Remarks on being requested to resume writing, after a mystical experience while saying mass on or around 6 December 1273, as quoted in A Taste of Water : Christianity through Taoist-Buddhist Eyes (1990) by Chwen Jiuan Agnes Lee and Thomas G. Hand
All that I have written seems like straw to me.
As quoted in The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (1993), by Brian Davies, p. 9
Everything I have written seems like straw by comparison with what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.
As quoted in Sacred Games : A History of Christian Worship (1997) by Bernhard Lang, p. 323
Original: (la) Raynalde, non possum, quia omnia quae scripsi videntur mihi palae.
"Why I Write," Gangrel (Summer 1946)
Context: The Spanish war and other events in 1936-7 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.
"When War Drums Roll" (17 September 2001)
2000s
Context: The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's coming now. The party's over, folks... [Censorship of the news] is a given in wartime, along with massive campaigns of deliberately-planted "Dis-information". That is routine behavior in Wartime — for all countries and all combatants — and it makes life difficult for people who value real news.
Book VI, Ch. 1
Progress and Poverty (1879)
Context: In the plan of forcing by endurance an increase of wages, there are in such methods inherent disadvantages which workingmen should not blink. I speak without prejudice, for I am still an honorary member of the union which, while working at my trade, I always loyally supported. But, see: The methods by which a trade union can alone act are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical. A strike, which is the only recourse by which a trade union can enforce its demands, is a destructive contest — just such a contest as that to which an eccentric, called "The Money King," once, in the early days of San Francisco, challenged a man who had taunted him with meanness, that they should go down to the wharf and alternately toss twenty-dollar pieces into the bay until one gave in. The struggle of endurance involved in a strike is, really, what it has often been compared to — a war; and, like all war, it lessens wealth. And the organization for it must, like the organization for war, be tyrannical. As even the man who would fight for freedom, must, when he enters an army, give up his personal freedom and become a mere part in a great machine, so must it be with workmen who organize for a strike. These combinations are, therefore, necessarily destructive of the very things which workmen seek to gain through them — wealth and freedom.
“Compared to what human life has mainly been like here on earth, our current societies are WEIRD.”
"Our Narrow Slice", Vsauce (8 October 2013)
Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (1855) by Sir David Brewster (Volume II. Ch. 27). Compare: "As children gath'ring pebbles on the shore", John Milton, Paradise Regained, Book iv. Line 330
"Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel" (essay, 1949), first published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962)
“And what has been hidden from the wise and the prudent been revealed in the mouth of the toddlers.”
Forever Loving Jah
Uprising (1979)
Sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent, Luke 21:25-36 (1522) http://www.trinitylutheranms.org/MartinLuther/MLSermons/mlserms_original.html, as translated in The Precious and Sacred Writings of Martin Luther (1905) edited by John Nicholas Lenker
