
My Destiny.
Song lyrics, Back to Front (1992)
My Destiny.
Song lyrics, Back to Front (1992)
Source: Jayant V. Narlikar Violent Phenomena in the Universe http://books.google.com/books?id=VFbCAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover, Courier Dover Publications, 16 October 2012, p. 1
Mary's Song (Oh My My My), written by Taylor Swift, Liz Rose, and Brian Maher.
Song lyrics, Taylor Swift (2006)
Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 147
“A glorious death is his
Who for his country falls.”
XV. 496–497 (tr. Lord Derby); spoken by Hector.
Iliad (c. 750 BC)
"Revenge of the introverts: It's often assumed extroverts do best in life, but a new book reveals quite the opposite... ," The Daily Mail, March 25, 2012.
Interview with Steve Alten http://www.screenwritersutopia.com/article/d14867f2 (March 11th, 2004)
" To The Stone-Cutters http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/poetry/stone.html" in Tamar and Other Poems (1924)
Referring to the figure of the prostitute.
Source: A History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869), Chapter 5 (3rd edition pages 282-283).
Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)
The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)
Stanza 1, quoted in Walter Scott's Kenilworth (1821), Ch. 6. Compare: "Jove, thou regent of the skies", Alexander Pope, The Odyssey, book ii, line 42; "Now Cynthia, named fair regent of the night", John Gay, Trivia, book iii; "And hail their queen, fair regent of the night", Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, part i, canto ii, line 90.
Cumnor Hall (1784)
On Chopin's Preludes in Histoire de Ma Vie (1902-04), Vo. IV, p. 439
Context: It was there he composed these most beautiful of short pages which he modestly entitled the Preludes. They are masterpieces. Several bring to mind visions of deceased monks and the sound of funeral chants; others are melancholy and fragrant; they came to him in times of sun and health, in the clamor of laughing children under he window, the faraway sound of guitars, birdsongs from the moist leaves, in the sight of the small pale roses coming in bloom on the snow. … Still others are of a mournful sadness, and while charming your ear, they break your heart. There is one that came to him through an evening of dismal rain — it casts the soul into a terrible dejection. Maurice and I had left him in good health one morning to go shopping in Palma for things we needed at out "encampment." The rain came in overflowing torrents. We made three leagues in six hours, only to return in the middle of a flood. We got back in absolute dark, shoeless, having been abandoned by our driver to cross unheard of perils. We hurried, knowing how our sick one would worry. Indeed he had, but now was as though congealed in a kind of quiet desperation, and, weeping, he was playing his wonderful Prelude. Seeing us come in, he got up with a cry, then said with a bewildered air and a strange tone, "Ah, I was sure that you were dead." When he recovered his spirits and saw the state we were in, he was ill, picturing the dangers we had been through, but he confessed to me that while waiting for us he had seen it all in a dream, and no longer distinguished the dream from reality, he became calm and drowsy while playing the piano, persuaded that he was dead himself. He saw himself drowned in a lake. Heavy drops of icy water fell in a regular rhythm on his breast, and when I made him listen to the sound of the drops of water indeed falling in rhythm on the roof, he denied having heard it. He was even angry that I should intepret this in terms of imitative sounds. He protested with all his might — and he was right to — against the childishness of such aural imitations. His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky. … The gift of Chopin is [the expression of] the deepest and fullest feelings and emotions that have ever existed. He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power.
“Appear to know only this,—never to fail nor fall.”
That Courage is not inconsistent with Caution, book ii. Chap. i.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Book II, Chapter 3, "The Shocking Alternative"
Mere Christianity (1952)
Context: I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
Scaffold speech (1683)
Context: The Lord sanctify these my sufferings unto me, and though I fall as a sacrifice unto the — Idols, suffer not idolatry to be established in this land. Bless thy people and save them. Defend thy own cause and those that defend it. Stir up such as are faint. Direct those that are willing. Confirm those that waver. Give wisdom and integrity unto all. Order all things so as they may most redound unto thine own glory. Grant that I may die glorifying thee for all thy mercies and that (as the last) thou hast permitted me to be singled out as witness of thy truth, and even by the confession of my oppressors, for that Old Cause in which I was from my youth engaged and for which thou hast often and wonderfully declared thyself.
Edie : American Girl (1982)
Context: Everything that happened to me has been a paradox for life. The very things that I should have done would have been the trap. The very things I might have given into, that demanded, that said, this is your life. I mean, this is your only way to survive, are the things I found hardest to end. 'Cause I believed in something else. You have to work like mad to make people understand... Even if I don't make it, you know, I really insist on believing, and then I fall off the edge because there's nobody else to follow it. And I would just fall off the edge.
“Euryalus
In death went reeling down,
And blood streamed on his handsome length, his neck
Collapsing let his head fall on his shoulder—
As a bright flower cut by a passing plow
Will droop and wither slowly, or a poppy
Bow its head upon its tired stalk
When overborne by a passing rain.”
Volvitur Euryalus leto, pulchrosque per artus
It cruor inque umeros cervix conlapsa recumbit:
Purpureus veluti cum flos succisus aratro
Languescit moriens; lassove papavera collo
Demisere caput, pluvia cum forte gravantur.
Compare:
Μήκων δ' ὡς ἑτέρωσε κάρη βάλεν, ἥ τ' ἐνὶ κήπῳ
καρπῷ βριθομένη νοτίῃσί τε εἰαρινῇσιν,
ὣς ἑτέρωσ' ἤμυσε κάρη πήληκι βαρυνθέν.
He bent drooping his head to one side, as a garden poppy
bends beneath the weight of its yield and the rains of springtime;
so his head bent slack to one side beneath the helm's weight.
Homer, Iliad, VIII, 306–308 (tr. R. Lattimore)
Source: Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book IX, Lines 433–437 (tr. Fitzgerald)
“Let not sleep fall upon thy eyes till thou has thrice reviewed the transactions of the past day.”
As translated in The Rambler No. 8 http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=Joh1Ram.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=8&division=div1 (14 April 1750) by Samuel Johnson
Let not sleep e'er close thy eyes
Without thou ask thyself: What have I omitted and what done?
Abstain thou if 'tis evil; persevere if good.
As translated by Fabre d'Olivet
Do not let sleep close your tired eyes until you have three times gone over the events of the day. 'What did I do wrong? What did I accomplish? What did I fail to do that I should have done?' Starting from the beginning, go through to the end. Then, reproach yourself for the things you did wrong, and take pleasure in the good things you did.
As quoted in Divine Harmony: The Life and Teachings of Pythagoras by John Strohmeier and Peter Westbrook. (1999)
The Golden Verses
Context: Let not sleep fall upon thy eyes till thou has thrice reviewed the transactions of the past day. Where have I turned aside from rectitude? What have I been doing? What have I left undone, which I ought to have done? Begin thus from the first act, and proceed; and, in conclusion, at the ill which thou hast done, be troubled, and rejoice for the good.
Neb [No-one] (1985)
Context: On seeing his shadow fall on such ancient rocks, he had to question himself in a different context and ask the same old question as before, "Who am I?", and the answer now came more emphatically than ever before, "No-one."
But a no-one with a crown of light about his head. He would remember a verse from Pindar: "Man is a dream about a shadow. But when some splendour falls upon him from God, a glory comes to him and his life is sweet."
Lecture to the Chicago chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (1904); later published as "The Art and Craft of the Machine" in On Architecture: Selected Writings (1894-1940) (1941) <!-- Duell, Sloan, & Pearce publishers -->
Context: If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization … go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city. There beneath you is the monster, stretching acre upon acre into the far distance. High over head hangs the stagnant pall of its fetid breath, reddened with light from myriad eyes endlessly, everywhere blinking. Thousands of acres of cellular tissue, the city’s flesh outspreads layer upon layer, enmeshed by an intricate network of veins and arteries radiating into the gloom, and in them, with muffled, persistent roar, circulating as the blood circulates in your veins, is the almost ceaseless beat of the activity to whose necessities it all conforms. The poisonous waste is drawn from the system of this gigantic creature by infinitely ramifying, thread-like ducts, gathering at their sensitive terminals matter destructive of its life, hurrying it to millions of small intestines to be collected in turn by larger, flowing to the great sewers, on to the drainage canal, and finally to the ocean.
The First Part, Chapter 5, p. 21 (See also: John Rawls).
Leviathan (1651)
Context: It is not easy to fall into any absurdity, unless it be by the length of an account; wherein he may perhaps forget what went before. For all men by nature reason alike, and well, when they have good principles. For who is so stupid as both to mistake in geometry, and also to persist in it, when another detects his error to him?
By this it appears that reason is not, as sense and memory, born with us; nor gotten by experience only, as prudence is; but attained by industry: first in apt imposing of names; and secondly by getting a good and orderly method in proceeding from the elements, which are names, to assertions made by connexion of one of them to another; and so to syllogisms, which are the connexions of one assertion to another, till we come to a knowledge of all the consequences of names appertaining to the subject in hand; and that is it, men call science. And whereas sense and memory are but knowledge of fact, which is a thing past and irrevocable, science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another; by which, out of that we can presently do, we know how to do something else when we will, or the like, another time: because when we see how anything comes about, upon what causes, and by what manner; when the like causes come into our power, we see how to make it produce the like effects.
Children therefore are not endued with reason at all, till they have attained the use of speech, but are called reasonable creatures for the possibility apparent of having the use of reason in time to come.
"The Science of History", (5 February 1864); lecture published in Representative Essays (1885) by George Haven Putnam, p. 274; Lord Acton quoted the first sentence of this statement in an address "The Study Of History" (11 June 1895) http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1906acton.html, and it has often since been misattributed to him. The phrase has also sometimes been misquoted as: Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral laws are written on the table of eternity.
Context: Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has to be paid at last.
“Religion is always falling apart.”
Buddhism, the Religion of No-Religion
Part III, Chapter VI
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)
Context: Once the masterpiece has emerged, the lesser works surrounding it fall into place; and it then gives the impression of having been led up to and foreseeable, though actually it is inconceivable — or, rather, it can only be conceived of once it is there for us to see it. It is not a scene that has come alive, but a latent potentiality that has materialized. Suppose that one of the world's masterpieces were to disappear, leaving no trace behind it, not even a reproduction; even the completest knowledge of its maker's other works would not enable the next generation to visualize it. All the rest of Leonardo's oeuvre would not enable us to visualize the Mona Lisa; all Rembrandt's, the Three Crosses or The Prodigal Son; all Vermeer's, The Love Letter; all Titian's, the Venice Pietà; all medieval sculpture, the Chartres Kings or the Naumburg Uta. What would another picture by the Master of Villeneuve look like? How could even the most careful study of The Embarkation for Cythera, or indeed that of all Watteau's other works conjure up L'Enseigne de Gersaint, had it disappeared?
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Context: This ascent will be betrayed to Gravity. But the Rocket engine, the deep cry of combustion that jars the soul, promises escape. The victim, in bondage to falling, rises on a promise, a prophecy, of Escape....
Moving now toward the kind of light where at last the apple is apple-colored. The knife cuts through the apple like a knife cutting an apple. Everything is where it is, no clearer than usual, but certainly more present. So much has to be left behind now, so quickly.
Notes to his mother, on The Life of Humanity (1884-6) http://www.wikiart.org/en/gustave-moreau/humanity-the-golden-age-depicting-three-scenes-from-the-lives-of-adam-and-eve-the-silver-age-1886, his composition of a ten image polyptych, p. 48 · Photo of its exhibition on the 3rd Floor of Musée National Gustave Moreau http://en.musee-moreau.fr/house-museum/studios/third-floor
Gustave Moreau (1972)
Talent.
Standing Female Nude (1985)
"This Cruel Age has deflected me..." (1944)
Context: This cruel age has deflected me,
like a river from this course.
Strayed from its familiar shores,
my changeling life has flowed
into a sister channel.
How many spectacles I've missed:
the curtain rising without me,
and falling too. How many friends
I never had the chance to meet.
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Concluding Remarks
Context: Is man ever a creature to be trusted with wholly irresponsible power? And does not the slave system, by denying the slave all legal right of testimony, make every individual owner an irresponsible despot? Can anybody fall to make the inference what the practical result will be? If there is, as we admit, a public sentiment among you, men of honor, justice and humanity, is there not also another kind of public sentiment among the ruffian, the brutal and debased? And cannot the ruffian, the brutal, the debased, by slave law, own just as many slaves as the best and purest? Are the honorable, the just, the high-minded and compassionate, the majority anywhere in this world?
“We forget cruelty and past betrayal,
Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.”
"The White Goddess," lines 18–22, from Poems and Satires (1951).
Poems
Context: But we are gifted, even in November,
Rawest of seasons, with so huge a sense
Of her nakedly worn magnificence
We forget cruelty and past betrayal,
Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.
The Great Movies II (2005), p. 94
Context: It's said that Chaplin wanted you to like him, but Keaton didn't care. I think he cared, but was too proud to ask. His films avoid the pathos and sentiment of the Chaplin pictures, and usually feature a jaunty young man who sees an objective and goes for it in the face of the most daunting obstacles. Buster survives tornados, waterfalls, avalanches of boulders, and falls from great heights, and never pauses to take a bow: He has his eye on his goal. And his movies, seen as a group, are like a sustained act of optimism in the face of adversity; surprising, how without asking, he earns our admiration and tenderness.
Because he was funny, because he wore a porkpie had, Keaton's physical skills are often undervalued … no silent star did more dangerous stunts than Buster Keaton. Instead of using doubles, he himself doubled for his actors, doing their stunts as well as his own.
Litany for Dictatorships (1935)
Context: For the man crucified on the crossed machine guns
Without name, without resurrection, without stars,
His dark head heavy with death and his flesh long sour
With the smell of his many prisons — John Smith, John Doe,
John Nobody — oh, crack your mind for his name!
Faceless as water, naked as the dust,
Dishonored as the earth the gas-shells poison
And barbarous with portent.
This is he.
This is the man they ate at the green table
Putting their gloves on ere they touched the meat.
This is the fruit of war, the fruit of peace,
The ripeness of invention, the new lamb,
The answer to the wisdom of the wise.
And still he hangs, and still he will not die
And still, on the steel city of our years
The light falls and the terrible blood streams down.
Interview in Only Angels Have Wings (April 2004) http://onlyangels.free.fr/interviews/d/dresden_dolls.htm
Context: I write a lot, but it's not all fantastic. There's plenty of terrible crap. We work on a few things at a time, let some things fall away, make changes. We certainly have enough for the next album, which could take at least another year to come out.
First Ennead, Book VIII, as translated by Thomas Taylor, The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries: A Dissertation (1891) pp. 38-39.
The First Ennead (c. 250)
“Without a hook, the new information falls on the floor.”
p xxi
The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998)
Context: Human memory, they say, is like a coat closet: The most enduring outcome of a formal education is that it creates rows of coat hooks so that later on, when you come upon a new piece of information, you have a hook to hang it on. Without a hook, the new information falls on the floor.
"I Thought I Saw Your Face Today".
She & Him : Volume One (2008)
Context: I somehow see what's beautiful
In things that are ephemeral
I'm my only friend of mine
And love is just a piece of time
in the world
in the world.
And I couldn't help but fall in love again.
Speech at the Chamber of Commerce, New York City, New York (2 January 1896)
Context: What is the rule of honor to be observed by a power so strongly and so advantageously situated as this Republic is? Of course I do not expect it meekly to pocket real insults if they should be offered to it. But, surely, it should not, as our boyish jingoes wish it to do, swagger about among the nations of the world, with a chip on its shoulder, shaking its fist in everybody's face. Of course, it should not tamely submit to real encroachments upon its rights. But, surely, it should not, whenever its own notions of right or interest collide with the notions of others, fall into hysterics and act as if it really feared for its own security and its very independence.
As a true gentleman, conscious of his strength and his dignity, it should be slow to take offense. In its dealings with other nations it should have scrupulous regard, not only for their rights, but also for their self-respect. With all its latent resources for war, it should be the great peace power of the world. It should never forget what a proud privilege and what an inestimable blessing it is not to need and not to have big armies or navies to support. It should seek to influence mankind, not by heavy artillery, but by good example and wise counsel. It should see its highest glory, not in battles won, but in wars prevented. It should be so invariably just and fair, so trustworthy, so good tempered, so conciliatory, that other nations would instinctively turn to it as their mutual friend and the natural adjuster of their differences, thus making it the greatest preserver of the world's peace.
This is not a mere idealistic fancy. It is the natural position of this great republic among the nations of the earth. It is its noblest vocation, and it will be a glorious day for the United States when the good sense and the self-respect of the American people see in this their "manifest destiny." It all rests upon peace. Is not this peace with honor? There has, of late, been much loose speech about "Americanism." Is not this good Americanism? It is surely today the Americanism of those who love their country most. And I fervently hope that it will be and ever remain the Americanism of our children and our children's children.
Source: Quartered Safe Out Here (1992), p. xxiv.
“To know that light falls and fills, often without our knowing.”
The Shape of the Fire," ll. 88-92
The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)
Context: To stare into the after-light, the glitter left on the lake's surface,
When the sun has fallen behind a wooded island;
To follow the drips sliding from a lifted oar
Held up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward;
To know that light falls and fills, often without our knowing.
'Krishnamurti Foundation Trust Bulletin 3 (1969), and Krishnamurti Foundation Trust Bulletin 4, (1969)
1960s
Context: Can't you fall in love and not have a possessive relationship? I love someone and she loves me and we get married — that is all perfectly straightforward and simple, in that there is no conflict at all. (When I say we get married I might just as well say we decide to live together — don't let's get caught up in words.) Can't one have that without the other, without the tail as it were, necessarily following? Can't two people be in love and both be so intelligent and so sensitive that there is freedom and absence of a centre that makes for conflict? Conflict is not in the feeling of being in love. The feeling of being in love is utterly without conflict. There is no loss of energy in being in love. The loss of energy is in the tail, in everything that follows — jealousy, possessiveness, suspicion, doubt, the fear of losing that love, the constant demand for reassurance and security. Surely it must be possible to function in a sexual relationship with someone you love without the nightmare which usually follows. Of course it is.
“It is no fault of Christianity that a hypocrite falls into sin.”
Letter 125
Letters
Robert Fulghum in True Love (1998). Versions attributed to Dr. Seuss usually run "mutual weirdness".
Misattributed
Last public speech before his death (4 March 1799); as quoted in Patrick Henry: Life, Correspondences and Speeches (1891) by William Wirt Henry, Vol. 2, p. 609-610 http://www.archive.org/stream/pathenrylife02henrrich#page/608/mode/2up
1790s, Speech (1799)
Context: Let us trust God and our better judgment to set us right hereafter. United we stand, divided we fall. Let us not split into factions which must destroy that union upon which our existence hangs. Let us preserve our strength for the French, the English, the Germans, or whoever else shall dare invade our territory, and not exhaust it in civil commotions and intestine wars.
As quoted in Contemporary Authors New Revision Series: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Non-Fiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion Pictures, Television, & Other Fields (1982) by Ann Evory
Context: I talk about the things people have always talked about in stories: pain, hate, truth, courage, destiny, friendship, responsibility, growing old, growing up, falling in love, all of these things. What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal dreads. I try to go into those places in me that contain the cauldrous. I want to dip up the fire, and I want to put it on paper. The closer I get to the burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better is my work. … It is a love/hate relationship I have with the human race. I am an elitist, and I feel that my responsibility is to drag the human race along with me — that I will never pander to, or speak down to, or play the safe game. Because my immortal soul will be lost.
Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 3.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Context: Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other's eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the experience of either with no great result. But on this occasion all is different. They fall at once into that state in which another person becomes to us the very gist and centrepoint of God's creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with the one master-thought that even the trivial cares of our own person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and desirable a fellow-creature.
http://www.paulglover.org/8709.html (“What’s Next for Ithaca?”), The Grapevine, cover story, 1987-09-15
Context: “Growth is a good thing, up to about seven feet tall, then it starts to get inconvenient. People eight feet tall bang their heads, their backs ache, their circulation slows, they spend more for food and clothes, and when they fall it really hurts. Who can they make love to? ---The same is true of cities. After a certain size they get more frustrating than exciting: People collide and anger turns to crime. Streets become dangerous, housing costs more, tax rates rise, schools teach less, structures dwarf people, air smells stale, water fouls and traffic slows no matter how wide the roads.”
Confessions Of A Sceptic
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: Belief is the result of the proportion, whatever it he, in which the many elements which go to make the human being are combined. In some the grosser nature preponderates; they believe largely in their stomachs, in the comforts and conveniences of life, and being of such kind, so long as these are not threatened, they gravitate steadily towards the earth. Numerically this is the largest class of believers, with very various denominations indeed; bearing the names of every faith beneath the sky, and composing the conservative elements in them, and therefore commonly persons of much weight in established systems. But they are what I have called them: their hearts are where I said they were, and as such interests are commonly selfish, and self separates instead of unites, they are not generally powerful against any heavy trial. Others of keener susceptibility are yet volatile, with slight power of continuance, and fly from attraction to attraction in the current of novelty. Others of stronger temper gravitate more slowly, but combine more firmly, and only disunite again when the idea or soul of the body into which they form dies out, or they fall under the influence of some very attractive force indeed. It may be doubted, indeed, whether a body which is really organised by a living idea can lose a healthy member except by violence.
A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Müller Written by Himself, First Part.
First Part of Narrative
This appears to have been originally written by John Briley in the screenplay http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/Gandhi.txt for the movie, Gandhi (1982), spoken by Ben Kingsley, playing Gandhi. The earliest [partial] misattribution to Gandhi appears to be by Ronald Reagan in an address http://www.nytimes.com/1984/09/25/world/transcript-of-reagan-s-address-to-the-un-general-assembly.html?pagewanted=all to the United Nations General Assembly on 24 September 1984 (also a misquotation, substituting the word fail for fall). John S. Dunne misattributes the first sentence in The Peace of the Present (1991) on p. 50 https://books.google.com/books?id=NYIJAAAAIAAJ&q=%22when+Gandhi+says%22+%22When+I+despair,+I+remember+that+all+through+history+the+way+of+truth+and+love+has+always+won.%22&dq=%22when+Gandhi+says%22+%22When+I+despair,+I+remember+that+all+through+history+the+way+of+truth+and+love+has+always+won.%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjhufXN09LWAhWG7SYKHbRdCJ0Q6AEIJzAA, just after misattributing the same first two sentences that Reagan did. Dunne also misattributes the final part of the quotation in the same book on p. 34 https://books.google.com/books?id=NYIJAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Think+of+it+%E2%80%94+always%E2%80%A6%22+%22When+you+are+in+doubt+that+that+is+God%27s+way,+the+way+the+world+is+meant+to+be%E2%80%A6+think+of+that.%22&dq=%22Think+of+it+%E2%80%94+always%E2%80%A6%22+%22When+you+are+in+doubt+that+that+is+God%27s+way,+the+way+the+world+is+meant+to+be%E2%80%A6+think+of+that.%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjEw57e1tLWAhUSdiYKHUNiA2kQ6AEIMTAC.
Misattributed
Context: When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it—always… When you are in doubt that that is God's way, the way the world is meant to be… think of that.
"Notes about Music" (29 March 1946) also quoted in Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie (2004) by Ed Cray
Context: No matter how bad the wicked world has hurt you, in the long run, there is something gained, and it is all for the best … The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution, because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine, a working machine, and any song that says, the pleasures I have seen in all of my trouble, are the things I never can get — don't worry — the human race will sing this way as long as there is a human to race.
The human race is a pretty old place.
Robert Harris, "The Making of Neil Kinnock" (Faber and Faber, 1984), page 208.
Speech in Bridgend, Glamorgan, on Tuesday 7 June 1983. Thursday 9 June 1983 was polling day in the general election.
Context: If Margaret Thatcher is re-elected as prime minister on Thursday, I warn you. I warn you that you will have pain – when healing and relief depend upon payment. I warn you that you will have ignorance – when talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right. I warn you that you will have poverty – when pensions slip and benefits are whittled away by a government that won’t pay in an economy that can't pay. I warn you that you will be cold – when fuel charges are used as a tax system that the rich don't notice and the poor can't afford.I warn you that you must not expect work – when many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don't earn, they don't spend. When they don't spend, work dies. I warn you not to go into the streets alone after dark or into the streets in large crowds of protest in the light. I warn you that you will be quiet – when the curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient. I warn you that you will have defence of a sort – with a risk and at a price that passes all understanding. I warn you that you will be home-bound – when fares and transport bills kill leisure and lock you up. I warn you that you will borrow less – when credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income.If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday, I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. And I warn you not to grow old.
The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)
Context: What did we build it for? Was it all a dream?...
Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam...
And after a while they will fall to dust and rain;
Or else we will tear them down with impatient hands;
And hew rock out of the earth, and build them again.
"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)
Context: In Andrew Motion's book, we have the constant sense that Larkin is somehow falling short of the cloudless emotional health enjoyed by, for instance, Andrew Motion. Also the sense, as Motion invokes his like-minded contemporaries, that Larkin is being judged by a newer, cleaner, braver, saner world. … Motion is extremely irritated by Larkin's extreme irritability. He's always complaining that Larkin is always complaining.
Source: A Dream of John Ball (1886), Ch. 1: The Men of Kent
Context: When I was journeying (in a dream of the night) down the well-remembered reaches of the Thames betwixt Streatley and Wallingford, where the foothills of the White Horse fall back from the broad stream, I came upon a clear-seen mediæval town standing up with roof and tower and spire within its walls, grey and ancient, but untouched from the days of its builders of old. All this I have seen in the dreams of the night clearer than I can force myself to see them in dreams of the day. So that it would have been nothing new to me the other night to fall into an architectural dream if that were all, and yet I have to tell of things strange and new that befell me after I had fallen asleep.
Frankie Machine above the Club Safari, where drug is sold.
The Man with the Golden Arm (1949)
Context: The clock in the room above the Safari told only Junkie Time. For every hour here was Old Junkie's Hour and the walls were the color of all old junkies' dreams: the hue of diluted morphine in the moment before the needle draws the suffering blood. / Walls that went up and up like walls in a troubled dream. Walls like water where no legend could be written and no hand grasp metal or wood. [... ] He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-colored walls of [an addict]'s terrible pit.
Source: Politics: A Very Short Introduction, Chapter 1
Context: In a despotic government, the ultimate principle of order issues from the inclinations of the despot himself. Yet despotism is not a system in which justice is entirely meaningless: it has generally prevailed in highly traditional societies where custom is king and the prevailing terms of justice are accepted as part of the natural order of things. Each person fits into a divinely recognized scheme. Dynasties rise and fall according to what the Chinese used to call 'the mandate of heaven', but life for the peasant changes little. Everything depends on the wisdom of the ruler.
Interview with Laura Knoy, New Hampshire Public Radio (5 November 2003)
Context: I think we're at a time in American history that's probably analogous to, maybe, Rome before the first emperors, when the Republic started to fall... I think if you look at the pattern of events, if you look at the disputed election of 2000, can you imagine? In America, people are trying to recount ballots and a partisan mob is pounding on the glass and threatening the counters? Can you imagine that? Can you imagine a political party which does its best to keep any representatives from another party — who've even been affiliated with another party — from getting a business job in the nation's capital? Can you imagine a political party that wants to redistrict so that its opponents can be driven out entirely?... it's a different time in America and the Republic is — this election is about a lot more than jobs. I'm not sure everybody in America sees it right now. But I see it, I feel it.
Letter II : Heloise to Abelard
Letters of Abelard and Heloise
Context: A consolatory letter of yours to a friend happened some days since to fall into my hands. My knowledge of the character, and my love of the hand, soon gave me the curiosity to open it. In justification of the liberty I took, I flattered myself I might claim a sovereign privilege over every thing which came from you nor was I scrupulous to break thro' the rules of good breeding, when it was to hear news of Abelard. But how much did my curiosity cost me? what disturbance did it occasion? and how was I surprised to find the whole letter filled with a particular and melancholy account of our misfortunes? I met with my name a hundred times; I never saw it without fear: some heavy calamity always, followed it, I saw yours too, equally unhappy. These mournful but dear remembrances, puts my spirits into such a violent motion, that I thought it was too much to offer comfort to a friend for a few slight disgraces by such extraordinary means, as the representation of our sufferings and revolutions. What reflections did I not make, I began to consider the whole afresh, and perceived myself pressed with the same weight of grief as when we first began to be miserable. Tho' length of time ought to have closed up my wounds, yet the seeing them described by your hand was sufficient to make them all open and bleed afresh. Nothing can ever blot from my memory what you have suffered in defence of your writings.
“People call, say beware doll, you're bound to fall, you thought they were all, kiddin you.”
Song lyrics, Highway 61 Revisited (1965), Like a Rolling Stone
Context: Once upon a time you dressed so fine, threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you. People call, say beware doll, you're bound to fall, you thought they were all, kiddin you.
“The quantity of energy that ceased to "fall in" is the system's entropy.”
130.01 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s01/p3000.html
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards
Context: Critical proximity occurs where there is angular transition from "falling back in" at 180-degree to 90-degree orbiting—which is precession. (Gravity may be described as "falling back in" at 180 degrees.) The quantity of energy that ceased to "fall in" is the system's entropy. Critical proximity is when it starts either "falling in" or going into orbit, which is the point where either entropy or antientropy begins. An aggregate of "falling ins" is a body. What we call an object or an entity is always an aggregate of interattracted entities; it is never a solid. And the critical proximity transition from being an aggregate entity to being a plurality of separate entities is precession, which is a "peeling off" into orbit rather than falling back in to the original entity aggregate. This explains entropy intimately.
War (1816)
Context: War is to be ranked among the most dreadful calamities which fall on a guilty world; and, what deserves consideration, it tends to multiply and perpetuate itself without end. It feeds and grows on the blood which it sheds. The passions, from which it springs, gain strength and fury from indulgence.
“On me the tempest falls. It does not make me tremble.”
Source: Prometheus Bound, line 1089
Context: On me the tempest falls. It does not make me tremble. O holy Mother Earth, O air and sun, behold me. I am wronged.
“To avoid falling into the toils of love is not so hard as, after you are caught, to get out of the nets you are in and to break through the strong meshes of Venus.”
Vitare, plagas in amoris ne iaciamur,
non ita difficile est quam captum retibus ipsis
exire et validos Veneris perrumpere nodos.
Book IV, lines 1146–1148 (tr. Munro)
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
Context: The clock runs down. I lift the weight by exerting the proper amount of energy, and in this action the law of conservation of energy is strictly obeyed. But now I have the choice of either letting the weight fall free in a fraction of a second, or, constrained by the wheelwork, in twenty-four hours. I can do which I like, and whichever way I decide, no more energy is developed in the fall of the weight. I strike a match; I can use it to light a cigarette or to set fire to a house. I write a telegram; it may be simply to say I shall be late for dinner, or it may produce fluctuations on the stock exchange that will ruin thousands. In these cases the actual force required in striking the match or in writing the telegram is governed by the law or conservation of energy; but the vastly more momentous part, which determines the words I use or the material I ignite, is beyond such a law. It is probable that no expenditure of energy need be used in the determination of direction one way more than another. Intelligence and free will here come into play, and these mystic forces are outside the law of conservation of energy as understood by physicists.
Song lyrics, So (1986)
Context: Rest your head.
You worry too much.
It's going to be alright.
When times get rough,
You can fall back on us.
Don't give up;
Please don't give up.
“I won't fall for the oldest trick in the book”
"That's Just What You Are" · Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArXL7uEQsEg
Song lyrics, I'm with Stupid (1995)
Context: In our endeavor we are never seeing eye to eye;
No guts to sever so forever may we wave goodbye.
And you're always telling me that it's my turn to move,
When I wonder what could make the needle jump the groove.
I won't fall for the oldest trick in the book,
So don't sit there and think you're off of the hook.
By saying there is no use changing 'causeThat's just what you are.
That's just what you are.
Technopagans at the End of History (1998)
Context: It's strange — you know, the Net is denounced as austere, the product of the engineering mentality, so forth and so on. It's the most feminine influence that Western civilization has ever allowed itself to fall under the spell of. The troubadors of the fourteenth century were as nothing compared to the boundary-dissolving, feminizing, permitting, nurturing nature of the Net. Maybe that's why there is an overwhelming male preference for it, in its early form, because that's where that was needed. But it is Sophia, it is wisdom, it is the penetrating archetypal female logos of the world-soul, leading us away from what was very sharp-edged and uncomfortable and repressive to our creativity and our sexuality and our relationships to each other and to the Earth.
Source: The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951), Chapter 8
Context: Among primitives sometimes evil is escaped by never mentioning the name, as in Malaysia, where one never mentions a tiger by name for fear of calling him. Among others, as even among ourselves, the giving of a name establishes a familiarity which renders the thing impotent. It is interesting to see how some scientists and philosophers, who are an emotional and fearful group, are able to protect themselves against fear. In a modern scene, when the horizons stretch out and your philosopher is likely to fall off the world like a Dark Age mariner, he can save himself by establishing a taboo-box which he may call "mysticism" or "supernaturalism" or "radicalism." Into this box he can throw all those thoughts which frighten him and thus be safe from them.
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1980s, Talk at University of California, Berkeley, 1984
Context: There have been times, however, when US officials have described what's going on in relatively frank terms; sometimes quite clearly. One put the matter in these words: "The Central American area down to and including the Isthmus of Panama constitutes a legitimate sphere of influence for the United States [... ] We do control the destinies of Central America and we do so for the simple reason that the national interest absolutely dictates such a course [... ] We must decide whether we shall tolerate the interference of any other power in Central American affairs, or insist upon our own dominant position [... ] Until now, Central America has always understood that governments that we recognize and support stay in power, while those we do not recognize and support, fall [... ] Nicaragua has become a test case, it is difficult to see how we can afford to be defeated." That's fairly familiar. These remarks were made by Under Secretary of State Robert Olds in 1927, and the outside power that he was concerned about was Mexico. [audience laughter] Mexico at that time was a Russian proxy. We were no longer fighting Huns in the Dominican Republic, now we were fighting Russians in Nicaragua, and in particular the Russian proxy Mexico. Mexico was then a proxy of the Bolsheviks, so the Marines had to be sent in, once again, and they established Somoza, and established the National Guard which was the basis for American power throughout the region, and in fact one of the most effective murder-incorporated forces down there for many years. They killed Sandino, he was killed off by stealth couple of years later, the guerilla leader. As President Coolidge sent the Marines in, he made the following declaration: "Mexico is on trial before the world." Mexico is on trial before the world as a proxy of the Soviet Union when we send the Marines into Nicaragua. Now things have changed a little bit, now it's Nicaragua that's threatening Mexico as a Russian proxy... But again there's the same conclusion, you know, kill the spics and the niggers and so on. That follows no matter who's the proxy for who. And all of this is repeated at every moment of history with great seriousness and awe and so on as if it had some meaning, as if it wasn't just some black comedy.
“Since the fall of the Roman Empire, there has rarely been more interesting times than these.”
Source: Liber Null & Psychonaut (1987), p. 113
Context: An ancient Chinese curse runs, "May you live in interesting times." Since the fall of the Roman Empire, there has rarely been more interesting times than these. Whenever history becomes unstable and destinies hang in the balance, then magicians and messiahs appear everywhere. Our own civilization has moved into an epoch of permanent crisis and upheaval, and we are beset with a plague of wizards. They serve an historic purpose, for whenever a society undergoes radical change, alternative spiritualities proliferate, and from among these a culture will select a new world view.
Cyrano, Act 5, Sc. 6
Cyrano de Bergerac (1897)
Context: What say you? It is useless? Ay, I know
But who fights ever hoping for success?
I fought for lost cause, and for fruitless quest!
You there, who are you! — You are thousands! Ah!
I know you now, old enemies of mine!
Falsehood!
Have at you! Ha! and Compromise!
Prejudice, Treachery! …
Surrender, I?
Parley? No, never! You too, Folly, — you?
I know that you will lay me low at last;
Let be! Yet I fall fighting, fighting still!
8 November 1852
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries
Context: My privilege is to be spectator of my life drama, to be fully conscious of the tragi-comedy of my own destiny, and, more than that, to be in the secret of the tragi-comic itself, that is to say, to be unable to take my illusions seriously, to see myself, so to speak, from the theater on the stage, or to be like a man looking from beyond the tomb into existence. I feel myself forced to feign a particular interest in my individual part, while all the time I am living in the confidence of the poet who is playing with all these agents which seem so important, and knows all that they are ignorant of. It is a strange position, and one which becomes painful as soon as grief obliges me to betake myself once more to my own little rôle, binding me closely to it, and warning me that I am going too far in imagining myself, because of my conversations with the poet, dispensed from taking up again my modest part of valet in the piece. Shakespeare must have experienced this feeling often, and Hamlet, I think, must express it somewhere. It is a Doppelgängerei, quite German in character, and which explains the disgust with reality and the repugnance to public life, so common among the thinkers of Germany. There is, as it were, a degradation a gnostic fall, in thus folding one's wings and going back again into the vulgar shell of one's own individuality. Without grief, which is the string of this venturesome kite, man would soar too quickly and too high, and the chosen souls would be lost for the race, like balloons which, save for gravitation, would never return from the empyrean.
“The most fatal trap into which thinking may fall is the equation of existence and expediency.”
Source: Who Is Man? (1965), Ch. 5<!-- Existence and expediency, p. 85 -->
Context: Man is naturally self-centered and he is inclined to regard expediency as the supreme standard for what is right and wrong. However, we must not convert an inclination into an axiom that just as man's perceptions cannot operate outside time and space, so his motivations cannot operate outside expediency; that man can never transcend his own self. The most fatal trap into which thinking may fall is the equation of existence and expediency.
“The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,
The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.”
The Rubaiyat (1120)
Context: Whether at Naishapur or Babylon,
Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run,
The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,
The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.
“Philosophers conceive of the passions which harass us as vices into which men fall by their own fault, and, therefore, generally deride, bewail, or blame them, or execrate them, if they wish to seem unusually pious.”
Affectus, quibus conflictamur, concipiunt philosophi veluti vitia, in quae homines sua culpa labuntur; quos propterea ridere, flere, carpere vel (qui sanctiores videri volunt) detestari solent. Sic ergo se rem divinam facere, et sapientiae culmen attingere credunt, quando humanam naturam, quae nullibi est, multis modis laudare et eam, quae revera est, dictis lacessere norunt. Homines namque non ut sunt, sed ut eosdem esse vellent, concipiunt; unde factum est, ut plerumque pro e t h i c a satyram scripserint, et ut nunquam p o l i t i c a m conceperint, quae possit ad usum revocari; sed quae pro chimaera haberetur, vel quae in Utopia vel in illo poëtarum aureo saeculo, ubi scilicet minime necesse erat, institui potuisset. Cum igitur omnium scientiarum, quae usum habent, tum maxime p o l i t i c e s t h e o r i a ab ipsius p r a x i discrepare creditur, et regendae reipublicae nulli minus idonei aestimantur, quam theoretici seu philosophi.
Source: Political Treatise (1677), Ch. 1, Introduction; section 1
Context: Philosophers conceive of the passions which harass us as vices into which men fall by their own fault, and, therefore, generally deride, bewail, or blame them, or execrate them, if they wish to seem unusually pious. And so they think they are doing something wonderful, and reaching the pinnacle of learning, when they are clever enough to bestow manifold praise on such human nature, as is nowhere to be found, and to make verbal attacks on that which, in fact, exists. For they conceive of men, not as they are, but as they themselves would like them to be. Whence it has come to pass that, instead of ethics, they have generally written satire, and that they have never conceived a theory of politics, which could be turned to use, but such as might be taken for a chimera, or might have been formed in Utopia, or in that golden age of the poets when, to be sure, there was least need of it. Accordingly, as in all sciences, which have a useful application, so especially in that of politics, theory is supposed to be at variance with practice; and no men are esteemed less fit to direct public affairs than theorists or philosophers.
The Clerk's Vision (1949)
Context: The world stretches out before me, the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium. Universe of kings and presidents and jailors, of mandarins and pariahs and liberators and liberated, of judges and witnesses and the condemned: stars of the first, second, third and nth magnitudes, planets, comets, bodies errant and eccentric or routine and domesticated by the laws of gravity, the subtle laws of falling, all keeping step, all turning slowly or rapidly around a void. Where they claim the central sun lies, the solar being, the hot beam made out of every human gaze, there is nothing but a hole and less than a hole: the eye of a dead fish, the giddy cavity of the eye that falls into itself and looks at itself without seeing. There is nothing with which to fill the hollow center of the whirlwind. The springs are smashed, the foundations collapsed, the visible or invisible bonds that joined one star to another, one body to another, one man to another, are nothing but a tangle of wires and thorns, a jungle of claws and teeth that twist us and chew us and spit us out and chew us again. No one hangs himself by the rope of a physical law. The equations fall tirelessly into themselves.
And in regard to the present matter, if the present matters: I do not belong to the masters. I don't wash my hands of it, but I am not a judge, nor a witness for the prosecution, nor an executioner. I do not torture, interrogate, or suffer interrogation. I do not loudly plead for leniency, nor wish to save myself or anyone else. And for all that I don't do and for all that they do to us, I neither ask forgiveness nor forgive. Their piety is as abject as their justice. Am I innocent? I'm guilty. Am I guilty? I'm innocent. (I'm innocent when I'm guilty, guilty when I'm innocent. I'm guilty when … but that is another song. Another song? It's all the same song.) Guilty innocent, innocent guilty, the fact is I quit.
Max Weber, letter to Ferdinand Tönnies, Feb. 19, 1909; As cited in: . Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920. Oxford University Press, 24 mrt. 1988. p. 498
Context: When I studied modern Catholic literature in Rome a few years ago, I became convinced how hopeless is to think that there are any scientific results this church cannot digest... I could not honestly participate in such anti-clericalism. It is true that I am absolutely unmusical in matters religious and that I have neither the need nor the ability to erect any religious edifices within me — that is simply impossible for me, and I reject it. But after examining myself carefully I must say that I am neither anti-religious nor irreligious. In this regard too I consider myself a cripple, a stunted man whose fate it is to admit honestly that he must put up with this state of affairs (so as not to fall for some romantic swindle)... For you a theologian of liberal persuasion (whether Catholic or Protestant) is necessarily most abhorrent as the typical representative of a halfway position; for me he is in human terms infinitely more valuable and interesting... than the intellectual (and basically cheap) pharisaism of naturalism, which is intolerably fashionable and in which there is much less life than in the religious position (again, depending on the case, of course!)
Mathematical Methods in Science (1977)
Context: Life is full of surprises: our approximate condition for the fall of a body through a resisting medium is precisely analogous to the exact condition for the flow of an electric current through a resisting wire [of an induction coil]....
m\frac {dv}{dt} = mg - Kv
This is the form most convenient for making an analogy with the "fall", i. e., flow, of an electric current.
... in order from left to right, mass m, rate of change of velocity \frac {dv}{dt}, gravitational force mg, and velocity v. What are the electrical counterparts?... To press the switch, to allow current to start flowing is the analogue of opening the fingers, to allow the body to start falling. The fall of the body is caused by the force mg due to gravity; the flow of the current is caused by the electromotive force or tension E due to the battery. The falling body has to overcome the frictional resistance of the air; the flowing current has to overcome the electrical resistance of the wire. Air resistance is proportional to the body's velocity v; electrical resistance is proportional to the current i. And consequently rate of change of velocity \frac {dv}{dt} corresponds to rate of change of current \frac {di}{dt}.... The electromagnetic induction L opposes the change of current... And doesn't the inertia or mass m..? Isn't L, so to speak, an electromagnetic inertia?
L\frac {di}{dt} = E - Ki
“I would much prefer to be a judge than a coal miner because of the absence of falling coal.”
"Sitting on the Bench" (1961)
Beyond the Fringe (1960 - 1966)
Context: I could have been a Judge, but I never had the Latin for the judgin'. I never had it, so I'd had it, as far as being a judge was concerned... I would much prefer to be a judge than a coal miner because of the absence of falling coal.
“I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man.”
Equality (1943)
Context: I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason.
The Mask of Apollo (1966)
Context: Christianity and Islam have changed irrevocably the moral reflexes of the world. The philosopher Herakleitos said with profound truth that you cannot step twice into the same river. The perpetual stream of human nature is formed into ever-changing shallows, eddies, falls and pools by the land over which it passes. Perhaps the only real value of history lies in considering this endlessly varied play between the essence and the accidents.
Oedipus (Line 1079?).
Oedipus Rex
Variant: I am Fortune's child,
Not man's; her mother face hath ever smiled
Above me, and my brethren of the sky,
The changing Moons, have changed me low and high.
There is my lineage true, which none shall wrest
From me; who then am I to fear this quest?
(From a 1963 letter to his wife Gweneth, written while attending a gravity conference in Communist-era Warsaw.)
"Letters, Photos, and Drawings," p. 90-91
What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988)
Context: The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity — and until they do (and find the cure), all ideal plans will fall into quicksand.
From an interview in the newspaper To-Day (1894), as quoted in Aubrey Beardsley : A Biography (1999) by Matthew Sturgis, p. 200
Context: All humanity inspires me. Every passer-by is my unconscious sitter; and as strange as it may seem, I really draw folk as I see them. Surely it is not my fault that they fall into certain lines and angles.
On Democracy (6 October 1884)
Context: Few people take the trouble of trying to find out what democracy really is. Yet this would be a great help, for it is our lawless and uncertain thoughts, it is the indefiniteness of our impressions, that fill darkness, whether mental or physical, with spectres and hobgoblins. Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.