“The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.”
Source: On Love
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Alain de Botton 146
Swiss writer 1969Related quotes
“We do not argue with those who disagree with us, we destroy them.”
The Lazio Speeches (1936), as quoted in The Book of Italian Wisdom by Antonio Santi, Citadel Press, 2003. p. 88.
1930s
Chapter 2 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo/Chapter_2
The Count of Monte Cristo (1845–1846)
Beija-me as mãos, Amor, devagarinho...
Como se os dois nascessemos irmãos,
Aves cantando, ao sol, no mesmo ninho...<p>Beija-mas bem!... Que fantasia louca
Guardar assim, fechados, nestas mãos,
Os beijos que sonhei pra minha boca!
Quoted in Presença literária (2001), p. 70
Translated by John D. Godinho
Book of Sorrows (1919), "Amiga"
2015, Naturalization Ceremony speech (December 2015)
Context: We celebrate this history, this heritage, as an immigrant nation. And we are strong enough to acknowledge, as painful as it may be, that we haven’t always lived up to our own ideals. We haven’t always lived up to these documents. [... ] We succumbed to fear. We betrayed not only our fellow Americans, but our deepest values. We betrayed these documents. It’s happened before. And the biggest irony of course was -- is that those who betrayed these values were themselves the children of immigrants. How quickly we forget. One generation passes, two generation passes, and suddenly we don’t remember where we came from. And we suggest that somehow there is “us” and there is “them,” not remembering we used to be “them.”
Political questionnaire response (1952)
Context: The other threat to the security of our tradition, I believe, lies at home. It is the current fear of radical ideas and of people who propound them. I do not agree with the extremists of either the left or the right, but I think they should be allowed to speak and to publish, both because they themselves have, and ought to have, rights, and once their rights are gone, the rights of the rest of us are hardly safe. Extremists typically want to squash not only those who disagree with them diametrically, but those who disagree with them at all. It seems to me that in every country where extremists of the left have gotten sufficiently in the saddle to squash the extremists of the right, they have ridden on to squash the center or terrorize it also. And the same goes for extremists of the right. I do not want that to happen in our country.
Source: The Division of Labor in Society (1893), p. 54