
“I am bound by my oath to abide by the law, and I cannot suffer anybody to derogate from it.”
Redhead alias Yorke's Case (1795), 25 How. St. Tr. 1083.
Letter from Naples, Italy to Otto Grautoff (1896); as quoted in A Gorgon's Mask: The Mother in Thomas Mann's Fiction (2005) by Lewis A. Lawson, p. 34
Context: I think of my suffering, of the problem of my suffering. What am I suffering from? From knowledge — is it going to destroy me? What am I suffering from? From sexuality — is it going to destroy me? How I hate it, this knowledge which forces even art to join it! How I hate it, this sensuality, which claims everything fine and good is its consequence and effect. Alas, it is the poison that lurks in everything fine and good! — How am I to free myself of knowledge? By religion? How am I to free myself of sexuality? By eating rice?
“I am bound by my oath to abide by the law, and I cannot suffer anybody to derogate from it.”
Redhead alias Yorke's Case (1795), 25 How. St. Tr. 1083.
In Munshi Premchand:Biography, 10 December 2013, Internet Media Data Base http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0695919/bio,
“Weep not for me: suffering, as I do, unjustly, I am in a happier case than my murderers.”
To one of his executioners, whom he noticed weeping, as quoted in Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1844) by WIlliam Smith, p. 73.
Dialogues on Metaphysics (1688) Dialogue III
Context: I am unable, when I turn to myself, to recognize any of my faculties or my capacities. The inner sensation which I have of myself informs me that I am, that I think, that I will, that I have sensory awareness, that I suffer, and so on; but it provides me with no knowledge whatever of what I am — of the nature of my thought, my sensations, my passions, or my pain — or the mutual relations that obtain between all these things … I have no idea whatever of my soul.
“My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not;
I think thy answers make me what I am.”
Source: The Diary of an Old Soul & the White Page Poems
“From my earliest years, the first thing that I saw was suffering.”
Letter to his family (31 October 1931) http://www.skeptic.ca/Durruti.htm
Context: From my earliest years, the first thing that I saw was suffering. And if I couldn't rebel when I was a child, it was only because I was an unaware being then. But the sorrows of my grandparents and parents were recorded in my memory during those years of unawareness. How many times did I see our mother cry because she couldn't give us the bread that we asked for! And yet our father worked without resting for a minute. Why couldn't we eat the bread that we needed if our father worked so hard? That was the first question whose answer I found in social injustice. And, since that same injustice exists today, thirty years later, I don't see why, now that I'm conscious of this, that I should stop fighting to abolish it.
I don't want to remind you of the hardships suffered by our parents until we got older and could help out the family. But then we had to serve the so-called fatherland. The first was Santiago. I still remember mother weeping. But even more strongly etched in my memory are the words of our sick grandfather, who sat there, disabled and next to the heater, punching his legs in anger as he watched his grandson go off to Morocco, while the rich bought workers' sons to take their children's place …
Don't you see why I'll continue fighting as long as these social injustices exist?