“To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.”
John Milton book Paradise Lost
i.262-263
Paradise Lost (1667)
Source: Vacuum Flowers (1987), Chapter 14, “Girlchild” (p. 224)
“To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.”
John Milton book Paradise Lost
i.262-263
Paradise Lost (1667)
“If we had not driven them into hell… hell would have swallowed us.”
Alexander Suvorov (1730–1800) Russian military commander
About the Battle of Kinburn, 1787, from "The Book of Military Quotations" By Peter G. Tsouras - Page 138.
Immortal Technique (1978) American rapper and activist
Leaving the Past
Albums, Revolutionary Vol. 2 (2003)
“Where are we going? Do not ask! Ascend, descend. There is no beginning and no end.”
Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: Where are we going? Do not ask! Ascend, descend. There is no beginning and no end. Only this present moment exists, full of bitterness, full of sweetness, and I rejoice in it all.
Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author
Let's Be Frank (1957)
Context: The ambition of the original Frank had not died; it had grown subtler. It had become a wish to sample everything. The more bodily habitations there were with which to sample, the more tantalizing the idea seemed: for many experiences, belonging only to one brief era, are never repeated, and may be gone before they are perceived and tasted.
Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 55
Context: When we hear of carbon beginning to appear in the ascending series of rocks, we are unavoidably led to consider it as marking a time of some importance in the earth's history, a new era of natural conditions, one in which organic life has probably played a part.
“And she had It. It, hell; she had Those.”
Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist
Regarding a character in Elinor Glyn's novel It; in her review, "Madame Glyn Lectures on 'It,' with Illustrations" in The New Yorker (26 November 1927)
“It was men’s ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer
“The Finder” (p. 56)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)
Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution
Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 2: “The Whittakers and Gertrude”, p. 40