“The Duke can get his rent
and we can get our ticket
twa pund emigrant
on a C. P. R. packet.”
Basil Bunting (1900–1985) Poet
Gin the Goodwife Stint, from Odes I:14 (1930)
Gin the Goodwife Stint, from Odes I:14 (1930)
“The Duke can get his rent
and we can get our ticket
twa pund emigrant
on a C. P. R. packet.”
Basil Bunting (1900–1985) Poet
Gin the Goodwife Stint, from Odes I:14 (1930)
“A great pilot can sail even when his canvas is rent.”
Magnus gubernator et scisso navigat velo.
Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XXX: On conquering the conqueror, Line 3.
Hammurabi (-1810–-1750 BC) sixth king of Babylon
Section 48 of the Code of Hammurabi (translated by Leonard William King, 1910).
Alternately translated as: If a man owe a debt and Adad inundate his field and carry away the produce, or, though lack of water, grain have not grown in the field, in that year he shall not make any return of grain to the creditor, he shall alter his contract-tablet and he shall not pay the interest for that year.
Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist
2010s, 2016, Donald Trump and the fitness threshold (2016)
Context: Of course we all try to protect our own dignity and command respect. But Trump’s hypersensitivity and unedited, untempered Pavlovian responses are, shall we say, unusual in both ferocity and predictability.
This is beyond narcissism. I used to think Trump was an 11-year-old, an undeveloped schoolyard bully. I was off by about 10 years. His needs are more primitive, an infantile hunger for approval and praise, a craving that can never be satisfied. He lives in a cocoon of solipsism where the world outside himself has value — indeed exists — only insofar as it sustains and inflates him.
Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer
The Lang Coortin, last two stanzas
Rhyme? and Reason? (1883)
W.B. Yeats book The Winding Stair and Other Poems
Crazy Jane Talks With The Bishop, st. 3
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist
1990s, Long Walk to Freedom (1995)
Context: It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.
When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that that is not the case. The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.