Source: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (posthumous), p. 32
Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (1948)
“A dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees farther of the two.”
Jacula Prudentum (1651)
“The Dwarf sees farther than the Giant, when he has the Giant's shoulders to mount on.”
The Friend; A Series of Essays (1812), No. 15 (30 November 1809), p. 228
Cf. Isaac Newton, letter to Robert Hooke (15 February 1676): "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants".
“Each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand mediocre minds appointed to guard the past.”
As quoted in Optimum Sports Nutrition (1993) by Michael Colgan, p. 144
“Europe is an economic giant, a political dwarf, and a military worm.”
As quoted by Craig R. Whitney in WAR IN THE GULF: EUROPE; Gulf Fighting Shatters Europeans' Fragile Unity, The New York Times, January 25th, 1991. http://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/25/world/war-in-the-gulf-europe-gulf-fighting-shatters-europeans-fragile-unity.html?pagewanted=1
This phrase was pronounced in January 1991, a few days before the beginning of Desert Storm, while Eyskens was the Foreign Minister of Belgium.
Source: Norse Mythology (2017), Chapter 16, “Ragnarok: The Final Destiny of the Gods” (p. 276)
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Democritus Junior to the Reader
What I Believe (1938)
Context: I realize that all society rests upon force. But all the great creative actions, all the decent human relations, occur during the intervals when force has not managed to come to the front. These intervals are what matter. I want them to be as frequent and as lengthy as possible, and I call them "civilization". Some people idealize force and pull it into the foreground and worship it, instead of keeping it in the background as long as possible. I think they make a mistake, and I think that their opposites, the mystics, err even more when they declare that force does not exist. I believe that it exists, and that one of our jobs is to prevent it from getting out of its box. It gets out sooner or later, and then it destroys us and all the lovely things which we have made. But it is not out all the time, for the fortunate reason that the strong are so stupid.
