only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow. I like to think of the world I created as being a kind of keystone in the universe; that, small as that keystone is, if it were ever taken away the universe itself would collapse.
Paris Review interview (1958)
Letter to W G Whittaker, 1914, quoted in Paul Holmes Holst p. 62.
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)
Context: In any case God's act was the union of Mind with Matter by the same act or will which created both. No intermediate cause or condition intervened; no secondary influence had anything whatever to do with the result. Time had nothing to do with it. Every individual that has existed or shall exist was created by the same instantaneous act, for all time. "When the question regards the universal agent who produces beings and time, we cannot consider him as acting now and before, according to the succession of time." God emanated time, force, matter, mind, as he might emanate gravitation, not as a part of his substance but as an energy of his will, and maintains them in their activity by the same act, not by a new one. Every individual is a part of the direct act, not a secondary outcome.
"Communism. The Production of the Form of Intercourse Itself",
The Marx-Engels Reader
The German Ideology (1845/46)
Source: The German Ideology (1845-1846), Vol. I, Part 4.
1970s, State of the Union Address (1975)
Context: Government exists to create and preserve conditions in which people can translate their ideas into practical reality. In the best of times, much is lost in translation. But we try. Sometimes we have tried and failed. Always we have had the best of intentions.
But in the recent past, we sometimes forgot the sound principles that guided us through most of our history. We wanted to accomplish great things and solve age-old problems. And we became overconfident of our abilities. We tried to be a policeman abroad and the indulgent parent here at home.
We thought we could transform the country through massive national programs, but often the programs did not work. Too often they only made things worse. In our rush to accomplish great deeds quickly, we trampled on sound principles of restraint and endangered the rights of individuals. We unbalanced our economic system by the huge and unprecedented growth of Federal expenditures and borrowing. And we were not totally honest with ourselves about how much these programs would cost and how we would pay for them.
Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.10
“Simple people, people who don't exist, prefer things which don't exist,simple things.”
"Foreword to an Exhibit: I" (1944)
Context: Simple people, people who don't exist, prefer things which don't exist, simple things.
"Good" and "bad" are simple things. You bomb me = "bad." I bomb you = "good." Simple people(who, incidentally, run this socalled world)know this(they know everything)whereas complex people—people who feel something—are very, very ignorant and really don't know anything.
Reported in Biography of Rev. Hosea Ballou (1854) p. 261.
