Tract 83 http://anglicanhistory.org/tracts/tract83.html (29 June 1838).
Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Wind Book
Context: Some other schools have a liking for extra-long swords. From the point of view of my strategy these must be seen as weak schools. This is because they do not appreciate the principle of cutting the enemy by any means. Their preference is for the extra-long sword and, relying on the virtue of its length, they think to defeat the enemy from a distance.
In this world it is said, "One inch gives the hand advantage", but these are the idle words of one who does not know strategy. It shows the inferior strategy of a weak spirit that men should be dependant on the length of their sword, fighting from a distance without the benefit of strategy.
“On the other hand, not all propaganda is art”
"Charles Dickens" (1939)
Context: I have been discussing Dickens simply in terms of his ‘message’, and almost ignoring his literary qualities. But every writer, especially every novelist, has a ‘message’, whether he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda. Neither Dickens himself nor the majority of Victorian novelists would have thought of denying this. On the other hand, not all propaganda is art. As I said earlier, Dickens is one of those writers who are felt to be worth stealing. He has been stolen by Marxists, by Catholics and, above all, by Conservatives. The question is, What is there to steal? Why does anyone care about Dickens? Why do I care about Dickens?
"The Authority Principle" in No Gods, No Masters : An Anthology of Anarchism (1980) Daniel Guérin, as translated by Paul Sharkey (1998), p. 90
Context: I stand ready to negotiate, but I want no part of laws: I acknowledge none; I protest against every order with which some authority may feel pleased on the basis of some alleged necessity to over-rule my free will. Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government.
A Hero of Our Time (1840; rev. 1841)
Variant translation: "...the search for truth strains the patience of most people, who would rather believe the first things that come to hand." Translation by Paul Woodruff.
Book I, 1.20-[3]
History of the Peloponnesian War, Book I
Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, 1992
Context: There is a noticeable general difference between the sciences and mathematics on the one hand, and the humanities and social sciences on the other. It's a first approximation, but one that is real. In the former, the factors of integrity tend to dominate more over the factors of ideology. It's not that scientists are more honest people. It's just that nature is a harsh taskmaster. You can lie or distort the story of the French Revolution as long as you like, and nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in chemistry, and it'll be refuted tomorrow.
A part of this passage appeared in The Best Loved Poems of the American People (1936) with the title "Friendship":
A Life for a Life (1859)
Context: Thus ended our little talk: yet it left a pleasant impression. True, the subject was strange enough; my sisters might have been shocked at it; and at my freedom in asking and giving opinions. But oh! the blessing it is to have a friend to whom one can speak fearlessly on any subject; with whom one's deepest as well as one's most foolish thoughts come out simply and safely. Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.
Somebody must have done a good deal of the winnowing business this afternoon; for in the course of it I gave him as much nonsense as any reasonable man could stand...
Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: Let us not violate the RIGHT of the artist to express exclusively his own experiences and introspections, disregarding everything that happens in the world beyond. Let us not DEMAND of the artist, but — reproach, beg, urge and entice him — that we may be allowed to do. After all, only in part does he himself develop his talent; the greater part of it is blown into him at birth as a finished product, and the gift of talent imposes responsibility on his free will. Let us assume that the artist does not OWE anybody anything: nevertheless, it is painful to see how, by retiring into his self-made worlds or the spaces of his subjective whims, he CAN surrender the real world into the hands of men who are mercenary, if not worthless, if not insane.
"The Reaction in Germany" (1842)
Context: Everywhere, especially in France and England, social and religious societies are being formed which are wholly alien to the world of present-day politics, societies that derive their life from new sources quite unknown to us and that grow and diffuse themselves without fanfare. The people, the poor class, which without doubt constitutes the greatest part of humanity; the class whose rights have already been recognized in theory but which is nevertheless still despised for its birth, for its ties with poverty and ignorance, as well as indeed with actual slavery – this class, which constitutes the true people, is everywhere assuming a threatening attitude and is beginning to count the ranks of its enemy, far weaker in numbers than itself, and to demand the actualization of the right already conceded to it by everyone. All people and all men are filled with a kind of premonition, and everyone whose vital organs are not paralyzed faces with shuddering expectation the approaching future which will utter the redeeming word. Even in Russia, the boundless snow-covered kingdom so little known, and which perhaps also has a great future in store, even in Russia dark clouds are gathering, heralding storm. Oh, the air is sultry and pregnant with lightning.
And therefore we call to our deluded brothers: Repent, repent, the Kingdom of the Lord is at hand!
Source: An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789; 1823), Ch. 17 : Of the Limits of the Penal Branch of Jurisprudence
Context: The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still. The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not Can they reason?, nor Can they talk?, but Can they suffer?
“Do you believe in fairies?... If you believe, clap your hands!”
Act IV
Peter Pan (1904)
"Notes on Nationalism" (1945)
Context: By "nationalism" I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled "good" or "bad." But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By "patriotism" I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.
Disputed
Source: Udall, U.S. Rep. Morris K., Khrushchev Could Have Said It, 2016-04-06, originally published in The New Republic, 1962 http://www.library.arizona.edu/exhibits/udall/khrushch_htm.html,
as quoted in "Keynes and the Ethics of Capitalism" by Robert Skidelsy http://www.webcitation.org/query?id=1256603608595872&url=www.geocities.com/monedem/keyn.html
Essays in Persuasion (1931), Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)
Context: When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease … But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.
“We, holding Art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters”
Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: We, holding Art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters; boldly we direct it, we renew, reform and manifest it; we sell it for money, use it to please those in power; turn to it at one moment for amusement — right down to popular songs and night-clubs, and at another — grabbing the nearest weapon, cork or cudgel — for the passing needs of politics and for narrow-minded social ends. But art is not defiled by our efforts, neither does it thereby depart from its true nature, but on each occasion and in each application it gives to us a part of its secret inner light.
“It's like a bar of soap in the bathtub — you have it in your hand until you hold on too tight.”
“I've been waiting for the guide to come and take me by the hand.”
Song Disorder
Goel, Sita Ram (editor) (1998). Freedom of expression: Secular theocracy versus liberal democracy. https://web.archive.org/web/20171026023112/http://www.bharatvani.org:80/books/foe/index.htm Ch. 6
Narrated in Bukhari by Abu Huraira, Vol. 9, Book 87, Hadith 141 http://sunnah.com/bukhari/91/31
Sunni Hadith
Part I : England Your England, § III
The Lion and the Unicorn (1941)
Letter Three (23 April 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
With the observable fact that scientific knowledge makes our lives better when applied with concern for human welfare and environmental protection, there is no question that science and technology can produce abundance so that no one has to go without... Hopes for divine intervention by mythical characters are delusions that cannot solve the problems of our modern world. The future of the world is our responsibility and it depends upon decisions we make today. We are our own salvation or damnation.
Source: Designing the Future (2007), p. 10
“With the right tools at hand, a woman is capable to do anything in life.”
“You look at the hands, not at the face, if you want to stay out of trouble.”
Source: da Strani giorni
Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
“I bring you with reverent hands
The books of my numberless dreams.”
Source: The Wind Among the Reeds
Source: Curran
“When it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me.”
Source: Three More Plays: The Silver Tassie, Purple Dust, Red Roses For Me
Source: The Dresden Files, Turn Coat (2009), Chapter 24
Context: Harry Dresden: You’re in America now. Our idea of diplomacy is showing up with a gun in one hand and a sandwich in the other and asking which you’d prefer.
Anastasia Luccio: Did you bring a sandwich?
Harry Dresden: What do I look like, Kissinger?
“She was what we used to call a suicide blonde-- dyed by her own hand.”
“sorrow… is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of
love touches it”
Source: De Profundis
Presidency (1977–1981), 1977
“Let us not be too particular. It is better to have old second-hand diamonds than none at all.”
“For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.”
Source: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Source: To Be the Best
“If she'd known she was going to die at his hands, she would have dressed up.”
Source: The Darkest Part of the Forest
Douglas Adams. The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time. New York: Random House, 2002, 135–136.
Also quoted by Richard Dawkins in his Eulogy for Douglas Adams (17 September 2001) http://www.edge.org/documents/adams_index.html
Context: If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.
Source: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
“I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.”
Source: The Price of Salt
“He had risked his life and now it was walking away from him, hand-in-hand with a Ruffian prince.”
Source: The Princess Bride
Source: The Return of the Native
“Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.”
“On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons.”
Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Attributions in an "Oration upon the Death of General Washington, Delivered at the Request of the Corporation of the City of New York On the 31st of December, 1799", by Gouverneur Morris. Though these words, supposedly given at the opening of the Constitutional Convention, were not recorded in James Madison's summary of the events of 25 May 1787, George Bancroft accepted them as genuine (History of the United States of America, volume VI, Book III, Chapter I). Henry Cabot Lodge however gave cogent reasons for rejecting them (George Washington, Volume II, Chapter I). The attribution to Washington was so widely accepted that it was engraved above the Fifteenth Street entrance to the Department of Commerce Bldg. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015060022434;view=1up;seq=48 in Washington, D.C., on the arch in Washington Square Park in New York City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Square_Arch and on a bronze plaque above the Eighteenth Street doorway to Constitution Hall http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015060022434;view=1up;seq=50.
Disputed
Context: Americans! let the opinion then delivered by the greatest and best of men, be ever present to your remembrance. He was collected within himself. His countenance had more than usual solemnity; his, eye was fixed, and seemed to look into futurity. "It is (said he) too probable that no plan we propose will be adopted. Perhaps another dreadful conflict is to be sustained. If to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God." This was the patriot voice of Washington; and this the constant tenor of his conduct. With this deep sense of duty, he gave to our Constitution his cordial assent; and has added the fame of a legislator to that of a hero.
“After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.”
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest
Variant: Simon snorted. "If you ever meet the man who could take advantage of Isabelle, you'll have to let me know. I'd like to shake his hand. Or run away from him very fast, I'm not sure which.
Source: City of Glass
“I am writing with my burnt hand about the nature of fire.”
Source: Our Lady of the Flowers
Source: The Power of Positive Thinking
“This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.”
“My hands are of your color, but I shame to wear a heart so white.”
Variant: My hands are of your colour; but I shame
To wear a heart so white.
Source: Macbeth
Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
Source: The Quest for Peace, the Cause of Freedom
“I’ll follow thee and make a heaven of hell,
To die upon the hand I love so well.”
Source: A Midsummer Night's Dream
John Proctor
Source: The Crucible (1953)
Letter Three (23 April 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Context: No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others.
1860s, 1864, Letter to the City of Atlanta (September 1864)
Source: Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman
Context: You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices today than any of you to secure peace. But you cannot have peace and a division of our country. If the United States submits to a division now, it will not stop
Context: You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices today than any of you to secure peace. But you cannot have peace and a division of our country. If the United States submits to a division now, it will not stop, but will go on until we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war. The United States does and must assert its authority, wherever it once had power; for, if it relaxes one bit to pressure, it is gone, and I believe that such is the national feeling.
Source: Magic Burns
“The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.”
Source: Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None
then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
"When I have fears that I may cease to be" (1817)
Source: The Complete Poems
Source: Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
