Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Prerequisite to Dignity of Labour (1957), p. 245
Context: It is not in a person's nature to desire what he already has. Desire is a tendency, the start of a movement toward something, toward a point from which one is absent. If, at the very outset, this movement doubles back on itself toward its point of departure, a person turns round and round like a squirrel in a cage or a prisoner in a condemned cell. Constant turning soon produces revulsion. All workers, especially though not exclusively those who work under inhumane conditions, are easily the victims of revulsion, exhaustion and disgust and the strongest are often the worst affected.
“I might have a chance of starting a movement toward change in this broken system.”
As quoted in "Angus may be a king-maker" by Deborah McDermott in Seacoast Online (11 March 2012) http://www.seacoastonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120311/NEWS/203110325/-1/NEWSMAP
Context: I think I can honestly say that if Olympia had announced her retirement because of ill health or to spend more time with Jock I probably wouldn't have run. … What perked me up is why she is leaving. Olympia has 30 years of seniority, she's likable, she works very hard, and if she can't make it work, nobody in either party is going to make it work. … I don't have any illusions it will be easy, but I do think particularly if the two parties are closely divided, I will have an influence … I might have a chance of starting a movement toward change in this broken system. This country has serious problems, but you can't address them if the institution set up to address the problems is broken.
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Angus King 19
United States Senator from Maine 1944Related quotes
“It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit.”
Source: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Ch. 6
Context: It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dugout I might have been smashed to atoms, and in the open survive ten hours' bombardment unscathed. No soldier survives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl
"Model Vida Guerra's Naked Photo Shoot", video interview with PETA (21 March 2011) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyATIrWIT0c
“Grab a chance and you won't be sorry for a might-have-been.”
We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea (Title page and Chapter 2), 1937
Source: The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy (1963), p. 61
Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 4
Context: Since movement is a metaphor for change, the best thing will be to say: nonchange is (always) change. It would appear that I have finally arrived at the desired disequilibrium. Nonetheless, change is not the primordial, original word that I am searching for: it is a form of becoming. When becoming is substituted for change, the relation between the two terms is altered, so that I am obliged to replace nonchange by permanence, which is a metaphor for fixity, as becoming is for coming-to-be, which in turn is a metaphor for time in all its ceaseless transformations…. There is no beginning, no original word: each one is a metaphor for another word which is a metaphor for yet another, and so on. All of them are translations of translations. A transparency in which the obverse is the reverse: fixity is always momentary.
I begin all over again: if it does not make sense to say that fixity is always momentary, the same may not be true if I say that it never is.