Who Is Your Favorite Fictional Father?

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In continuing with my series on favorite fictional characters, I was thinking about one in particular, so I decided on this question about your favorite fictional father. This man is, in many ways, the image of honor, decency, and courage. He is Atticus Finch from Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird.  The novel has won the Pulitzer Prize and adapted into both a magnificent movie and a currently running drama on Broadway. In the above photograph, Atticus Finch is portrayed by the excellent actor Gregory Peck.

Here are a few quotations from Atticus Finch:

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”

“When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness’ sake. But don’t make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles ‘em.”

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

So, I ask all of you, who is your favorite fictional father?

 

Happy Birthday To The United States Marine Corps!

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Happy Birthday to the United States Marine Corps, who are on this day 244 years old. This branch of the Armed Forces of the United States has a long and distinguished history.  They will always have a special place in my heart, because my father was a Marine in World War II.

The Marine Corps is a family, and I saw this clearly one day, when my father was dying of cancer. His body had become a tiny version of the man he had been. He had taken to wearing his Marine Corps cap, and two young men in their uniforms, clearly just out of boot camp, saw him. We had been out for a small meal in my home town of Easton, PA,  and they approached him and began a conversation with him about his experiences. Then one young man asked me with complete courtesy if it was okay if they borrowed him for a few hours, simply to talk with an older Marine. My father was delighted, and I knew he was in good hands. I came back later that afternoon to pick him up, and he was still there talking with the two youngsters.

When he stood to go, they saluted him. My heart was full, and I saw the great joy these two young men had given to a mortally ill, elderly man they had never known before. When he was leaving, they exchanged, “Semper Fi.”

Happy Birthday to the United States Marine Corps.

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Quotations on Integrity

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“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

                                                                       Lillian Hellman

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“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”

                                                                       Marcus Aurelius

 

(By Artur Pawłowski – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53409432)

“In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”

                                                                       Czeslaw Milosz

Quotations on Perseverance

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“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.”

                                                                Maya Angelou

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“Courage is not having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don’t have the strength.”

                                                               Theodore Roosevelt

 

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“Never, never, never give in!”

                                                                Winston Churchill

Quotations on Character

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“The final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.”

                                                                  Anne Frank

 

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“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

                                                                 Abraham Lincoln

 

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“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.”

                                                                Mark Twain

Quotations on Leadership

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“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.”

                                                                    John F. Kennedy

 

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“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”

                                                                   Theodore Roosevelt

 

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“All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope”

                                                                   Winston S. Churchill

Quotations by Rod Serling

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“All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes -all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard, into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance. Then we become the grave diggers.”

 

“It has forever been thus: So long as men write what they think, then all of the other freedoms – all of them – may remain intact. And it is then that writing becomes a weapon of truth, an article of faith, an act of courage.”

 

“The writer’s role is to menace the public’s conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time.”