“I can't let myself fly with my fantasy because it is against my nature.”
Pietro Badoglio (1871–1956) Italian general during both World Wars and a Prime Minister of Italy
Non posso abbandonarmi a voli di fantasia perché ciò è contrario alla mia natura.
Quoted in "Badoglio Risponde" - Page 225 - by Vanna Vailati - Italy - 1958
“Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist
Source: Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
Thomas D'Arcy McGee (1825–1868) Canadian politician
Legislative Assembly, February 9, 1865
Context: I will content myself, Mr. Speaker, with those principal motives to union; first, that we are in the rapids and must go on; next that our neighbours will not, on their side, let us rest supinely, even if we could do so from other causes; and thirdly, that by making the united colonies more valuable as an ally to Great Britain, we shall strengthen rather than weaken the imperial connection. (Cheers.)
“I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own tastes.”
Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor
Quote by Harriet & Sidney Janis in 'Marchel Duchamp: Anti-Artist' in View magazine 3/21/45; reprinted in Robert Motherwell, Dada Painters and Poets (1951)
1921 - 1950
Variant: I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) Swedish painter
Quote of Friedrich, 1821; as cited in Authenticity and Fiction in the Russian Literary Journey, 1790-1840 (2000) by Andreas Schönle, p. 108, from memoirs of Vasily Zhukovsky
Variant translation: I have to stay alone in order to fully contemplate and feel nature.
This answer of Friedrich is recorded by Vasily Zhukovsky who asked the painter in 1821 to travel together to Switzerland
1794 - 1840
Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director
Si je me tue ce ne sera pas pour me détruire, mais pour me reconstituer, le suicide ne sera pour moi qu’un moyen de me reconquérir violemment, de faire brutalement irruption dans mon être, de devancer l’avance incertaine de Dieu. Par le suicide, je réintroduis mon dessin dans la nature, je donne pour la première fois aux choses la forme de ma volonté.
“On Suicide,” no. 1, Le Disque Vert (1925).
Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia
Georg Alexander von Müller's diary entry (16 September 1914), quoted in Georg Alexander von Müller, The Kaiser and His Court (London: Macdonald, 1961), p. 33
1910s
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist
Light (1919), Ch. XV - An Apparition
Context: I think of myself, of all that I am. Myself, my home, my hours; the past, and the future, — it was going to be like the past! And at that moment I feel, weeping within me and dragging itself from some little bygone trifle, a new and tragical sorrow in dying, a hunger to be warm once more in the rain and the cold: to enclose myself in myself in spite of space, to hold myself back, to live.
