Quotes about knife
page 2

“I had wished to visit a slaughter-house, in order to see with my own eyes the reality of the question raised when vegetarianism is discussed. But at first I felt ashamed to do so, as one is always ashamed of going to look at suffering which one knows is about to take place, but which one cannot avert; and so I kept putting off my visit. But a little while ago I met on the road a butcher … He is not yet an experienced butcher, and his duty is to stab with a knife. I asked him whether he did not feel sorry for the animals that he killed. He gave me the usual answer: 'Why should I feel sorry? It is necessary.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

But when I told him that eating flesh is not necessary, but is only a luxury, he agreed; and then he admitted that he was sorry for the animals.
Source: The First Step (1892), Ch. IX

Feeling, Question, Reality, Suffering

“His fine wit
Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Letter to Maria Gisborne (1820), l. 240

“The sharp side of the knife goes away from you. Pure reason does not trump brute force but suprisingly few people know what hot peppers look like when the teacher asks if you have enough to share with everyone. Never take the lid of a pressure cooker 'to see if it's done yet'. Even if you are careful with the picric acid that won't matter if you are careless with other items next to it. Move *away* from mysterious burglar alarms. Do not append 'you moron' to exposition directed at people who have just broken into your building. 'We need to talk' is overwhelmingly unlikely to precede good news. A rough brick wall may be used to sort socks or as a backdrop for sock-art (The Neglected Art). A silent cat is Up to Something. Lungs are unsuited for many possible atmospheres, including that of London, and anything with a high content of industrial cleaners. Youth will not save you from Newton's Laws. Or Darwin's.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

Facebook post (2014) https://www.facebook.com/james.nicoll.927/posts/10152710405547985 2010s

People, Youth, Law, Art

“You took me weak and unprepared.
I had not thought that you who shared
My days, my nights, my heart, my life,
Would slash me with a naked knife
And gently tell me not to bleed
But to accept your crazy creed.”

Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) English writer and gardener

"And so it ends", quoted in V. Sackville-West : A Critical Biography (1974) by Michael Stevens, p. 91

Life, Heart, Night

“I am terrified of mayonnaise. It was so bad when I was little that my friends would chase me around the house with a jar of mayonnaise and a knife.”

Megan Mullally (1958) American actress

Attributed

Housing

“You caught mum chasing dad with a knife
You ran away to escape from the fights
Now you're lost in a maze of neon light
And she's worried, he's worried, she's worried, oh…”

Colin Moulding (1955) English bassist, songwriter and vocalist

"Runaways"
English Settlement (1982)

Light, Fight

“So, there was a girl.
What I’ve guessed, and what the history books imply, is that she was unlucky enough to have been sired by a cruel man. He beat both wife and daughter and abused them in other ways. Bright Itempas is called, among other things, the god of justice. Perhaps that was why He responded when she came into His temple, her heart full of unchildlike rage.
“I want him to die,” she said (or so I imagine). “Please Great Lord, make him die.”
You know the truth now about Itempas. He is a god of warmth and light, which we think of as pleasant, gentle things. I once thought of Him that way, too. But warmth uncooled burns; light undimmed can hurt even my blind eyes. I should have realized. We should all have realized. He was never what we wanted Him to be.
So when the girl begged the Bright Lord to murder her father, He said, “Kill him yourself.” And He gifted her with a knife perfectly suited to her small, weak child’s hands.
She took the knife home and used it that very night. The next day, she came back to the Bright Lord, her hands and soul stained red, happy for the first time in her short life. “I will love you forever,” she declared. And He, for a rare once, found Himself impressed by mortal will.
Or so I imagine.
The child was mad, of course. Later events proved this. But it makes sense to me that this madness, not mere religious devotion, would appeal most to the Bright Lord. Her love was unconditional, her purpose undiluted by such paltry considerations as conscience or doubt. It seems like Him, I think, to value that kind of purity of purpose—even though, like warmth and light, too much love is never a good thing.”

N. K. Jemisin book The Broken Kingdoms

Source: The Broken Kingdoms (2011), Chapter 11 “Possession” (watercolor) (pp. 202-203)

Love, Life, God, Happiness

“Kerchak was dead.
Withdrawing the knife that had so often rendered him master of far mightier muscles than his own, Tarzan of the Apes placed his foot upon the neck of his vanquished enemy, and once again, loud through the forest rang the fierce, wild cry of the conqueror.
And thus came the young Lord Greystoke into the kingship of the Apes.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 11 : "King of the Apes"

Cry, Dead

“According to Aristophanes in Plato's The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend there were three types of people.
In ancient times people weren't simply male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everyone in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing half.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter Five, Oshima

God, Happiness, People, World

“I’ll have to throw it at him, Rebel thought. Swing it up, catch him under the jaw, break a few teeth. Then grab the knife and hold him for the security people. That was a good plan. It ranked right up there with suddenly learning how to teleport.”

Michael Swanwick book Vacuum Flowers

Source: Vacuum Flowers (1987), Chapter 5, “People's Sheraton” (pp. 74-75)

People, Learning

“[About the Swiss] The nice Germans, Yeah. Or as they like to say, the other white race. Now, I have only one question. How can you trust an army, how butch is an army that has a wine opener on its knife? "Many of you have never opened Chardonnay under fire! First, you pull the cork out, sniff it, say, 'Meat or fish?', and throw! (Military cadence) I don't know, but I've been told, Chardonnay must be served cold! Ja!"”

Robin Williams (1951–2014) American actor and stand-up comedian

Robin Williams: Live on Broadway (2002)

Question, Fish, Wine

“It is common talk that every individual is entitled to economic security. The only animals and birds I know that have economic security are those that have been domesticated--and the economic security they have is controlled by the barbed-wire fence, the butcher's knife and the desire of others. They are milked, skinned, egged or eaten up by their protectors.”

Ray Lyman Wilbur (1875–1949) President of Stanford University

"Ray Lyman Wilbur", The Washington Post, June 28, 1949

Bird, Animals

“Straightforwardness without civility is like a surgeon's knife, effective but unpleasant. Candor with courtesy is helpful and admirable.”

Yukteswar Giri (1855–1936) Indian yogi and guru

Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

Help

“My oh My, what a wretched Life.
I was born on the day that my poor mama died.
I was cut from Her belly with a stanley knife.
My daddy did a jig with the drunk midwife”

Nick Cave (1957) Australian musician

Song lyrics, Tender Prey (1988), Up Jumped the Devil

Life

“The tongue, the Chinese say,
is like a sharp knife:
it kills
without drawing blood.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

"The Dead Heart"
The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975)

Drawing

“Is it a gun, is it a knife?
Is it a wallet, this is your life?
It ain't no secret,
It ain't no secret,
No secret my friend.
You can get killed just for living
In your American skin.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"American Skin"
Song lyrics, High Hopes (2014)

Life, Secret

“I should want to go home, like Fenella. I should be so tired of the shambles here, the obscurantism, the colour-prejudice, the laziness and ignorance, as to desire nothing better than a headship in a cold stone country school in England. But I love this country. I feel protective towards it. Sometimes just before dawn breaks, I feel that somehow I enclose it, contain it. I feel that it needs me. This is absurd, because snakes and scorpions are ready to bite me, a drunken Tamil is prepared to knife me, the Chinese in the town would like to spit at me, some day a Malay boy will run amok and try to tear me apart. But it doesn’t matter. I want to live here; I want to be wanted. Despite the sweat, despite the fever, the prickly heat, the mosquitoes, the terrorists, the fools at the bar of the club, despite Fenella.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

Love, School, Fools, Feeling

“Just as the schoolmen philosophized only inside the belief of the church, … without ever throwing a doubt upon this belief; as authors fill whole folios on the State without calling in question the fixed idea of the State itself; as our newspapers are crammed with politics because they are conjured into the fancy that man was created to be a zoon politicon,—so also subjects vegetate in subjection, virtuous people in virtue, liberals in humanity, etc., without ever putting to these fixed ideas of theirs the searching knife of criticism. Undislodgeable, like a madman’s delusion, those thoughts stand on a firm footing, and he who doubts them—lays hands on the sacred!”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Cambridge 1995, p. 44
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

People, Search, Idea, Question

“A builder. A rough and ready plasterer. A colour grinder. He Courbet is like a Roman bricklayer. And yet he's another true painter. There's no one in this century that surpasses him. Even though he rolls up his sleeves, plugs up his ears, demolishes columns, his workmanship is classical!... His view was always compositional. His vision remained traditional. Like his palette-knife, he used it only out of doors. He was sophisticated and brought his work to a high finish... His great contribution is the poetic introduction of nature - the smell of damp leaves, mossy forest cuttings - into nineteenth century painting; the murmur of rain, woodlands shadows, sunlight moving under trees. The sea. And snow, he painted snow like no one else!”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 198 in: 'What he told me – II. The Louvre'

Nature, Tree, Painting, Sea

“Apple is balancing on a knife edge. I think we're looking at the end stage of a successful technology disruption on the classic pattern. The question is no longer whether Android can be stopped, but when Apple's market share will fall off a cliff. I think that could easily happen as soon as the next 90 days.”

Eric S. Raymond (1957) American computer programmer, author, and advocate for the open source movement

The Smartphone Wars: multicarrier breakout fail http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3152 in Armed and Dangerous (21 April 2011)

Question, Thinking, Success

“… less real than such threats as a man with a gun, a woman with a knife, or a U. S. Senator with an idea.”

Dean Koontz book Brother Odd

Source: Brother Odd (2006), Chapter 38

Idea

“Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the culprit,—Life!”

Emily Dickinson Life, and Death, and Giants —

Life, p. 25
Collected Poems (1993)

Life

“The white man is very clever. He came quietly with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 20 (p. 162)

Religion

“Reform your texts, reform your history. Say leather is not untouchable to God, the barber's knife is not untouchable to God. Take a Dalit priest and a Brahmin priest to celebrations. Do these symbolic things. Let them (high-caste Hindus) come and sit with Dalits in their huts and eat with them”

Kancha Ilaiah (1952) Indian scholar, activist and writer

Quoted in "War against Ignorance" at The Hindu (01 February 2010) http://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/society/war-against-ignorance/article98547.ece.

God, History

“The probing knife of madness
Can start a dullard brain;
Cold cheeks feel kisses
And warm with tears again”

Donald Davidson (1893–1968) American poet, essayist, critic and author

Redivivus

Feeling, Tear

“Once I went professionally to an archaeological expedition--and I learnt something there. In the course of an excavation, when something comes up out of the ground, everything is cleared away very carefully all around it. You take away the loose earth, and you scrape here and there with a knife until finally your object is there, all alone, ready to be drawn and photographed with no extraneous matter confusing it. That is what I have been seeking to do--clear away the extraneous matter so that we can see the truth--the naked shining truth.”

Agatha Christie book Death on the Nile

Hercule Poirot
Death on the Nile (1937)

Truth

“The wayfarer,
Perceiving the pathway to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds.
"Ha," he said,
"I see that none has passed here
In a long time."
Later he saw that each weed
Was a singular knife.
"Well," he mumbled at last,
"Doubtless there are other roads."”

Stephen Crane (1871–1900) American novelist, short story writer, poet, and journalist

The Wayfarer, No. 13
War Is Kind and Other Lines (1899)

Truth, Time

“Verily Allah has enjoined goodness to everything; so when you kill, kill in a good way and when you slaughter, slaughter in a good way. So every one of you should sharpen his knife, and let the slaughtered animal die comfortably.”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Narrated in Saheeh Muslim, Book 021, Number 4810
Sunni Hadith

Way, Animals

“Oh my god, you stabbed her! You killed her! HELP! HE KILLED HER! HE STABBED HER WITH A KITCHEN KNIFE!”

Markiplier (1989) American YouTuber and Internet personality

…I'm very sorry." Video game commentary, Calm Time (November 23, 2013) Source: Calm Time &#124; MOST DISTURBING GAME, Markiplier, wikipedia:Markiplier, November 23, 2013, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQQLZ6mRyrE,

God, Help

“The votaries of Pythagoras of Samos have this story to tell of him, that he was not an Ionian at all, but that, once on a time in Troy, he had been Euphorbus, and that he had come to life after death, but had died as the songs of Homer relate. And they say that he declined to wear apparel made from dead animal products and, to guard his purity, abstained from all flesh diet, and from the offering of animals in sacrifice. For that he would not stain the altars with blood; nay, rather the honey-cake and frankincense and the hymn of praise, these they say were the offerings made to the Gods by this man, who realized that they welcome such tribute more than they do the hecatombs note and the knife laid upon the sacrificial basket.”

Philostratus book Life of Apollonius of Tyana

Book 1, § 1.
Life of Apollonius of Tyana

Life, Death, God, Time

“Then you notice likkle carpet burn
My stomach drop and my guts churn
You shrug and it's the worst
Who truly stuck the knife in first?
I cheated myself like I knew I would
I told you I was trouble, you know that I'm no good
I cheated myself, like I knew I would
I told you I was trouble, yeah you know that I'm no good.”

Amy Winehouse (1983–2011) English singer and songwriter

You Know I'm No Good
Song lyrics, Back To Black (2006)

Cheating

“He grunted with satisfaction. The feel of the hilt cheered him and gave him a glow of confidence. Whatever webs of conspiracy were drawn about him, whatever trickery and treachery ensnared him, this knife was real. The great muscles of his right arm swelled in anticipation of murderous blows.”

Robert E. Howard book The Hour of the Dragon

The Hour of the Dragon (1935-1936)

Feeling, Confidence

““Are you sharpness personified?”
Khouri poured herself a few final sips of coffee and then left the rest of it on the stove for when she got back. Coffee was her only vice, one acquired in her soldiering days on the Edge. The trick was to reach a knife-edge of alertness, but not be so buzzing that she could not point the weapon without shaking.
“I think I’ve reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level, if that’s what you mean.””

Alastair Reynolds book Revelation Space

Source: Revelation Space (2000), Chapter 2 (p. 27).

Coffee, Thinking

“We cannot pretend that we do not see the armed policeman who marches up and down beneath our window to guarantee our security while we eat our luxurious dinner, or look at the new piece at the theater, or that we are unaware of the existence of the soldiers who will make their appearance with guns and cartridges directly our property is attacked.
We know very well that we are only allowed to go on eating our dinner, to finish seeing the new play, or to enjoy to the end the ball, the Christmas fete, the promenade, the races or, the hunt, thanks to the policeman's revolver or the soldier's rifle, which will shoot down the famished outcast who has been robbed of his share, and who looks round the corner with covetous eyes at our pleasures, ready to interrupt them instantly, were not policeman and soldier there prepared to run up at our first call for help.
And therefore just as a brigand caught in broad daylight in the act cannot persuade us that he did not lift his knife in order to rob his victim of his purse, and had no thought of killing him, we too, it would seem, cannot persuade ourselves or others that the soldiers and policemen around us are not to guard us, but only for defense against foreign foes, and to regulate traffic and fetes and reviews; we cannot persuade ourselves and others that we do not know that the men do not like dying of hunger, bereft of the right to gain their subsistence from the earth on which they live; that they do not like working underground, in the water, or in the stifling heat, for ten to fourteen hours a day, at night in factories to manufacture objects for our pleasure. One would imagine it impossible to deny what is so obvious. Yet it is denied.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), Chapter 12

Men, Hunger, Pleasure, Imagination

“What was important, now, with her eyes bent upon him, and the shadow of a branch trembling across her breast, was the immemorial game of love: no less a game for being grave. No less grave for being wild. Grave as a great green sky. Grave as a surgeon’s knife.”

Mervyn Peake book Titus Alone

Source: Titus Alone (1959), Chapter 42 (p. 881)

Love, Game

“The prosecutors say that Mr. Strauss-Kahn "forced" the complainant to have oral and other sex with him. How? Did he have a gun? Did he have a knife? He's a short fat old man.”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

Presumed Innocent, Anyone?
The American Spectator
2011-05-17
http://spectator.org/archives/2011/05/17/presumed-innocent-anyone
2011-06-07, quoted in * La Cage Aux Fools
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
2011-05-19
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-may-19-2011/la-cage-aux-fools
2011-06-07
regarding the May 2011 arrest of IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn for attempted rape of a hotel housekeeper

Sex

“Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or a knife, and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination.”

Lucy Parsons (1853–1942) American communist anarchist labor organizer

Statement appearing in the Chicago Tribune in 1885, as quoted in "What’s Missing From Black History Month" by Jon Hochshartner in The Red Phoenix (10 February 2012) http://theredphoenixapl.org/2012/02/10/whats-missing-from-black-history-month/

War, Waiting

“I was the baby of a large family, and as a youngster fresh to an infant school my mother tried to break me of lefthandedness. I always held my knife in the left hand and fork in the right. One day at dinner my mother said, ' You're not a boy; you must be girl to eat your food like that. We shall have to call you Peggy.' My elder brothers, always glad to take it out of me, carried that name to school, where the other boys seized upon it, and it has stuck to me through a life-time, though it is years since anybody was curious enough to ask how I got it.”

Arthur Frederick Bettinson (1862–1926) Manager and promoter of the National Sporting Club

Life, School, Family, Food

“Our relationship couldn’t continue to balance, as it did, on the point of a knife. We would fall off one edge or the other, depending entirely on his decision, or his instincts. My decision was made, made before I’d ever consciously chosen, and I was committed to seeing it through. Because there was nothing more terrifying to me, more excruciating, than the thought of turning away from him. It was an impossibility.”

Stephenie Meyer (1973) American author

Bella Swan about Edward Cullen, p. 248
Twilight series, Twilight (2005)

Decision, Dependency

“They had left him for dead in the middle of a pool of blood in his own bedroom, his belly slit open like gaping barn doors, the hilt of the knife wedged against his sternum. But the only trouble was that he had stayed alive somehow, his life pumping out, managing to knock the telephone off the little table and dial me. Now he was looking up at me with seconds left and all he could do was force out the words, "Mike …there was no reason."”

Mickey Spillane (1918–2006) American writer

Survival...Zero! (1970)

Life, Dead

“So many I considered, closest to me,
turned on a dime and sold me out dutifully,
although that knife was chipping away at me,
they turned their eyes away and went home to sleep.”

Mariah Carey (1970) American singer-songwriter

"Petals", Rainbow, 1999
Lyrics

Home, Sleep

“The whole plain was like a battlefield—or a farmyard. There was a reddish light and I jumped down, cramped and stiff with cold; a sliver of moon was piercing the low clouds and it looked like a gash from a knife and bathed the plain in a blood-red light. I stayed looking at it for a while. It terrified me.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Source: The moon and the bonfire (1950), Chapter XI, p. 67

Light

“In some traditionalist universities not long ago, you could not research on authors who were still alive. This was a great incentive to slip a knife between their ribs one foggy evening, or a remarkable test of patience if your chosen novelist was in rude health and only 34.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

2000s, After Theory (2003)

Health, Universe, Patience

“Your iron industry is dead; dead as mutton. Your coal industries, which depend greatly upon the iron industries, are languishing. Your silk industry is dead, assassinated by the foreigner. Your woollen industry is in articulo mortis, gasping, struggling. Your cotton industry is seriously sick. The shipbuilding industry, which held out longest of all, is come to a standstill. Turn your eyes where you like, survey any branch of British industry you like, you will find signs of mortal disease. The self-satisfied Radical philosophers will tell you it is nothing; they point to the great volume of British trade. Yes, the volume of British trade is still large, but it is a volume which is no longer profitable; it is working and struggling. So do the muscles and nerves of the body of a man who has been hanged twitch and work violently for a short time after the operation. But death is there all the same, life has utterly departed, and suddenly comes the rigot mortis…But what has produced this state of things? Free imports? I am not sure; I should like an inquiry; but I suspect free imports of the murder of our industries much in the same way as if I found a man standing over a corpse and plunging his knife into it I should suspect that man of homicide, and I should recommend a coroner's inquest and a trial by jury…”

Lord Randolph Churchill (1849–1895) British politician

Speech in Blackpool (24 January 1884), quoted in Robert Rhodes James, Lord Randolph Churchill (London: Phoenix, 1994), p. 137

Life, Death, Disease, Way

““Drew a knife on us,” one muttered, with the sullen rage of the bully who feels wronged when resisted.”

Avram Davidson book The Phoenix and the Mirror

Source: The Phoenix and the Mirror (1969), Chapter 5

Feeling, Rage

“In 1945, therefore, I proved a sentimental fool; and Mr. Truman could safely have classified me among the whimpering idiots he did not wish admitted to the presidential office. For I felt that no man has the right to decree so much suffering, and that science, in providing and sharpening the knife and in upholding the ram, had incurred a guilt of which it will never get rid. It was at that time that the nexus between science and murder became clear to me. For several years after the somber event, between 1947 and 1952, I tried desperately to find a position in what then appeared to me as a bucolic Switzerland,—but I had no success.”

Erwin Chargaff (1905–2002) Ukrinian-born biochemist who emigrated to the United States

Erwin Chargaff, Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life before Nature (1978), 4.

Fools, Suffering, Appearance, Science

“Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Mahatma Gandhi, June 1946, in an interview with Louis Fischer. Rabbi Stephen Pearce, Torah Offers Ethics, rules, so all is fair in love and war, September 2000, http://www.jewishsf.com/bk000901/torah.shtml . Quoted from Hinduism and Judaism compilation https://web.archive.org/web/20060423090103/http://www.nhsf.org.uk/images/stories/HinduDharma/Interfaith/hinduzion.pdf The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1950) by Louis Fischer. The quote is in the context of Gandhi's argument to his biographer that collective suicide would have been a heroic response that would have "aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence". Posthumous publications (1950s and later)

Time, Sea

“You remember what a fabulous success court-ordered "desegregation" plans have been. Few failures have been more spectacular. Illiterate students knifing one another between acts of sodomy in the stairwell is just one of the many eggs that had to be broken to make the left's omelette of transferring power from states to the federal government.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

Ashcroft and the blowhard discuss desegregation
2001-01-17
Townhall
http://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2001/01/17/ashcroft_and_the_blowhard_discuss/page/full; in her book How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) (2004) this passage is slightly revised to end with assertions about "transferring power from cities to the federal courts."
2001

Failure, Success

“You [the interviewer Edouard Roditi, in 1958] have probably understood that I had always been mainly a plain-air painter, though I also painted portraits and still-life compositions. At first I experienced great difficulty with my brushwork – I mean with that the French call 'la touche de pinceau'. So Kandinsky taught me how to achieve the effects that I wanted with a palette knife. In the view from my window in Sèvres, that I painted in 1906, when we were together in France, you can see how well he taught me. Later of course, here in Murnau, I learned to handle brushes, too, but I managed this by following Kandinsky's example, first with a palette knife, than with brushes.”

Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) German painter

Source: Interview by Edouard Roditi (1958), p. 120

Life, Learning, Painting

“A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy: a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept
Or one could weep because another wept.”

W. H. Auden book The Shield of Achilles

The Shield of Achilles (1952)

World, Girl, Boy, Bird

“A banal fever hallucination, soon obliterated and forgotten; it didn't reappear in M's memory until about thirty years later (on 10 August 1925), as he sat alone on a rainy day in a little inn by the seaside, staring at the wooden floor which had been scored by years of scrubbing, and noticed that the grain had started moving of its own accord (much like the lines on the [imitation] mahogany board of his childhood). As with the mahogany board back then, and as with visions seen between sleeping and waking, the lines formed shifting, changing images, blurred at first but then increasingly precise. Max {Ernst] decided to pursue the symbolism of this compulsory inspiration and, in order to sharpen his meditative and hallucinatory skills, he took a series of drawings from the floorboards. Letting pieces of paper drop at random on the floor, he rubbed over them with a black pencil. On careful inspection of the impressions made in this way, he was surprised by the sudden increase they produced in his visionary abilities. His curiosity was aroused. He was delighted, and began making the same type of inquiry into all sorts of materials, whatever caught his eye – leaves with their ribs, the frayed edges of sacking, the strokes of a palette knife in a 'modern' painting, thread rolling off a spool, and so forth. To quote 'Beyond Painting' These drawings, the first fruits of the frottage technique, were collected under the title 'Histoire Naturell.”

Max Ernst (1891–1976) German painter, sculptor and graphic artist

Quote in 'Biographical Notes. Tissue of truth, Tissue of Lies', 1929; as cited in Max Ernst. A Retrospective, Munich, Prestel, 1991, pp.283/284
1910 - 1935

Way, Quotes, Sleep, Memory

“What do you want to do with the [Communist] Party? A racing stable? What good is it to sharpen a knife every day if you never use it for slicing? A party is never more than a means. There is only one objective: power.”

Jean Paul Sartre Dirty Hands

Hoederer to Hugo, Act 5, sc. 3
Dirty Hands (1948)

“A knife is sharpened on stone, steel is tempered by fire, but men must be sharpened by men.”

Louis L'Amour book The Walking Drum

Source: The Walking Drum (1984), Ch. 57

Men

“Among other things he found a sharp hunting knife, on the keen blade of which he immediately proceeded to cut his finger. Undaunted he continued his experiments, finding that he could hack and hew splinters of wood from the table and chairs with this new toy.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 6 : Jungle Battles

“I recall some years ago this mother and son in California who was very angry and stomped out of the meeting and I did not see her again because I said it was the duty of Christian parents to have their child in the Christian school. And she went on about how wonderful their church was, and how marvelous the youth was, and her daughter had the best kind of Christian training imaginable and she was a good witness at school. And I never saw her again but I heard from her about six, seven years later when she called me weeping. Did I know a school that would take her daughter because her daughter was now into demonism, she was out sometimes for two or three nights, was into drugs and promiscuity, if the mother tried to say anything to her the girl thought nothing about pulling a knife and backing the mother against the wall with a knife against her throat and threatening her life. And she wanted to know if there was a Christian school in town, in particular, and I told her it would take a full time guard to stand over your daughter every moment, and she wanted, she felt that it was unchristian that they wouldn’t take her daughter. And I reminded her of her stand a few years back, when she continued to whine and feel sorry for herself, someone was going to take the mess she had created and hand her back her daughter, perhaps to stick her back in the public schools again.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Dangers Inherent in Public Education (March 24, 1986)

Life, Youth, School, Feeling

“Friends, last night I watched the Hollywood (Paramount) movie Noah. It is much, much worse than I thought it would be—much worse. The director of the movie, Darren Aronofsky, has been quoted in the media as saying that Noah is “the least biblical biblical film ever made,” and I agree wholeheartedly with him. I am disgusted. I am going to come right out and say it: this movie is disgusting and evil—paganism! Do you really want your family to see a pagan movie that portrays Noah as a psychopath who says that if his daughter-in-law’s baby is a girl then he will kill her as soon as she’s born? And when two girls are born, bloodstained Noah (the man the Bible calls “righteous” in Genesis 7:1) brings a knife down to the head of one of the babies to kill her—and at the last minute doesn’t do it. And then a bit later, Noah says he failed because he didn’t kill the babies. How can we recommend this movie and then speak against abortion? Psychopathic Noah sees humans as a blight on the planet and wants to rid the world of people. I feel dirty—as if I have to somehow wash the evil off myself. I cannot believe there are Christian leaders who have recommended that people see this movie.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

"The Noah Movie is Disgusting and Evil: Paganism!" http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2014/03/28/the-noah-movie-is-disgusting-and-evil-paganism/, Around the World with Ken Ham (March 28, 2014) Around the World with Ken Ham (May 2005 - Ongoing)

People, World, Family, Law

“There is no more embarrassing thing in my life that the fact that I have actually uttered the phrase, "I would like to order the Ginsu Knife."”

Jerry Seinfeld (1954) American comedian and actor

I'm Telling You for the Last Time (1998)

Life

“Jack was on top of the sow, stabbing downward with his knife. Roger found a lodgment for his point and began to push till he was leaning his whole weight. The spear moved forward inch by inch and the terrified squealing became a high-pitched scream. Then Jack found the throat and the hot blood spouted over his hands. The sow collapsed under them and they were heavy and fulfilled upon her. The butterflies still danced, preoccupied in the center of the clearing.”

William Golding book Lord of the Flies

Source: Lord of the Flies (1954), Ch. 8: Gift for the Darkness

Dance

“No, Travaglio kills no one. With a knife. He uses a weapon much more refined and unendictable in court: the archive.”

Indro Montanelli (1909–2001) Italian journalist

cited in Marco Travaglio, Montanelli e il Cavaliere: storia di un grande e di un piccolo uomo.
2000s - 2010s

“Peace treaties signed by the vanquished are not freely signed. Men sign with a knife at their throat, they sign in spite of themselves, in order to avoid still greater losses; they sign as men surrender their purse when it is a case of your money or your life.”

François Fénelon (1651–1715) Catholic bishop

Les traités de paix ne couvrent rien, lorsque vous êtes le plus fort, & que vous réduisez vos voisins à signer le traité pour éviter de plus grands maux: alors il signe comme un particulier donne sa bourse à un voleur qui lui tient le pistolet sur la gorge.
Directions pour la conscience d'un roi (Paris: Estienne, 1775) p. 60; translation by A. Lentin, cited from Margaret Lucille Kekewich (ed.) Princes and Peoples: France and the British Isles, 1620-1714 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) p. 226. (c. 1694).

Life, Men, Money, Peace

“It never felt so good, it never felt so right
And we're glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife.”

Jim Steinman (1947) American musician

Bat out of Hell (1977), Paradise by the Dashboard Light

“The icy cold will cut us like a knife in the dark
And we may lose everything in the wind
But the Northern Lights are burning
And they're giving off sparks.”

Jim Steinman (1947) American musician

"Bad for Good"
Bad for Good (1981)

Light

“It fetches crops from the rich earth,
It's a good beast biting the ground.
It must have its knife and its board
And its food right under its thigh.
It goes unwillingly through stones,
It skins the field with leg outstretched.”

Iolo Goch (1320–1398) Welsh bard

Cnwd a gyrch mewn cnodig âr,
Cnyw diwael yn cnoi daear.
E fynn ei gyllell a'i fwyd
A'i fwrdd dan fôn ei forddwd.
Gŵr a'i anfodd ar grynfaen,
Gwas a fling a'i goes o’i flaen.
Source: Y Llafurwr (The Labourer), Line 49.

Food

“Now and forever, you are a part of me
And the memory cuts like a knife.
Didn't we find the ecstasy, didn't we share the daylight
When you walked into my life?Now and forever, I'll remember
All the promises still unbroken.
And think about all the words between us
That never needed to be spoken.”

Carole King (1942) Nasa

Now and Forever
Song lyrics, Soundtrack to A League of Their Own (1992)

Life, Thinking, Memory, Parting

“… don't wait for the good woman. She doesn't exist. There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts. The female loves to play man against man, and if she is in a position to do it there is not one who will not resist. The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal. and torture and damnation. Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

in a letter to Steven Richmond (Published in Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life by Howard Sounes)
Letters

Love, Women, Feeling, Soul

“"What is Bazarov?" Arkady smiled. "Would you like me to tell you, uncle, what he really is?""Please do, nephew.""He is a nihilist!""What?" asked Nikolai Petrovich, while Pavel Petrovich lifted his knife in the air with a small piece of butter on the tip and remained motionless."He is a nihilist," repeated Arkady."A nihilist," said Nikolai Petrovich. "That comes from the Latin nihil, nothing, as far as I can judge; the word must mean a man who… who recognizes nothing?""Say — who respects nothing," interposed Pavel Petrovich and lowered his knife with the butter on it."Who regards everything from the critical point of view," said Arkady."Isn't that exactly the same thing?" asked Pavel Petrovich."No, it's not the same thing. A nihilist is a person who does not bow down to any authority, who does not accept any principle on faith, however much that principle may be revered.""Well, and is that good?" asked Pavel Petrovich. "That depends, uncle dear. For some it is good, for others very bad.""Indeed. Well, I see that's not in our line. We old-fashioned people think that without principles, taken as you say on faith, one can't take a step or even breathe. Vous avez changé tout cela; may God grant you health and a general's rank, and we shall be content to look on and admire your… what was the name?""Nihilists," said Arkady, pronouncing very distinctly."Yes, there used to be Hegelists and now there are nihilists. We shall see how you will manage to exist in the empty airless void; and now ring, please, brother Nikolai, it's time for me to drink my cocoa."”

Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) Russian writer

Source: Father and Sons (1862), Ch. 5.

God, People, Health, Faith

“Man rears his cattle, his sheep, and his poultry much like household pets. His children make his lambs their playmates. Side by side his oxen toil with him in the field. In return for kindness, they give affection. What confidence they repose in him! how faithfully they serve! With winter's frost an evil day arrives,—a day of massacre, of perfidy, of bloodshed and butchery. With knife and ax he turns upon his trusted friends, the sheep that kissed his hand, the ox that plowed his field. The air is filled with shrieks and moans, with cries of terror and despair; the soil is wet with warm blood, and strewn with corpses.”

John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) American physician

Source: The Living Temple, p. 186

Children, Confidence, Kiss, Winter

“If you try putting a woman on a horse when she does not want to go, she may put a knife in your ribs.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Aviendha to Matrim Cauthon
(15 October 1994)

Horse

“Later on you will find buried near the coconut tree
the knife which I hid there for fear you would kill me,
and now suddenly I would be glad to smell its kitchen steel
used to the weight of your hand, the shine of your foot:
under the dampness of the ground, among the deaf roots,
in all the languages of the men only the poor will know your name,
and the dense earth does not understand your name
made of impenetrable divine substances.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Enterrado junto al cocotero hallarás más tarde
el cuchillo que escodí allí por temor de que me mataras,
y ahora repentinamente quisiera oler su acero de cocina
acostumbrado al peso de tu mano y al brillo de tu pie:
bajo la humedad de la tierra, entre las sordas raíces,
de los lenguajes humanos el pobre sólo sabría tu nombre,
y la espesa tierra no comprende tu nombre
hecho de impenetrables y substancias divinas.
Tango del Viudo (The Widower's Tango), Residencia I (Residence I), III, stanza 3.
Alternate translation by Donald D. Walsh:
Buried next to the coconut tree you will later find
the knife that I hid there for fear that you would kill me,
and now suddenly I should like to smell its kitchen steel
accustomed to the weight of your hand and the shine of your foot:
under the moisture of the earth, among the deaf roots,
of all human labguages the poor thing would know only your name,
and the thick earth does not understand your name
made of impenetrable and divine substances.
Residencia en la Tierra (Residence on Earth) (1933)

Men, Fear, Understanding, Tree

“Lo, the book I hold here,
In the city cold here !

I hold it with a gentle hand and love it as I may;
Lo, the weary moments!
Lo, the icy comments!
And lo, false Fortune's knife of gold swift-lifted up to slay!

Has the strife no ending?
Has the song no meaning?

Linger I, idle as of old, while men are reaping or gleaning?”

Robert Williams Buchanan (1841–1901) Scottish poet, novelist and dramatist

"To David in Heaven", St. 9.
Undertones (1883)

Love, Men, Books, Falseness

“Ammu,' Chacko said, his voice steady and deliberately casual, 'is it at all possible for you to prevent your washed-up cynicism from completely colouring everything?'
Silence filled the car like a saturated sponge. Washed-up cut like a knife through a small thing. The sun shone with a shuddering sigh. This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things (1997)

Family, Cars, Silence, Sun

“As a boy of six I could understand the proof of a mathematical theorem more readily than that meat had to be cut with one's knife, not one's fork.”

Ferdinand Eisenstein (1823–1852) German mathematician

Curriculum Vitae - an autobiographical statement written when Eisenstein was 20, often referred to as his "Autobiography" (1843)

Boy, Mathematics, Understanding

“The outlaw uses the knife to separate the persona from the self. The outlaw uses the warrior’s sword to cut through his own character armor to destroy the defense mechanisms that have kept him imprisoned within the citadel of personality and role.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 132

Personality

“Pirates! No true honest seamen, these, with their strange contrast of finery and ruffianism. Tarry breeks and seamen's shirts, yet silken sashes lapped their waists; no stockings to their legs, yet many had on silver-buckled shoes and heavy gold rings to their fingers. Great gems dangled from many a heavy gold hoop serving as an ear ring. Not an honest sailorman's knife among them, but costly Spanish and Italian daggers. Their gauds, their ferocious faces, their wild and blasphemous bearing stamped them with the mark of their red trade.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Blue Flame of Vengeance" (1968)

Shoe

“An ugly knife lay buried in the heart of Mad Carew,
'Twas the 'Vengeance of the Little Yellow God.”

J. Milton Hayes The Green Eye of the Yellow God

The Green Eye of the Yellow God

God, Heart, Madness

“What is God? The telescope by which we hold converse with the stars, the microscope which unveils the secrets of nature, the crucible of the chemist, the knife of the anatomist, the reflective faculties of the philosopher, all the common instruments of science, avail not here. On the threshold of that impenetrable mystery, a voice arrests our steps. From out the clouds and darkness that are round about God's throne, the question comes, "Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection?"”

Thomas Guthrie (1803–1873) British divine

Source: The Gospel in Ezekiel Illustrated in a Series of Discourses (1856), PP. 63-64 (Man Suffering).

God, Secret, Search, Star

“Keen intelligence is two-edged, It may be used constructively or destructively like a knife, either to cut the boil of ignorance, or to decapitate one's self. Intelligence is rightly guided only after the mind has acknowledged the inescapability of spiritual law.”

Yukteswar Giri (1855–1936) Indian yogi and guru

Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

Law, Intelligence

“A man … found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner (2003)

Happiness, Sadness, Way, Mountain

“And all the trips you know you missed
And all the lips you never kissed
Cut through you like a knife.
And now you see stretched out before thee
Just another story of a life.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Story of a Life
Song lyrics, Sequel (1981)

Life, Kiss

“Conservatives — Republicans — are socialists.
True, they may desire to hold you down atop the stone altar and cut your still-beating heart out with an obsidian knife for a set of entirely different reasons — national security, Judaeo-Christian traditions, 'common' decency — than the liberals or 'progressives' or Democrats do, but to you, the important part is cutting your heart out with an obsidian knife, not whatever excuse they may offer for doing it.
This is why, no matter which political party happens to be in power, ordinary people — whose thinking and hard work maintain this civilization each and every day — never seem to get an even break with regard to their individual liberty or holding onto the fruits of their labor. It's why the late philosopher Robert LeFevre referred to Democrats and Republicans as 'Socialist Party A' and 'Socialist Party B.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"To Reduce Them Under Absolute Despotism".

People, Thinking, Heart, Parting

“I'm drinking Jack and I started blacking out. You ever black out? Or as I call it, time travel? You ever do that? Oh yeah! You know how it is -- you're drinking, you black out. You wake up, you're in another bar. You're drinking, you black out. You wake up, you're playing that knife game with a half-Indian somewhere in North Dakota, "Yeah! Yeah! Winner fixes the tranny! Yeah". You're drinking, you black out. You wake up, you're in White Castle -- working there 3 years, STILL not assistant manager. Your buddies tell you to quit, but you can't 'cause you're banging the slow girl on the fry-o-later. They say she's a little retarded, but those titties ain't retarded!”

Dave Attell (1965) comedian

Comedy Central Presents: Dave Attell

Travel, Girl, Game, Drink

“Then no soft arms could hold me from my wilderness
To reap at daylight's fallow edge, with bullet or knife,
That flicker of hoof or pelt, that flash of wings returning -
The dogs trace it - harvest of life that gives me life.”

Donald Davidson (1893–1968) American poet, essayist, critic and author

Second Harvest

Life, Dogs

“I agree with that in principle. Where would you stick the knife in?”

John Podesta (1949) Former White House Chief of Staff

February 21, 2016 https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/44131 Attributed, WikiLeaks - The Podesta Emails

“Please let me know to what extent you have used, or intend using, the pruning knife.”

John Tenniel (1820–1914) British illustrator, graphic humourist and political cartoonist

Urging Carroll to shorten Through the Looking-Glass; p. 14
M. N. Cohen & E. Wakeling, Lewis Carroll and his Illustrators (2003)

“I say, rather than that apostates should flourish here, I will unsheath my bowie knife, and conquer or die. (Great commotion in the congregation, and a simultaneous burst of feeling, assenting to the declaration.) Now, you nasty apostates, clear out, or judgment will be put to the line, and righteousness to the plummet. (Voices, generally, "go it, go it.")If you say it is right, raise your hands. (All hands up.) Let us call upon the Lord to assist us in this, and every good work.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses 1:83 (March 27, 1853)
Young describing his feelings upon awakening from a dream in which he "saw two ruffians, whom I knew to be mobbers and murderers, and they crept into a bed, where one of my wives and children were..."
1850s

Feeling

“To cut with a sharp knife a bright green watermelon on a big scarlet plate of a summer afternoon. Ah, is this not happiness?”

Jin Shengtan (1610–1661) Chinese writer

"Thirty-three Happy Moments"

Happiness, Summer

“Cursed be all those on land and sea who eat their fill,
cursed be all those who starve yet raise no hand in protest,
cursed be all the bread, the wine, the meat which day by day
descends deep in the entrails of the exploited man
and turns not into freedom's cry, the murderer's ruthless knife!”

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) Greek writer

Prayer of three revolutionaries, Book X, line 391
The Odyssey : A Modern Sequel (1938)

Freedom, Wine, Cry, Sea

“I hold the subtle knife on behalf of the Guild.”

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

Giacomo Paradisi in Ch. 8 : The Tower of the Angels
His Dark Materials, The Subtle Knife (1997)

“The Universalists think they are very charitable. Why? Because they send all to heaven, whether they are good or evil, saints or sinners. Murderers, drunkards, and all classes of society are to dwell together in heaven. And what a heaven it would be!—Methodists contending against Baptists, and Baptists against Methodists, Presbyterians against Quakers, Roman Catholics against Protestants, and Nothingarians against Sectarians, and Sectarians against Nothingarians; and then add to the whole catalogue of contending sects drunkards, blasphemers, whoremongers, murderers, and every species of wicked beings, all jumbled up together. Oh, what a happy place! Brother Kimball says—"And all of them with a revolver and bowie knife at their sides."”

Orson Pratt (1811–1881) Apostle of the LDS Church

Journal of Discourses 7:88 (Aug. 28, 1859).
Who goes to heaven

Happiness, Thinking, Evil

“Watch the grown ups all twirling with the clock throughout the day. Watch them spinning through the hours while the time hands tick away. They talk and grip the world, as they would catch a falling knife. Reality deceives them ’neath amusing games of life.”

Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician

"Rhythm of Surrender"
A Different Drum (2004)

Life, World, Game, Reality

“When I came back to Ottawa I found myself faced with a very difficult parliamentary situation… I think it is fair to say that Mr St Laurent, on the basis of private discussions with the Opposition leaders, did not expect any serious division in the House of Commons over our policies on Suez. However, bitter division there was, and we were condemned strongly for deserting our two mother countries. The Conservative attack was led by Howard Green (who in June 1959 was to become Secretary of State for External Affairs). Green accused us of being the "chore boy" of the United States, of being a better friend to Nasser than to Britain and France, and claimed that our government "by its actions in the Suez crisis, has made this month of November 1956, the most disgraceful period for Canada in the history of this nation," and that it was "high time Canada had a government which will not knife Canada's best friends in the back." Any feeling of exaltation and conceit or euphoria at our success in avoiding a general war in the Middle East (if in fact we had avoided it by our actions) was dissipated for me by the vigour of the assaults on my conduct, my wisdom, my rectitude, my integrity, and my everything else by an embattled Conservative Opposition. It was a very vigorous debate reflected in the general election of the next year. But I have always believed, and I think the great weight of Canadian opinion strongly approved what we had done. Further, I am absolutely certain and will remain certain in my own mind that the New Commonwealth would have soon shattered over the issue had the British not backed down.”

Lester B. Pearson (1897–1972) 14th Prime Minister of Canada

Memoirs, Volume Two

Wisdom, War, Feeling, History

“Among the Romans in Christian times Mithras-worship as very widely spread, and so late as the Middle Ages we meet with a secret Mithras-worship ostensibly connected with the order of the Knights-Templars. Mithras thrusting the knife into the neck of the ox is a figurative representation belonging essentially to the cult of Mithras, of which examples have been frequently found in Europe.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) German philosopher

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Lectures on the philosophy of religion, together with a work on the proofs of the existence of God. Vol 2 Translated from the 2d German ed. 1895 Ebenezer Brown Speirs 1854-1900, and J Burdon Sanderson p. 81-82
Lectures on Philosophy of Religion, Volume 2

Secret, Age, Time

“With a sudden clarity which went beyond the immediacy of his pain or sorrow, Sol Weintraub suddenly understood perfectly why Abraham had agreed to sacrifice Isaac, his son, when the Lord commanded him to do so.
It was not obedience.
It was not even to put the love of God above the love of his son.
Abraham was testing God.
By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham.”

Dan Simmons book The Fall of Hyperion

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 45 (p. 491)

Love, God, Pain, Heart

“She went away, she cut me like a knife.
Hello beautiful thing, maybe you could save my life.
In just a glance, down here on magic street,
Loves a fool's dance
And I ain't got much sense, but I still got my feet.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Girls in Their Summer Clothes"
Song lyrics, Magic (2007)

Love, Life, Beauty, Fools

“His the knife, and mine the body
the twofold cause of suffering.
He has grasped the knife, I my body.
At which is there anger?”

Šantidéva (685–763) 8th-century Indian Buddhist monk and scholar

Bodhicaryavatara

Suffering, Anger

“The GNP by itself is no mark of our national achievement. For it includes smokestacks that pollute, drugs that destroy, and ambulances which clear our highways of human wreckage. It includes a mugger's knife, a rioter's bomb, and Oswald's rifle, but if the GNP tells us all this, there is much that it does not tell us. It says nothing about the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play.”

Jerry Springer (1944) American television presenter, former lawyer, politician, news presenter, actor, and musician

from a speech given circa 1970 to citizens in Cincinnati Ohio. This American Life http://www.thislife.org/pages/descriptions/04/258.html, Ep. 258, 01/30/04, Leaving the Fold; Act One. PLEASE NOTE that this quote borrows very heavily, in substance and form, from a 1968 speech by Robert F. Kennedy http://www.mccombs.utexas.edu/faculty/Michael.Brandl/Main%20Page%20Items/Kennedy%20on%20GNP.htm.

Health, Education, Family, Joy