George W. Bush will probably name at least three new Supreme Court justices during the next four years. With GOP gains in the Senate, he can push through extremist judges who will blight our laws for thirty years to come.

I’m 52 years old. I’m not likely to live to see the end of the darkness that fell on Tuesday.

Abraham Lincoln:

It is said that an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.”

How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride!—how consoling in the depths of affliction! “And this, too, shall pass away.”

And yet let us hope that it be not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath us and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.

God help us.