Ground States

Famous quotes containing the words ground and/or states:

    “O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
    How can you be alive you growths of spring?
    How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
    Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
    Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?”
    —Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

    “Perhaps anxious politicians may prove that only seventeen white men and five negroes were concerned in the late enterprise; but their very anxiety to prove this might suggest to themselves that all is not told. Why do they still dodge the truth? They are so anxious because of a dim consciousness of the fact, which they do not distinctly face, that at least a million of the free inhabitants of the United States would have rejoiced if it had succeeded. They at most only criticise the tactics.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)