Find course materials and supplemental information for Professor McBride's English and Humanities Classes.

Students should check the Brightspace course site for the most up-to-date handouts for class.

Favorite Quotes and Ideas

• "To the man who is afraid everything rustles." Sophocles, Fragment 58, Acrisius, 5th Century, B.C.

• "The contest, for ages, has been to rescue Liberty from the grasp of executive power." Daniel Webster, Speech in U.S. Senate, May 27, 1834

• "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Col. Charles Yancey, January 6, 1816

• "Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself." Abraham Lincoln, Notes, July 1, 1854

• "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905

• "The first casualty when war comes is truth." Hiram Warren Johnson, Speech, US Senate, 1917

• "Each day provides its own gifts." Martial, Epigrams, 86 A.D.

• "A sword never kills anybody; it's a tool in the killer's hand." Seneca (the Younger), Letters to Lucilius, circa 63-65 A.D.

• "The face of tyranny is always mild at first." Racine, Britannicus, 1669

• "We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately." Benjamin Franklin, Remark on signing the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.

• "Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." William Pitt the Younger, Speech, House of Commons. November 18, 1783.

• "In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes." Benjamin Franklin, Letter to M Leroy, 1789

• "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

• "We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge." John Naisbitt

• "I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life.  As I see it today, the ability to read awoke in me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive." Malcolm X

• "My mother and my father were illiterate immigrants from Russia. When I was a child they were constantly amazed that I could go to a building and take a book on any subject. They couldn't believe this access to knowledge we have here in America. They couldn't believe that it was free." Kirk Douglas

• "When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes." Erasmus

• "We read to know we are not alone." C. S. Lewis

• "If you get up one more time than you fall, you will make it through." Chinese Proverb

• "We have not inherited the earth from our ancestors, we have only borrowed it from our children." Ancient Proverb

• "We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading." B. F. Skinner

• "Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted." Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1838

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