761 – Washington on the State of the World and Its Future

“On these occasions I consider how mankind may be connected like one great family in fraternal ties—I endulge a fond, perhaps an enthusiastic idea, that as the world is evidently much less barbarous than it has been, its melioration must still be progressive—that nations are becoming more humanized in their policy—that the subjects of ambition & causes for hostility are daily diminishing—and in fine, that the period is not very remote when the benefits of a liberal & free commerce will, pretty generally, succeed to the devastations & horrors of war.”

–George Washington, 1st President of the United States of America

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750 – “You have been my friend. … That in itself is a tremendous thing.”

–Charlotte in E B White’s Charlotte’s Web [See Source Note for exact quote]

It is Make a Friend Day, so go out and makes some new ones!

739 – “We have a genetic kinship with all life on Earth, an atomic kinship to all matter in the cosmos. So when I look at the Universe, I feel large, because I remind myself that not only are we living in this Universe, the Universe is living within us.”

–Neil deGrasse Tyson

682 – “We are not isolationists. Intelligent people are not isolationists. We are a part of the great civilization of this world at this moment, and every part of the world where a similar civilization prevails is a part of us.”

–Dwight Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States of America

663 – Will Durant on Living History

“It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. So with a city, a country, and a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it.”

–Henry Steele Commager

656 – Eisenhower’s Kinship Among Nations Quote

“Kinship among nations is not determined in such measurements as proximity of size and age. Rather we should turn to those inner things — call them what you will — I mean those intangibles that are the real treasures free men possess. To preserve his freedom of worship, his equality before law, his liberty to speak and act as he sees fit, subject only to provisions that he trespass not upon similar rights of others….”

–Dwight Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States of America

29 years ago today, in 1989, Mauerfall began when East and West Berliners joined together and began dismantling the Berlin Wall, which would eventually lead to the fall of the Iron Curtain and preceded the collapse of the Soviet Union.

616 – “But I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life.”

–James Baldwin