
“Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.”
Interview with Ed Hirsch (1986), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series (Penguin, 1988)
The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, Ch. 11 (1931)
“Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.”
Interview with Ed Hirsch (1986), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series (Penguin, 1988)
Source: Letter to Benjamin Disraeli (16 July 1875), quoted in Marvin Swartz, Politics of British Foreign Policy in the Era of Disraeli and Gladstone (1985), p. 17
Ill Fares the Land (2010), Ch. 6 : The Shape of Things to Come
Scotland and Northern Ireland (June 18, 2007)
Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: Our Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors. Our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes. The primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principle and is considered the virtue of orthodoxy. It demands millions of sacrifices in ceaseless civil wars, it drums into our souls that there is no such thing as unchanging, universal concepts of goodness and justice, that they are all fluctuating and inconstant. Therefore the rule — always do what's most profitable to your party. Any professional group no sooner sees a convenient opportunity to BREAK OFF A PIECE, even if it be unearned, even if it be superfluous, than it breaks it off there and then and no matter if the whole of society comes tumbling down.
“Variant: What is not yet done is only what we have not yet attempted to do.”
Source: Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter XV-IXX, Chapter XVIII.
“What have I done for you,
England, my England?
What is there I would not do,
England, my own?”
Source: Poems (1898), Rhymes And Rhythms, XXV
Interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show
2000s