“Tragedy springs from outrage; it protests at the conditions of life. It carries in it the possibilities of disorder, for all tragic poets have something of the rebelliousness of Antigone. Goethe, on the contrary, loathed disorder. He once said that he preferred injustice, signifying by that cruel assertion not his support for reactionary political ideals, but his conviction that injustice is temporary and reparable whereas disorder destroys the very possibilities of human progress. Again, this is an anti-tragic view; in tragedy it is the individual instance of injustice that infirms the general pretence of order. One Hamlet is enough to convict a state of rottenness.”

XL, 1
Rifacimento of Orlando Innamorato

The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870), Note I : Hâjî Abdû, The Man
Context: The Hâjî regrets the excessive importance attached to a possible future state: he looks upon this as a psychical stimulant, a day dream, whose revulsion and reaction disorder waking life. The condition may appear humble and prosaic to those exalted by the fumes of Fancy, by a spiritual dram-drinking which, like the physical, is the pursuit of an ideal happiness. But he is too wise to affirm or to deny the existence of another world. For life beyond the grave there is no consensus of mankind… Even the instinctive sense of our kind is here dumb. We may believe what we are taught: we can know nothing. He would, therefore, cultivate that receptive mood which, marching under the shadow of mighty events, leads to the highest of goals, — the development of Humanity. With him suspension of judgment is a system.

Modern American Poetry 1950

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Stone of Farewell (1990), Chapter 9, “Cold and Curses” (p. 211).

Book V, Chapter 1 http://www.readprint.com/chapter-7136/Niccolo-Machiavelli
Florentine Histories (1526)

Source: Speaker for the Dead

Letter 22, 7.
Letters, Book IV

On himself, as quoted in World Authors 1900-1950 (1996)

"Connoisseur of Chaos"
Parts of a World (1942)