“For men use, if they have an evil turn, to write it in marble: and whoso doth us a good turn we write it in dust.”

— Thomas More

Richard III and His Miserable End (1543)

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Thomas More 26

English Renaissance humanist 1478–1535

Stefano Guazzo (1530–1593) Italian writer

Ve ne sono molti che scrivono i beneficii nella polvere, e l'ingiurie nel marmo.
Del Prencipe di Valacchia, p. 79.
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 436.

“He that doth not as other men do, but endeavoureth that which ought to be done, shall thereby rather incur peril than preservation; for whoso laboureth to be sincerely perfect and good shall necessarily perish, living among men that are generally evil.”

Walter Raleigh (1554–1618) English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, spy, and explorer

Source: The Cabinet Council (published 1658), Chapter 25

“Music has taken a bad turn; these young people have no idea how to write a melody, they just give us shavings”

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) German composer, conductor

21 June 1880
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (1978)
Context: Music has taken a bad turn; these young people have no idea how to write a melody, they just give us shavings, which they dress up to look like a lion's mane and shake at us... It's as if they avoid melodies, for fear of having perhaps stolen them from someone else.

“No explanation is required for Holy Writing. Whoso speaks truly is full of eternal life, and wonderfully related to genuine mysteries does his Writing appear to us, for it is a Concord from the Symphony of the Universe.”

Novalis (1772–1801) German poet and writer

Pupils at Sais (1799)

“It's all of the good that won't come out of us and how eventually our hands will just turn to dust, if we keep shaking them standing here on this frozen lake.”

Jenny Lewis (1976) American actor, singer-songwriter

"The Good That Won't Come Out"
Song lyrics, The Execution of All Things (2003)

“The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. … With us, the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one.”

Lytton Strachey book Eminent Victorians

Preface.
Eminent Victorians (1918)

“In 250 years, reading and writing will have turned out to be a fad.”

Bran Ferren (1953) American technologist

The Creators, The New York Times Magazine, September 8, 2013 http://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/millennium/m4/ferren.html,

“The only book that is worth writing is the one we don’t have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed”

Hélène Cixous (1937) French philosopher and writer

“Men's evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water.”

William Shakespeare Henry VIII

Source: Henry VIII

“Camera-phones are like nuclear power plants: bad people will turn them into evil, good people will put them to good use.”

Philippe Kahn (1952) Entrepreneur, camera phone creator

NPR Interview January 2007, regarding current uses of the camera phone http://weekendamerica.publicradio.org/programs/2007/01/06/father_of_the_camera.html.

“For men use, if they have an evil turn, to write it in marble: and whoso doth us a good turn we write it in dust.”

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Thomas More 26

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