“And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.”
Source: Player Piano (1952), Chapter 32 (p. 295)
“Yet sometimes glimpses on my sight,
Through present wrong the eternal right;
And, step by step, since time began,
I see the steady gain of man;”
The Chapel of the Hermits, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
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Through present wrong the eternal right;
And, step by step, since time began,
I …" by John Greenleaf Whittier?
John Greenleaf Whittier 47
American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slave… 1807–1892Related quotes
“I don't advocate violence; but if a man steps on my toes, I'll step on his…”
Malcolm X
(1925–1965) American human rights activist
John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
(1834–1902) British politician and historian
The Study of History (1895)
Context: Most of this, I suppose, is undisputed, and calls for no enlargement. But the weight of opinion is against me when I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong. The plea in extenuation of guilt and mitigation of punishment is perpetual. At every step we are met by arguments which go to excuse, to palliate, to confound right and wrong, and reduce the just man to the level of the reprobate. The men who plot to baffle and resist us are, first of all, those who made history what it has become. They set up the principle that only a foolish Conservative judges the present time with the ideas of the past; that only a foolish Liberal judges the past with the ideas of the present.
Source: The Greatest Salesman in the World (1968), Ch. 10 : The Scroll Marked III, p. 65.
Madeleine Lee in Ch. VIII
Democracy: An American Novel (1880)
Mikheil Saakashvili
(1967) Georgian-Ukrainian politician, President of Georgia and Governor of Odessa
Inaugural address (2004)
Source: As quoted in "Georgia swears in new president" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3426977.stm (25 January 2004), BBC News
Source: Message in a Bottle
“I see the right, and I approve it too,
Condemn the wrong, and yet the wrong pursue.”
Samuel Garth
(1661–1719) British writer
Translation of Ovid, Metamorphoses, vii. 20 (translated by Tate and Stonestreet, edited by Garth), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "I know and love the good, yet, ah! the worst pursue" [veggio ’l meglio, et al peggior m’appiglio], Petrarch, Sonnet ccxxv. canzone xxi. To Laura in Life.