“Perhaps the first fire, the first tool, the first wheel, the first carving in a limestone cave, had each possessed a symbolic rather than a practical value, had each been pressed to serve distortion rather than reality. It was a sort of madness that had driven man from his humble sites on the edges of the woods into towns and cities, into arts and wars, into religious crusades, into martyrdom and prostitution, into dyspepsia and fasting, into love and hatred, into this present cul-de-sac; it had all come about in pursuit of symbols. In the beginning was the symbol, and darkness was over the face of the Earth.”

On passing through a village in the Alps, as attributed in Parallel Lives, by Plutarch, as translated by John Langhorne and William Langhorne (1836), p. 499

Variant: First in a village rather than second in Rome.

Source: Hainish Cycle, City of Illusions (1967), Chapter 5

Source: Definitely Dead

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

Source: My Years As Prime Minister (2007), Chapter One, At Laurier's Desk, p. 28 ( See also: Aline Chretien)

First lines, Ch. 1 : The Ramrobot
A Gift From Earth (1968)
Context: A ramrobot had been the first to see Mount Lookitthat. Ramrobots had been first visitors to all the settled worlds. The interstellar ramscoop robots, with an unrestricted fuel supply culled from interstellar hydrogen, could travel between stars at speeds approaching that of light.

Che per amor venne in furore e matto,
d'huom che si saggio era stimato prima.
Canto I, stanza 2 (tr. Guido Waldman); of Orlando.
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Source: The Lucky One

Quoted in Seth Schiesel, Microsoft Unveils Games For Its New Xbox 360 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DE3DF1E30F935A35753C1A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all The New York Times (2005-10-06)