“For a time they confronted each other like two mute unspeaking forts.”
Malcolm Lowry book Under the Volcano
Source: Under the Volcano (1947), Ch. III (p. 75)
Source: The State — Its Historic Role (1897), X
Context: Throughout the history of our civilization, two traditions, two opposing tendencies have confronted each other: the Roman and the Popular; the imperial and the federalist; the authoritarian and the libertarian. And this is so, once more, on the eve of the social revolution.
Between these two currents, always manifesting themselves, always at grips with each other — the popular trend and that which thirsts for political and religious domination — we have made our choice.
We seek to recapture the spirit which drove people in the twelfth century to organise themselves on the basis of free agreement and individual initiative as well as of the free federation of the interested parties. And we are quite prepared to leave the others to cling to the imperial, the Roman and canonical tradition.
“For a time they confronted each other like two mute unspeaking forts.”
Malcolm Lowry book Under the Volcano
Source: Under the Volcano (1947), Ch. III (p. 75)
Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party
2 April 1945.
Disputed, The Testament of Adolf Hitler (1945)
Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic
Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992)
Context: Two opposing world-views — the technological and the traditional — coexisted in uneasy tension. The technological was the stronger, of course, but the traditional was there — still functional, still exerting influence... This is what we find documented not only in Mark Twain but in the poetry of Walt Whitman, the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, the prose of Thoreau, the philosophy of Emerson, the novels of Hawthorne and Melville, and, most vividly of all, in Alexis de Tocqueville's monumental Democracy in America. In a word, two distinct thought-worlds were rubbing against each other in nineteenth-century America.
"Truth Is the Death of Intention: Benjamin's Esoteric History of Romanticism," Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 31, No. 4, Winter 1992, p. 458
Isaac Newton book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Laws of Motion, III
Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)
Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist
Napoleon the Little (1852), Book V, VII
Napoleon the Little (1852)
Rex Ryan (1962) American football coach
[Jets welcome Ryan to New York, http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=3848743, ESPN, Associated Press, January 22, 2009, http://www.webcitation.org/5x46uk5jD, March 9, 2011, March 9, 2011]
Andrew Hsia (1950) Taiwanese politician
Source: Andrew Hsia (2015) cited in " Hsia, Zhang evoke the past at Taiwan-China meeting http://focustaiwan.tw/news/aipl/201505230020.aspx" on Focus Taiwan, 23 May 2015.
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
Context: Americans have been leading a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics which is concrete, factual, practical and unbelievably dull if not for the consequences of the actions of some of these men; and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.