“Life is short. Short, and not about anything except what you can touch and what touches you.”
2000s, Is Diversity Good? (2003)
Context: To allow slavery to be introduced into free territories, where it had not hitherto existed, was, Abraham Lincoln held, a very bad thing. His opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, held that it was a sacred right, belonging to the people of each territory, to decide for themselves whether or not to have slavery among their domestic institutions. According to Douglas, Lincoln wanted to destroy the diversity upon which the union had subsisted, by insisting that all the states ought to be free. But for Douglas himself, the principle of 'popular sovereignty' did not admit of exceptions. There was to be no diversity, no deviation from the right of the people to decide. For Lincoln the wrongness of slavery meant that no one, and no people, had the right to decide in its favor. For Lincoln, the principle of human equality, "that all men are created equal", did not admit exceptions.
“Do you seek Alcides' equal? None is, except himself.”
Hercules Furens (The Madness of Hercules), line 84.
Tragedies
continuity (13) “Multiply by a Million”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
“If an idea is true, it belongs equally to all who are capable of understanding it.”
Source: The Crisis of the Modern World (1927), p. 73
“Take everything you like seriously, except yourselves.”
As quoted in Life of John Stuart Mill (1954) by M. St.J. Packe, Bk. I, Ch. II
“None of you ask for anything — except everything, but just for so long as you need it.”
Anna Wulf
The Golden Notebook (1962)
“Life grows short. Have you done everything you wanted to do, or have you played it safe?”
Shit Magnet: One Man's Miraculous Ability to Absorb the World's Guilt (Feral House, 2002)
