Quotes about end
page 60

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge photo
Karl Kraus photo

“Everyone is stopped and waiting, maitre d's, hansom cab drivers and governments. Everyone's waiting for the end. Let's hope the apocalypse is pleasant, Your Highness.”

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) Czech playwright and publicist

1899, quoted in Franz Hare, Jahrhundertwende 1900: Untergangsstimmung und Fortschrittsglauben, Stuttgart, 1998, p. 190

Tawakkol Karman photo
Tryon Edwards photo

“Most controversies would soon be ended, if those engaged in them would first accurately define their terms, and then adhere to their definitions.”

Tryon Edwards (1809–1894) American theologian

Source: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1891, p. 88.

“I do not know whether it was the will of God, or just an evolutionary accident, but as it happens I am Afrikaans. This is a circumstance with which I am normally perfectly content. The truth is that I actually do not think about it too much, just as I do not think about it too much that I have a liver. The current flutterings about Afrikaans, however, I find disturbing. It is not doing the image of Afrikaners, and hence also of Afrikaans, any good.A mere ten years after the end of apartheid (yes, there was such a thing, and it was evil) to beat one's chest in such a self-justificatory manner, is bad taste morally.…
We are … being called up by certain parties to mobilise for Afrikaans, to fight for the survival of Afrikaans, and for minority rights. The problem is, however, that I do not see myself currently as part of a minority. When, in the 1970s and 1980s, as an Afrikaner, I resisted apartheid – and not in the 1990s when it became fashionable – then I felt myself part of a minority. At present I mainly find myself with an enormous feeling of moral relief. I would now like to carry on with my life and make a constructive contribution at the level of content. I do not wish to have to write letters like this one.”

Paul Cilliers (1956–2011) South African philosopher

Paul Cilliers. A letter to The Burger, 10 October 2005; Cited in: Chris Brink (2006) No Lesser Place: The Taaldebat at Stellenbosch. p. 133

Camille Pissarro photo

“One can do such lovely things with so little. Subjects that are too beautiful end by appearing theatrical – take Switzerland, for example. Think of all the beautiful little things Corot did at Gisors; two willows, a little water, a bridge, like the picture in the Universal Exhibition. What a masterpiece!... Everything is beautiful, all that matters is to be able to interpret.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

In a letter to his son Lucien, 26 July 1892, as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock - , Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 146
Quote of Pissarro, referring to a willow-painting of his former art-teacher Camille Corot
1890's

Ingrid Newkirk photo
Kage Baker photo
Camille Paglia photo
David Hume photo
John Tyndall photo
Bill Gates photo

“Life is not fair. Get used to it… Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

Though widely attributed to Gates on the internet, this list of life suggestions is actually based on one from Charles J. Sykes. More information at Snopes.com http://www.snopes.com/language/document/liferule.htm
Misattributed

Evo Morales photo
James McCosh photo

“She can find in her bewilderment no words wherewith to begin, how to order or where to end her speech; fain would she pour out all in her first utterance, but not even the first words doth fear-stricken shame allow her.”
Nec quibus incipiat demens videt ordine nec quo quove tenus, prima cupiens effundere voce omnia, sed nec prima pudor dat verba timenti.

Source: Argonautica, Book VII, Lines 433–435

Michel Foucault photo
George Bernard Shaw photo

“Well, I tell you again to get rid of your Constitution. But I suppose you won't do it. You have a good president and you have a bad Constitution, and the bad Constitution gets the better of the good President all the time. The end of it will be is that you might as well have an English Prime Minister.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Newsreel interview by George Bernard Shaw entitled “Various Scenes with George Bernard Shaw,” Fox Movietone Newsreel (1931), referring to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency
1910s

Taylor Swift photo
Rose Wilder Lane photo
Stephen Corry photo
Frank Chodorov photo

“All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates.”

Frank Chodorov (1887–1966) American libertarian thinker

Source: Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov (1980), p. 363

Angela Davis photo

“Where cultural representations do not reach out beyond themselves, there is the danger that they will function as the surrogates for activism, that they will constitute both the beginning and the end of political practice.”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

"Black Nationalism: The Sixties and the Nineties." Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle, Wash: Bay Press, 1992), 324.

William Saroyan photo

“Everything begins with inhale and exhale, and never ends.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

The Resurrection of a Life (1935)

Catherine the Great photo
Tim O'Brien photo
H. G. Wells photo

“Suppose, now, there is such a thing as an all-round inferior race. Is that any reason why we should propose to preserve it for ever…? Whether there is a race so inferior I do not know, but certainly there is no race so superior as to be trusted with human charges. The true answer to Aristotle’s plea for slavery, that there are “natural slaves,” lies in the fact that there are no “natural” masters… The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior. There is only one sane and logical thing to be done with a really inferior race, and that is to exterminate it. Now there are various ways of exterminating a race, and most of them are cruel. You may end it with fire and sword after the old Hebrew fashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniards did the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowly with deleterious commodities, as the Americans do with most of their Indians; you may incite it to wear clothing to which it is not accustomed and to live under new and strange conditions that will expose it to infectious diseases to which you yourselves are immune, as the missionaries do the Polynesians; you may resort to honest simple murder, as we English did with the Tasmanians; or you can maintain such conditions as conduce to “race suicide,” as the British administration does in Fiji. Suppose, then, for a moment, that there is an all-round inferior race… If any of the race did, after all, prove to be fit to survive, they would survive—they would be picked out with a sure and automatic justice from the over-ready condemnation of all their kind. Is there, however, an all-round inferior race in the world? Even the Australian black-fellow is, perhaps, not quite so entirely eligible for extinction as a good, wholesome, horse-racing, sheep-farming Australian white may think. These queer little races, the black-fellows, the Pigmies, the Bushmen, may have their little gifts, a greater keenness, a greater fineness of this sense or that, a quaintness of the imagination or what not, that may serve as their little unique addition to the totality of our Utopian civilisation. We are supposing that every individual alive on earth is alive in Utopia, and so all the surviving “black-fellows” are there. Every one of them in Utopia has had what none have had on earth, a fair education and fair treatment, justice, and opportunity…Some may be even prosperous and admired, may have married women of their own or some other race, and so may be transmitting that distinctive thin thread of excellence, to take its due place in the great synthesis of the future.”

Source: A Modern Utopia (1905), Ch. 10, sect. 3

Charles Lightoller photo
Jonah Goldberg photo
Ricardo Sanchez photo
John Polkinghorne photo

“Let me end this chapter by suggesting that religion has done something for science. The latter came to full flower in its modern form in seventeenth-century Europe. Have you ever wondered why that's so? After all the ancient Greeks were pretty clever and the Chinese achieved a sophisticated culture well before we Europeans did, yet they did not hit on science as we now understand it. Quite a lot of people have thought that the missing ingredient was provided by the Christian religion. Of course, it's impossible to prove that so - we can't rerun history without Christianity and see what happens - but there's a respectable case worth considering. It runs like this.
The way Christians think about creation (and the same is true for Jews and Muslims) has four significant consequences. The first is that we expect the world to be orderly because its Creator is rational and consistent, yet God is also free to create a universe whichever way God chooses. Therefore, we can't figure it out just by thinking what the order of nature ought to be; we'll have to take a look and see. In other words, observation and experiment are indispensable. That's the bit the Greeks missed. They thought you could do it all just by cogitating. Third, because the world is God's creation, it's worthy of study. That, perhaps, was a point that the Chinese missed as they concentrated their attention on the world of humanity at the expense of the world of nature. Fourth, because the creation is not itself divine, we can prod it and investigate it without impiety. Put all these features together, and you have the intellectual setting in which science can get going.
It's certainly a historical fact that most of the pioneers of modern science were religious men. They may have had their difficulties with the Church (like Galileo) or been of an orthodox cast of mind (like Newton), but religion was important for them. They used to like to say that God had written two books for our instruction, the book of scripture and the book of nature. I think we need to try to decipher both books if we're to understand what's really happening.”

John Polkinghorne (1930) physicist and priest

page 29-30.
Quarks, Chaos & Christianity (1995)

Lewis Black photo

“You know what would help the instruction form? Verbs! Verbs would be nice! Because they help you get to the end of a thought!”

Lewis Black (1948) American stand-up comedian, author, playwright, social critic and actor

Taxed Beyond Belief (2002)

Robin Maugham photo
Roger Manganelli photo
Charlotte Brontë photo

“Yesterday I went for the second time to the Crystal Palace. We remained in it about three hours, and I must say I was more struck with it on this occasion than at my first visit. It is a wonderful place – vast, strange, new and impossible to describe. Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. Whatever human industry has created you find there, from the great compartments filled with railway engines and boilers, with mill machinery in full work, with splendid carriages of all kinds, with harness of every description, to the glass-covered and velvet-spread stands loaded with the most gorgeous work of the goldsmith and silversmith, and the carefully guarded caskets full of real diamonds and pearls worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. It may be called a bazaar or a fair, but it is such a bazaar or fair as Eastern genii might have created. It seems as if only magic could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth – as if none but supernatural hands could have arranged it this, with such a blaze and contrast of colours and marvellous power of effect. The multitude filling the great aisles seems ruled and subdued by some invisible influence. Amongst the thirty thousand souls that peopled it the day I was there not one loud noise was to be heard, not one irregular movement seen; the living tide rolls on quietly, with a deep hum like the sea heard from the distance.”

Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) English novelist and poet

Charlotte Brontë, on attending The Great Exhibition of 1851. The Brontes' Life and Letters, (by Clement King Shorter) (1907)

Seneca the Younger photo

“Nothing lasts forever, few things even last for long: all are susceptible of decay in one way or another; moreover all that begins also ends.”
Nihil perpetuum, pauca diuturna sunt; aliud alio modo fragile est, rerum exitus variantur, ceterum quicquid coepit et desinit.

From Ad Polybium De Consolatione (Of Consolation, To Polybius), chap. I; translation based on work of Aubrey Stewart
Other works

Friedrich Hayek photo
Báb photo
Jean Vanier photo
Bartolomé de las Casas photo
Gough Whitlam photo

“If I begin my book with a review of the coup, it is only to show that my abiding interests for Australia did not end with it. They shall end only with a long and fortunate life.”

Gough Whitlam (1916–2014) Australian politician, 21st Prime Minister of Australia

Abiding Interests (1997), Foreword

RuPaul photo
Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV photo

“Here, in India, the problem is peculiar. Our trade tends steadily to expand and it is possible to demonstrate by means of statistics the increasing prosperity of the country generally. On the other hand, we in India know that the ancient handicrafts are decaying, that the fabrics for which India was renowned in the past are supplanted by the products of Western looms, and that our industries are not displaying that renewed vitality which will enable them to compete successfully in the home or the foreign market. The cutivator on the margin of subsistence remains a starveling cultivator, the educated man seeks Government employment or the readily available profession of a lawyer, while the belated artisan works on the lines marked out for him by his forefathers for a return that barely keeps body and soul together. It is said that India is dependent on agriculture and must always remain so. That may be so; but there can, I venture to think, be little doubt that the solution of the ever recurring famine problem is to be found not merely in the improvement of agriculture, the cheapening of loans, or the more equitable distribution of taxation, but still more in the removal from the land to industrial pursuits of a great portion of those, who, at the best, gain but a miserable subsistence, and on the slightest failure of the season are thrown on public charity. It is time for us in India to be up and doing; new markets must be found, new methods adopted and new handicrafts developed, whilst the educated unemployed, no less than the skilled and unskilled labourers, all those, in fact, whose precarious means of livelihood is a standing menace to the well-being of the State must find employment in reorganised and progressive industries It seems to me that what we want is more outside light and assistance from those interested in industries. Our schools should not be left entirely to officials who are either fully occupied with their other duties or whose ideas are prone, in the nature of things, to run in official grooves. I should like to see all those who "think" and “know" giving us their active assistance and not merely their criticism of our results. It is not Governments or forms of Government that have made the great industrial nations, but the spirit of the people and the energy of one and all working to a common end.”

Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV (1884–1940) King of Mysore

On the occasion of the opening of Industrial and Arts Exhibition on 26 December 1903 in Madras (now known as Chennai) Modern_Mysore, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Open University, 26 November 2013, archive.org, 203 http://archive.org/stream/modernmysore035292mbp/modernmysore035292mbp_djvu.txt,
As ruler of the state

Czeslaw Milosz photo

“On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"A Song On the End of the World" http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19195

David McNally photo

“Genuine growth is always dialogical — it requires engagement in a dynamic, developing, and open-ended dialogue.”

David McNally (1953) Canadian political scientist

Source: Another World Is Possible : Globalization and Anti-capitalism (2002), Chapter 7, Freedom Song, p. 231

E. W. Hobson photo

“The second period, which commenced in the middle of the seventeenth century, and lasted for about a century, was characterized by the application of the powerful analytical methods provided by the new Analysis to the determination of analytical expressions for the number π in the form of convergent series, products, and continued fractions. The older geometrical forms of investigation gave way to analytical processes in which the functional relationship as applied to the trigonometrical functions became prominent. The new methods of systematic representation gave rise to a race of calculators of π, who, in their consciousness of the vastly enhance means of calculation placed in their hands by the new Analysis, proceeded to apply the formulae to obtain numerical approximations to π to ever larger numbers of places of decimals, although their efforts were quite useless for the purpose of throwing light upon the true nature of that number. At the end of this period no knowledge had been obtained as regards the number π of the kind likely to throw light upon the possibility or impossibility of the old historical problem of the ideal construction; it was not even definitely known whether the number is rational or irrational. However, one great discovery, destined to furnish the clue to the solution of the problem, was made at this time; that of the relation between the two numbers π and e, as a particular case of those exponential expressions for the trigonometrical functions which form one of the most fundamentally important of the analytical weapons forged during this period.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Squaring the Circle (1913), pp. 11-12

Thomas Hobbes photo
Julian of Norwich photo
Simon Cowell photo

“If I tape an 11-hour day, guess which parts end up on air. Not the bits when I'm pleasant, but the parts when I'm obnoxious.”

Simon Cowell (1959) English reality television judge, television producer and music executive

Quoted in interview, Playboy magazine (February 2007)
2000s

Thomas Henry Huxley photo
Anthony Watts photo
Thomas Browne photo

“To make an end of all things on Earth, and our Planetical System of the World, he (God) need but put out the Sun”

Thomas Browne (1605–1682) English polymath

Letter to a Friend (circa 1656)

Tom Robbins photo
George Macaulay Trevelyan photo

“Their demands were limited and practical, and for that reasonthey successfully initiated a movement that led in the end to yet undreamt-of liberties for all.”

George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876–1962) Historian

describing the English barons who pressured King John into accepting the Magna Carta.
A Shortened History of England (1959)

Henry Adams photo

“The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Leo Tolstoy photo
Herbert A. Simon photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Thomas Browne photo
Augusto Boal photo
Alphonse Daudet photo

“That's fame: just a cigar with the hot end and ash in your mouth.”

Alphonse Daudet (1840–1897) French novelist

C'est ça la gloire. Un bon cigare dans la bouche par le côté du feu et de la cendre.
L'immortel: mœurs parisiennes (1888; repr. Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1890) p. 56; Arthur Woollgar Verrall and Margaret de G. Verrall (trans.) One of the "Forty" (Chicago: Rand, McNally, 1920) p. 50.

Walter Schellenberg photo
Owen Lovejoy photo

“In truth, I swore to support the Constitution because I believe in it. I do not believe in their construction of it. It is as well known as any historical fact can be known, that the framers of the Constitution so worded it as that it never should recognize the idea of slave property. From the beginning to the ending of it.”

Owen Lovejoy (1811–1864) American politician

As quoted in His Brother's Blood: Speeches and Writings, 1838–64 https://books.google.com/books?id=qMEv8DNXVbIC&pg=PA199 (2004), edited by William Frederick Moore and Jane Ann Moore, p. 199
1860s, Speech to the U.S. House of Representatives (April 1860)

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos photo

“Luxury, nowadays, is ruinous. We criticize, but must conform, and superfluities in the end deprive us of necessities.”

Le luxe absorbe tout: on le blâme, mais il faut l'imiter; et le superflu finit par priver du nécessaire.
Letter 104: La Marquise de Merteuil to Madame de Volanges. Trans. P.W.K. Stone (1961). http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Liaisons_dangereuses_-_Lettre_104
Les liaisons dangereuses (1782)

Adam Roberts photo

“So it ends
As it begins.
Off we climb
And no one wins.”

From Thom Gunn, “Seesaw” quoted in Part 3, “The Impossible Gun” Epigram (p. 261).
Jack Glass (2012)

John Barrowman photo
George Holmes Howison photo
Russell Brand photo

“With each tentative tiptoe and stumble, I had to inwardly assure myself that I was a good comedian and that my life was not pointless. “I am addicted to comfort,” I thought as I tumbled into the wood chips. I have become divorced from nature; I don’t know what the names of the trees and birds are. I don’t know what berries to eat or which stars will guide me home. I don’t know how to sleep outside in a wood or skin a rabbit. We have become like living cutlets, sanitized into cellular ineptitude. They say that supermarkets have three days’ worth of food. That if there was a power cut, in three days the food would spoil. That if cash machines stopped working, if cars couldn’t be filled with fuel, if homes were denied warmth, within three days we’d be roaming the streets like pampered savages, like urban zebras with nowhere to graze. The comfort has become a prison; we’ve allowed them to turn us into waddling pipkins. What is civilization but dependency? Now, I’m not suggesting we need to become supermen; that solution has been averred before and did not end well. Prisoners of comfort, we dread the Apocalypse. What will we do without our pre-packed meals and cozy jails and soporific glowing screens rocking us comatose? The Apocalypse may not arrive in a bright white instant; it may creep into the present like a fog. All about us we may see the shipwrecked harbingers foraging in the midsts of our excess. What have we become that we can tolerate adjacent destitution? That we can amble by ragged despair at every corner? We have allowed them to sever us from God, and until we take our brothers by the hand we will find no peace.”

Revolution (2014)

Nicolas Chamfort photo
George W. Bush photo
Anthony Kiedis photo

“In the end the question is: Who is to be master, man or his machines? As long as the control over technology rests primarily on economic calculation, the victor is not likely to be man.”

Robert L. Heilbroner (1919–2005) American historian and economist

Source: The Future As History (1960), Chapter III, part 10, The Mastery of Technology, p. 161

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi photo
Ralph Klein photo

“Edmonton isn’t really the end of the world – although you can see it from there.”

Ralph Klein (1942–2013) Canadian politician

Source: The best quotes from Ralph Klein’s colourful public life http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/the-best-quotes-from-ralph-kleins-colourful-public-life/article10577310/

Mark Satin photo
Sri Aurobindo photo
Mahatma Gandhi photo

“Once you become self-conscious, there is no end to it; once you start to doubt, there is no room for anything else.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Will Arnett photo
Don Henley photo
Jackson Browne photo

“Out into the cool of the evening strolls the pretender. He knows that all his hopes and dreams begin and end there.”

Jackson Browne (1948) American singer-songwriter

The Pretender from The Pretender (1976)

Samuel Vince photo

“The rapid establishment of Christianity must therefore have been from the conviction which those who embraced it, had of its "Truth and power unto salvation." Christianity at first spread itself amongst the most enlightened nations of the earth - in those places where human learning was in its greatest perfection; and, by the force of the evidence which attended it, amongst such men it gained an establishment. It has been justly observed, that "it happened very providentially to the honour of the Christian religion, that it did not take its rise in the dark illiterate ages of the world, but at a time when arts and sciences were t their height, and when there were men who made it the business of their lives to search after truth and lift the several opinions of the philosophers and wise men, concerning the duty, the end, and chief happiness of reasonable creatures." Both the learned and the ignorant alike embraced its doctrines; the learned were not likely to be deceived in the proofs which were offered; and the same cause undoubtedly operated to produce the effect upon each. But an immediate conversion of the bulk of mankind, can arise only from some proofs of a ddivine authority offering themselves immediately to the senses; the preaching of any new doctrine, if lest to operate only by its own force, would go but a very little way towards the immediate conversion of the gnorant, who have no principle of action but what arises from habit, and whose powers of reasoning are insufficient to correct their errors. When Mahomet was required by his followers to work a miracle for their conviction, he always declined it; he was too cautious to trust to an experiment, the success of which was scarcely whithin the bounds of probablity; he amused his followers with prtended visions, which with the aid afterwards of the civil and military powr; and as the accomplishment of that event was by a few obscure persons, who founded their pretentions upon authority from heaven, we are next to consider, what kind of proofs of their divine commission they offered to the world; and whether they themselves could have been deceived, or mankind could have been deludded by them.”

Samuel Vince (1749–1821) British mathematician, astronomer and physicist

Source: The Credibility of Christianity Vindicated, p. 20; As quoted in " Book review http://books.google.nl/books?id=52tAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA261," in The British Critic, Volume 12 (1798). F. and C. Rivington. p. 261-262

James Madison photo

“Justice is the end of Government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be pursued, until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Federalist No. 51 (6 February 1788)
1780s, Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

“I do not know why journalists insist on calling their stuff "pieces", when they are in fact little entities, attempting to have beginnings, middles and endings.”

James Cameron (journalist) (1911–1985) British journalist

The Best of Cameron (Sevenoaks: New English Library, 1981) p. 49. ISBN 0450048810.

Joe Higgins photo

“We want to see measures to implement taxation justice for ordinary working people. We want an end to the policy of many years now, of huge tax concessions for big corporations and a plethora of stealth taxes on ordinary families and ordinary working people.”

Joe Higgins (1949) Irish socialist politician

In November 2003. breakingnews.ie http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/higgins-mccreevy-must-deliver-tax-justice-in-budget-123560.html

Friedrich Engels photo

“Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

Anti-Dühring http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/quotes/index.htm (1878)

Ursula K. Le Guin photo

“The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.”

Source: The Lathe of Heaven (1971), Chapter 6

Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Nathanael Greene photo

“Hitherto our principal difficulty has arose from a want of proper supplies of money, and from the inefficacy of that which we obtained; but now there appears a scene opening which will introduce new embarrassments. The Congress have recommended to the different States to take upon themselves the furnishing certain species of supplies for our department. The recommendation falls far short of the general detail of the business, the difficulty of ad justing which, between the different agents as well as the different authorities from which they derive their appointments, I am very apprehensive will introduce some jarring interests, many improper disputes, as well as dangerous delays. Few persons, who have not a competent knowledge of this employment, can form any tolerable idea of the arrangements necessary to give despatch and success in discharging the duties of the office, or see the necessity for certain relations and dependencies. The great exertions which are frequently necessary to be made, require the whole machine to be moved by one common interest, and directed to one general end. How far the present measures, recommended to the different States, are calculated to promote these desirable purposes, I cannot pretend to say; but there appears to me such a maze, from the mixed modes adopted by some States, and about to be adopted by others, that I cannot see the channels, through which the business may be conducted, free from disorder and confusion.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (January 1780)

John Ramsay McCulloch photo
Vivian Stanshall photo
Mobutu Sésé Seko photo
Paul Krugman photo
Ian McEwan photo
William McFee photo

“Responsibility's like a string we can only see the middle of. Both ends are out of sight.”

William McFee (1881–1966) American writer

Book II: The City, Ch. VI
Casuals of the Sea (1916)