Using flickr's slant on the English language, this is an "interestingness" after I had explored the "gorgeousity" by choosing "a point in time." Sigh. I can only ask an uncaring universe what these extraordinary words and phrases are supposed to mean? As I wrote in my first blog, "who will ever know?"
The Library of Congress photographs on flickr are excellent, as are the hundreds and thousands of other photographs. I would however at this stage only subscribe to flickr for one reason, and that is to archive all the family photographs, so that family and friends would have access to them. I'll see how these exercises progress and how much I learn from them before I commit myself to any of these "interestingnesses!"
I chose The Library of Congress because when I visited it in 1995, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the architecture and the ideals contained within in the halls of the three buildings that make up the Library - the Thomas Jefferson Building, the John Adams Building, and the James Madison Building. The inscriptions and quotations on the walls and ceilings of the buildings express the Library's ambitious mission of collecting and sharing the wisdom of all civilizations.
The Library has been shaped primarily by the philosophy and ideas of its principal founder, Thomas Jefferson, who believed that a democratic legislature needed information and ideas on ALL subjects to do its work.
My two favourite quotations from the Library are both by Thomas Jefferson ...
"Educate and inform the mass of the people, enable them to see that it is in their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them. Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and opression of the body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day."
"The people of every country are the only safe guardians of their own rights, and are the only instruments which can be used for their destruction. It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, that, too, of the people with a certain degree of instruction."
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