Brininstool + Lynch

"All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence."

MLK, Jr.

In 1776 Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence on a portable lap desk of his own design. Featuring a hinged writing board and a locking drawer for papers, pens and inkwell, the desk was Jefferson's companion as a revolutionary patriot, American diplomat and President of the United States.

Jefferson was an architect, but he could also write:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

"Our debt to the heroic men and valient women in the service of our country can never be repaid. They have earned our undying gratitude. America will never forget their sacrifices."

Harry S. Truman

"There is a great need, and growing support, for the introduction of new values in our society--where bigger is not necessarily better--where slower can be faster--and where less can be more."

Gaylord Nelson, United States Senator from Wisconsin and founder of Earth Day

from Under Ben Bulben

                 V

Irish poets learn your trade

Sing whatever is well made,

Scorn the sort now growing up

All out of shape from toe to top,

Their unremembering hearts and heads

Base-born products of base beds.

Sing the peasantry, and then

Hard-riding country gentleman,

The holiness of monks, and after

Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter;

Sing the lords and ladies gay

That were beaten into the clay

Through seven heroic centuries;

Cast your mind on other days

That in coming days may be

Still the indomitable Irishry.

- William Butler Yeats

“Our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. . . . Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.”

AL