1940s, Victory broadcast (1945)
Context: We have known the bitterness of defeat and the exultation of triumph, and from both we have learned there can be no turning back. We must go forward to preserve in peace what we won in war.
A new era is upon us. Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization. The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concepts of war.
“…a sense of defeat the years have brought back to him, after what seemed for a while to be triumphs.”
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
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John Updike 240
American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, an… 1932–2009Related quotes
" Speech at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-blank/nyu-commencement-speech-2_b_10114910.html," at huffingtonpost.com, posted 05/24/2016.
Source: The Lost Princess: A Double Story
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified
The Future of Civilization (1938)
Context: We see the world as it is now, after these defeats of the League, and we can compare it with what it was six or seven years ago. The comparison is certainly depressing; the contrast is terrible. And we have not yet reached a time when we can estimate the full material losses and human suffering which have been the direct result of the ambitions of one set of powers and the weakness of the others. Nor is there any purpose in attempting to do so. Let us, rather, examine where we now stand and what steps we ought to take in order to strengthen the international system and thrust back again the forces of reaction.
In the first place, let us admit that the first ten years of the League were in a sense unnatural. The horror of war to which I have already alluded was necessarily far more vivid than it can be expected long to remain. That tremendous argument for peace, the horror of war, was a diminishing asset. Most of us, at that time, were, I think, quite well aware that unless we could get the international system into solidly effective working order in the first ten years, we were likely to have great difficulties in the succeeding period, and so it has proved.
Floyd Abrams, Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment, (Viking Press, 2005), p. 71.
Message to the US Senate on laws constraining the discretionary powers of the President to remove or suspend officials. (1 March 1886).