Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576) Italian Renaissance mathematician, physician, astrologer
The Book of My Life (1930)
1960s, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence (1967)
Context: Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576) Italian Renaissance mathematician, physician, astrologer
The Book of My Life (1930)
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher
Statement after his excommunication from Jewish society, attributed by Lucas, in The Oldest Biography of Spinoza (1970) by A. Wolf; also in Spinoza: A Life (1999) by Steven Nadler
Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States
Noah Brooks, scribe for the Sacramento Union, writing in the Harper’s Weekly for July 1865, 3 months after Lincoln had died, reported that the Lincoln once said this, at an unspecified date; as reported in "Did Abraham Lincoln Actually Say That Obama Quote?" by James M. Cornelius, The Daily Beast (9 August 2012) http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/08/did-abraham-lincoln-actually-say-that-obama-quote.html <br class="br">Posthumous attributions
Borís Pasternak book Doctor Zhivago
Мое собственное сердце скрыло бы это от меня, потому что нелюбовь почти как убийство, и я никому не в силах была бы нанести этого удара.
Doctor Zhivago (1957)
Alice Miller (1923–2010) Swiss psychologist
Breaking Down the Wall of Silence (Abbruch der Schweigemauer) (1990)
Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director
Source: Lettres à Génica Athanasiou
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement
1960s, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence (1967)
Context: Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.
And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.
Context: Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing, as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we're always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on. Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony. But we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for in all our history there has never been such a monumental dissent during a war, by the American people.
Davy Crockett (1786–1836) American politician
Comments on his final election defeat (11 August 1835) Ch. 2; in Dr. Swan's Prescriptions for Job-Itis (2003) by Dennis Swanberg and Criswell Freeman, p. 45, part of this seems to have become paraphrased as "Let your tongue speak what your heart thinks." No earlier publication of this version has been located.
Col. Crockett's Exploits and Adventures in Texas (1836)
Sunil Dutt (1929–2005) Hindi film actor
About his wife Nargis’s past love life. Nargis-Sunil Dutt: A real life romance, 20 October 2003, 6 December 2013, Rediff.com http://www.rediff.com/movies/2003/oct/20dutt.htm, <br class="br">We all are one, whichever religion we belong to