About

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Education

• Appalachian State University

Favorite saying

• ""To dare is to do." "Great minds think differently." "Death is nothing, but to live defeated and ingloriously is to die every day." - Napoleon Bonaparte "Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools." - Napoleon Bonaparte "It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words." - T.S. Eliot "There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children." - Nelson Mandela "Friendship is unnecessary, like art; it has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival." - C.S. Lewis "Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth." - Benjamin Disraeli "Oh my dear little librarian. You pile up enough tomorrows and you'll find you've collected nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays. I don't know about you...but I'd like to make today worth remembering." - Robert Preston as Professor Hill in The Music Man "Of more worth is one man to society than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived." - Thomas Paine "This is my age! I'm in the prime of my youth, and I'll only be young once!" - Teddy Duchamp in Stand By Me "His eyes were dimmed with tears, and, looking humbly up to heaven, he wept for the innocence he had lost." - excerpt from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” - Theodore Roosevelt - 1910 "Writing must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." - Franz Kafka "Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve — hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve — not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows us." - excerpt from "Why I Write," from the larger work Ill Nature, Joy Williams "Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles." -Emerson "I use the oldest words in the English language. People think I’m an ignorant bastard who doesn’t know the ten-dollar words. I know the ten-dollar words. There are older and better words which if you arrange them in the proper combination you make it stick. Remember, anybody who pulls his erudition or education on you hasn’t any." -Ernest Hemingway “It is quite possible—overwhelmingly probable, one might guess—that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology” -Noam Chomsky "The blinding instant of passion alone--passion, free, unashamed, irresistible--that is the only gate by which we can escape from the misery of what slaves call life." -excerpt from James Joyce's Exiles "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." -T.S. Eliot "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it." -Winston Churchill “No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written. He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.” -T.S. Eliot "Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all." - Abraham Lincoln "I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." - James Madison "In those other constitutions, the government tells the people what they are allowed to do. In our Constitution, we the people tell the government what it can do and that it can only do those things listed in that document and no other." - Ronald Reagan "The Constitution is not a document designed to solve the problems of a community at any level—local state or national. Rather it is a document that trusts people to solve those problems themselves." - Stephen Breyer "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniencies attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it." - Thomas Jefferson "Investigate what is, and not what pleases." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe "Our ambition ends only when our imaginations cease." Nathan O. Hatch, President, Wake Forest University "The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error." - John Stuart Mill "Let experience, the least fallible guide of human opinions, be appealed to for an answer to these inquiries." - Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 6 "I don't fuck with bees, man. Other than that I'm not afraid of nothing." - Kobe Bryant "Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us." - Franklin D. Roosevelt "The culture of a country, the history of a country, has a lot more to do with how free a country is than words written on a particular piece of paper." - Jeffrey Toobin "It is my impression that our generation was the first to recognize something which had passed the notice of all earlier generations: namely that the great decisions of the world are not, in fact, arrived at simply in the public chambers, or else during a handful of days given over to an international conference under the full gaze of the public and the press. Rather, debates are conducted, and crucial decisions arrived at, in the privacy and calm of the great houses of this country. What occurs under the public gaze with so much pomp and ceremony is often the conclusion, or mere ratification, of what has taken place over weeks or months within the walls of such houses." - excerpt from Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day "That's the problem with history, we like to think it's a book--that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn't the paper it's printed on. It's memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you." - excerpt from Paul Beatty's The Sellout “Who are to be the electors of the federal representatives? Not the rich, more than the poor; not the learned, more than the ignorant; not the haughty heirs of distinguished names, more than the humble sons of obscurity and unpropitious fortune. The electors are to be the great body of the people of the United States.” - James Madison, Federalist No. 57 "What democracy requires is vigorous public debate, not information. Of course, it needs information too, but the kind of information it needs can be generated only by debate. We do not know what we need to know until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy. Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its byproduct. When we get into arguments that focus and fully engage our attention, we become avid seekers of relevant information. Otherwise we take in information passively--if we take it in at all." -excerpt from Christopher Lasch's The Revolt of the Elites "In our country the federal and state constitutions are the charters which demark the extent and the limitations of legislative power; and while it is true that the rigidity of a written constitution may at times prove to be a hindrance to the march of progress, yet more often its stability protects the people against the frequent and violent fluctuations of that which, for want of a better name, we call 'public opinion'." -excerpt from "The Living Law" by Louis Brandeis "The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves." -Plato "There is no perch above society from which we can see more clearly than the people living in it. There are only perches within society, and we can evaluate our sights by considering how things might look from those of others." -Yuval Levin "If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold." -Louis Brandeis, Dissent in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann "It is the job of progressives to keep on making mistakes, and the job of conservatives to keep them from being corrected." -G.K. Chesterton "Democracy is meaningless unless it involves the serious and steady co-operation of large numbers of citizens in the actual work of government." -excerpt from Alfred Zimmern's The Greek Commonwealth "It seems to me that we show a government to be representative not by demonstrating its control over its subjects but just the reverse, by demonstrating that its subjects have control over what it does." -excerpt from Hannah Fenichel Pitkin's The Concept of Representation "It’s worth remembering that democracy has always flourished not in the citadel of government but in the campaigns to open it up, to make it more than it has been." - Rebecca Solnit "Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you'll be criticized anyway." - Eleanor Roosevelt "The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones." - John Maynard Keynes"