
“Shall we never never get rid of this Past?… It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.”
Source: The House of the Seven Gables
Black Day In July, Track 3, (mono 45 edit), UNITED ARTISTS 50281, March 1968
Did She Mention My Name? (1968)
“Shall we never never get rid of this Past?… It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.”
Source: The House of the Seven Gables
“Gabrina kept her eyes upon the ground,
For to the truth no answer can be found.”
Gabrina tenne sempre gli occhi bassi,
Perché non ben risposta al vero dassi.
Canto XXI, stanza 69 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)
Speech on May 1, 1937, quoted in John S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933-45 (New York, NY, Basic Books, 1968), p. 178
1930s
1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)
Comment about the League of Nations in 1922 Herbert Hoover and Economic Diplomacy: Department of Commerce Policy, 1921-1928 https://books.google.com/books?id=rinywBbGac4C&pg=PA27
"The Mystic Vision" as translated in Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists (1984) edited by Ken Wilber
Context: It is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling, and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense — that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it... For we should then have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? what, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but, inconceiveable as it seems to ordinary reason, you — and all other conscious beings as such — are all in all. Hence, this life of yours... is, in a certain sense, the whole... This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula... 'Tat tvam asi' — this is you. Or, again, in such words as 'I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world.'
Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you … For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.
Source: Commonplace book, P. 195
Speech to the Cabinet (28 May 1940), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 420
The Second World War (1939–1945)
Context: I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering negotiations with That Man. But it was idle to think that, if we tried to make peace now, we should get better terms than if we fought it out. The Germans would demand our fleet—that would be called 'disarmament'—our naval bases, and much else. We should become a slave state, though a British Government which would be Hitler's puppet would be set up—under Mosley or some such person. And where should we be at the end of all that? On the other hand, we had immense reserves and advantages. And I am convinced that every man of you would rise up and tear me from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.
Address to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (14 June 1946)