1990s
“All passions that suffer themselves to be relished and digested are but moderate.”
Book I, Ch. 2. Of Sorrow
Essais (1595), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“754. Absence cools moderate Passions, but inflames violent ones.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“When the sword is once drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation.”
No. 16 http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa16.htm : The Insufficiency of the Present Confederation to Preserve the Union
The Federalist Papers (1787–1788)
Context: When the sword is once drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation. The suggestions of wounded pride, the instigations of irritated resentment, would be apt to carry the States against which the arms of the Union were exerted, to any extremes necessary to avenge the affront or to avoid the disgrace of submission. The first war of this kind would probably terminate in a dissolution of the Union.
[Richard H., Weiss, November 5, 1998, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Times columnist likes to mine a vein of thought, G1]
About
“I've always admitted that I'm ruled by my passions.”
As quoted in "Elizabeth Taylor's 20 best quotes" in The Telegraph (23 March 2011) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/8401001/Elizabeth-Taylors-20-best-quotes.html
Source: Anti-Machiavel, Ch. 6 : New States That The Prince Acquires By His Valor And His Own Weapons
Debating Linus Pauling, in The Nuclear Bomb Tests...Is Fallout Overrated? : Fallout and Disarmament KQED-TV, San Francisco (20 February 1958) http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/specialcollections/coll/pauling/peace/papers/1958p2.1.html
Context: I don't want to kill anybody. I am passionately opposed to killing, but I'm even more passionately fond of freedom. The freedom of Dr. Pauling and of myself expressing our opinions freely on any subject, however broad, however far removed of our proper competence, but particularly, to be able to express our opinions in the fields we really know; this would not be possible in Russia.
“I eat football, I sleep football, I breathe football. I'm not mad, I'm just passionate.”
Attributed
“I'm so romantic
I'm such a passionate man
Sometimes I panic
What if nobody finds out who I am?”
Big Man on Mulberry Street.
Song lyrics, The Bridge (1986)
"To the Countess of Essex, Upon Her Grief occasioned by the loss of Her only Daughter" (29 January 1674), in Miscellanea (4th ed. pub. 1705), p. 172.
Variant: "Christianity teaches us to moderate our passions; to temper our affections toward all things below; to be thankful for the possession, and patient under loss, whenever He who gave shall see fit to take away." Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 140.
