Source: I Capture the Castle
“I read, I study, I examine, I listen, I reflect, and out of all of this I try to form an idea into which I put as much common sense as I can.”
Letter to his father-in-law, the Duc d'Ayan (4 December 1776), as quoted in George Washington's Generals and Opponents: Their Exploits and Leadership (1994) by George Athan Billias, p. 219
Context: I read, I study, I examine, I listen, I reflect, and out of all of this I try to form an idea into which I put as much common sense as I can. I shall not speak much for fear of saying foolish things; I will risk still less for fear of doing them, for I am not disposed to abuse the confidence which they have deigned to show me. Such is the conduct which until now I have followed and will follow.
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Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette 7
French general and politician 1757–1834Related quotes
“I accept this idea of democracy. I am all for trying it out.”
Zora Neale Hurston
(1891–1960) American folklorist, novelist, short story writer
"Crazy for This Democracy" in Negro Digest (December 1945).
Context: I accept this idea of democracy. I am all for trying it out. It must be a good thing if everybody praises it like that. If our government has been willing to go to war and sacrifice billions of dollars and millions of men for the idea I think that I ought to give the thing a trial.
The only thing that keeps me from pitching head long into this thing is the presence of numerous Jim Crow laws on the statute books of the nation. I am crazy about the idea of Democracy. I want to see how it feels.
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya
(1982) Belarusian politician and educator
"Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya: ‘Belarusians weren’t ready for this level of cruelty’" in The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/09/sviatlana-tsikhanouskaya-belarusians-not-ready-cruelty-lukashenko-belarus (9 August 2021)
Ralph Ellison
(1914–1994) American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer
As quoted in "An American Novelist Who Sometimes Teaches" by John Corry http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/06/20/specials/ellison-teaches.html in The New York Times (20 November 1966).
Martin Amis
(1949) Welsh novelist
"The voice of the lonely crowd" (2002)
Context: My apostasy, at the age of nine, was vehement. Clearly, I didn't want the shared words, the shared identity. I forswore chapel; those Bibles were scribbled on and otherwise desecrated, and two or three of them were taken into the back garden and quietly torched.
Later — we were now in Cambridge — I gave a school speech in which I rejected all belief as an affront to common sense. I was an atheist, and I was 12: it seemed open-and-shut. I had not pondered Kant's rather lenient remark about the crooked timber of humanity, out of which nothing straight is ever built. Nor was I aware that the soul had legitimate needs.
Much more recently I reclassified myself as an agnostic. Atheism, it turns out, is not quite rational either. The sketchiest acquaintance with cosmology will tell you that the universe is not, or is not yet, decipherable by human beings. It will also tell you that the universe is far more bizarre, prodigious and chillingly grand than any doctrine, and that spiritual needs can be met by its contemplation. Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.
