“Gottfried, like any true dictator, liked to surround himself with bland obliging ciphers.”
Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 7 (p. 27)
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Robert Silverberg 88
American speculative fiction writer and editor 1935Related quotes
“The only obligation we have in any lifetime is to be true to ourselves.”
Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)
Variant: Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself.
Source: Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
Context: Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah.
Context: Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah.
Winston Churchill, in "The Defence of Freedom and Peace (The Lights are Going Out)", radio broadcast to the United States and to London (16 October 1938).
The 1930s
Context: People say we ought not to allow ourselves to be drawn into a theoretical antagonism between Nazidom and democracy; but the antagonism is here now. It is this very conflict of spiritual and moral ideas which gives the free countries a great part of their strength. You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like — they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home — all the more powerful because forbidden — terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armoury of potent and indestructible knowledge?
“What person with any sense likes himself? I know myself too well to like myself.”
Fallaci interview (1973)
“Socialism urged to find dictator,” Berkeley Daily Gazette (Nov. 30, 1927)
1890s
Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)
Quoted from Elst, Koenraad. The Problem with Secularism (2007)
L'esprit de M. Nicole, ou: Instructions sur les vérités de la religion, p. 461, in The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1968), p. 94