
A Prescription for Hope (1985)
"The United States of America Has Gone Mad" (2003)
Context: America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.
A Prescription for Hope (1985)
Speech in the House of Commons, November 12, 1936 "Debate on the Address" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1936/nov/12/debate-on-the-address#column_1117
Cited in Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth
This speech is also commonly known by the name "The Locust Years" http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/Locusts.html.
The 1930s
N.S. Rajaram: From Harappa to Ayodhya, Sahitya Sindhu Prakashana, Bangalore 1997, p.6;
Leninism or Marxism? (1904)
“This divine madness enters more or less into all our noblest undertakings.”
Here Longfellow is translating or paraphrasing an expression attributed to a canon of Seville, also quoted as "we shall have a church so great and of such a kind that those who see it built will think we were mad".
Table-Talk (1857)
Context: "Let us build such a church, that those who come after us shall take us for madmen," said the old canon of Seville, when the great cathedral was planned. Perhaps through every mind passes some such thought, when it first entertains the design of a great and seemingly impossible action, the end of which it dimly foresees. This divine madness enters more or less into all our noblest undertakings.
Lovell v. City of Griffin, 303 U.S. 444 (1938).
Judicial opinions
Source: Blood in My Eye (1971), p. 130