“Men do not shape destiny. Destiny produces the man for the hour.”
Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba
I Won't Be a Dictator (1959)
Source: The High King
“Men do not shape destiny. Destiny produces the man for the hour.”
Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba
I Won't Be a Dictator (1959)
Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States
1940s, Third inaugural address (1941)
Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor
Man's Greatest Achievement (1908; 1930)
Context: According to an adopted theory, every ponderable atom is differentiated from a tenuous fluid, filling all space merely by spinning motion, as a whirl of water in a calm lake. By being set in movement this fluid, the ether, becomes gross matter. Its movement arrested, the primary substance reverts to its normal state. It appears, then, possible for man through harnessed energy of the medium and suitable agencies for starting and stopping ether whirls to cause matter to form and disappear. At his command, almost without effort on his part, old worlds would vanish and new ones would spring into being. He could alter the size of this planet, control its seasons, adjust its distance from the sun, guide it on its eternal journey along any path he might choose, through the depths of the universe. He could make planets collide and produce his suns and stars, his heat and light; he could originate life in all its infinite forms. To cause at will the birth and death of matter would be man's grandest deed, which would give him the mastery of physical creation, make him fulfill his ultimate destiny.
Jack Vance (1916–2013) American mystery and speculative fiction writer
Startling Stories (September 1948), p. 113
Short fiction, Sanatoris Short-Cut (1948)
“No man knows fully what has shaped his own thinking”
Robert K. Merton book Social Theory and Social Structure
Source: Social Theory and Social Structure (1949), p. ix (1957 edition)
Thomas Edison (1847–1931) American inventor and businessman
John Burroughs, in "Religious Contrasts : Letters of Pantheist and a Churchman", in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 128, No. 4 (October 1921), p. 520.
Misattributed
“For rarely man escapes his destiny.”
Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso
Che l'uomo il suo destin fugge di raro.
Canto XVIII, stanza 58 (tr. W. S. Rose)
Orlando Furioso (1532)
Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985) American philosopher
Feeling and Form, ch. 19, Scribner (1953)