
“There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.”
Section 3, Chapter 19, p. 287
Source: The Gods Themselves (1972)
The Call of Freedom.
“There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.”
Section 3, Chapter 19, p. 287
Source: The Gods Themselves (1972)
2000s, 2006, State of the Union (January 2006)
2013, Cape Town University Address (June 2013)
Context: We always have the opportunity to choose our better history. We can always understand that most important decision -- the decision we make when we find our common humanity in one another. That’s always available to us, that choice. [... ] it can be heard in the confident voices of young people like you. It is that spirit, that innate longing for justice and equality, for freedom and solidarity -- that’s the spirit that can light the way forward. It's in you.
Meditations on the Sacraments (1977), Introduction, p. xi.
Context: Grace is everywhere as an active orientation of all created reality toward God, though God does not owe it to any creature to give it this special orientation. Grace does not happen in isolated instances here and there in an otherwise profane and graceless world. It is legitimate, of course, to speak of grace-events which occur at discrete points in space and time. But then what we are really talking about is the existential and historical acceptance of this grace by human freedom. … Grace itself … is everywhere and always, even though a human being's freedom can sinfully say no to it, just as a human being's freedoms can protest against humankind itself. This immanence of grace in the conscious world always and everywhere does not take away the gratuity of grace, because God's immediacy out of self-giving love is not something anyone can claim as his or her due. The immanence of grace always and everywhere does not make salvation history cease to be history, because history is the acceptance of grace by the historical freedom of human beings and the history of spirit coming ever more to itself in grace.
Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 4, Historical Analysis, p. 99
Source: An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973), p. 47
“Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.”
The Critic as Artist (1891), Part I