"The Stars Go Over The Lonely Ocean" (1940)
Context: The world's in a bad way, my man,
And bound to be worse before it mends;
Better lie up in the mountain here
Four or five centuries,
While the stars go over the lonely ocean...
“Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse”
“Prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse.”
Hurd takes on prison reform trust http://www.independent.co.uk/news/hurd-takes-on-prison-reform-trust-1283200.html (15 January 1997)
As quoted in "Constance Wu Doesn’t Want to Be Your “It” Girl" in Vulture https://www.vulture.com/2016/06/constance-wu-c-v-r.html
“I must mend the ways of my mind. This is a very big place, and I do not know how it works.”
The Fragile Species (1992)
Context: I must mend the ways of my mind. This is a very big place, and I do not know how it works. I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of of our fossils, radioactive at that.
“For a man wins nothing better than a good wife, and, again, nothing worse than a bad one.”
Source: Works and Days (c. 700 BC), line 702.
Source: Man's Search for Meaning
