
“A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.”
Open letter to Dr. Gustáv Husák, Communist President (8 April 1975)
Context: Life cannot be destroyed for good, neither … can history be brought entirely to a halt. A secret streamlet trickles on beneath the heavy lid of inertia and pseudo-events, slowly and inconspicuously undercutting it. It may be a long process, but one day it must happen: the lid will no longer hold and will start to crack. This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique … something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard.
“A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.”
Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 15
Variant translations
It is best to keep one’s own state intact; to crush the enemy’s state is only second best.
Source: The Art of War, Chapter III · Strategic Attack
His last message, carved onto the walls of his dungeon cell, as quoted in For Faith and Freedom (1997) by Charles A. Howe, p. 109 <!-- Skinner House Books, Boston; also quoted on their web page [LINK now DEAD 2016·03·01] about the Transylvania Unitarian Church (Archive 2007) https://web.archive.org/web/20070717180511/www.emersonhou.org/Transylvania.htm by the Emerson Unitarian Universalist Church, Houston -->
Context: Neither the sword of popes, nor the cross, nor the image of death — nothing will halt the march of truth. I wrote what I felt and that is what I preached with trusting spirit. I am convinced that after my destruction the teachings of false prophets will collapse.
Source: Tools For Survival (2009), P.149
Preface
The Age of Revolution (1962)
“Change and growth cannot be halted, time must run on. That is the whole moral of the three books.”
Colin Greenland, Beowulf to Kafka: Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone, reprinted in the omnibus edition The Gormenghast Novels published by The Overlook Press, p. 1141