“Mr. Churchill you were given a mission.
— Yes
— I want to have been given your mission. I want your place in world events, the centrality of it. You were born in the cradle of a catapult!
— You are wrong. I found my mission.
— I disagree.
— If you must.
— Tell me: where is my mission? Where are my bunkers and trenches, my goddamn Gallipoli?”

Introduction to Shatterday (1980), p. 2
Context: I don't know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run and your eyeballs water.

Then & Now: Jane Goodall (2005)

CBC interview with Scott Russell

Source: The Shadowhunter's Codex

Address on sentencing (1885)
Context: The Court. has done the work for me, and although at first appearance it seems to be against me, I am so confident in the idea which I have had the honor to express yesterday, that I think it is for good and not for my loss. Up to this moment, I have been considered by a certain party as insane, by another party as a criminal, by another party as a man with whom it was doubtful whether to have any intercourse. So there was hostility and there was contempt, and there was avoidance To-day, by the verdict of the Court, one of these three situations has disappeared.
I suppose that after having been condemned, I will cease to be called a fool, and for me it is a great advantage. I consider it as a great advantage. If I have a mission, I say "If " for the sake of those who doubt, but for my part it means "Since," since I have a mission, I cannot fulfil my mission as long as I am looked upon as an insane being-human being, at the moment that I begin to ascend that scale, I begin to succeed.

Address to Grand Jury (1885)
Variant: I believed that I had a mission, I believe that I had a mission at this very moment.
The Queen Vs. Louis Riel : Accused and Convicted of the Crime of High Treason. Report of Trial at Regina (1886), p. 147 http://books.google.com/books?id=jLANAAAAQAAJ&output=text
Context: It is true, gentlemen, I believed for years I had a mission, and when I speak of a mission you will understand me not as trying to play the role of insane before the grand jury so as to have a verdict of acquittal upon that ground. I believe that I have a mission, I believe I had a mission at this very time. What encourages me to speak to you with more confidence in all the imperfections of my English way of speaking, it is that I have yet and still that mission, and with the help of God, who is in this box with me, and He is on the side of my lawyers, even with the honorable court, the Crown and the jury, to help me, and to prove by the extraordinary help that there is a Providence to-day in my trial, as there was a Providence in the battles of the Saskatchewan.

Presidential debate, October 11, 2000 http://www.debates.org/?page=october-11-2000-debate-transcript
2000s, 2000

Source: Isaac Herzog (2021) cited in " Israel swears in Isaac Herzog as 11th president https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/7/israel-swears-in-isaac-herzog-as-11th-president" on Aljazeera, 7 July 2021.

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)