“Related to this is the surgery of wounds arising in military service, which concerns the extraction of missiles.”

Retirement ceremony, Friday, 23 July 2010, as quoted in The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/us/24mcchrystal.html.
2010
Context: Service in this business is tough and often dangerous. It extracts a price for participants, and that price can be high. It is tempting to protect yourself from the personal and professional cost of loss by limiting how much you commit, how much you believe and trust in people, and how deeply you care… If I had it to do over again, I’ d do some things in my career differently, but not many. I believed in people and I still believe in them. I trusted and I still trust. I cared and I still care. I wouldn’ t have had it any other way.

A Short History of Chemistry (1937)
Context: The earliest applications of chemical processes were concerned with the extraction and working of metals and the manufacture of pottery.... The irruption of an iron using race or races into Mediterranean sites... introduced the Iron Age... but many of the oldest arts still survived in almost their original form. The potter, for example, still used nearly the same materials and appliances as Neolithic man.

Source: Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

Attributed in Deborah Gillan Straub (1996), Native North American Voices
Misattributed

Source: Nationalism and Culture (1937), Ch. 1 "The Insufficiency of Economic Materialism"
Context: Every process which arises from our physical being and is related to it, is an event which lies outside of our volition. Every social process, however, arises from human intentions and human goal setting and occurs within the limits of our volition. Consequently, it is not subject to the concept of natural necessity. … We are here stating no prejudiced opinion, but merely an established fact. Every result of human purposiveness is of indisputable importance for man's social existence, but we should stop regarding social processes as deterministic manifestations of a necessary course of events. Such a view can only lead to the most erroneous conclusions and contribute to a fatal confusion in our understanding of historical events.
It is doubtless the task of the historian to trace the inner connection of historical events and to make clear their causes and effects, but he must not forget that these connections are of a sort quite different from those of natural physical events and must therefore have quite a different valuation.

Teaching the Pig to Dance

Book XLII: Ch. 18: A summary of the changes which have occurred around the globe in my lifetime
Mémoires d'outre-tombe (1848 – 1850)
Context: New storms will arise; one can believe in calamities to come which will surpass the afflictions we have been overwhelmed by in the past; already, men are thinking of bandaging their old wounds to return to the battlefield. However, I do not expect an imminent outbreak of war: nations and kings are equally weary; unforeseen catastrophe will not yet fall on France: what follows me will only be the effect of general transformation. No doubt there will be painful moments: the face of the world cannot change without suffering. But, once again, there will be no separate revolutions; simply the great revolution approaching its end. The scenes of tomorrow no longer concern me; they call for other artists: your turn, gentlemen!
As I write these last words, my window, which looks west over the gardens of the Foreign Mission, is open: it is six in the morning; I can see the pale and swollen moon; it is sinking over the spire of the Invalides, scarcely touched by the first golden glow from the East; one might say that the old world was ending, and the new beginning. I behold the light of a dawn whose sunrise I shall never see. It only remains for me to sit down at the edge of my grave; then I shall descend boldly, crucifix in hand, into eternity.

Source: A Mechanical Account of Poisons (1702), p. xxviii-xxix

Source: The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, 1959, p. 66