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Doris Haddock
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“As far as I am concerned, the secret to a happy life, especially in your later years, is to help other people until you don't notice your own needs and pains anymore. When the only person you worry about is yourself, all your problems tend to get magnified and out of hand, and you become thoroughly unpleasant to be around.”
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“... if you are afraid of death, you are afraid of life, for living your life leads to death. Until you face death and see its beauty, you will be afraid to really live — you will never properly burn the candle for fear of its end.”
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“My body was never entirely the same from day to day; there would usually be some newly sore toe or something pinching or rubbing or aching somewhere to create an annoying backbeat for the day's trudge — the ache du jour. After age forty, it's always something. But after eight-five, it's always nearly everything.”
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“Never be discouraged from being an activist because people tell you that you'll not succeed. You have already succeeded if you're out there representing truth or justice or compassion or fairness or love. You already have your victory because you have changed the world; you have changed the status quo by you; you have changed the chemistry of things. And changes will spread from you, will be easier to happen again in others because of you, because, believe it or not, you are the center of the world.”
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“Beyond the roadside flowers — a project of Lady Bird Johnson's by the way — were alternating fields of prickly pear cactus and brushy areas of creosote and cacti. The mantis heads of oil wells poked up everywhere. Their constant beat marks the passage of time in this part of the world, and never was there a more perfect clock to remind us that time is money.”
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“Parents must be careful to imprint upon their children the idea that each child is loved and special and worth attention. Somewhere deep in the subconscious, which is a very stupid place as you know if you have watched a hypnotist, we unquestioningly believe our parents and accept their opinion of us. That opinion, good or bad, becomes the blueprint for our lives.”
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“The price of doing the right thing and of following your heart is always, in the end, the best bargain.”
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“... when you fully dedicate yourself to a good mission, the floodgates of heaven open up for you, beads or no beads, sending you whatever luck and resources you need. If you can make a creative crack in the crust of the world's deadly abstractions, the divine will rush up, bringing great bounty with it. God does seem to favor gate-crashing heroism.”
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“All that we can do is ... to make our lives the meaty products of our deepest values.”
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“Well, if you are in the market for some August humidity and some dead polecats and armadillos, I cannot recommend this stretch of road enough ... I was constantly stepping around a great collection of unfortunate armadillos, presenting themselves nearly every tenth mile. It was as if some armadillo Spartacus, fleeing Arkansas, had been captured and executed with all his followers along this road.”
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“... people have always told stories to their children around the flickering campfire, and those stories formed the culture of that community. Our flickering campfire now is the television and computer screen ...”
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“It is said that democracy is not something we have, but something we do. But right now, we cannot do it because we cannot speak. We are shouted down by the bullhorns of big money. It is money with no manners for democracy, and it must be escorted from the room. While wealth has always influenced our politics, what is new is the increasing concentration of wealth and the widening divide between the political interests of the common people and the political interests of the very wealthy who are now able to buy our willing leaders wholesale. ... What villainy allows this political condition?The twin viral ideas that money is speech and that corporations are people. If money is speech, then those with more money have more speech, and that idea is antithetical to a democracy that cherishes political fairness. It makes us no longer equal citizens.”
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“You sit back most of your life, and you assume that there are grown-ups somewhere running the show. If you really get out there, if you look behind the curtain, you see it is just a bunch of tired people like yourself, needing help, trying their best and not doing half as well as they would like. That is the moment when you have an opportunity to grow up and to take your part.”
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“Our shallow culture makes us people of great longing, for we are not always provided with opportunities to live out our most meaningful beliefs.”
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“What, indeed, would the community look like if it were the perfect expression of our best instincts and deepest beliefs? The difference between that ideal and our actual lives is the gap that, like a stretched elastic, energizes both our political emotions and our sense of personal belonging. Politics, in this sense, is a much more personal thing than we give it credit for.”
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“Samoyeds are very smart and therefore very disobedient.”
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“It is so easy to ruin a town — it can be done in one day with a bulldozer and a redevelopment plan.”
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“... the art of your passion, embraced fully, redeems you from all the sins and shortcomings of a life.”
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“The greatest danger before you is this: You live in an age when people would package and standardize your life for you — steal it from you and sell it back to you at a price. That price is very high.”
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“... democracy is a lifestyle, not a fringe benefit of paying your taxes.”
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“Friends often come from your commitments, your passions. If you are all alone, it is usually a sign that you need to commit yourself to your beliefs or at least to a good activity. You need to give yourself away.”
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“I suspect that in old age we naturally turn to the issues left unfinished in youth and to old grooves of behavior we cut deep in those energetic years. One never loses one's youth. It is always just hiding under the wrinkles, excited for a chance to be out in the open air again.”
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“Along my three thousand miles through the heart of America, did I meet anyone who thought that their voice as an equal citizen now counts for much in the corrupt halls of Washington? No, I did not. Did I meet anyone who felt anger or pain over this? I did indeed, and I watched them shake with rage ...”
Doris Haddock, U.S. political activist
(1910 - 2010)
Full name: Ethel Doris Rollins Haddock. She was widely known as Granny D.