Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) eighteenth President of the French Republic
Said to Pierre Bertaux in 1944, as recounted in The Atlantic, November 1960
Fifth Republic and other post-WW2
“For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter. The old story of good and evil.”
— Charles Bukowski, book Factotum
Source: Factotum (1975), Ch. 56
Context: The bus ran along a very narrow strip of cement that stood up out of the water with no guard-rail, no nothing; that's all there was to it. The bus driver leaned back and we roared along over this narrow cement strip surrounded by water and all the people in the bus, the twenty-five or forty or fifty-two people trusted him, but I never did. Sometimes it was a new driver, and I thought, how do they select these sons of bitches? There's deep water on both sides of us and with one error of judgement he'll kill us all. It was ridiculous. Suppose he had an argument with his wife that morning? Or cancer? Or visions of God? Bad teeth? Anything. He could do it. Dump us all. I knew that if I was driving that I would consider the possibility or desirability of drowning everybody. And sometimes, after just such considerations, possibility turns into reality. For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter. The old story of good and evil. But none of the bus drivers ever dumped us. They were thinking instead of car payments, baseball scores, haircuts, vacations, enemas, family visits. There wasn't a real man in the whole shitload.
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Charles Bukowski555
American writer 1920–1994Related quotes
“Angles are measured by arcs, such that 360° and 2π correspond to each other.”
Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician
Source: Mathematics as an Educational Task (1973), p. 477
Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777) German mathematician, physicist and astronomer
Sect. 4, Lemma 26, Insigniores orbitae cometarum proprietates (1761) [Notable properties of comets' orbits] translated by Florian Cajori, A History of Mathematics https://books.google.com/books?id=kqQPAAAAYAAJ (1906) p. 259, from the German of Michel Chasles, Geschichte der Geometrie, haupsächlich mit Bezug auf die neuern Methoden https://books.google.com/books?id=NgYHAAAAcAAJ (1839) p. 183.
Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era
Abt Vogler, ix.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist
"Gauss's Abstract of the Disquisitiones Generales circa Superficies Curvas presented to the Royal Society of Gottingen" (1827) Tr. James Caddall Morehead & Adam Miller Hiltebeitel in General Investigations of Curved Surfaces of 1827 and 1825 http://books.google.com/books?id=SYJsAAAAMAAJ& (1902)
Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart
Variant: The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.
Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 15 (p. 130)
Context: "We have heard stories about white men who make the powerful guns and the strong drinks and took slaves away across the seas, but no one thought the stories were true." [said Obierika]
"There is no story that is not true," said Uchendu. "The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others. We have albinos among us. Do you not think that they came to our clan by mistake, that they have strayed from their way to a land where everybody is like them?"
“There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist
1970s, How do we tell truths that might hurt? (1975)
