Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Context: The fat Russian agent was cornering all the foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an Anarchist plot. I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies — unless one counts journalists.
“If I had never seen a watch and should see one for the first time, I should be sure its hands were moving according to some plan and not at random.”
Source: Alone (1938), Ch. 6
Context: If I had never seen a watch and should see one for the first time, I should be sure its hands were moving according to some plan and not at random. Nor does it seem any more reasonable for me to conceive that the precision and order of the universe is the product of blind chance. This whole concept is summed up in the word harmony. For those who seek it, there is inexhaustible evidence of an all-pervading intelligence.
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Richard Evelyn Byrd 21
Medal of Honor recipient and United States Navy officer 1888–1957Related quotes
Oral History Interview with Konrad Adenauer https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/oral-histories/adenauer (10 June 1964), Harry S. Truman Library
Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mad-dog-time-1996 of Mad Dog Time (29 November 1996)
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“It wasn't that I had to be first in everything, but I should have been number one.”
Source: Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story (1990), p. 72
Pamiętnik znaleziony w wannie (1961), translated as Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1973)
Context: My past had disappeared. Not that I believed for a moment that this was an accident; in fact, I had suspected for some time now that the Cosmic Command, obviously no longer able to supervise every assignment on an individual basis when there were literally trillions of matters in its charge, had switched over to a random system. The assumption would be that every document, circulating endlessly from desk to desk, must eventually hit upon the right one. A time-consuming procedure, perhaps, but one that would never fail. The Universe itself operated on the same principle. And for an institution as everlasting as the Universe — certainly our Building was such an institution — the speed at which these meanderings and perturbations took place was of no consequence.