My Reviewers Reviewed (lecture from June 27, 1877, San Francisco, CA)
Context: I have been denounced by the religious press and by ministers in their pulpits as a demon, as an enemy of order, as a fiend, as an infamous man. Of this, however, I make no complaint. A few years ago they would have burned me at the stake and I should have been compelled to look upon their hypocritical faces through flame and smoke. They cannot do it now or they would.
“He remembered his dismay at finding himself committed to a hand of cards without having honestly looked at the stakes, fourteen years ago. Had he been doing it again? But if the stakes were too frightening to consider, and the game was already lost, what value could there be in clear comprehension?”
Source: Declare (2001), Chapter 17 (p. 496)
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Tim Powers 63
American writer 1952Related quotes
I am now bald and Calvinist and in that faith will I die.
William to a supporter of the King, as quoted in William the Silent (1897) by Frederic Harrison, p. 92
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/07/clinton-concession-speech_n_105842.html, Washington D.C., June 7, 2008
Presidential campaign (January 20, 2007 – 2008)
“There's a game out there, and the stakes are high.”
Johnny Got His Gun (1938)
Context: There's a game out there, and the stakes are high. And the guy who runs it figures the averages all day long and all night long. Once in a while he lets you steal a pot. But if you stay in the game long enough, you've got to lose. And once you've lost there's no way back, no way at all.
Diane L. Wilcox, Classic Tales of Mulla Nasreddin, Retold by Houman Farzad (1989), , p. 26
Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, The Crystal City (2003), Chapter 1 “Nueva Barcelona” (p. 19).