“I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”

Pedro Henríquez Ureña, p. 777
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
Context: There is a consoling mythology, constantly being added to, which would have us believe that genius operates beyond donkey work. Thus we are told reassuringly that Einstein was no better at arithmetic than we are; that Mozart gaily broke the rules of composition while jotting down a stream of black dots without even looking; and that Shakespeare didn't care about grammar. Superficially, there are facts to lend substance to these illusions. But illusions they remain. There is always some autistic child in India who can speak in prime numbers, but that doesn't mean Einstein couldn't add up; Mozart would not have been able to break the rules in an interesting way unless he was able to keep them if required; and Shakespeare, far from being careless about grammar, could depart from it in any direction only because he had first mastered it as a structure.

Source: Outlaw Journalist (2008), Chapter 3, The Dark Thumb Of Fate, p. 47

Part IV: Wage Rage, page 120.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)

Period I To the Revival of Letters in Erope
The History and Present State of Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light, and Colours (1772)
Context: Great as Bacon was, he was far from being free from the mistakes and prejudices of those who went before him. Even some of the most wild and absurd opinions of the antients have the sanction of his approbation and authority. He does not hesitate to assent to an opinion... that visual rays proceed from the eye; giving this reason for it, that every thing in nature is qualified to discharge its proper functions by its own powers, in the same manner as the sun, and other celestial bodies. He acknowledges, however, that the presence of light, as well as several other circumstances, is necessary to vision.

Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 270

Fragments of Markham's notes
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: It is an old remark, that as men are, such they paint their gods; and as in themselves the passionate, or demonic nature, long preponderated, so the gods they worshipped were demons like themselves, jealous, capricious, exacting, revengeful, the figures which fill the old mythologies, and appear partly in the Old Testament. They feared them as they feared the powerful of their own race, and sought to propitiate them by similar offerings and services.
Go on, and now we find ourselves on a third stage; but now fast rising into a clearing atmosphere. The absolute worth of goodness is seen as distinct from power; such beings as these demon gods could not he the highest beings. Good and evil could not coexist in one Supreme; absolutely different in nature, they could not have a common origin; the moral world is bipolar, and we have dualism, the two principles, coeternal, coequal.
By and by, again, the horizon widens. The ultimate identity of might and right glimmers out feebly in the Zenda Vesta as the stars come out above the mountains when we climb out of the mist of the valleys. The evil spirit is no longer the absolute independent Ahriman; but Ahriman and Ormuzd are but each a dependent spirit; and an awful formless, boundless figure, the eternal, the illimitable, looms out from the abyss behind them, presently to degrade still farther the falling Ahriman into a mere permitted Satan, finally to be destroyed.

ISBN 9789463962094 Prince Leopold II in a 1863 travel note in admiration for Ferdinand de Lesseps when visiting Egypt and the digging sites of the Suez Canal by tens of thousands of cheap workers.
Source: https://klara.be/leopold-ii-aflevering-3 Leopold II, Het hele Verhaal, Johan Op De Beeck Horizon, 2020

Source: Where the Wild Things Are

MTV Global Discussion https://web.archive.org/web/20020220234413/http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/02/15/powell.mtv/index.html (14 February 2002).
2000s
Context: Far from being the Great Satan, I would say that we are the Great Protector. We have sent men and women from the armed forces of the United States to other parts of the world throughout the past century to put down oppression. We defeated Fascism. We defeated Communism. We saved Europe in World War I and World War II. We were willing to do it, glad to do it. We went to Korea. We went to Vietnam. All in the interest of preserving the rights of people.
And when all those conflicts were over, what did we do? Did we stay and conquer? Did we say, "Okay, we defeated Germany. Now Germany belongs to us? We defeated Japan, so Japan belongs to us"? No. What did we do? We built them up. We gave them democratic systems which they have embraced totally to their soul. And did we ask for any land? No, the only land we ever asked for was enough land to bury our dead. And that is the kind of nation we are.