1910s, The Progressives, Past and Present (1910)
Context: [Clarifying statement above]: Every Muslim should be a terrorist. A terrorist is a person who causes terror. The moment a robber sees a policeman he is terrified. A policeman is a terrorist for the robber. Similarly every Muslim should be a terrorist for the antisocial elements of society, such as thieves, dacoits [bandits] and rapists. Whenever such an anti-social element sees a Muslim, he should be terrified. It is true that the word ‘terrorist’ is generally used for a person who causes terror among the common people. But a true Muslim should only be a terrorist to selective people, i. e. anti-social elements, and not to the common innocent people. In fact, a Muslim should be a source of peace for innocent people.
On Osama Bin Laden, October 1, 2009. http://barthsnotes.com/2013/05/26/spotlight-on-greenwich-university-islamic-society-in-wake-of-murder/
The Satanic Bible (1969)
To Leon Goldensohn, July 15, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004
“One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.”
As quoted in "V.S. Naipaul in Search of Himself: A Conversation" with Mel Gussow, The New York Times, (24 April 1994)
The Crisis No. IV.
1770s, The American Crisis (1776–1783)
Context: Men who are sincere in defending their freedom, will always feel concern at every circumstance which seems to make against them; it is the natural and honest consequence of all affectionate attachments, and the want of it is a vice. But the dejection lasts only for a moment; they soon rise out of it with additional vigor; the glow of hope, courage and fortitude, will, in a little time, supply the place of every inferior passion, and kindle the whole heart into heroism.
Light (1919), Ch. XXIII - Face To Face
Context: Against the window's still pallid sky I see her hair, silvered with a moonlike sheen, and her night-veiled face. Closely I look at the share of sublimity which she bears on it, and I reflect that I am infinitely attached to this woman, that it is not true to say she is of less moment to me because desire no longer throws me on her as it used to do. Is it habit? No, not only that. Everywhere habit exerts its gentle strength, perhaps between us two also. But there is more. There is not only the narrowness of rooms to bring us together. There is more, there is more! So I say to her:
"There's you."
"Me?" she says. "I'm nothing."
"Yes, you are everything, you're everything to me."
Timebends : A Life (1987)
Context: The Crucible became by far my most frequently produced play, both abroad and at home. Its meaning is somewhat different in different places and moments. I can almost tell what the political situation in a country is when the play is suddenly a hit there — it is either a warning of tyranny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past.
Interview with Nobel Media (2014)
Context: You have given the great honour … to hundreds of millions of children in the world who are deprived of their childhood and health and education, and fundamental right to freedom. It is a great moment for all those children. … I am quite hopeful and rather sure that this will help in giving bigger visibility and attention to the cause of children who are most neglected and most deprived. This will also inspire individuals, activists, governments, business houses, corporate to work hand in hand to fight this out. And I am quite hopeful about it, that the recognition of this issue will help in mobilising bigger support for the cause.
1984
Context: On technology: "That’s probably why I don’t rush out to buy all the latest technology. In fact, I find it quite boring at the moment, simply because so much of it is just technology — nothing more. I buy something if it really appeals to me, if I think it will add another dimension to what I have at the moment. Don’t misunderstand me: I think it is important to have as many different instruments as possible, with different libraries of sounds, and different characteristics. But some people adopt the attitude that if they had enough money they could have all the machinery they wanted, and that would somehow make their music better. That’s simply not the case... This is another reason why it’s important not to become obsessed with technology. You’ve got to remember that however a sound is generated — acoustically, electronically digitally - it’s still just a sound, a part of nature".
Book III, 3.39-[3]
History of the Peloponnesian War, Book III
Source: Prometheus Bound, lines 510–524, as translated by R. Potter (1860)
A Tryst With Destiny (1947)
Source: Quicktime excerpt http://www.harappa.com/wall/nehru.html and in: Rediscovery of India, The: A New Subcontinent http://books.google.com/books?id=XRpFol4AnO0C&pg=PA191, Orient Blackswan, 1 January 1999, p. 191
Excerpts from his speech delivered on the eve of declaration of Independence, on 14 August 1947, at the midnight hour declaring Independence of India on 15 August 1947.
Context: Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment, we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.
Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 227
Context: The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have. The past and future have meaning because they are part of the present: a past event has existence now because you are thinking of it at this present moment, or because it influences you so that you, as a living being in the present, are that much different. The future has reality because one can bring it into his mind in the present. Past was the present at one time, and the future will be the present at some coming moment. To try to live in the "when" of the future or the "then" of the past always involves an artificiality, a separating one's self from reality; for in actuality one exists in the present. The past has meaning as it lights up the present, and the future as it makes the present richer and more profound.
Interview in Writers at Work Third Series (1967) edited by George Plimpton
Context: One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness — the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.
The Psychology of the Child Archetype [Das göttliche Kind] (1941), 1963 translation, II, 1 : The Archetype as a Link with the Past; also in Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part I, p. 160
Context: Not for a moment dare we succumb to the illusion that an archetype can be finally explained and disposed of. Even the best attempts at explanation are only more or less successful translations into another metaphorical language. (Indeed, language itself is only an image.) The most we can do is dream the myth onwards and give it a modern dress. And whatever explanation or interpretation does to it, we do to our own souls as well, with corresponding results for our own well-being. The archetype — let us never forget this — is a psychic organ present in all of us. A bad explanation means a correspondingly bad attitude toward this organ, which may thus be injured. But the ultimate sufferer is the bad interpreter himself.
Book I, 1.1-[1] (opening lines...)
History of the Peloponnesian War, Book I
"The Law and the Gospel" (1896)
Context: You cannot judge a man's life by the success of a moment, by the victory of an hour, or even by the results of a year. You must view his life as a whole. You must stand where you can see the man as he treads the entire path that leads from the cradle to the grave — now crossing the plain, now climbing the steeps, now passing through pleasant fields, now wending his way with difficulty between rugged rocks — tempted, tried, tested, triumphant.
“Flow in the living moment. — We are always in a process of becoming and NOTHING is fixed.”
Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 13; Unsourced variant: Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
Context: Flow in the living moment. — We are always in a process of becoming and NOTHING is fixed. Have no rigid system in you, and you'll be flexible to change with the ever changing. OPEN yourself and flow, my friend. Flow in the TOTAL OPENNESS OF THE LIVING MOMENT. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Moving, be like water. Still, be like a mirror. Respond like an echo.
Speak, Memory: A Memoir (1951)
Context: Whenever in my dreams, I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then — not in dreams — but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle-tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.
The world goes crazy for Lady Gaga (2009)
Context: I don't want to see Bowie in a tracksuit. He never let anyone see him that way. The outlet for my work is not just the music and the videos, it's every breathing moment of my life. I'm always saying something about art and music and fame. That's why you don't ever catch me in sweatpants.
Speech to a joint session of the US Congress (12 March 1947), outlining what became known as The Truman Doctrine
Context: At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.
One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.
The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.
I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.
Letter to Queen Mother Elisabeth of Belgium (9 January 1939), asking for her help in getting an elderly cousin of his out of Germany and into Belgium. Quoted in Einstein on Peace edited by Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden (1960), p. 282
1930s
Context: The moral decline we are compelled to witness and the suffering it engenders are so oppressive that one cannot ignore them even for a moment. No matter how deeply one immerses oneself in work, a haunting feeling of inescapable tragedy persists. Still, there are moments when one feels free from one's own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments, one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable: life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only being.
Responding to the social theories of Benjamin Kidd, in "Kidd's 'Social Evolution'" in The North American Review (July 1895), p. 109
1890s
Context: A perfectly stupid race can never rise to a very high plane; the negro, for instance, has been kept down as much by lack of intellectual development as by anything else; but the prime factor in the preservation of a race is its power to attain a high degree of social efficiency. Love of order, ability to fight well and breed well, capacity to subordinate the interests of the individual to the interests of the community, these and similar rather humdrum qualities go to make up the sum of social efficiency. The race that has them is sure to overturn the race whose members have brilliant intellects, but who are cold and selfish and timid, who do not breed well or fight well, and who are not capable of disinterested love of the community. In other words, character is far more important than intellect to the race as to the individual. We need intellect, and there is no reason why we should not have it together with character; but if we must choose between the two we choose character without a moment's hesitation.
"I create gods all the time - now I think one might exist" (2008)
Context: So what shall I make of the voice that spoke to me recently as I was scuttling around getting ready for yet another spell on a chat-show sofa?
More accurately, it was a memory of a voice in my head, and it told me that everything was OK and things were happening as they should. For a moment, the world had felt at peace. Where did it come from?
Me, actually — the part of all of us that, in my case, caused me to stand in awe the first time I heard Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium, and the elation I felt on a walk one day last February, when the light of the setting sun turned a ploughed field into shocking pink; I believe it's what Abraham felt on the mountain and Einstein did when it turned out that E=mc2.
It's that moment, that brief epiphany when the universe opens up and shows us something, and in that instant we get just a sense of an order greater than Heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Stephen Hawking. It doesn't require worship, but, I think, rewards intelligence, observation and enquiring minds.
I don't think I've found God, but I may have seen where gods come from.
p 110
The Undiscovered Self (1958)
Context: We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a "metamorphosis of the gods," i. e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science.
Address to United Nations General Assembly http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1987/092187b.htm (21 September 1987)
1980s, Second term of office (1985–1989)
Context: Cannot swords be turned to plowshares? Can we and all nations not live in peace? In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?
54
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)
Context: There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.
One can disintegrate the world by means of very strong light. For weak eyes the world becomes solid, for still weaker eyes it seems to develop fists, for eyes weaker still it becomes shamefaced and smashes anyone who dares to gaze upon it.
My Way: The Way of the White Clouds (1995)
Context: Find moments when you are not, and those will be the moments when you will be for the first time... really. So I am the white cloud, and the whole effort is to make you also white clouds drifting in the sky. Nowhere to go, coming from nowhere, just being there this very moment — perfect. I don't teach you any ideals, I don't teach you any oughts. I don't say to you be this, become that. My whole teaching is simply this: Whatsoever you are, accept it so totally that nothing is left to be achieved, and you will become a white cloud.
Billy writing a letter to a newspaper describing the Tralfamadorians
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Context: The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."
Barks and Purrs
Context: Toby-Dog: It seems to me that of the two of us it's you they make the most of, and yet you do all the grumbling.
Kiki-The-Demure: A dog's logic, that! The more one gives the more I demand.
Toby-Dog: That's wrong. It's indiscreet.
Kiki-The-Demure: Not at all. I have a right to everything.
Toby-Dog: To everything? And I?
Kiki-The-Demure: I don't imagine you lack anything, do you?
Toby-Dog: Ah, I don't know. Sometimes in my very happiest moments, I feel like crying. My eyes grow dim, my heart seems to choke me. I would like to be sure, in such times of anguish, that everybody loves me; that there is nowhere in the world a sad dog behind a closed door, that no evil will ever come...
Kiki-The-Demure: And then what dreadful thing happens?
Toby-Dog: You know very well! Inevitably, at that moment She appears, carrying a bottle with horrible yellow stuff floating in it — Castor Oil!
Source: No Way Out (2002), Ch. 2: Nothing To Be Transformed
Context: Whether you are interested in moksha, liberation, freedom, transformation, you name it, you are interested in happiness without one moment of unhappiness, pleasure without pain, it is the same thing. Whether one is here in India or Russia or in America or anywhere, what people want is to have one without the other. But there is no way you can have one without the other. This demand is not in the interest of the survival of this living organism.
“Everything that man esteems
Endures a moment or a day.”
II, st. 2
The Tower (1928), Two Songs From a Play http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1741/
Context: Everything that man esteems
Endures a moment or a day.
Love’s pleasure drives his love away,
The painter’s brush consumes his dreams.
“The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed.”
On Fairy-Stories (1939)
Context: The story-maker proves a successful 'sub-creator'. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed.
“The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual.”
6
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)
Context: The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.
On the main character in his novel The Catcher in the Rye, as quoted in Asks Appeals Court to Uphold Ban on ‘Catcher’ Sequel" in The New York Times (14 August 2009) http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/salinger-asks-appeals-court-to-uphold-ban-on-catcher-sequel/"Salinger
2009, Nobel Prize acceptance speech (December 2009)
Context: We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the intractability of deprivation, and still strive for dignity. Clear-eyed, we can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace. We can do that — for that is the story of human progress; that's the hope of all the world; and at this moment of challenge, that must be our work here on Earth.
1900s, Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School (1904)
Context: You often hear people speaking as if life was like striving upward toward a mountain peak. That is not so. Life is as if you were traveling a ridge crest. You have the gulf of inefficiency on one side and the gulf of wickedness on the other, and it helps not to have avoided one gulf if you fall into the other. It shall profit us nothing if our people are decent and ineffective. It shall profit us nothing if they are efficient and wicked. In every walk of life, in business, politics; if the need comes, in war; in literature, science, art, in everything, what we need is a sufficient number of men who can work well and who will work with a high ideal. The work can be done in a thousand different ways. Our public life depends primarily not upon the men who occupy public positions for the moment, because they are but an infinitesimal fraction of the whole. Our public life depends upon men who take an active interest in that public life; who are bound to see public affairs honestly and competently managed; but who have the good sense to know what honesty and competency actually mean. And any such man, if he is both sane and high-minded, can be a greater help and strength to any one in public life than you can easily imagine without having had yourselves the experience. It is an immense strength to a public man to know a certain number of people to whom he can appeal for advice and for backing; whose character is so high that baseness would shrink ashamed before them; and who have such good sense that any decent public servant is entirely willing to lay before them every detail of his actions, asking only that they know the facts before they pass final judgment.
1860s, Speeches to Ohio Regiments (1864), Speech to One Hundred Forty-eighth Ohio Regiment (1864)
Context: It is vain and foolish to arraign this man or that for the part he has taken, or has not taken, and to hold the government responsible for his acts. In no administration can there be perfect equality of action and uniform satisfaction rendered by all. But this government must be preserved in spite of the acts of any man or set of men. It is worthy your every effort. Nowhere in the world is presented a government of so much liberty and equality. To the humblest and poorest amongst us are held out the highest privileges and positions. The present moment finds me at the White House, yet there is as good a chance for your children as there was for my father's.
2016, Howard University commencement address (May 2016)
Context: Racism persists. Inequality persists. Don’t worry — I’m going to get to that. But I wanted to start, Class of 2016, by opening your eyes to the moment that you are in. If you had to choose one moment in history in which you could be born, and you didn’t know ahead of time who you were going to be — what nationality, what gender, what race, whether you’d be rich or poor, gay or straight, what faith you'd be born into — you wouldn’t choose 100 years ago. You wouldn’t choose the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies. You’d choose right now. If you had to choose a time to be, in the words of Lorraine Hansberry, “young, gifted, and black” in America, you would choose right now.
I tell you all this because it's important to note progress. Because to deny how far we’ve come would do a disservice to the cause of justice, to the legions of foot soldiers; to not only the incredibly accomplished individuals who have already been mentioned, but your mothers and your dads, and grandparents and great grandparents, who marched and toiled and suffered and overcame to make this day possible. I tell you this not to lull you into complacency, but to spur you into action — because there’s still so much more work to do, so many more miles to travel. And America needs you to gladly, happily take up that work.
“Nevertheless, at that moment a saint ruled over the Church.”
Source: The Revolt of the Angels (1914), Ch. XXXV
Context: Satan, piercing space with his keen glance, contemplated the little globe of earth and water where of old he had planted the vine and formed the first tragic chorus. And he fixed his gaze on that Rome where the fallen God had founded his empire on fraud and lie. Nevertheless, at that moment a saint ruled over the Church. Satan saw him praying and weeping. And he said to him:
"To thee I entrust my Spouse. Watch over her faithfully. In thee I confirm the right and power to decide matters of doctrine, to regulate the use of the sacraments, to make laws and to uphold purity of morals. And the faithful shall be under obligation to conform thereto. My Church is eternal, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Thou art infallible. Nothing is changed."
And the successor of the apostles felt flooded with rapture. He prostrated himself, and with his forehead touching the floor, replied:
"O Lord, my God, I recognise Thy voice! Thy breath has been wafted like balm to my heart. Blessed be Thy name. Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."
1961, UN speech
Context: Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.
2018, Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture (2018)
Context: It was in service of this long walk towards freedom and justice and equal opportunity that Nelson Mandela devoted his life. At the outset, his struggle was particular to this place, to his homeland – a fight to end apartheid, a fight to ensure lasting political and social and economic equality for its disenfranchised non-white citizens. But through his sacrifice and unwavering leadership and, perhaps most of all, through his moral example, Mandela and the movement he led would come to signify something larger. He came to embody the universal aspirations of dispossessed people all around the world, their hopes for a better life, the possibility of a moral transformation in the conduct of human affairs.
Madiba’s light shone so brightly, even from that narrow Robben Island cell, that in the late ‘70s he could inspire a young college student on the other side of the world to reexamine his own priorities, could make me consider the small role I might play in bending the arc of the world towards justice. And when later, as a law student, I witnessed Madiba emerge from prison, just a few months, you’ll recall, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I felt the same wave of hope that washed through hearts all around the world.
Do you remember that feeling? It seemed as if the forces of progress were on the march, that they were inexorable. Each step he took, you felt this is the moment when the old structures of violence and repression and ancient hatreds that had so long stunted people’s lives and confined the human spirit – that all that was crumbling before our eyes. And then, as Madiba guided this nation through negotiation painstakingly, reconciliation, its first fair and free elections; as we all witnessed the grace and the generosity with which he embraced former enemies, the wisdom for him to step away from power once he felt his job was complete, we understood that – we understood it was not just the subjugated, the oppressed who were being freed from the shackles of the past. The subjugator was being offered a gift, being given a chance to see in a new way, being given a chance to participate in the work of building a better world.
The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVII
Context: Who shall compose the Bible of human desire, the terrible and simple Bible of that which drives us from life to life, the Bible of our doings, our goings, our original fall? Who will dare to tell everything, who will have the genius to see everything?
I believe in a lofty form of poetry, in the work in which beauty will be mingled with beliefs. The more incapable of it I feel myself, the more I believe it to be possible. The sad splendour with which certain memories of mine overwhelm me, shows me that it is possible. Sometimes I myself have been sublime, I myself have been a masterpiece. Sometimes my visions have been mingled with a thrill of evidence so strong and so creative that the whole room has quivered with it like a forest, and there have been moments, in truth, when the silence cried out.
But I have stolen all this, and I have profited by it, thanks to the shamelessness of the truth revealed. At the point in space in which, by accident, I found myself, I had only to open my eyes and to stretch out my mendicant hands to accomplish more than a dream, to accomplish almost a work.
Book I, 1.22-[4]
History of the Peloponnesian War, Book I
As A Man Thinketh (1902), Effect of Thought on Circumstances
Context: The world is your kaleidoscope, and the varying combinations of colours, which at every succeeding moment it presents to you are the exquisitely adjusted pictures of your ever-moving thoughts.
You will be, what you "will" to be.
Let failure find its false content,
In that poor word "environment,"
But spirit scorns it and is free.
2016, Convention (August 2016)
Context: No one -- no one -- has given more for our freedom and our security than our Gold Star families.... They represent the very best of our country. They continue to inspire us every day, every moment. They serve as a powerful reminder of the true strength of America. We have to do everything we can for those families, and honor them, and be humbled by them.
1790s, Farewell Address (1796)
Context: It is of infinite moment, that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national Union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the Palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion, that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.
“Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin”
Source: The Waves (1931), p. 224
Context: Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.
And what we will, we must will to build it, with order, with method, beginning at the beginning, when once we have been as far as that beginning. We must not only open our eyes, but our arms, our wings.
Light (1919), Ch, XXI - No!
"The Death of Me", p. 150
Awareness (1992)
Context: One of your American authors put it so well. He said awakening is the death of your belief in injustice and tragedy. The end of the world for a caterpillar is a butterfly for the master. Death is resurrection. We're talking not about some resurrection that will happen but about one that is happening right now. If you would die to the past, if you would die to every minute, you would be the person who is fully alive, because a fully alive person is one who is full of death. We're always dying to things. We're always shedding everything in order to be fully alive and resurrected at every moment. The mystics, saints, and others make great efforts to wake people up. If they don't wake up, they're always going to have these other minor ills like hunger, wars, and violence. The greatest evil is sleeping people, ignorant people.
“This is my generation's nuclear-free moment, and I am determined that we will tackle it head on.”
on climate change. Source: Ewing, Isobel (20 August 2017). Jacinda Ardern: 'Climate change is my generation's nuclear-free moment' http://www.newshub.co.nz/home/election/2017/08/jacinda-ardern-climate-change-is-my-generation-s-nuclear-free-moment.html. Newshub. Retrieved on 9 April 2018.
Source: Liberalism (1927), Ch. 1 : The Foundations of Liberal Policy § 10 : The Argument of Fascism
Context: Repression by brute force is always a confession of the inability to make use of the better weapons of the intellect — better because they alone give promise of final success. This is the fundamental error from which Fascism suffers and which will ultimately cause its downfall. The victory of Fascism in a number of countries is only an episode in the long series of struggles over the problem of property. The next episode will be the victory of Communism. The ultimate outcome of the struggle, however, will not be decided by arms, but by ideas. It is ideas that group men into fighting factions, that press the weapons into their hands, and that determine against whom and for whom the weapons shall be used. It is they alone, and not arms, that, in the last analysis, turn the scales.
So much for the domestic policy of Fascism. That its foreign policy, based as it is on the avowed principle of force in international relations, cannot fail to give rise to an endless series of wars that must destroy all of modern civilization requires no further discussion. To maintain and further raise our present level of economic development, peace among nations must be assured. But they cannot live together in peace if the basic tenet of the ideology by which they are governed is the belief that one's own nation can secure its place in the community of nations by force alone.
It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.
1790s, First Principles of Government (1795)
Context: It is never to be expected in a revolution that every man is to change his opinion at the same moment. There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy.
The Way to Love (1995)
Context: If you want to know what it means to be happy, look at a flower, a bird, a child; they are perfect images of the kingdom. For they live from moment to moment in the eternal now with no past and no future. So they are spared the guilt and anxiety that so torment human beings and they are full of the sheer joy of living, taking delight not so much in persons or things as in life itself. As long as your happiness is caused or sustained by something or someone outside of you, you are still in the land of the dead. The day you are happy for no reason whatsoever, the day you find yourself taking delight in everything and in nothing, you will know that you have found the land of unending joy called the kingdom.
quoted in Arun Shourie - The World of Fatwas Or The Sharia in Action (2012, Harper Collins)
2010, Weekly Address (May 29, 2010)
Infinite Jest (1996)
Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 1
The English Renaissance of Art https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/wilde/oscar/english-renaissance-of-art/ (1882)
Source: Letter to Sir William Miles (11 June 1860), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume II. 1860–1881 (London: John Murray, 1929), pp. 23–24
Oriana Fallaci. Interview with Indira Gandhi in New Delhi, February 1972
Source: Oneness With All Life: Inspirational Selections from A New Earth (2008)
Statements made by Fr. Jesus Rodriguez in an interview with Memory and Justice Chile Organisation on June 19, 2003. http://www.memoriayjusticia.cl/english/en_focus-llido.html#A%20Priest.
Statement on the Coronavirus as Chancellor (20 March 2020)
Instagram post @rishisunakmp https://www.instagram.com/p/B990ItXHhXW/ (21 March 2020)
2020
Interview with Lisa Owen at Newshub Nation, 21 October 2017
Letter to Friedrich Engels (4 February 1852), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 39. Letters 1852–55 (2010), p. 32
“A moment of weakness comes, for everyone, but then he feels stupid, and listens to his good sense.”
Original: (de) "Die schwache Stunde kommt für jeden, da wird er dumm und lässt mit sich reden."
Source: Quotes from his operas, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Hans Sachs, Act 3 Scene 3
Quoted in The Times, 16 June 2014 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cameron-bumbles-from-one-shambles-to-another-with-no-sense-of-purpose-d2vxlbxchvf
It is psychological time: past and future. Certain things in the past didn't go the way you wanted them to go. You are still resisting what happened in the past, and now you are resisting what is. Hope is what keeps you going, but hope keeps you focused on the future, and this continued focus perpetuates your denial of the Now and therefore your unhappiness. p. 43
The Power of Now (1997)
Source: The Power of Now (1997), p. 38
The Power of Now (1997)
The Power of Now (1997)
"Millie Bobby Brown admits tension with her Stranger Things co-stars" https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-5546137/Millie-Bobby-Brown-admits-theres-tension-Stranger-Things-stars.html. dailymail.co.uk. (26 March 2018).
Full version of the original (ca. 1942)
The Serenity Prayer (c. 1942)
1873. Quoted in A Holy Life: St. Bernadette of Lourdes (2005) by Patricia McEachern, [//books.google.com/books?id=ESX7DQAAQBAJ&pg=PT18 ch. 2].
I couldn't live by a rigid schedule. I try to live freely from moment to moment, letting things happen and adjusting to them.
Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 13
"Inaugural address of Premier Tadeusz Mazowiecki" https://polishfreedom.pl/en/document/statement-inaugural-address-of-the-prime-minister-tadeusz-mazowiecki-delivered-at-the-seym-session-on-12th-september-1989 (12 September 1989)
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
