“There are clouds, wind, smoke and dust and noise, over head and around, and there always will be; but no genuine thunder, with destructive bolt, menaces from any quarter of the sky. The real trouble with us was never our system or form of government, or the principles underlying it, but the peculiar composition of our people; the relations existing between them and the compromising spirit which controlled the ruling power of the country.”
1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)
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Frederick Douglass274
American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman 1818–1895Related quotes
Charles Stross The Laundry Files
Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 13, “Fimbulwinter” (p. 258)
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero As King
Context: To me, in these circumstances, that of "Hero-worship" becomes a fact inexpressibly precious; the most solacing fact one sees in the world at present. There is an everlasting hope in it for the management of the world. Had all traditions, arrangements, creeds, societies that men ever instituted, sunk away, this would remain. The certainty of Heroes being sent us; our faculty, our necessity, to reverence Heroes when sent: it shines like a polestar through smoke-clouds, dust-clouds, and all manner of down-rushing and conflagration.
Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1938/oct/05/policy-of-his-majestys-government#column_370 in the House of Commons (5 October 1938) against the Munich Agreement <br class="br">The 1930s
James Monroe (1758–1831) American politician, 5th President of the United States (in office from 1817 to 1825)
The Monroe Doctrine (2 December 1823)
Morgan Tsvangirai (1952–2018) former Prime Minister of Zimbabwe
Remarks at the launch of his book – At the Deep End http://www.zimeye.org/?p=41996&cpage=1
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)
1910s, Address to Congress: Analyzing German and Austrian Peace Utterances (1918)
Thomas Paine book Rights of Man
Part 1.3 Rights of Man
1790s, Rights of Man, Part I (1791)
Context: There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the "end of time," or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore all such clauses, acts or declarations by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void. Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.