2015, Address to the People of India (January 2015)
Context: No society is immune from the darkest impulses of man. And too often religion has been used to tap into those darker impulses as opposed to the light of God. Three years ago in our state of Wisconsin, back in the United States, a man went to a Sikh temple and, in a terrible act of violence, killed six innocent people -- Americans and Indians. And in that moment of shared grief, our two countries reaffirmed a basic truth, as we must again today -- that every person has the right to practice their faith how they choose, or to practice no faith at all, and to do so free of persecution and fear and discrimination.
“Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is — and a woman too, I guess.”
Source: The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Part Two, Chapter XIV
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John Steinbeck 366
American writer 1902–1968Related quotes
Source: 1950s, The Skills of the Economist, 1958, p. 183
“I still think too much about the mothers
And ask what is man born of woman.”
"Preparation," trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass
Unattainable Earth (1986)
Context: I still think too much about the mothers
And ask what is man born of woman.
He curls himself up and protects his head
While he is kicked by heavy boots; on fire and running,
He burns with bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit.
Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy.
No.7. Rob Roy — DIANA VERNON.
Literary Remains
“Man, whence is he? / Too bad to be the work of a god, too good for the work of chance.”
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, as quoted in Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern English and Foreign Sources (1899) by James Wood, p. 61; usually attributed to Doris Lessing in the form: "Man — who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!"
Misattributed