“You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down.”

Alesha Dixon cited in Exclusive Interview with: Alesha Dixon http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/the-ticket/2009/05/exclusive-interview-with-alesh.html" at blog.mirror.co.uk, 8 May 2009

The Apprentice, Series 2

Lecture to the Chicago chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (1904); later published as "The Art and Craft of the Machine" in On Architecture: Selected Writings (1894-1940) (1941) <!-- Duell, Sloan, & Pearce publishers -->
Context: If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization … go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city. There beneath you is the monster, stretching acre upon acre into the far distance. High over head hangs the stagnant pall of its fetid breath, reddened with light from myriad eyes endlessly, everywhere blinking. Thousands of acres of cellular tissue, the city’s flesh outspreads layer upon layer, enmeshed by an intricate network of veins and arteries radiating into the gloom, and in them, with muffled, persistent roar, circulating as the blood circulates in your veins, is the almost ceaseless beat of the activity to whose necessities it all conforms. The poisonous waste is drawn from the system of this gigantic creature by infinitely ramifying, thread-like ducts, gathering at their sensitive terminals matter destructive of its life, hurrying it to millions of small intestines to be collected in turn by larger, flowing to the great sewers, on to the drainage canal, and finally to the ocean.

Mount Analogue (1952)

up to a man's age-old dream; the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.
1960s, A Time for Choosing (1964)

Algernon, Act I
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

"God's Grandeur," line 10
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)