Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885)


Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885)

Ulysses S. Grant (born Hiram Ulysses Grant; April 27, 1822 – July 23, 1885) was the 18th President of the United States (1869–1877) following his dominant role in the second half of the Civil War. Under Grant, the Union Army defeated the Confederate military and effectively ended the war with the surrender of Robert E. Lee's army at Appomattox. As president he led the Radical Republicans in their effort to eliminate all vestiges of Confederate nationalism and slavery; he effectively destroyed the Ku Klux Klan in 1871. His reputation was marred by his repeated defense of corrupt appointees, and by the deep economic depression (called the "Panic of 1873") that dominated his second term. Although his Republican Party split in 1872 with reformers denouncing him, Grant was easily reelected. By 1874 the opposition was gaining strength and as he left the White House in March 1877, conservative white Southerners, as federal troops were withdrawn, regained control of every state in the South and Reconstruction ended on a note of failure as the civil rights of blacks were not secure.

A career soldier, he graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and served in the Mexican–American War. When the Civil War began in 1861, Grant trained Union volunteer regiments in Illinois. In 1862, as a general he fought a series of battles and was promoted to major general after forcing the surrender of a large Confederate army and gaining control of Kentucky and most of Tennessee. He then led Union forces to victory after initial setbacks in the Battle of Shiloh, earning a reputation as an aggressive commander. In July 1863, after a long, complex campaign, Grant defeated five uncoordinated Confederate armies (capturing one of them) and seized Vicksburg. This famous victory gave the Union full control of the Mississippi River, split off the western Confederacy, and opened the way for more Union triumphs. After another win at the Battle of Chattanooga in late 1863, President Abraham Lincoln made him lieutenant general and commander of all of the Union Armies. As commanding general of the army, Grant confronted Robert E. Lee in a series of very bloody battles in 1864 known as the Overland Campaign that ended bottling up Lee at Petersburg, outside the Confederate capital of Richmond. During the siege, Grant coordinated a series of devastating campaigns launched by William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip Sheridan, and George Thomas. Finally breaking through Lee's trenches, the Union Army captured Richmond in April 1865. Lee surrendered his depleted forces to Grant at Appomattox as the Confederacy collapsed. Although Lee's allies denounced Grant in the 1870s as a ruthless butcher who won by brute force, most historians have hailed his military genius.

Grant's two consecutive terms as President stabalized the nation after the American Civil War and during the turbulent Reconstruction period that followed. As president, he enforced Reconstruction by enforcing civil rights laws and fighting Ku Klux Klan violence. Grant won passage of the Fifteenth Amendment; giving constitutional protection for African American voting rights. He used the army to build the Republican Party in the South, based on black voters, Northern newcomers ("Carpetbaggers") and native white supporters ("Scalawags.") As a result, African Americans were represented in the U.S. Congress for the first time in American history in 1870. Grant's reputation as president by 1875 was at an all time high for his previous veto of the Inflation Bill, the passage of the Resumption of Specie Act, and Secretary Bristow's successful raids that shut down the Whiskey Ring.

Grant's foreign policy, led by Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, implemented International Arbitration, settled the Alabama Claims with Britain and avoided war with Spain over the Virginius Affair. His attempted annexation of the Dominican Republic failed. Grant's response to the Panic of 1873 and the severe depression that followed was ineffective. More than any other president, Grant had to respond to Congressional investigations into financial corruption charges of all federal departments. In 1876, Grant's reputation was damaged by his White House deposition defending his personal secretary Orville Babcock, indicted in the Whiskey Ring graft trials, and his Secretary of War William W. Belknap's resignation, impeachment by the House, and trial in the Senate over receiving profit money from the Fort Sill tradership. After leaving office, Grant embarked on a two-year world tour that included many enthusiastic royal receptions. In 1880, he made an unsuccessful bid for a third presidential term. His memoirs were a critical and popular success. Historians until recently have given Grant's presidency the worst rankings; his reputation, however, has significantly improved because of greater appreciation for his enforcement of African American voting and citizenship rights during Reconstruction.


Quotes·Quotations by Ulysses S. Grant

War

¶ I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant

Samuel Ullman (1840-1924)


Samuel Ullman (1840-1924)

Samuel Ullman (April 13, 1840 – March 21, 1924) was an American businessman, poet, humanitarian. He is best known today for his poem Youth which was a favorite of General Douglas MacArthur. The poem was on the wall of his office in Tokyo when he became Supreme Allied Commander in Japan. In addition, he often quoted from the poem in his speeches, leading to it becoming better known in Japan than in the United States.


Quotes·Quotations by Samuel Ullman

Youth

¶ Youth is not a time of life - it is a state of Mind.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Ullman

Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

Jobs holding
an iPhone 4
at Worldwide
Developers
Conference 2010

Attribution:
Matthew Yohe

Wikimedia
Commons

/ CC-BY-SA-3.0

Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

Steven Paul Jobs (/ˈdʒɒbz/; February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman and inventor widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. Jobs was co-founder and previously served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, following the acquisition of Pixar by Disney.

In the late 1970s, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak engineered one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. Jobs directed its aesthetic design and marketing along with A.C. "Mike" Markkula, Jr. and others.

In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa (engineered by Ken Rothmuller and John Couch) and, one year later, creation of Apple employee Jef Raskin's Macintosh. After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher-education and business markets.

In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd, which was spun off as Pixar Animation Studios. He was credited in Toy Story (1995) as an executive producer. He remained CEO and majority shareholder at 50.1 percent until its acquisition by The Walt Disney Company in 2006, making Jobs Disney's largest individual shareholder at seven percent and a member of Disney's Board of Directors.

In 1996, NeXT was acquired by Apple. The deal brought Jobs back to the company he co-founded, and provided Apple with the NeXTSTEP codebase, from which the Mac OS X was developed." Jobs was named Apple advisor in 1996, interim CEO in 1997, and CEO from 2000 until his resignation. He oversaw the development of the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and iPad and the company's Apple Retail Stores.

In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer. Though it was initially treated, Jobs reported a hormone imbalance, underwent a liver transplant in 2009, and appeared progressively thinner as his health declined. In August 2011, during his third medical leave, Jobs resigned as CEO, but continued to work for Apple as Chairman of the Board until his death.

On October 5, 2011, he died in his Palo Alto home, aged 56. His death certificate listed respiratory arrest as the immediate cause of death, with "metastatic pancreas neuroendocrine tumor" as the underlying cause. His occupation was listed as "entrepreneur" in the "high tech" business.


Quotes·Quotation by Steve Jobs

Advice

¶ Stay hungry, Stay foolish.

Business·Employment

¶ It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. We believe that it’s technology married with the humanities, that yields us that result that makes our heart sing. [Mar 2011]

¶ My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each other’s negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are never done by one person, they are done by a team of people. [2003]

¶ My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.

¶ Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. [1977]

¶ Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

¶ The reason Apple resonates with people is that there’s a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves.

¶ What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.

Chance

¶ Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?


Creativity

¶ I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me.

Innovation

¶ Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.

Life

¶ Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. [2005]

Marriage(Positive)

¶ Years passed, kids came, good times, hard times, but never bad times. Our love and respect has endured and grown. We’ve been through so much together and here we are right back where we started 20 years ago-older, wiser- with wrinkles on our faces and hearts. We now know many of life’s joys, sufferings, secrets and wonders and we’re still here together. My feet have never returned to the ground. [2011]

Success

¶ The journey is the reward.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Paul_Jobs


Images

Wikimedia Commons

Image: Steve Jobs | Date: 8 June 2010 | Author: Matthew Yohe | Attribution: Matthew Yohe | Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license | https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Steve_Jobs_Headshot_2010-CROP.jpg


Pixabay




Unsplash


Lee Mi-yeon (1971- )

Happiness
Does Not
Come In Grades
(1989)

Lee Mi-yeon (1971- )

Lee Mi-yeon (born September 23, 1971) is a South Korean actress.


Lee Mi-yeon as Lee Eun-joo from Happiness Does Not Come In Grades (1989)

¶ I'm not an robot nor object without any feeling such as stone. Happiness does not come in grades.

¶ God, why did you make such a scary place?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Mi-yeon

Peter Sellers (1925-1980)


Peter Sellers (1925-1980)

Richard Henry Sellers, CBE (8 September 1925 – 24 July 1980), known as Peter Sellers, was a British comedian, singer and actor who was perhaps best known as Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther series of films. He is also notable for his appearances in the BBC Radio comedy series The Goon Show and for his many comic songs which he performed frequently during his 50-year career.

Born in Portsmouth, Sellers made his stage debut at the Kings Theatre, Southsea, during his infant years and later appeared at the Windmill Theatre. Sellers began accompanying his parents in a variety act which toured the provincial theatres. His theatrical abilities were dismissed by his father but encouraged by his mother and he later built on his abilities as an improvisational performer whilst attending college in his teenage years. Sellers became interested in stand-up comedy, but was initially unsuccessful and so planned on a performing career on radio. In 1948 his made his radio debut in Much Binding in the Marsh eventually becoming a regular radio performer, appearing in Starlight Hour, The Gang Show, Henry Hall's Guest Night and It's Fine To Be Young.

During the early 1950s, Sellers, along with Michael Bentine, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe, took part in a series of recordings known as the Goon Show; a collaboration which ended in 1960. His ability to speak in different accents along with his talent to portray a wide range of characters to comic effect, contributed to his success as a radio personality and screen actor and earned him national and international nominations and awards.

In the 1950s, Sellers began to appear in films and scored some considerable success with his roles. His film output was frequent and he displayed a versatile ability to perform in different film genres. Perhaps the most famous of these were The Pink Panther series of films, Dr. Strangelove, Lolita and Being There. Actress Bette Davis once remarked of him, "He isn't an actor—he's a chameleon." Despite his professional success, Sellers struggled with depression and his behaviour was famously erratic. Sellers' private life was characterised by turmoil and crises, and included emotional problems and substance abuse. Sellers was married four times, and had three children from the first two marriages. He died as a result of heart disease in 1980.


Quotes·Quotations by Peter Sellers

Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley from Dr. Strangelove (1964)

Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sellers