Oneida Quotes & Sayings

Why can't you write a great pop song when you are 85? Maybe you can. — Tim Finn

Marriage may be polygamic, monogamic, polyandric, complex according to the Oneida pattern, or other, and is true marriage (I do not say perfect marriage) so long as it promotes the happiness of the persons married, and the procreation, support, and education of children, and so long as it is founded on the joint free contract of the persons married, and remains under the sanction of the organic society of which those persons are members. — William Batchelder Greene

Mutual Criticism required a member of the group to stand up in front of everybody and listen to the enumeration of his or her faults. The bright side of being that night's subject for criticism was the rare treat at Oneida of being the center of attention. The downside was that everyone you knew and loved was allowed, even encouraged, to look into your eyes and ask, You know what your problem is? — Sarah Vowell

Back inside, I'm shown an antique cabinet in which members of the community, famous for their homegrown produce, dried herbs.
The Oneida Community was an upstate tourist attraction right from the start, second, Valesky says, to Niagara Falls. I'm taking the same guided tour offered a hundred and fifty years ago to prim rubbernecks who came here to peep at sex fiends. I wonder how many of my vacationing forebears went home disappointed? They thought they were taking the train to Gomorrah but instead they got to watch herbs dry. Valesky opens a drawer in the herb cabinet so I can get a whiff. He mentions that back in the day, when one tourist was shown the cabinet she rudely asked her community-member guide, "What's that odor?" To which the guide replied, "Perhaps it's the odor of crushed selfishness." Valesky grins. "How about that for a utopian answer?" To my not particularly utopian nose, crushed selfishness smells a lot like cilantro. — Sarah Vowell

We share management's vision that the recent regulatory changes, the large presence of Sprint Nextel in the 2.5 GHz band, and the near-term implementation of 4G systems make Oneida the right company in the right place at the right time. — Peter Schiff

Your drawbacks is not just the evil you did but the good you refuse to do — Ikechukwu Joseph

They [Oneida people] didn't want to fix problems one at a time. If someone invited them to a feminist convention, their answer would have been, 'In the new world women will have total equality, so lets spend our energy creating that whole new world.' And to their credit, the women at Oneida probably had far greater practical equality than what any of the women gathered at Seneca Falls experienced in their lifetimes. — Christine Jennings

It's human nature to set a point in our minds when we feel triumphant and to measure everything that comes after it by how far we fall or rise from that point. — Susan Orlean

Billy Graham is one of my great lifetime heroes. I think he epitomizes the essence of what a Christian leader should be. I have participated in some of his crusades a couple of times in Atlanta. I've seen the profound impact he's had on me personally, and on other people who were not Christians and accepted Christ as Savior. — Jimmy Carter

When you talk about Lacrosse, you talk about the lifeblood of the six nations. The game is ingrained into our culture and our system and our lives. (the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora) — Oren Lyons

At the same time, popular notions of marriage and the home were challenged on other fronts. Utopian communities experimented with radical new forms of marriage or, as in the Oneida Community, did away with it altogether. The Shakers took up celibacy, the Mormons polygamy; and Charles Knowlton issued an underground best-seller on birth control methods. William Alcott, Catherine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and scores of other experts countered — Ann Jones

It goes without saying that in order for me to buy a teapot at the Oneida, Ltd., outlet store at the Sherrill Shopping Plaza, the second coming of Jesus Christ had to have taken place in the year 70 A.D. To the Oneida Community, 70 A.D., the year the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, marks the beginning of the New Jerusalem. Which means we've all been living in heaven on earth for nearly two thousand years. Everyone knows there is no marriage in heaven (though one suspects there's no shortage of it in hell). So, the Oneidans said, we're here in heaven, already saved and perfect in the eyes of God, so let's move upstate and sleep around. (I'm paraphrasing.) — Sarah Vowell

I have this recurring nightmare in which I have to move back in with my old college roommates. I'll admit, that's what I was expecting to find at Oneida. The 19th century equivalent of sharing a house with the friend who brought home a crazy drifter to sleep on our couch - a man who claimed the local car dealership was built out of 'needles nourishing the earth'. The week before I went to Oneida, I had that claustrophobic dream again - that I had to move back in with the girl who claimed to enjoy baking and always promised tomorrow was going to be 'Muffin Day!' even though tomorrow was never Muffin Day. It was Muffin Day maybe once. — Sarah Vowell

The Oneida Perfectionists, along with some of the others, believed that feminism, and abolitionism, and other causes that they pursued in their own way without participating with other people outside of their communities, were all piecemeal reforms. That's what makes a utopian a utopian, this idea that they were going to create a whole new world from scratch. — Christine Jennings

Christian faith is ... basically about love and being loved and reconciliation. These things are so important, they're foundational and they can transform individuals, families. — Philip Yancey

You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality. — Sarah Vowell

A staunch abolitionist, Hamilton was one of the founding members of the New York Manumission Society. He was a trustee and namesake of Hamilton-Oneida Academy, an upstate New York school dedicated to educating Native-American boys. — Eric Schneiderman

If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by 'mere machines,' there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend. — Daniel Dennett

I have seen in Japan the voluntary submission of the whole people to the trimming of their minds and clipping of their freedom by their government, which through various educational agencies regulates their thoughts, manufactures their feelings, becomes suspiciously watchful when they show signs of inclining toward the spiritual, leading them through a narrow path not toward what is true but what is necessary for the complete welding of them into one uniform mass according to its own recipe. The people accept this all-pervading mental slavery with cheerfulness and pride because of their nervous desire to turn themselves into a machine of power, called the Nation, and emulate other machines in their collective worldliness. — Rabindranath Tagore

Maybe all the events of the last few months had occured for just one reason - to bring Thad and me together. Perhaps our being here on the Titanic wasn't pre-destination, but rather, destiny. — Suzanne Weyn

My work is very much like the restaurant critic's - a number of factors come together to make for a strong review. — Hank Stuever

Lusitania, after a Roman province on the Iberian Peninsula that occupied roughly the same ground as modern-day Portugal. "The inhabitants were warlike, and the Romans conquered them with great difficulty," said a memorandum in Cunard's files on the naming of the ship. "They lived generally upon plunder and were rude and unpolished in their manners." In popular usage, the name was foreshortened to "Lucy. — Erik Larson

Being a word wielder is far better than being a sword wielder. Greatest thing is you can still change the world. — Chandan Sharma

(The subject of Peter Gallagher's eyebrows, I realize, is a digression away from the Oneida Community, and yet, I do feel compelled, indeed almost conspiracy theoretically bound to mention that one of the reasons the Oneida Community broke up and turned itself into a corporate teapot factory is that a faction within the group, led by a lawyer named James William Towner, was miffed that the community's most esteemed elders were bogarting the teenage virgins and left in a huff for none other than Orange County, California, where Towner helped organize the Orange County government, became a judge, and picked the spot where the Santa Ana courthouse would be built, a courthouse where, it is reasonable to assume, Peter Gallagher's attorney on The O.C. might defend his clients.) — Sarah Vowell

Strategy is the art of making use of time and space. I am less concerned about the later than the former. Space we can recover, lost time never. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Trust me, my runners aren't going to run one event while looking past it to the second event. When they get on the line for the 10K, that's a do-or-die situation for them. — Alberto Salazar

Some people think God is going to guide those humans. The Oneida community and the Shakers both believed that they had received revelations about how to build the New Jerusalem that the Bible says is coming — Christine Jennings

I'll never turn down a red velvet cupcake. — Shay Mitchell