“[The world may end up] under a Sword of Damocles … on a tightrope over the abyss.”

— Andrei Gromyko

Criticising the US Strategic Defense Initiative
Time Magazine, 11 Mar 1985 http://bartelby.org/63/54/454.html

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "[The world may end up] under a Sword of Damocles … on a tightrope over the abyss." by Andrei Gromyko?

Andrei Gromyko 2

Soviet diplomat 1909–1989

Related quotes

“This result [… ] will daily stand as a veritable sword of Damocles over every succeeding president and his advisers.”

William H. Rehnquist (1924–2005) Chief Justice of the United States

Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, 433 U.S. 425 (1977) (dissent); the court ruled 7–2 that Congress could seize Richard Nixon’s presidential papers.
Judicial opinions

“Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1961, UN speech
Context: Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.

“When people hurt you over and over, think of them like a sand paper. They may scratch and hurt you a bit but in the end, you end up polished and they end up useless ”

Chris Colfer (1990) actor, singer, book author

“We are not yet free of peril from the Arabs, who long seriously threatened our existence, and their creation, Mohammedanism, is the greatest of all hindrances to every progress of civilisation, hanging like a sword of Damocles over our slowly and laboriously rising culture in Europe, Asia and Africa.”

Houston Stewart Chamberlain book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century

The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts) (1899)

“[Satiation may spill over outside the specific task to structurally similar tasks) and may end up in an early] exhaustion of the occupational will.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Kurt Lewin (1928) "Die Bedeutung der “psychischen Sättigung” für einige Probleme der Psychotechnik" [Significance of “mental satiation” for some problems of psychotechnics]. in: Psychotechnisches Zeitschrift, Vol 3, p. 186. as cited in: E. Demerouti et all. (2002) " From mental strain to burnout http://www.beanmanaged.com/doc/pdf/arnoldbakker/articles/articles_arnold_bakker_79.pdf"
1920s

“Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman - a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God

The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life. As soon as we are born the return begins, at once the setting forth and the coming back; we die in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of life is death! But as soon as we are born we begin the struggle to create, to compose, to turn matter into life; we are born in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of ephemeral life is immortality! In the temporary living organism these two streams collide … both opposing forces are holy. It is our duty, therefore, to grasp that vision which can embrace and harmonize these two enormous, timeless, and indestructible forces, and with this vision to modulate our thinking and our action.

“Protocols:
supplementary budget, and all this ends up in accordance with the sum of the total addition, the annual departure from the normal reaches up as much as 50 percent in a year, and so the annual budget is trebled in ten years….
Every kind of loan proves infirmity in the State and a want of understanding of the rights of the State. Loans hang like a sword of Damocles over the heads of rulers, who, instead of taking from their subects by a temporary tax, come begging with outstretched palm of our bankers…the Goy states go on in persisting in putting more on to themselves to that they must inevitably perish, drained by voluntary blood-letting.
Graves: Their interest calculations are the same to support the financial dangers of loans!”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.84

“The spark once transmitted may smoulder for generations under ashes, but the appointed time will come, and it will flare up to warm the world.”

John Buchan book The Path of the King

Prologue
The Path of the King (1921)
Context: The spark once transmitted may smoulder for generations under ashes, but the appointed time will come, and it will flare up to warm the world. God never allows waste. And we fools rub our eyes and wonder, when we see genius come out of the gutter. It didn't begin there. We tell ourselves that Shakespeare was the son of a woolpedlar, and Napoleon of a farmer, and Luther of a peasant, and we hold up our hands at the marvel. But who knows what kings and prophets they had in their ancestry!

“Despair is deep. An abyss that swallows dreams. A wall at the world's end. Behind it I await death. Because all our work has come to this.”

Catherine Fisher book Incarceron

Source: Incarceron

“[The world may end up] under a Sword of Damocles … on a tightrope over the abyss.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Andrei Gromyko 2

Related quotes

Related topics