American Quotations by William J. Federer 2024

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (August 6, 1809-October 6, 1892) 1st Baron Tennyson, was accorded the royal honor of being named an English poet-laureate. He authored the poem Charge of the Light Brigade, memorializing the courage of the British Cavalry as they charged to their death against the Russian guns at the Battle of Balaklava, October 25, 1854. He wrote Idylls of the King, 1859-85, which described the legends of King Arthur's Court, the Knights of the Round Table, Queen Guinevere, Sir Lancelot, Sir Galahad and the search for the Holy Grail. Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote: <Bible reading is an education in...

Charles Paschal Telesphor Chiniquy (July 30, 1809-January 16, 1899) was ordained a priest in Canada, 1833. He became known as the "Apostle of Temperance of Canada." In 1851, he brought 7,500 French Canadians into Illinois to found the French Colony of St. Anne. The church he built, at 334 South St. Louis Avenue, in St. Anne, Illinois, still stands. Late in life he was befriended by Abraham Lincoln. In 1859, he returned to Canada and began traveling and ministering in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. A prolific writer, he relayed his experience after studying the Scriptures: <It seemed that God was...

Ormsby Macknight Mitchel (July 28, 1809-October 30, 1862) was an American astronomer and a Major-General in the Civil War. He was famous for having led the raid which captured Huntsville, Alabama, in April of 1862. As director of the Dudley Observatory in Albany, New York, Ormsby Mitchell wrote: Planetary and Stellar Worlds, 1848; Popular Astronomy, 1860; and a book titled, The Astronomy of the Bible, in which he stated: <Let us turn to the language of the Bible; it furnishes the only vehicle to express the thoughts which overwhelm us, and we break out involuntarily in the language of God's...

Robert Charles Winthrop (May 12, 1809-November 16, 1894) was a U.S. Representative, author and orator. He served as the Speaker of the House of Representatives, 1847-49. He was a descendant of Governor John Winthrop. On May 28, 1849, Robert Charles Winthrop spoke at the Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Bible Society in Boston, stating: <The voice of experience and the voice of our own reason speak but one language....Both united in teaching us, that men may as well build their houses upon the sand and expect to see them stand, when the rains fall, and the winds blow, and the floods...

Charles Robert Darwin (February 12, 1809-April 19, 1882) was a British naturalist. He propounded the evolutionary theory of origins. In his work, Origin of Species, 1859, Charles Darwin wrote: <To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.> 1809CD001 <May we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of...