
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.”
Speech at the Copley Plaza Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts (7 June 1945), quoted in Patton : Ordeal and Triumph (1970) by Ladislas Farago
Witchcraft
Literary Essays, vol. II (1870–1890)
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.”
Speech at the Copley Plaza Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts (7 June 1945), quoted in Patton : Ordeal and Triumph (1970) by Ladislas Farago
Nītiśataka 74; translated by B. Hale Wortham
Śatakatraya
“I make that four horses and ten men just to get rid of one old woman. What did youto the King?”
Source: Howl's Moving Castle
Civil Disobedience (1849)
Source: Civil Disobedience and Other Essays
Context: Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.
Context: To speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it. After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? — in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.
quoted in Warren Roberts (2000). Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Louis Prieur, Revolutionary. p. 321.
Lecture V, section 82.
The Eagle's Nest (1872)
Speech in Leeds (13 March 1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), p. 62.
1925
Context: We were not peculiarly impressed with speeches that talked of the glorious time that was coming after the war. We realised what the war meant in the world. We felt the foundations of civilisation in Europe cracking. We knew as business men that for a generation this country and the world would be as a whole far, far poorer, and we realised early the struggle that must result to repair the cracks in the foundations of our civilisation and to restore to the country that level of prosperity which she had enjoyed before the war. I think, too, many of us had little faith in supermen. I think that our experience in business had taught us that, as a matter of fact, there are no such things as supermen, and that we should have to rely on the innate common-sense, integrity, courage and faith of the common men and women of this country if we were to make good.
2004
https://web.archive.org/web/20040803001942/http://www.popimage.com/content/grant20044.html Popimage interview
On The X-Men
“There's reason good, that you good laws should make:
Men's manners ne'er were viler, for your sake.”
XXIV, To The Parliament, lines 1-2
The Works of Ben Jonson, First Folio (1616), Epigrams