Red Cross Societies

Famous quotes containing the words red, cross and/or societies:

    What journeyings on foot and on horseback through the wilderness, to preach the gospel to these minks and muskrats! who first, no doubt, listened with their red ears out of a natural hospitality and courtesy, and afterward from curiosity or even interest, till at length there “were praying Indians,” and, as the General Court wrote to Cromwell, the “work is brought to this perfection that some of the Indians themselves can pray and prophesy in a comfortable manner.”
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Expecting me to grovel,
    she carefully covers both feet
    with the hem of her skirt.
    She pretends to hide
    a coming smile
    and won’t look straight at me.
    When I talk to her,
    she chats with her friend
    in cross tones.
    Even this slim girl’s rising anger
    delights me,
    let alone her deep love.
    Amaru (c. seventh century A.D.)

    It is fatally easy for Western folk, who have discarded chastity as a value for themselves, to suppose that it can have no value for anyone else. At the same time as Californians try to re-invent “celibacy,” by which they seem to mean perverse restraint, the rest of us call societies which place a high value on chastity “backward.”
    Germaine Greer (b. 1939)