“Work as if you were in the early days of a better nation.”
Frontispiece Variants on this epigraph appear in other books by Alasdair Gray; one of them, "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation", is now engraved on a wall of the Scottish Parliament building. http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/vli/holyrood/faq/answers/art006.htm They are all loose paraphrases of a couplet from Dennis Lee's "Civil Elegies": And best of all is finding a place to be in the early days of a better civilization. http://election.theherald.co.uk/homepage/electionnews/display.var.1370748.0.canadians_should_look_out_for_scottish_election.php Gray later devised a more distinct variant of this, because he believed the "nation" version should be credited to Lee: Work as if you live in the early days of a better world. As quoted in "Early Days of a Better Nation" by Harry Mcgrath, in Scottish Review of Books (28 March 2013) https://www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/2013/03/early-days-of-a-better-nation/
Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)
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Alasdair Gray 8
Scottish writer and artist 1934–2019Related quotes
Source: Lullaby (2002), Chapter 3
Context: The muffled thunder of dialogue comes through the walls, then a chorus of laughter. Then more thunder. Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.
Sect. 1: Pioneering Days
"Computers Then and Now" (1968)
Speech in the House of Commons (16 February 1923), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 59-60.
1923
Context: I am myself of that somewhat flabby nature that always prefers agreement to disagreement... When the Labour Party sit on these benches, we shall all wish them well in their effort to govern the country. But I am quite certain that whether they succeed or fail there will never in this country be a Communist Government, and for this reason, that no gospel founded on hate will ever seize the hearts of our people— the people of Great Britain. It is no good trying to cure the world by spreading out oceans of bloodshed. It is no good trying to cure the world by repeating that pentasyllabic French derivative, "Proletariat." The English language is the richest in the world in thought. The English language is the richest in the world in monosyllables. Four words, of one syllable each, are words which contain salvation for this country and for the whole world, and they are "Faith," "Hope," "Love," and "Work." No Government in this country to-day, which has not faith in the people, hope in the future, love for his fellow-men, and which will not work and work and work, will ever bring this country through into better days and better times, or will ever bring Europe through or the world through.
as quoted by Kenneth Chang and Megan Specia in: [8 October 2019, Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded for Studies of Earth's Place in the Universe, NY Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/science/nobel-physics.html]
“Movies were much better in the days when I was doing them.”
As quoted in St. Petersburg Times (23 June 1968)
“Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise”
