The Reconstruction Quotes

#1. Multiplied - the South went through the Reconstruction with only one permanent political change: there was no more slavery. The people became no less than what they were to begin with - in some cases they became horrifyingly more.

Harper Lee

#2. Iraq is a very wealthy country. Enormous oil reserves. They can finance, largely finance, the reconstruction of their own country. And I have no doubt that they will.

Richard Perle

#3. Let our first care today be the re-establishment of our physical strength, the reconstruction of our national organism, so that in future, where the respect due to us cannot be won by entreaty, it may be commanded, and where it cannot be commanded, it may be enforced.

Emma Lazarus

#4. While floor statements from today's [congressional] representatives are typically delivered to empty galleries and published into unread oblivion, legislative debates in the Reconstruction era were widely disseminated and closely observed.

Andrew Buttaro

#5. I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.

Adrienne Rich

#6. I don't think it would be crazy to have a model or an entity model on the Reconstruction Finance Corp. That goes back to 1932, although it was really implemented in '33 under Jesse Jones, and it invested in mostly banks initially and preferred stock and that sort of thing.

Howard Warren Buffett

#7. And the Marshall Plan, to us, meant a general who had turned into a secretary of state, and that the secretary of state saw the necessity of the reconstruction of these European countries that had suffered so heavily.

Giovanni Agnelli

#8. Its assimilation requires the reconstruction of prior theory and re-evaluation of prior fact, an intrinsically revolutionary process that is seldom completed a single man and never overnight

Thomas S. Kuhn

#9. Being in this business for as long as I've been in it, it's sort of like living in a town or a city before the war and then after the war and then during the reconstruction and then during the time that it sprawls out to the malls.

Carly Simon

#10. India has been contributing very much to the reconstruction of Afghanistan; we are strongly engaged there.

Joschka Fischer

#11. Anti-Semitism is the unifying element of the reconstruction of Germany.

Alfred Rosenberg

#12. The real story of the Ground Zero mosque is that the project only became feasible because of the appalling and astonishing fecklessness of the officials who were charged with the reconstruction of the site and the neighborhood all the way back in 2001.

John Podhoretz

#13. We must stop posing as victims of the West and behaving negatively towards the West. We must participate with the West on an equal footing in the reconstruction of the world.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

#14. We demand in the Reconstruction suffrage for all the citizens of the Republic. I would not talk of Negroes or women, but of citizens.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#15. The third point is that for some time the UN has been talking about helping Afghanistan in the reconstruction of the country but there has never been any real commitment by the international community to provide resources for that.

Lakhdar Brahimi

#16. Canada remains alienated from its allies, shut out of the reconstruction process to some degree, unable to influence events. There is no upside to the position Canada took.

Stephen Harper

#17. Another thing: a living culture is forever changing, without losing itself as a framework and context of change. The reconstruction of a culture is not the same as its restoration.

Jane Jacobs

#18. The important thing is that the worst is over, ... Now comes the reconstruction.

Vicente Fox

#19. I have come to Germany to learn at first hand the problems involved in the reconstruction of Germany and to discuss with our representatives the views of the United States Government as to some of the problems confronting us.

James F. Byrnes

#20. This document [the Reconstruction and Development Programme] was translated into a simpler manifesto called 'A Better Life for All', which in turn became the ANC's campaign slogan.

Nelson Mandela

#21. The technique of beaming a ray on to window glass and reading from the vibrations the conversation going on inside had been used against the American embassy in Moscow in the Cold War and required the reconstruction of the entire building.

Frederick Forsyth

#22. All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.

Margaret Atwood

#23. The strewn and tangled wreckage that litters our lives is the precious raw material from which great beginnings are forged.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#24. Is puppy love the reason so many Americans are blind to the incompetence and waste of Republicans - who at a minimum are supposed to be good money managers - running Iraq reconstruction?

Margaret Carlson

#25. Modern man's capacity for destruction is quixotic evidence of humanity's capacity for reconstruction. The powerful technological agents we have unleashed against the environment include many of the agents we require for its reconstruction.

George Will

#26. Postmodernity is the simultaneity of the destruction of earlier values and their reconstruction. It is renovation within ruination.

Jean Baudrillard

#27. I've never said that troops should be withdrawn. What I've said is, is that we've got to make sure that we secure and execute the rebuilding and reconstruction process effectively and properly, and I don't think we should have an artificial deadline when to do that.

Barack Obama

#28. Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled, and bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to manhood.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#29. Disneyworld ... is a historical reconstruction as sanitised as the Kremlin's, and a future vision as uncognisant of contemporary pointers as Peter Pan's. It is a magic carpet under which everything has been swept.

Alan Coren

#30. We are these people,
wistful, ironical, wilful,
who have no part in
new-world reconstruction,
in the confederacy of labour.

Hilda Doolittle

#31. She couldn't survey the wreck of the world with an air of casual unconcern.

Margaret Mitchell

#32. I am currently in Haiti to help the Haitian people in their reconstruction.

Jean-Claude Duvalier

#33. We need better coordination on the international side, just as they need better and more effective efforts on the Somali side. We have too many reconstruction and development assistance plans.

Jan Egeland

#34. The natural does not have to be a specific representation. I am now working on a thing which is a reconstruction of a starry sky, yet I make it, nevertheless, without a given in nature.

Piet Mondrian

#35. A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.

Edith Hamilton

#36. Today, Mihir stopped a bomb from killing the Tahitian President but not from shattering his own collar bone. So, he is now in the operating chamber, undergoing his 250th reconstruction. The nurses have tied a balloon to his bed that says, "Don't make it to 251!

Mads Sukalikar

#37. At the end of my patient reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books.

Umberto Eco

#38. Further, Japan is the second largest donor in Iraq after the United States, with over $5 billion dollars for humanitarian, infrastructure and reconstruction projects.

Michael K. Simpson

#39. Most of our oldest memories are the product of repeated rehearsal and reconstruction.

Ulric Neisser

#40. A worker in the rural reconstruction must have: The body of an athlete The attitude of a teacher The mind of a scientist The heart of a missionary The spirit of a crusader.

Y. C. James Yen

#41. It generally troubles them [the reformers] not a whit that their remedy implies a complete reconstruction of society, or even a reconstitution of human nature.

William Graham Sumner

#42. The consolidation of the states into one vast empire, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of ruin which has overwhelmed all that preceded it.

Robert E.Lee

#43. As a former minority leader who became the first Republican Speaker of the House in Florida since Reconstruction, I know that leadership is not an easy task.

Dan Webster

#44. After two decades of reconstruction work, I want to work on projects that lay at the intersection of cultural diplomacy and national identity - ones that empower local communities to define progress, not have it sanctioned by others.

Cameron Sinclair

#45. My youth passed at the time of the country's reconstruction from the ruins and ashes of the war in which my nation never bowed to the enemy paying the highest price in the struggle.

Lech Walesa

#46. No religion which is narrow and which cannot satisfy the test of reason, will survive the coming reconstruction of society in which the values will have changed and character, not possession of wealth, title or birth, will be the test of merit.

Mahatma Gandhi

#47. Longing hearts could only stand so much longing.

Margaret Mitchell

#48. We won the war, but we are losing the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. It is past time for a new approach, one that relies on accountability, responsibility, and phasing down the scope of our military commitment.

Earl Blumenauer

#49. While Financier George Soros was investing money in Kosovo's reconstruction, the George Soros Foundation for an Open Society had opened a branch office in Pristina establishing the Kosovo Foundation for an Open Society (KFOS) as part of the Soros' network of "non-profit foundations" in the Balkans.

Michel Chossudovsky

#50. As goes the family, so goes the faith; as goes the faith, so goes the culture.

Kenneth L. Gentry Jr.

#51. Because our fight has been for such a long time we are isolated from the world, even after reconstruction we don't have much attention from people outside.

Hanoi Hannah

#52. I'm talking to you and it's basically a direct communication, whereas if I'm writing a letter to you and you read the letter, there are like 12 extra deconstruction and reconstruction steps in the communication.

Kevin J. Anderson

#53. But nobody predicted anything of this magnitude in terms of resistance. And in part, the magnitude of the resistance was spurred by our failures in reconstruction.

Wayne White

#54. It was not, then, race and culture calling out of the South in 1876; it was property and privilege, shrieking to its own kind, and privilege and property heard and recognized the voice of its own.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#55. Education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.

John Dewey

#56. The criminalization of Black life was something specific to the United States in the post-Reconstruction period and there's something like it happening today with mass incarceration, directed largely against black males.

Noam Chomsky

#57. Our neighbor Canada has 2,200 troops serving in Afghanistan. Canada has also assumed responsibility for the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kandahar, which was originally established by our own military.

Tom Lantos

#58. For years, I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions in the South, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire system, a revolution of values.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#59. Indeed, I was unable to find any evidence whatsoever of the occurrence of a drastic evolutionary acceleration and genetic reconstruction in widespread, populous species.

Ernst Mayr

#60. War was easy. The hard part was cleaning up afterward.

Evan Meekins

#61. Iraq has tremendous resources that belong to the Iraqi people. And so there are a variety of means that Iraq has to be able to shoulder much of the burden for ther own reconstruction.

Ari Fleischer

#62. There's a lot of money to pay for this ... the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years ... We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.

Paul Wolfowitz

#63. We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.

Umberto Eco

#64. The liberal party said that marriage is an institution quite out of date, and that it needs reconstruction; and family life certainly afforded Stepan Arkadyevitch little gratification, and forced him into lying and hypocrisy, which was so repulsive to his nature.

Leo Tolstoy

#65. The purpose of the latest series of intellectual meetings, which were held in various parlors in Concord, was to talk about Reconstruction with objectivity, sensibility, and a lack of prejudice. As everyone had expected, the meetings were far from objective, seldom sensible, and never unprejudiced.

Lisa Kleypas

#66. To put it boldly, it is the attempt at a posterior reconstruction of existence by the process of conceptualization.

Albert Einstein

#67. Since historical reconstruction is a rational process, only justified and indeed possible if it involves the human reason, what we call history is the mess we call life reduced to some order. pattern and possibly purpose.

Geoffrey Elton

#68. Adolescence is a time of active deconstruction, construction, reconstruction
a period in which past, present, and future are rewoven and strung together on the threads of fantasies and wishes that do not necessarily follow the laws of linear chronology.

Louise J. Kaplan

#69. The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.

Frederik Pohl

#70. in simple terms, what you perceive as real, is actually a neurological reconstruction or simulation of the actual real thing. It's not as simple as saying, we see as it is. Actually we do not ever see as it is.

Abhijit Naskar

#71. What we have in the Bush team is a faith-based administration. It launched a faith-based war in Iraq, on the basis of faith-based intelligence, with a faith-based plan for Iraqi reconstruction, supported by faith-based tax cuts to generate faith-based revenues.

Thomas Friedman

#72. In a few decades of reconstruction, even the mathematical natural sciences, the ancient archetypes of theoretical perfection, have changed habit completely!

Edmund Husserl

#73. I know that my Republican colleagues are as ashamed as I am that the United States is forced to borrow over $1 trillion from foreign nations to pay for our national priorities like reconstruction of the gulf coast and the war in Iraq.

Dennis Cardoza

#74. A sincere and steadfast co-operation in promoting such a reconstruction of our political system as would provide for the permanent liberty and happiness of the United States.

James Madison

#75. There is a firm, clear commitment to provide resources and ideas to enable us to organize the Afghans towards starting the process of rehabilitation and reconstruction.

Lakhdar Brahimi

#76. A person in search of his ancestors naturally likes to believe the best of them, and the best in terms of contemporary standards. Where genealogical facts are few, and these located in the remote past, reconstruction of family history is often more imaginative than correct.

James G. Leyburn

#77. Institutions - government, churches, industries, and the like - have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.

Charles Horton Cooley

#78. Experiences in order to be educative must lead out into an expanding world of subject matter, a subject matter of facts or information and of ideas. This condition is satisfied only as the educator views teaching and learning as a continuous process of reconstruction of experience.

John Dewey

#79. As long as the problem of world reconstruction remains the center of interest for all nations, blocs having similar attitudes will form and operate even within the League itself.

Hjalmar Branting

#80. This is all a bit of a puzzle, ... It will depend obviously on how quickly these areas can be repopulated, and also you've got the positive of reconstruction spending and the fact that that will create jobs.

Paul Ashworth

#81. Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.

Umberto Eco

#82. If observed facts of undoubted accuracy will not fit any of the alternatives it leaves open, the system itself is in need of reconstruction.

Talcott Parsons

#83. Oh see, first off you gotta realize - everything for me is a reconstruction or deconstruction. I would actually say deconstruction. Mission: Impossible would be the exception. That would be a reconstruction- deconstruction.

Danny Elfman

#84. Rwanda, which is one of the younger independent states in Africa, must be regarded as a model of how great human trauma can be transformed to commence true reconstruction of people. Human trauma can lead to stunted growth and mass withdrawal.

Wole Soyinka

#85. Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery's full grip on U.S. Society - its intimate connections to present day wealth and power, the depth of its injury to black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end - can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life.

Douglas A. Blackmon

#86. Since history is not an objective reality, but only an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events, the pattern that appears useful and agreeable to one generation is never entirely so to the next.

Carl Lotus Becker

#87. The Arabic states have to be integrated into the Iraqi reconstruction. We need the help of the Arabic community, which understands its culture. Americans arrive, invade, occupy.

Neil Young