Uncertainty and Dread

Jerry Bennett's Days of Uncertainty and Dread

More PowerPoint presentations from Andrew Small

Dwight Eisenhower

"Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

"You don't lead by hitting people over the head - that's assault, not leadership."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

"I tell this story to illustrate the truth of the statement I heard long ago in the Army: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of "emergency" is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a speech to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference in Washington, D.C. (November 14, 1957)

"If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower, at the Fourth Annual Republican Women's National Conference on March 6, 1956

"I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."

-Abraham Lincoln

Woody Guthrie 100th Birthday

“Life has got a habit of not standing hitched. You got to ride it like you find it. You got to change with it. If a day goes by that don't change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like trying to milk a dead cow.”

-Woody Guthrie

"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."

-Woody Guthrie

The Battle of Gettysburg

Mark Twain and Tesla

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is really a large matter — it's the difference between a lightning bug and the lightning."

-Mark Twain

Bob Dylan: Chessmaster?

"In ceremonies of the horsemen,

Even the pawn must hold a grudge."

"Socrates, practise music!"

For where art is concerned, that despotic logician now and then had the feeling of a gap, of an emptiness, of a partial reproach, of a duty he had perhaps neglected. As he explains to his friends in prison, one and the same dream apparition often came to him, always with the same words, “Socrates, practice music!”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

James Marshall (July 29, 1923 - April 5, 2012

"I was making 10 shillings (£0.50/$0.75) a night and because it was wartime, we didn't have any petrol for cars, so I would ride my bicycle with a trailer behind it to carry my drum kit and the PA cabinets which I had made!"

-James Marshall

Give Me A Brake! The Social Significance of Cycling

In 1884, Mark Twain wrote,

“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it--if you live.” 

In an unpublished essay titled “Taming the Bicycle,” Twain details his daring efforts to learn to ride a large-wheeled “penny-farthing” bicycle invented by James Starley in 1871.

To Twain’s likely relief, Starley's nephew, John Kemp Starley, invented the first “safety” bicycle called The Rover a year later. His creation of a better balanced and chain driven bicycle propelled the product to become one of the most popular consumer goods of the next century.

Through the Gilded Age, public perception of the bicycle went from that of a dangerous play toy for rich daredevil men to a popular, practical device for the working class that everyone could use.

Bicycles were expensive at first and not available to everyone. Robert Smith, author of A Social History of the Bicycle, estimates that “any of the nearly two-thousand men employed in cycle plants in 1890 would have had to work nearly half a year at the prevailing wage to purchase one of the machines he helped assemble."

Perhaps they were better off waiting. Early bike enthusiasts bought bikes before innovations like the invention of the pneumatic tire and the subsequent inventions of brakes and gears made the hobby safer. After possibly the scariest beta tests in history, bicycle prices began to drop in 1893, as a result of public pressure and overproduction on the part of the manufacturers.

Bikes became a popular form of recreation and a practical machine, stimulating many business innovations of the era. Bicycles provided an energy efficient alternative to horses and brought rapid individual transit before the mass production of affordable cars.

The innovations in mass production--including mechanization, vertical integration, and aggressive advertising—would all become ideas that the automobile industry adopted soon. Many automobile makers began their training in bicycle plants.

The bicycle became a major consumer good. Major bicycle manufacturers spent between $4 million to $9 million a year to advertise bikes in newspapers designed to market the “identity” of a cyclist. 
Though early models of the bicycle were marketed towards the upper class (costing around $100 to $150), the bicycle had become affordable to working people by the turn of the 20th century.

In 1895, suffragist Frances Willard wrote in her book, A Wheel Within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle:

Tens of thousands who could never afford to own, feed and stable a horse, had by this bright invention enjoyed the swiftness of motion which is perhaps the most fascinating feature of material life.  

The president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union emphasized how important the bicycle had been in reviving her health and political optimism, using a bike as a metaphor for politics of action, stating "I would not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum."

Though the bicycle created some friction with the horse and buggy industry, it expanded possibilities for cities. Cycling created demand for suitable roads to provide ambulances, policemen, postmen, and other bicycle-savvy solutions to problems. The League of American Wheelmen lobbied for paved roads with the financial assistance of Columbia bike manufacturer, Albert Augustus Pope. They created pamphlets and magazines such as “The Gospel of Good Roads” and Outing, propagandizing the need to legalize biking, to build roads, and to implement safety features.

Businesses such as farmers, hotels, and inns benefited from tourism created by bikes journeying into rural areas. The bike boom brought about change by connecting communities closer together not only through building roads but also by emergence of amateur social cycling clubs and professional bicycle races. Bicycle culture created industries for accessories and uniforms associated with cycling clubs. The social benefit of the bike would soon quiet complaints from even the bicycle's harshest critics.

At the onset of the bicycle craze, physicians’ accused the bicycle of producing “chronic disease” while priests condemned it as “diabolical devices of the demon of darkness.” Cycling soon proved to not only to be beneficial for strengthening the lungs, improving circulation and building muscle tone but it also changed America's conception of moral propriety and social rules. The bicycle was touted as an alternative exercise for women to horse riding in 1890. Not only did the bike provide for good exercise but also many people argued that it also encouraged temperance because it deterred men from drinking so they could control their bicycle.

Though originally marketed to men, women began to use bicycles and it changed their fashion choices from clothing like the restrictive corset to more comfortable clothing such as bloomers. Though some would criticize bicycle fashion as a moral decay, most would welcome “rational dress” as a “reform that had been long demanded by common sense."

Susan B. Anthony affirmed the progress the bicycle had brought about for women, stating in a New York Sunday World interview on February 2, 1896: 

Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel...the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood. 

While the bicycle enabled greater freedom for the working class and for women, the bicycle's freedom on the roads became somewhat of a liability given its unique status.

Many people considered bicyclists menaces on the road. Taxi cab drivers and “teamsters” (previously used as a term for horse-and-buggy drivers rather than truck drivers) tried to have cycling defined as a “hazardous occupation." Bicycles would be given the same rights as other vehicles in 1897 along with the restrictions and responsibilities that those laws imposed.

George Bernard Shaw would joke over three decades later, “newspapers are unable seemingly to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.” Sensationalist accidents and ensuing social stigma marginalized the cycling. Despite having literally paved the road for the possibility of other vehicles, the bicycle presence began to decrease as roads became more heavily populated.

The bicycle remains a fixture of American culture with approximately 16 million bikes being sold in the United States every year. Approximately 66% of the 130 million bicycles sold globally are made in China. However, its role in broader society has changed dramatically. The bicycle is still viewed as a luxury item of conspicuous yet pragmatic consumption. A bicycle provides still fulfills superfluous fashion goals of Gilded Age status seekers. Consumer marketing has changed from materialism to an identity of ideals. The bicycle still serves as a symbol of self-reliance to its current enthusiasts, while also representing an environmental and safer alternative to the automobile.

While cyclists relish in their hobby, the majority of society today looks upon them in a different light. Today, less than one percent of all commuters use bicycles to commute to work. Motorists consider bicycles a nuisance and an obstacle in the way of their road. Society still reveres bicycles as a form of recreation and exercise today, but mostly as a childhood right of passage. The motorist-cyclist reveals that many people may no longer view cycling as a legitimate adult form of transportation.

Zach Furness highlights in One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobiles how society perceives bicycles as a “childish” device. Furness cites an example of this trope in The 40 Year Old Virgin. Steve Carell's character, Andy Stitzer, rides a bike to work. Andy Stitzer's coworkers, friends, and girlfriend consider his bike  evidence of his childish inability to grow up, his virginity. Ultimately, his girlfriend buys him a bike, embracing his quirkiness but the damage is done; Stitzer’s bicycle is a silly remnant of his childhood to be tossed away, losing his innocence after he brutally wrecks in the road.

Just as bicyclists brushed off criticisms from detractors in the Gilded Age, bicyclists today reject the judgments from those that deem bicycling unworthy of their status on the streets. They have embraced their antagonistic role in the road while also asserting that they can abide by the “grown up” rules designed to ensure their safety. Bicyclists have successfully petitioned government to build bike lanes in many cities. Nevertheless, bicycles face a danger especially in urban areas. In 2009, 630 pedalcyclist deaths accounted for 2 percent of all traffic fatalities during the year. Seventy percent of those deaths occurred in urban areas. When Mark Twain warned that you would enjoy a bicycle “if you live” he was commenting on the dangerous design of the penny-farthing he rode; today, after all the possible safety innovations created for and required of bicycles to legally ride, the external threat of the automobile poses the greatest threat to cyclists’ lives.

Many bicyclists consider themselves activists with a duty to highlight the injustices that car culture perpetuates. Cyclists have begun to use their bicycles as a method of protest. One example of this kind of protest is the recent series of naked bike rides that have occurred all across the country to promote awareness of how cars pose a threat to their safety, both on the road and environmentally. These naked protests share the spirit of disregarding dominant concepts of social propriety as their predecessors in the bicycle craze, while emphasizing the idea of positive body image that can be achieved through cycling.

Through bicycle activism, the bike has a chance to represent more than just sentiments about road safety, healthy lifestyle, and fashion; the bicycle has become a physical manifestation of individual power that accepts individual responsibility. At the same time, the egalitarian nature of bicycle culture welcomes both the amateur and the professional. Although the bicycle was designed for the individual, the roads bicyclists demanded demonstrate the possibility of collective effort in producing social benefits and bridging social connections.

“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle."

-Ernest Hemingway

John Brown's Raid

 

"I just feel like marching, always, when that tune is played." 

-President Abraham Lincoln

John Brown's Harper's Ferry raid was a watershed moment in defining the limitations of inalienable rights after the American Revolution. While the cultural, religious, and economic differences heighten tensions in the relationships between the North and South, Brown's raid becomes an exemplary embodiment of the ideological and regional struggle. Brown's martyrdom represents the realization of the hopes of the North and the fears of South. Brown's paradoxical “patriotic treason” highlights a cognitive dissonance between the values of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Brown's raid highlights the ideological inconsistency in both regions' irrational response of violence, which heightens the distrust that brings about the American Civil War.

"When I hear music, I fear no danger.

I am invulnerable. I see no foe.

I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest."

-Henry David Thoreau

While Northerners had condemned slavery, declaring it a threat to Union and a sin against humanity, John Brown's armed insurrection declared black liberation as an inalienable right. Brown argued he was compelled by the law of God to eliminate the sin of slavery. While many abolitionists saw slavery's extinction as necessary, they could not envision the means to achieve this goal without infringing upon state sovereignty protected by the Constitution.

"I do not think this army could survive without music."

-General Robert E. Lee

John Brown's vision of a utopian society provides a clear foil to Northern ambivalence towards the question of slavery. His constitution reflects his individual interpretation of the role government ought to play in society. His Provisional Constitution for the state of Virginia ambitiously asserts the priority of individual and human rights over state sovereignty. Brown asserts the ability to confiscate property from slaveholders and enforce religious doctrines. He envisioned an ideal society where all property is held common between those he deems qualified for membership (68).

"I know only two tunes. 
One of them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't." 
-General Ulysses S. Grant

In the pursuit of these religious and moral ideals, John Brown was adamant about his right to self defense in response to the violent forces that maintain slavery. He argued that he did not wish to overthrow the United States government violently but was asserting his right to bear arms in order to protect the inalienable rights of the slaves he sought to free. Brown objected to the argument that the struggle against slavery was a struggle against the United States. He claims he sought the nation's salvation, not its destruction. Slaveholders were traitors, not freedom fighters. Brown argues only through armed resistance will “the desired end may be effectually secured by the means proposed; namely, the enjoyment of our inalienable rights”(22).

"Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees..." 

-General Stonewall Jackson

The raid revealed divisions within the North over these violent means to eliminate slavery in the South. The Democratic New Hampshire Patriot argued that the raid “shall serve to recall the public mind from prejudice and excitement to a clear and honest consideration of the dangerous tendencies of pernicious doctrines.” The paper questioned whether the violence at Harper's Ferry was a “fair and natural consequence” of black republicans' rhetoric in response to the events in Kansas. They attacked William Seward's assertion that the economies of the North and South were incompatible because they were dictated by a “doctrine of 'irrepressible conflict'” as the most troubling “sum and substance of their political faith” (107). John Brown's massive business failures and family fatalities could arguably be attributed to the effect slavery had on free labor. Seward's Republican nomination opponent, Abraham Lincoln, later argued that the effects slavery had in stoking problems in interstate commerce and domestic tranquility that required the use of force, fulfilling the promise of the Declaration without subverting the Constitution.

"To be interested in the public good we must be disinterested, that is, not interested in goods in which our personal selves are wrapped up."  

- General George Meade

The Albany, New York, Evening Journal article “From the Philadelphia Press,” argues that “whatever sympathy the fate of John Brown awakens, will be occasioned by his bearing through an ordeal so trying, rather than any complicity of feeling in his lawless enterprise” (109). While the majority of the North is unwilling to endorse Brown's methods, Henry David Thoreau argues Brown's “commitment to justice and equality” forced him to use civil disobedience to act upon his own conscience (111). He criticizes newspaper editors that characterize Brown as “insane” or acting out of “revenge” against the South. Thoreau pleas not for Brown's life but rather his “immortal soul,” arguing that the North will not have their revenge until slavery is no more.

Arguing against the insanity defense, Brown cites the Golden Rule as justification for his actions at trial. He cites the Bible stating “remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them,” even if he must forfeit his life to “mingle my blood...of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicket, cruel, and unjust enactments (87). Brown's prophecies affirmed the South's greatest fear: bloody conflict.

Southern fears of revenge weighed heavily on Governor Henry Wise's decision to approve the Virginia jury's conviction Brown of treason, murder and inciting a slave insurrection against Virginia, sentencing Brown to death. Having earned respect for Brown's eloquent defense, he was left with the decision of either declaring Brown insane and commuting Brown's sentence or going forward with Brown's execution, making him a martyr. 

"I am tired and sick of war. 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, for vengeance, for desolation.  

War is hell."

-General William Tecumseh Sherman 

Arguments about state sovereignty rang hollow to Northerners who watched slave owners willingly invade free states, calling on the federal government to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law and the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision. The federal government's relinquishing of power in the Brown trial, despite the fact that the raid was on a federal armory and was enforced by the Marines, undermined states rights arguments from the South. The Mason Report investigating the suppliers of money, guns, and ammunition attempted to use federal powers to implicate Republicans.

"I have always thought 'Dixie' one of the best tunes I have ever heard. That tune is now federal property and it is good to show the rebels that with us in power, they will be free to hear it again."

-President Abraham Lincoln

The Petersburg (Virginia) Express called the raid “The Harper's Ferry Conspiracy” and implicated Republicans with sowing seeds of rebellion against the South through their thefts of slave property. Security and Southern state sovereignty became a call to arms in prevention of an abolitionist invasion (108). These pressures force a conviction for Wise because despite “general appeal of sympathizers with the crimes” he could not pardon Brown's acts “without exciting bad men to action of rescue or revenge”(129).

Henry David Thoreau condemned popular sovereignty as the judgment of sanity. 

He asked, 

“How then can they print truth? If we do not say pleasant things, they argue, nobody will attend to us. And so they do like some traveling auctioneers, who sing an obscene song in order to draw a crowd around them”(116). 

Like music, in the triad of inalienable rights—life, liberty, and property—we can determine the quality of relationships as major or minor according to what we consider “home” but everyone only needs to hear that one inconsistent note for Americans to feel the dissonance.

‎"The nation which indulges toward another a habitual hatred or habitual fondness is in some degree a slave..."

-President George Washington, Farewell Address

Works Cited
John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry: A Brief History with Documents- Jonathan Earle

Edison

"Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless."
—Thomas A. Edison

"If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward."
—Thomas Edison

"I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill."
—Thomas Edison

"There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking."
—Thomas Edison

"The value of an idea lies in the using of it."
—Thomas Edison

"To my mind the old masters are not art; their value is in their scarcity."
—Thomas Edison

"Your worth consists in what you are and not in what you have."
—Thomas Edison

"One might think that the money value of an invention constitutes its reward to the man who loves his work. But... I continue to find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success."

—Thomas Edison

Tesla

“I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success... Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.”
-Nikola Tesla

The practical success of an idea, irrespective of its inherent merit, is dependent on the attitude of the contemporaries. If timely it is quickly adopted; if not, it is apt to fare like a sprout lured out of the ground by warm sunshine, only to be injured and retarded in its growth by the succeeding frost.”
-Nikola Tesla

The spread of civilisation may be likened to a fire; First, a feeble spark, next a flickering flame, then a mighty blaze, ever increasing in speed and power.”
-Nikola Tesla


"If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.
I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.”
-Nikola Tesla


“My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get a new idea, I start at once building it up in my imagination, and make improvements and operate the device in my mind. When I have gone so far as to embody everything in my invention, every possible improvement I can think of, and when I see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form the final product of my brain.”
-Nikola Tesla

Frederick Douglass on struggle and progress

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.

It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake."

-Frederick Douglass

Practice without theory - Da Vinci

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast. 

– Leonardo da Vinci

Long for the sea...

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." 

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Wading the River

A man on foot, with his clothes in a bundle, coming to a stream which he must ford, made elaborate preparations by stripping off his garments, adding them to his bundle, and tying all to the top of a stick, which enabled him to raise the bundle high over his head to keep them dry during the crossing. He then fearlessly waded in and carefully made his way across the rippling stream, and found it in no place up to his ankles.

-Abraham Lincoln