Top 100 Bayard Quotes
#1. For decades, this great leader, often at Dr. King's side, was denied his rightful place in history because he was openly gay. No medal can change that, but today, we honor Bayard Rustin's memory by taking our place in his march towards true equality, no matter who we are or who we love.
Barack Obama
#2. Ah. Ah! A man of modesty, either so false that it may be true or so true that it seems entirely false. I can see why Bayard speaks so well of you, sir.
Jim Butcher
#3. Suggested Reading Louis Bayard, The Black Tower; Sarah Blake, Grange House; F. G. Cottam, The House of Lost Souls; Michael Cox, The Glass of Time; Mark Frost, The List of Seven; John Harwood, The Ghost Writer; Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale.
Susan Hill
#4. Luther King gave people "the feeling that they could be bigger and stronger and more courageous than they thought they could be," Bayard Rustin said - in part because of the powerful new weapon, non-violent resistance, that had been forged on the Montgomery battlefield.
Robert A. Caro
#5. He's a rather brilliant defensive tactician," Grimm said. "I agree," Bayard said. "The problem is that he's an inept defensive strategist.
Jim Butcher
#6. Why, you may ask, didn't we have a cow tonight? No one would sell Bayard one. He had the brilliant idea of telling the farmers why he wanted the cow. The God-fearing folk would sell their cows to be eaten, but not for raising zombies. Prejudiced bastards.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#7. Fame is what you have taken, character is what you give; when to this truth you waken then you begin to live.
Bayard Taylor
#8. Surely, I must at all times attempt to obey the law of the state. But when the will of God and the will of the state conflict, I am compelled to follow the will of God.
Bayard Rustin
#9. London has the advantage of one of the most gloomy atmospheres in the world.
Bayard Taylor
#10. The clouds are scudding across the moon,
A misty light is on the sea;
The wind in the shrouds has a wintry tune,
And the foam is flying free.
Bayard Taylor
#11. People can't see that if I had not been a poet, I could never have had such success as a traveler.
Bayard Taylor
#13. The Swedish language combines the strong manhood of the German with the delicate beauty of the Italian.
Bayard Taylor
#14. I'm a man of a certain age - old enough to have been every kind of fool- and I find to my surprise that the only counsel I have to pass on is this: Never let your name be found in a dead man's trousers.
Louis Bayard
#15. As I toiled up the Mount of Olives, in the very footsteps of Christ, panting with the heat and the difficult ascent, I found it utterly impossible to conceive that the Deity, in human form, had walked there before me.
Bayard Taylor
#16. Well, as to that, all I'll say is, you can't take out a fellow's heart before he's ready to give it up.
Louis Bayard
#17. The real radical is that person who has a vision of equality and is willing to do those things that will bring reality closer to that vision ...
Bayard Rustin
#18. When May, with cowslip-braided locks,
Walks through the land in green attire.
And burns in meadow-grass the phlox
His torch of purple fire:
And when the punctual May arrives,
With cowslip-garland on her brow,
We know what once she gave our lives,
And cannot give us now!
Bayard Taylor
#19. We are all one - and if we don't know it, we will learn it the hard way.
Bayard Rustin
#20. My activism did not spring from my being gay, or, for that matter, from my being black. Rather, it is rooted fundamentally in my Quaker upbringing and the values that were instilled in me by my grandparents who reared me.
Bayard Rustin
#21. I came to Berlin not to visit its museums and galleries, its operas, its theaters ... but for the sake of seeing and speaking with the world's greatest living man - Alexander von Humboldt.
Bayard Taylor
#22. And rest, that strengthens unto virtuous deeds,
Is one with Prayer.
Bayard Taylor
#23. I study hard at Russian, which is a tough but most attractive language.
Bayard Taylor
#24. Who thinks, at night, that morn will ever be? Who knows, far out upon the central sea, That anywhere is land? And yet, a shore Has set behind us, and will rise before: A past foretells a future ...
Bayard Taylor
#25. I cannot assume emotions I do not feel, and must describe Jerusalem as I found it. Since being here, I have read the accounts of several travellers, and in many cases the devotional rhapsodies - the ecstacies of awe and reverence - in which they indulge, strike me as forced and affected.
Bayard Taylor
#27. I've often thought a blind man could find his way through London simply by gauging the changes in innuendo: mild through Trafalgar Square, less veiled towards the river.
Louis Bayard
#29. The more I see of the Swedes, the more I am convinced that there is no kinder, simpler, and honester people in the world.
Bayard Taylor
#30. And far and wide, in a scarlet tide, The poppy's bonfire spread.
Bayard Taylor
#31. Poetry had great powers over me from my childhood, and today the poems live in my memory which I read at the age of 7 or 8 years and which drove me to desperate attempts at imitation.
Bayard Taylor
#32. Love is a fire that can nurture or destroy, but you can't tell which until you surrender to the flames.
Clara Bayard
#33. The lamp you lighted in the olden time Will show you my heart's-blood beating through the rhyme: A poet's journal, writ in fire and tears ... Then slow deliverance, with the gaps of years ...
Bayard Taylor
#34. Learn to live, and live to learn,
Ignorance like a fire doth burn,
Little tasks make large return.
Bayard Taylor
#35. I love thee, I love but thee,
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old
Bayard Taylor
#36. You are asking us to lie, Colonel?"
"I am asking you to omit. Surely, amidst the ... the infinite gradations of human venality, that particular sin ranks low." The old man kneaded the folds of his throat. "What happened out there belongs out there. The jungle has it; let the jungle keep it ...
Louis Bayard
#37. After all these years, his best friend is malaria.
Even on the brink of an Alaska summer, it comes calling: a bone-deep chill one night, a ministry of sweat the next. Calling him back to old battles.
Louis Bayard
#38. I am an opponent of war and of war preparations and an opponent of universal military training and conscription; but entirely apart from that issue, I hold that segregation in any part of the body politic is an act of slavery and an act of war.
Bayard Rustin
#39. There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement that would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that the absence of power also corrupts.
Bayard Rustin
#40. We follow and race In shifting chase, Over the boundless ocean-space! Who hath beheld when the race begun? Who shall behold it run?
Bayard Taylor
#42. Departed suns their trails of splendor drew
Across departed summers: whispers came
From voices, long ago resolved again
Into the primeval Silence, and we twain,
Ghosts of our present selves, yet still the same,
As in a spectral mirror wandered there.
Bayard Taylor
#43. When you're wrong, you're wrong. But when you're right, you're wrong anyhow.
Bayard Rustin
#44. The bravest are the most tender; the loving are the daring.
Bayard Taylor
#45. I have seen periods of progress followed by reaction. I have seen the hopes and aspirations of Negroes rise during World War II, only to be smashed during the Eisenhower years. I am seeing the victories of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations destroyed by Richard Nixon.
Bayard Rustin
#46. Opportunity is rare, and a wise man will never let it go by him.
Bayard Taylor
#47. But still I dream that somewhere there must be
The spirit of a child that waits for me.
Bayard Taylor
#48. The first duty of a newspaper is to be accurate. If it be accurate, it follows that it is fair.
Herbert Bayard Swope
#49. I know I am
that simplest bliss
The millions of my brothers miss.
I know the fortune to be born,
Even to the meanest wretch they scorn.
Bayard Taylor
#50. Alone each heart must cover up its dead; Alone, through bitter toil, achieve its rest.
Bayard Taylor
#51. We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.
Bayard Rustin
#52. If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.
J.K. Rowling
#53. If I do not fight bigotry wherever it is, bigotry is thereby strengthened. And to the degree that it is strengthened, it will, thereby, have the power to turn on me.
Bayard Rustin
#54. And the wind that saddens, the sea that gladdens, Are singing the selfsame strain.
Bayard Taylor
#55. The nearest approach I have ever seen to the symmetry of ancient sculpture was among the Arab tribes of Ethiopia. Our Saxon race can supply the athlete, but not the Apollo.
Bayard Taylor
#56. He teaches best,
Who feels the hearts of all men in his breast,
And knows their strength or weakness through his own.
Bayard Taylor
#57. With rushing winds and gloomy skies The dark and stubborn Winter dies: Far-off, unseen, Spring faintly cries, Bidding her earliest child arise; March!
Bayard Taylor
#58. Twenty-five, 30 years ago, the barometer of human rights in the United States were black people. That is no longer true. The barometer for judging the character of people in regard to human rights is now those who consider themselves gay, homosexual, lesbian.
Bayard Rustin
#59. The principal factors which influenced my life are 1) nonviolent tactics; 2) constitutional means; 3) democratic procedures; 4) respect for human personality; 5) a belief that all people are one.
Bayard Rustin
#60. But who will watch my lilies, When their blossoms open white? By day the sun shall be sentry, And the moon and the stars by night!
Bayard Taylor
#61. Although Damascus is considered the oldest city in the world, the date of its foundation going beyond tradition, there are very few relics of antiquity in or near it.
Bayard Taylor
#62. To be afraid is to behave as if the truth were not true.
Bayard Rustin
#63. Could one live on the sense of beauty alone, exempt from the necessity of 'creature comforts,' a sea-voyage would be delightful.
Bayard Taylor
#64. Gays are beginning to realize what blacks learned long ago: Unless you are out here fighting for yourself then nobody else will help you. I think the gay community has a moral obligation to continue the fight.
Bayard Rustin
#65. Don't forget that the only two things people read in a story are the first and last sentences. Give them blood in the eye on the first one.
Herbert Bayard Swope
#66. War is wrong. Conscription for war is inconsistent with freedom of conscience, which is not merely the right to believe but to act on the degree of truth that one receives, to follow a vocation which is God-inspired and God-directed.
Bayard Rustin
#67. Reading is first and foremost non-reading. Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of *not* picking up and *not* opening all the other books in the universe.
Pierre Bayard
#68. My activism did not spring from being black ... The racial injustice that was present in this country during my youth was a challenge to my belief in the oneness of the human family.
Bayard Rustin
#69. The view of the Rocky Mountains from the Divide near Kiowa Creek is considered one of the finest in Colorado.
Bayard Taylor
#70. The Germans form one of the most important branches of the Indo-Germanic or Aryan race - a division of the human family which also includes the Hindoos, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, and the Slavonic tribes.
Bayard Taylor
#71. I could never see a book written in a foreign language without the most ardent desire to read it.
Bayard Taylor
#72. if you want to be able to talk about a place, the best thing to do is stay at home.
Pierre Bayard
#73. If we desire a society in which men are brothers, then we must act towards one another with brotherhood. If we can build such a society, then we would have achieved the ultimate goal of human freedom.
Bayard Rustin
#74. The only weapon we have is our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don't turn
Bayard Rustin
#76. Higher than the perfect song For which love longeth, Is the tender fear of wrong, That never wrongeth.
Bayard Taylor
#77. By wisdom wealth is won; but riches purchased wisdom yet for none.
Bayard Taylor
#78. (in which, along with Montaigne, we raise the question of whether a book you have read and completely forgotten, and which you have even forgotten you have read, is still a book you have read)
Pierre Bayard
#80. Death is not rare, alas! nor burials few,
And soon the grassy coverlet of God
Spreads equal green above their ashes pale.
Bayard Taylor
#81. I believe in social dislocation and creative trouble.
Bayard Rustin
#82. The barometer for judging the character of people, in regard human rights, is now those who consider themselves gay, homosexual, lesbian. The judgment as to whether you can trust the future, the social advancement - depending on people - will be judged on where they come out on that question.
Bayard Rustin
#83. The Poet's leaves are gathered one by one,
In the slow process of the doubtful years.
Bayard Taylor
#84. Like language, books serve to express us, but also to complete us, furnishing, through a variety of excerpted and reworked fragments, the missing elements of our personality.
Pierre Bayard
#85. It is an agreeable and yet a painful sense of novelty to stand for the first time in the midst of a people whose language and manners are different from one's own.
Bayard Taylor
#86. The original home of the Aryan race appears to have been somewhere among the mountains and lofty table-lands of Central Asia. The word 'Arya,' meaning the high or the excellent, indicates their superiority over the neighboring races long before the beginning of history.
Bayard Taylor
#87. The Journey of Reconciliation was organized not only to devise techniques for eliminating Jim Crow in travel, but also as a training ground for similar peaceful projects against discrimination in such major areas as employment and in the armed services.
Bayard Rustin
#88. Above Coblentz almost every mountain has a ruin and a legend. One feels everywhere the spirit of the past, and its stirring recollections come back upon the mind with irresistible force.
Bayard Taylor
#89. It occurred to me that nothing is more interesting than opinion when opinion is interesting, so I devised a method of cleaning off the page opposite the editorial, which became the most important in America and thereon I decided to print opinions, ignoring facts.
Herbert Bayard Swope
#90. To Truth's house there is a single door, which is experience.
Bayard Taylor
#91. The proof that one truly believes is in action.
Bayard Rustin
#92. When an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.
Bayard Rustin
#93. Since Israel is a democratic state surrounded by essentially undemocratic states which have sworn her destruction, those interested in democracy everywhere must support Israel's existence.
Bayard Rustin
#94. There is a degree of confidence exhibited towards strangers in Sweden, especially in hotels, at post-stations, and on board the inland steamers, which tells well for the general honesty of the people.
Bayard Taylor
#95. I'm a solitary sort, I get chaffed by too many elbows.
Louis Bayard
#96. I know of nothing more moving, indeed semi-tragic, than the yearning helplessness in the face of a dog, who understands what is said to him, and can not answer!
Bayard Taylor
#97. My duty is that of a chronicler; and if I perform that conscientiously, the lessons which my observations suggest will need no pointing out.
Bayard Taylor
#99. Non-reading is not just the absence of reading. It is a genuine activity, one that consists of adopting a stance in relation to the immense tide of books that protects you from drowning. On that basis, it deserves to be defended and even taught.
Pierre Bayard
#100. An enthusiastic desire of visiting the Old World haunted me from early childhood. I cherished a presentiment, amounting almost to belief, that I should one day behold the scenes, among which my fancy had so long wandered.
Bayard Taylor
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