Helen Keller: 10 quotes on her birthday

Helen Keller was born on July 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Though deaf and blind, she overcame these impairments with the help of Anne Sullivan, who taught her to communicate through tactile sign language. This childhood breakthrough was only the beginning for Keller, who went on to write 12 books and several articles on a wide variety of subjects. She was the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree, and was admired by the likes of Mark Twain, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Charlie Chaplin. Keller was also politically active, campaigning for women's suffrage, labor rights, and other causes. Here are 10 quotes from this extraordinary historical figure.

BusinessWire
From the CriticalPast collection: auto magnate Henry Ford speaking to Helen Keller. Ms. Keller, deaf and blind, uses touch to interpret his words.

1. Aiming high

"One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar." 

– From an address to the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf in Philadelphia (July 8, 1896)

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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