
A Drinking Song http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1399/
The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)
From The Poetry of Menotti Lerro, p. 41
A Drinking Song http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1399/
The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)
Living Among Meat Eaters: The Vegetarians' Survival Handbook https://books.google.it/books?id=g1pMQzt6rGwC&pg=PA0 (Lantern Books, 2008), chapter 1.
In a letter to Otto Juliusburger, September 29, 1942. Available in Einstein Archives 38-238
1940s
Variant: Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.
Context: People like you and I, though mortal of course like everyone else, do not grow old no matter how long we live... [We] never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.
Source: Conversations with Judith Cladel (1939–1944), p. 406
Preface; Previous Attempts Miss the Point.
1930s, On the Rocks (1933)
Context: The extermination of what the exterminators call inferior races is as old as history. "Stone dead hath no fellow" said Cromwell when he tried to exterminate the Irish. "The only good nigger is a dead nigger" say the Americans of the Ku-Klux temperament. "Hates any man the thing he would not kill?" said Shylock naively. But we white men, as we absurdly call ourselves in spite of the testimony of our looking glasses, regard all differently colored folk as inferior species. Ladies and gentlemen class rebellious laborers with vermin. The Dominicans, the watchdogs of God, regarded the Albigenses as the enemies of God, just as Torquemada regarded the Jews as the murderers of God. All that is an old story: what we are confronted with now is a growing perception that if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it. There is a difference between the shooting at sight of aboriginal natives in the back blocks of Australia and the massacres of aristocrats in the terror which followed the foreign attacks on the French Revolution. The Australian gunman pots the aboriginal natives to satisfy his personal antipathy to a black man with uncut hair. But nobody in the French Republic had this feeling about Lavoisier, nor can any German Nazi have felt that way about Einstein. Yet Lavoisier was guillotined; and Einstein has had to fly for his life from Germany. It was silly to say that the Republic had no use for chemists; and no Nazi has stultified his party to the extent of saying that the new National Socialist Fascist State in Germany has no use for mathematician-physicists. The proposition is that aristocrats (Lavoisier's class) and Jews (Einstein's race) are unfit to enjoy the privilege of living in a modern society founded on definite principles of social welfare as distinguished from the old promiscuous aggregations crudely policed by chiefs who had no notion of social criticism and no time to invent it.
“Temper us in fire, and we grow stronger. When we suffer, we survive.”
Source: City of Heavenly Fire
“Mutual reflection. Open and candid conversation. Questioning of old beliefs and assumptions.”
The Dance of Change (1999)
Context: Mutual reflection. Open and candid conversation. Questioning of old beliefs and assumptions. Learning to let go. Awareness of how our own actions create the systemic structures that produce our problems. Developing these learning capabilities lies at the heart of profound change.
“We cannot grow when we are in shame, and we can't use shame to change ourselves or others.”
Source: I Thought It Was Just Me: Women Reclaiming Power and Courage in a Culture of Shame