“Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall?”
Ch 25
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Voluntas Tua
Context: Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America — burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion, he thought.
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Walter M. Miller, Jr. 37
American fiction writer 1923–1996Related quotes
"Never Go Hungry"
Song lyrics, Nobody's Daughter (2010)
Shane MacThomais, "90th Anniversary Commemoration Booklet 1831-1915" (Parnell Publications, Parnell Sq, Dublin), p. 2
Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart
2000s, 2006, State of the Union (January 2006)
“At the bottom of the fall we were able to stand again on dry land.”
Ch 10 : Across South Georgia; in this extract, Shackleton was paraphrasing the poem "The Call of the Wild" by Robert Service, published in 1907.
South (1920)
Context: At the bottom of the fall we were able to stand again on dry land. The rope could not be recovered. We had flung down the adze from the top of the fall and also the logbook and the cooker wrapped in one of our blouses. That was all, except our wet clothes, that we brought out of the Antarctic, which we had entered a year and a half before with well-found ship, full equipment, and high hopes. That was all of tangible things; but in memories we were rich. We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had "suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole. We had seen God in His splendours, heard the text that Nature renders." We had reached the naked soul of man.
Speech delivered at the Overtoun Hall, Kolkata in January 1917.
Source: Something Wicked This Way Comes
Remarks during a 2002 White House meeting referring to Bush's second tax cut proposal, as recalled by then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. Reported in Ron Suskind (2004), The Price of Loyalty, ISBN 0-7432-5545-3.
Attributed, Private/attributed