
“Even the Gods cannot strive against necessity.”
As quoted by Plato, Protagoras, 345d, and by Diogenes Laërtius, i. 77.
Pittacus, 4.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 1: The Seven Sages
“Even the Gods cannot strive against necessity.”
As quoted by Plato, Protagoras, 345d, and by Diogenes Laërtius, i. 77.
“Not even the gods fight against necessity.”
Quoted by Plato in the dialogue Protagoras, 345d http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0177%3Atext%3DProt.%3Asection%3D345d (Simonides Fr. 37.1.27 ff.).
Variant translations:
The gods do not fight against necessity.
Not even the gods war against necessity.
I praise and love all men who do no sin willingly; but with necessity even the gods do not contend.
“I hold that mortal foolish who strives against the stress of necessity.”
Hercules Furens l. 281
“A woman cannot be a pastor by the law of God. I say more, it is against the law of the realm.”
Colt and another v. Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield (1612), Hob. Rep. 148.
Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi in Favor of Suicide Operations http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/45.htm April 2004.
Martyrdom operations
(15 June 2007)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2007
Context: Art is not science. Even when art is about science, it is still art. There cannot be consensus, in the sense that science strives for meaningful consensus. And unlike science, art is not progressive. Personally, I have my doubts that science can be said to be genuinely progressive, but I'm pretty dammed certain that art is not. Which is not to say that it is not accumulative or accretionary. But the belief that sf writers are out there forecasting the future, that they have some social responsibility to do so, that's malarky, if you ask me. Writers of sf can only, at best, make educated guesses, and usually those guesses are wrong, and clumping together to form a consensus does not in any way insure against history unfolding in one of those other, unpredicted directions. People love to pick out the occasional instances where Jules Verne and William Gibson got it right; they rarely ever point fingers at their miscalls.