My Reviewers Reviewed (lecture from June 27, 1877, San Francisco, CA)
Context: The waste of that immense force in stopping the planets in their grand courses, for the purpose claimed, would be like using a Krupp gun to destroy an insect to which a single drop of water is “an unbounded world.” How is it possible for men of ordinary intellect, not only to endorse such ignorant falsehoods, but to malign those who do not? Can anything be more debasing to the intellect of man than a belief in the astronomy of the Bible?
Source: From the poem Li-Hawā An-Nufūsi http://www.almotanabbi.com/poemPage.do?poemId=248, Line 8
Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)
Nītiśataka 74; translated by B. Hale Wortham
Śatakatraya
“Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For ordinary men.”
"From a German War Primer"
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 475.
“Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.”
Source: My Name is Red
Variant translation: Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.
As quoted in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1974) edited by Leopold Labedz
Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: We shall be told: what can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.
Original: Chi non ammette i propri errori, confermati da prove, fatti ed eventi, è dotato di scarso intelletto.
Source: prevale.net
