“The will of man is unconquerable. Even God cannot conquer it.”
Source: Under the Volcano (1947), Ch. III (*p. 97)
"Canada's Best Service for British Ideals" (1913)
“The will of man is unconquerable. Even God cannot conquer it.”
Source: Under the Volcano (1947), Ch. III (*p. 97)
Written by Henry Stuber as part of a biographical sketch of Franklin appended to a 1793 edition of Franklin's autobiography and sometimes reprinted with it in the 19th century. It is frequently misattributed to Franklin himself.
Misattributed
Context: Libraries … will be the best security for maintaining our liberties. A nation of well-informed men, who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them, cannot be enslaved. It is in the regions of ignorance that tyranny reigns.
“Q:So God cannot teach anything, except through a Master?”
A: What is God? You don't know what God is. God cannot be a human being. God is Light; God is power. God cannot talk. Electricity cannot give light. Only the bulb gives light, but electricity has to be put through the wire for the bulb to give light. It's power. Power cannot do anything; it has to be put through a medium. Yes?
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, October 2, 1971
1970s
“God can only set in motion:
He cannot control the things he has made.”
Substance, Shadow, and Spirit, "Spirit expounds"
Translated by Arthur Waley
No. 29.
Seventy Resolutions (1722-1723)
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), VI Perspective of Colour and Aerial Perspective
Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (1817–1898), Speech in March 1888, Quoted by Dilip Hiro, "The Longest August: The Unflinching Rivalry Between India and Pakistan" https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/longest-august-unflinching-rivalry-between-india-and-pakistan
My Religion (1884), as translated in The Human Experience : Contemporary American and Soviet Fiction and Poetry (1989) by the Quaker US/USSR Committee