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Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for, I have grown not only gray, but almost blind in the service of my country.
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Statement as he put on his glasses before delivering his response to the first Newburgh Address (15 March 1783).

 

George Washington

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Normally, in February, in Boston and in most of the country, the weather is gray, rainy, gray, sleet, snow, gray; every day it just gets grayer and grayer and grayer! You wake up one day and you go 'I'm not coming into work today!' Your boss goes, 'Why not? You sick?' 'No! Its too gray!' Then you wake up and its the grayest day you've ever seen! And the next day it's even grayer! And that's usually Valentine's Day, and that's the day you look at your wrists and go, 'Hey, maybe I should slit 'em to see color!

 

Lewis Black

 

Summer fog. It leached all color and substance from the world, leaving only grays. Lead gray tombstone gray cobweb gray ash gray snot gray dust gray corpse gray. It was unheard-of that there be fog at this time of the year, late August. So it had to be another portent — as dire a one as the death of the One-Handed Warrior. There were many who said that the fog had its origin in the supercooled ashes of the hero: each molecule of his scattered body accreting water vapor, each tiny relic drawing to itself the air's own tears to fashion this wide-spreading shroud over the Many-Colored Land.

 

Julian May

 

Yesterday I saw Mr. Thackeray. He dined here with some other gentlemen. He is a very tall man — above six feet high, with a peculiar face — not handsome, very ugly indeed, generally somewhat stern and satirical in expression, but capable also of a kind look. He was not told who I was, he was not introduced to me, but I soon saw him looking at me through his spectacles; and when we all rose to go down to dinner he just stepped quietly up and said “Shake hands”; so I shook hands. He spoke very few words to me, but when he went away he shook hands again in a very kind way. It is better, I should think, to have him for a friend than an enemy, for he is a most formidable-looking personage. I listened to him as he conversed with the other gentlemen. All he says is most simple, but often cynical, harsh, and contradictory.

 

Charlotte Bronte

 

I wish to be useful, and every kind of service necessary to the public good becomes honorable by being necessary. If the exigencies of my country demand a peculiar service, its claim to perform that service are imperious.

 

Nathan Hale

 

I am just one of yourselves, who has been called to special work for the country at this time. I never sought the office. I never planned out or schemed my life. I have but one idea, which was an idea that I inherited, and it was the idea of service — service to the people of this country. My father lived in the belief all his life ... It is a tradition; it is in our bones; and we have to do it. That service seemed to lead one by way of business and the county council into Parliament, and it has led one through various strange paths to where one is; but the ideal remains the same, because all my life I believed from my heart the words of Browning, "All service ranks the same with God". It makes very little difference whether a man is driving a tramcar or sweeping streets or being Prime Minister, if he only brings to that service everything that is in him and performs it for the sake of mankind.

 

Stanley Baldwin