L’étroitesse de notre territoire ainsi que notre histoire mouvementée nous ont rendus pleinement conscients de notre dépendance à l’égard de tous ceux qui nous entourent. Je pense que cette prise de conscience a le mérite de nous préserver de l’arrogance.
Christmas message http://www.monarchie.lu/fr/actualites/discours/2014/12/discours-noel-lu/index.html (25 December 2015)
Luxembourg
2014, Review of Signals Intelligence Speech (June 2014)
Joseph Fourier, p. 408.
Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men (1859)
Context: The ancients had a taste, let us say rather a passion, for the marvellous, which caused them to forget even the sacred duties of gratitude. Observe them, for example, grouping together the lofty deeds of a great number of heroes, whose names they have not even deigned to preserve, and investing the single personage of Hercules with them. The lapse of ages has not rendered us wiser in this respect. In our own time the public delight in blending fable with history. In every career of life, in the pursuit of science especially, they enjoy a pleasure in creating Herculeses.
2014, Review of Signals Intelligence Speech (June 2014)
Context: There was a recognition by all who participated in these reviews that the challenges to our privacy do not come from government alone. Corporations of all shapes and sizes track what you buy, store and analyze our data, and use it for commercial purposes; that’s how those targeted ads pop up on your computer and your smartphone periodically. But all of us understand that the standards for government surveillance must be higher. Given the unique power of the state, it is not enough for leaders to say: Trust us, we won’t abuse the data we collect. For history has too many examples when that trust has been breached. Our system of government is built on the premise that our liberty cannot depend on the good intentions of those in power; it depends on the law to constrain those in power.
Source: Infinite in All Directions (1988), Ch. 1 : In Praise of Diversity
Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), Chapter II, Consolation For Not having Enough Money, p. 57
2010s, 2016, Statement regarding the Khan family (1 August 2016)
I.332 http://books.google.com/books?id=Nl-vaAdJD3MC&pg=PA139&dq=:%22Arrogance+on+the+part+of+the+meritorious+is+even+more+offensive+to+us%22&hl=en&ei=7HFTTKGJOcmhnQfSrsXJAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%3A%22Arrogance%20on%20the%20part%20of%20the%20meritorious%20is%20even%20more%20offensive%20to%20us%22&f=false
Human, All Too Human (1878)
The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI
Context: The heavens have fallen on our heads! What a tremendous idea! It is the loftiest cry that life hurls. That was the cry of deliverance for which I had been groping until then. I had had a foreboding it would come, because a thing of glory like a poet's song always gives something to us poor living shadows, and human thought always reveals the world. But I needed to have it said explicitly so as to bring human misery and human grandeur together. I needed it as a key to the vault of the heavens.
These heavens, that is to say, the azure that our eyes enshrine, purity, plenitude — and the infinite number of suppliants, the sky of truth and religion. All this is within us, and has fallen upon our heads. And God Himself, who is all these kinds of heavens in one, has fallen on our heads like thunder, and His infinity is ours.
This is paraphrased in "Karl Barth's Conception of God" (1952) http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol2/520102BarthsConceptionOfGod.pdf by Martin Luther King, Jr.: God is the one who stands above our highest and deepest feelings, strivings and intuitions.
Dogmatics in Outline (1949)
Context: He is the One who stands above us and also above our highest and deepest feelings, strivings, intuitions, above the products, even the most sublime, of the human spirit. God in the highest means first of all … He who is in no way established in us, in no way corresponds to a human disposition and possibility, but who is in every sense established simply in Himself and is real in that way; and who is manifest and made manifest to us men, not because of our seeking and finding, feeling and thinking, but again and again, only through Himself. It is this God in the highest who has turned as such to man, given Himself to man, made Himself knowable to him … God in the highest, in the sense of the Christian Confession, means He who from on high has condescended to us, has come to us, has become ours.<!-- p. 37
Source: Speech in Wolverhampton (8 June 1969), quoted in The Times (9 June 1969), p. 3
