Absurd Walls
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), An Absurd Reasoning
“It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”
Remarks on The Birth of a Nation attributed to Wilson by writer Thomas Dixon, after White House screening of the film, which was based on Dixon's The Clansman. Wilson later said that he disapproved of the "unfortunate film." Wilson aide Joseph Tumulty, in a letter to the Boston branch of the NAACP in response to reports of Wilson's regard for the film wrote: The President was entirely unaware of the nature of the play before it was presented and at no time has expressed his approbation of it.
Misattributed
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Woodrow Wilson 156
American politician, 28th president of the United States (i… 1856–1924Related quotes
“Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently!”
Charles Dudley Warner
(1829–1900) American writer
Eighteenth Week.
My Summer in a Garden (1870)
“Man brings all things to the test of himself, and this is notably true of lightning.”
“February: Good Oak”, p. 8.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "January Thaw", "February: Good Oak" & "March: The Geese Return"
Johannes Brahms
(1833–1897) German composer and pianist
Letter to Clara Schumann (15 October 1868), as quoted in Johannes Brahms : A Biography (1997) by Jan Swafford, p. 340
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Absurd Creation, p. 18
Source: The Historian (2005), Ch. 5
Context: In the Year of Our Lord 1456 Drakula did many terrible and curious things. When he was appointed Lord in Wallachia, he had all the young boys burned who came to his land to learn the language, four hundred of them. He had a large family impaled and many of his people buried naked up to the navel and shot at. Some he had roasted and then flayed.
There was a footnote, too, at the bottom of the first page. The typeface of the note was so fine that I almost missed it. Looking more closely, I realized it was a commentary on the word impaled. Vlad Tepes, it claimed, had learned this form of torture from the Ottomans. Impalement of the sort he practiced involved the penetration of the body with a sharpened wooden stake, usually through the anus or genitals upward, so that the stake sometimes emerged through the mouth and sometimes through the head.
I tried for a minute not to see these words; then I tried for several minutes to forget them, with the book shut.
The thing that most haunted me that day, however, as I closed my notebook and put my coat on to go home, was not my ghostly image of Dracula, or the description of impalement, but the fact that these things had — apparently — actually occurred. If I listened too closely, I thought, I would hear the screams of the boys, of the “large family” dying together. For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history’s terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth. And once you’ve seen that truth — really seen it — you can’t look away.
“The true conquests, the only ones that cause no regret, are those made over ignorance.”
Napoleon I of France
(1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French
(November 26, 1797) as quoted in Andrew Roberts Napoleon: A Life p. 157
Clive James
(1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist
On Camille Paglia (New York Times Book Review, March 27, 2005)
Essays and reviews
