
“I'll fling a spear myself and leave the rest to Zeus.”
XVII. 515 (tr. Robert Fagles).
Iliad (c. 750 BC)
Rule a Wife and Have a Wife (licensed 19 October 1624; 1640), Act III, scene 5.
“I'll fling a spear myself and leave the rest to Zeus.”
XVII. 515 (tr. Robert Fagles).
Iliad (c. 750 BC)
“Fling but a stone, the giant dies.”
Source: The Spleen (1737), Line 93.
How Twitter radicals are controlling corporate America (2019)
“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar.”
1960s, Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam (1967)
Context: A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be changed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
“It is a graph of a theme that flings
The dancer kneeling on nothing into the wings”
"Grace" in The Poems of Richard Wilbur (1963)
Context: Hebetude. It is a graph of a theme that flings
The dancer kneeling on nothing into the wings,
And Nijinsky hadn't the words to make the laws
For learning to loiter in air; he merely said,
"I merely leap and pause."
(14th January 1826) Lezione per l’Amore
The London Literary Gazette, 1826
“Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.”
Source: Fahrenheit 451