Novalis (1829)
Context: The ideal of Morality has no more dangerous rival than the ideal of highest Strength, of most powerful life; which also has been named (very falsely as it was there meant) the ideal of poetic greatness. It is the maximum of the savage; and has, in these times, gained, precisely among the greatest weaklings, very many proselytes. By this ideal, man becomes a Beast-Spirit, a Mixture; whose brutal wit has, for weaklings, a brutal power of attraction.
"Grosz Comes to America," Esquire, 1936
“Is America a weakling, to shrink from the work of the great world powers? No!”
Letter to John Hay, American Ambassador to the Court of St. James, London, written in Washington, DC http://www.trsite.org/content/pages/speaking-loudly (June 7, 1897)
1890s
Context: Is America a weakling, to shrink from the work of the great world powers? No! The young giant of the West stands on a continent and clasps the crest of an ocean in either hand. Our nation, glorious in youth and strength, looks into the future with eager eyes and rejoices as a strong man to run a race.
“When a man comes to love a woman exactly as she had dreamed, she decides he is a weakling.”
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Love
1900s, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900), National Duties
Context: The man who works, the man who does great deeds, in the end dies as surely as the veriest idler who cumbers the earth’s surface; but he leaves behind him the great fact that he has done his work well. So it is with nations. While the nation that has dared to be great, that has had the will and the power to change the destiny of the ages, in the end must die, yet no less surely the nation that has played the part of the weakling must also die; and whereas the nation that has done nothing leaves nothing behind it, the nation that has done a great work really continues, though in changed form, to live forevermore. The Roman has passed away exactly as all the nations of antiquity which did not expand when he expanded have passed away; but their very memory has vanished, while he himself is still a living force throughout the wide world in our entire civilization of today, and will so continue through countless generations, through untold ages.
My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)
President Trump on Syria's chemical weapons attack, "President Trump blasts Syria for 'cruelly murdering' its own people as U.S. fires at least 50 missiles at airfield" http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/trump-blasts-syria-murdering-civilians-u-s-strike-article-1.3027449, 6 April 2017.
2010s, 2017, April
Pages 125-126
Post-Presidency, Our Endangered Values (2005)
