"Song of an Old General" (老将行)
Further Studies in a Dying Culture (1949), Chapter IV: Consciousness: A Study in Bourgeois Psychology
“May you live happy, you whose Woes are done.
Stern Fates, to Fates more cruel, us constrain.”
The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro (2nd ed. 1654), Virgil's Æneis
“We may no longer be able to count; but Fate will count.”
Light (1919), Ch. XVI - De Profundis Clamavi
Context: We may no longer be able to count; but Fate will count. Some day the men will be killed, and the women and children. And they also will disappear — they who stand erect upon the ignominious death of the soldiers, — they will disappear along with the huge and palpitating pedestal in which they were rooted. But they profit by the present, they believe it will last as long as they, and as they follow each other they say, "After us, the deluge." Some day all war will cease for want of fighters.
Corinne’s Chant in the Vicinity of Naples
Translations, From the French
“This principle is old, but true as fate,—
Kings may love treason, but the traitor hate.”
The Honest Whore (1604), Part i, Act iv. Sc. 4.
Compare: "Cæsar said he loved the treason, but hated the traitor", Plutarch, Life of Romulus.
Compare: "treason is loved of many, but the Traitor hated of all", Robert Greene, Pandosto (1588).
Speech to the thirtieth anniversary of the Junior Imperial League in Kingsway Hall (19 June 1926), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), pp. 17-18.
1926
Context: You have to realize that these years in which we are living, the years into which we are entering, are going to be, as no years before have been, the real testing-time of democracy... We in this country may make a fearful mess of it; and if we make a mess of it, we shall get something much worse— we shall get a tyranny of some kind or other. I don't know what form of tyranny it may be. It may be the communist tyranny; it may be tyranny from the other end. But if you cannot evolve a sound and sane democracy, that will be the fate of the country.
“Human life is inexplicable, and still without meaning: a fool may decide its fate.”
Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Remarks by President Obama and Mrs. Obama in Town Hall with Youth of Northern Ireland, Belfast Waterfront, Belfast, Northern Ireland (17 June 2013)
2013
