Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America
Press statement as quoted in Countdown with Keith Olbermann (1 August 2008) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26010596/ <br class="br">2008
Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America
Press statement as quoted in Countdown with Keith Olbermann (1 August 2008) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26010596/ <br class="br">2008
Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America
2009, First Inaugural Address (January 2009)
Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist
1790s, Discourse to the Theophilanthropists (1798)
Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States
1910s, The New Nationalism (1910)
Galileo Galilei book Sidereus Nuncius
Sidereus Nuncius (Venice, 1609), Letter to Benedetto Castelli http://www.heritage-history.com/www/heritage.php?Dirbooks&MenuItemdisplay&authorgibson&bookscientists&storyletter (1613)
Ronald Fisher (1890–1962) English statistician, evolutionary biologist, geneticist, and eugenicist
British Agricultural Bulletin 4, 217–218, 1951.
1950s
Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007) 1st President of Russia and Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR
Interview on Zerkalo http://web.archive.org/web/20021117080050/http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/6011-5.cfm (RTR) (29 December 2001) <br class="br">2000s <br class="br">Context: It looks as if some people either have a short memory and are forgetting about that time and the events that occurred then … Let us recall the putsch of August 19, 1991. It was after the putsch that the republics began, one after another, to declare their independence.<br>Russia also declared its independence. This was approved by the Supreme Soviet, and you know and remember that there was the Declaration on the Independence of Russia. So, the entire course of history was leading to a point when the regime, the political regime in the country had to be changed. It demonstrated that the Union was not as strong as this was loudly preached by mass media and the propaganda in general. The republics wished to become independent. This must only be welcomed... We have good peaceful relations and there were no military clashes. None of these countries had revolutions with bloody casualties and there was no civil war in any of the republics... Russia had to change and it did change.
Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America
2016, DNC Address (July 2016)
Context: That’s what Hillary Clinton understands — this fighter, this stateswoman, this mother and grandmother, this public servant, this patriot — that’s the America she’s fighting for.
And that is why I have confidence, as I leave this stage tonight, that the Democratic Party is in good hands. My time in this office, it hasn’t fixed everything. As much as we’ve done, there’s still so much I want to do. But for all the tough lessons I’ve had to learn, for all the places where I’ve fallen short — I’ve told Hillary, and I’ll tell you, what’s picked me back up every single time: It’s been you. The American people.
“Historical communities are, in short, more deeply involved in nature and time than the individual.”
Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) American protestant theologian
The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (1941)
Context: The brotherhood of the community is indeed the ground in which the individual is ethically realized. But the community is the frustration as well as the realization of individual life. Its collective egotism is an offense to his conscience; its institutional injustices negate the ideal of justice; and such brotherhood as it achieves is limited by ethnic and geographic boundaries. Historical communities are, in short, more deeply involved in nature and time than the individual.
Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist
1790s, Discourse to the Theophilanthropists (1798)
Context: The evil that has resulted from the error of the schools in teaching natural philosophy as an accomplishment only has been that of generating in the pupils a species of atheism. Instead of looking through the works of creation to the Creator Himself, they stop short and employ the knowledge they acquire to create doubts of His existence. They labor with studied ingenuity to ascribe everything they behold to innate properties of matter and jump over all the rest by saying that matter is eternal.
Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) Indian lawyer, statesman, and writer, first Prime Minister of India
Speech at Columbia University (1949); published in Speeches 1949 - 1953 p. 402; as quoted in Sources of Indian Tradition (1988) by Stephen Hay, p. 350
Context: In times of crisis it is not unnatural for those who are involved in it deeply to regard calm objectivity in others as irrational, short-sighted, negative, unreal or even unmanly. But I should like to make it clear that the policy India has sought to pursue is not a negative and neutral policy. It is a positive and vital policy that flows from our struggle for freedom and from the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. Peace is not only an absolute necessity for us in India in order to progress and develop but also of paramount importance to the world. How can that peace be preserved? Not by surrendering to aggression, not by compromising with evil or injustice but also not by the talking and preparing for war! Aggression has to be met, for it endangers peace. At the same time, the lesson of the past two wars has to be remembered and it seems to me astonishing that, in spite of that lesson, we go the same way. The very processes of marshaling the world into two hostile camps precipitates the conflict that it had sought to avoid. It produces a sense of terrible fear and that fear darkens men's minds and leads them to wrong courses. There is perhaps nothing so bad and so dangerous in life as fear. As a great President of the United States said, there is nothing really to fear except fear itself.
Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) American writer
"Preface"
Between Time and Timbuktu (1972)
Context: I have become an enthusiast for the printed word again. I have to be that, I now understand, because I want to be a character in all of my works. I can do that in print. In a movie, somehow, the author always vanishes. Everything of mine which has been filmed so far has been one character short, and that character is me.
“Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered”
Marcus Aurelius book Meditations
VIII, 21
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VIII
Context: Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered: and all this in a nook of this part of the world; and not even here do all agree, no, not any one with himself: and the whole earth too is a point.
Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War
Book II, 2.64-[5]
History of the Peloponnesian War, Book II
Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics
Vol. I, Ch. 14: Of the Mahuzzims, honoured by the King who doth according to his will
Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733)
Context: Gregory Nyssen tells us, that after the persecution of the Emperor Decius, Gregory Bishop of Neocæsarea in Pontus, instituted among all people, as an addition or corollary of devotion towards God, that festival days and assemblies should be celebrated to them who had contended for the faith, that is, to the Martyrs. And he adds this reason for the institution: When he observed, saith Nyssen, that the simple and unskilful multitude, by reason of corporeal delights, remained in the error of idols; that the principal thing might be corrected among them, namely, that instead of their vain worship they might turn their eyes upon God; he permitted that at the memories of the holy Martyrs they might make merry and delight themselves, and be dissolved into joy. The heathens were delighted with the festivals of their Gods, and unwilling to part with those delights; and therefore Gregory, to facilitate their conversion, instituted annual festivals to the Saints and Martyrs. Hence it came to pass, that for exploding the festivals of the heathens, the principal festivals of the Christians succeeded in their room: as the keeping of Christmas with ivy and feasting, and playing and sports, in the room of the Bacchanalia and Saturnalia; the celebrating of May-day with flowers, in the room of the Floralia; and the keeping of festivals to the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist, and divers of the Apostles, in the room of the solemnities at the entrance of the Sun into the signs of the Zodiac in the old Julian Calendar. In the same persecution of Decius, Cyprian ordered the passions of the Martyrs in Africa to be registered, in order to celebrate their memories annually with oblations and sacrifices: and Felix Bishop of Rome, a little after, as Platina relates... "consulting the glory of the Martyrs, ordained that sacrifices should be celebrated annually in their name." By the pleasures of these festivals the Christians increased much in number, and decreased as much in virtue, until they were purged and made white by the persecution of Dioclesian. This was the first step made in the Christian religion towards the veneration of the Martyrs: and tho it did not yet amount to an unlawful worship; yet it disposed the Christians towards such a further veneration of the dead, as in a short time ended in the invocation of Saints.
Henri Barbusse book Under Fire
Under Fire (1916), Ch. 24 - The Dawn
Context: There are all those things against you. Against you and your great common interests which as you dimly saw are the same thing in effect as justice, there are not only the sword-wavers, the profiteers, and the intriguers.
There is not only the prodigious opposition of interested parties — financiers, speculators great and small, armorplated in their banks and houses, who live on war and live in peace during war, with their brows stubbornly set upon a secret doctrine and their faces shut up like safes.
There are those who admire the exchange of flashing blows, who hail like women the bright colors of uniforms; those whom military music and the martial ballads poured upon the public intoxicate as with brandy; the dizzy-brained, the feeble-minded, the superstitious, the savages.
There are those who bury themselves in the past, on whose lips are the sayings only of bygone days, the traditionalists for whom an injustice has legal force because it is perpetuated, who aspire to be guided by the dead, who strive to subordinate progress and the future and all their palpitating passion to the realm of ghosts and nursery-tales.
With them are all the parsons, who seek to excite you and to lull you to sleep with the morphine of their Paradise, so that nothing may change. There are the lawyers, the economists, the historians — and how many more? — who befog you with the rigmarole of theory, who declare the inter-antagonism of nationalities at a time when the only unity possessed by each nation of to-day is in the arbitrary map-made lines of her frontiers, while she is inhabited by an artificial amalgam of races; there are the worm-eaten genealogists, who forge for the ambitious of conquest and plunder false certificates of philosophy and imaginary titles of nobility. The infirmity of human intelligence is short sight. In too many cases, the wiseacres are dunces of a sort, who lose sight of the simplicity of things, and stifle and obscure it with formulae and trivialities. It is the small things that one learns from books, not the great ones.
And even while they are saying that they do not wish for war they are doing all they can to perpetuate it. They nourish national vanity and the love of supremacy by force. "We alone," they say, each behind his shelter, "we alone are the guardians of courage and loyalty, of ability and good taste!" Out of the greatness and richness of a country they make something like a consuming disease. Out of patriotism — which can be respected as long as it remains in the domain of sentiment and art on exactly the same footing as the sense of family and local pride, all equally sacred — out of patriotism they make a Utopian and impracticable idea, unbalancing the world, a sort of cancer which drains all the living force, spreads everywhere and crushes life, a contagious cancer which culminates either in the crash of war or in the exhaustion and suffocation of armed peace.
They pervert the most admirable of moral principles. How many are the crimes of which they have made virtues merely by dowering them with the word "national"? They distort even truth itself. For the truth which is eternally the same they substitute each their national truth. So many nations, so many truths; and thus they falsify and twist the truth.
Those are your enemies. All those people whose childish and odiously ridiculous disputes you hear snarling above you — "It wasn't me that began, it was you!" — "No, it wasn't me, it was you!" — "Hit me then!" — "No, you hit me!" — those puerilities that perpetuate the world's huge wound, for the disputants are not the people truly concerned, but quite the contrary, nor do they desire to have done with it; all those people who cannot or will not make peace on earth; all those who for one reason or another cling to the ancient state of things and find or invent excuses for it — they are your enemies!
They are your enemies as much as those German soldiers are to-day who are prostrate here between you in the mud, who are only poor dupes hatefully deceived and brutalized, domestic beasts. They are your enemies, wherever they were born, however they pronounce their names, whatever the language in which they lie. Look at them, in the heaven and on the earth. Look at them, everywhere! Identify them once for all, and be mindful for ever!
Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States
1900s, "In God we Trust" letter (1907)
Context: My own feeling in the matter is due to my very firm conviction that to put such a motto on coins, or to use it in any kindred manner, not only does not good but does positive harm, and is in effect irreverence which comes dangerously close to sacrilege. A beautiful and solemn sentence such as the one in question should be treated and uttered only with that fine reverence which necessarily implies a certain exaltation of spirit. Any use which tends to cheapen it, and, above all, any use which tends to secure its being treated in a spirit of levity, is free from every standpoint profoundly to be regretted. It is a motto which it is indeed well to have inscribed on our great national monuments, in our temples of justice, in our legislative halls, and in buildings such as those at West Point and Annapolis - in short, wherever it will tend to arouse and inspire a lofty emotion in those who look thereon. But it seems to be eminently unwise to cheapen such a motto by use on coins, just as it would be to cheapen it by use on postage stamps, or in advertisements.
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist
Light (1919), Ch. XVI - De Profundis Clamavi
Context: It terrifies one to think for how short a time science has been methodical and of useful industry; and after all, is there anything on earth more marvelously easy than destruction? Who knows the new mediums it has laid in store? Who knows the limit of cruelty to which the art of poisoning may go? Who knows if they will not subject and impress epidemic disease as they do the living armies — or that it will not emerge, meticulous, invincible, from the armies of the dead? Who knows by what dread means they will sink in oblivion this war, which only struck to the ground twenty thousand men a day, which has invented guns of only seventy-five miles' range, bombs of only one ton's weight, aeroplanes of only a hundred and fifty miles an hour, tanks, and submarines which cross the Atlantic? Their costs have not yet reached in any country the sum total of private fortunes.
“From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus.”
William S. Burroughs book The Ticket That Exploded
The Ticket That Exploded (1962)
Context: The 'Other Half' is the word. The 'Other Half' is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the 'Other Half' is a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common 'hallucinations' of subject during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject's body at an angle... yes quite an angle it is the 'Other Half' worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
Context: What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.
“When you write a short story … you had better know the ending first.”
Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …
The Casebook of the Black Widowers (1980), p. 177
General sources
Context: When you write a short story... you had better know the ending first. The end of a story is only the end to the reader. To the writer, it's the beginning. If you don't know exactly where you're going every minute you're writing, you'll never get there — or anywhere.
Samuel Adams (1722–1803) American statesman, Massachusetts governor, and political philosopher
The Rights of the Colonists (1772)
Context: Government was instituted for the purposes of common defence … In short, it is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one, or any number of men … to renounce their essential natural rights, or the means of preserving those rights; when the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defence of those very rights; the principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty, and Property. If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.
Catherine the Great (1729–1796) Empress of Russia
Memoirs
Context: The Grand Duke appeared to rejoice at the arrival of my mother and myself. I was in my fifteenth year. During the first ten days he paid me much attention. Even then and in that short time, I saw and understood that he did not care much for the nation that he was destined to rule, and that he clung to Lutheranism, did not like his entourage, and was very childish. I remained silent and listened, and this gained me his trust. I remember him telling me that among other things, what pleased him most about me was that I was his second cousin, and that because I was related to him, he could speak to me with an open heart. Then he told me that he was in love with one of the Empress’s maids of honor, who had been dismissed from court because of the misfortune of her mother, one Madame Lopukhina, who had been exiled to Siberia, that he would have liked to marry her, but that he was resigned to marry me because his aunt desired it. I listened with a blush to these family confidences, thanking him for his ready trust, but deep in my heart I was astonished by his imprudence and lack of judgment in many matters.
H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author
Letter to "The Keicomolo"—Kleiner, Cole, and Moe (October 1916), in Selected Letters I, 1911-1924 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 26-27
Non-Fiction, Letters
Context: Frankly, I cannot conceive how any thoughtful man can really be happy. There is really nothing in the universe to live for, and unless one can dismiss thought and speculation from his mid, he is liable to be engulfed by the very immensity of creation. It is vastly better that he should amuse himself with religion, or any other convenient palliative to reality which comes to hand. … There is much relief from the burden of life to be derived from many sources. To the man of high animal spirits, there is the mere pleasure of being alive; the Joi de vivre, as our Gallick friends term it. To the credulous there is religion and its paradisal dreams. To the moralist, there is a certain satisfaction in right conduct. To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth. To the person of cultivated taste, there are the fine arts. To the man of humour, there is the sardonic delight of spying out pretensions and incongruities of life. To the poet there is the ability and privilege to fashion a little Arcadia in his fancy, wherein he may withdraw from the sordid reality of mankind at large. In short, the world abounds with simple delusions which we may call "happiness", if we be but able to entertain them.
Zakir Naik (1965) Islamic televangelist
In Most Common Questions Asked by the non-Muslims https://www.amazon.com/Most-Common-Questions-Asked-Muslims/dp/9675699299 p: 46
Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French
Precis des Guerres Cesar Das Napoleon I
Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America
2010, Weekly Address (May 29, 2010)
Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America
Remarks by the President on the Iran Nuclear Deal at American University in Washington, D.C. (August 05, 2015) https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/08/05/remarks-president-iran-nuclear-deal <br class="br">2015
“Old Norwegian Proverb: Swedes have short dicks but long memories.”
Kurt Vonnegut book A Man Without a Country
A Man Without a Country (2005)
C.G. Jung book Psychological Types
Source: Psychological Types, or, The Psychology of Individuation (1921), Ch. 1, p. 82
Jacque Fresco (1916–2017) American futurist and self-described social engineer
Designing the Future (2007)
Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher
The viceadmiral thought his son crazy; but soon discovered he was a Quaker. He then employed every method that prudence could suggest to engage him to behave and act like other people. The youth answered his father only with repeated exhortations to turn Quaker also. After much altercation, his father confined himself to this single request, that he would wait on the king and the duke of York with his hat under his arm, and that he would not "thee" and "thou" them. William answered that his conscience would not permit him to do these things. This exasperated his father to such a degree that he turned him out of doors. Young Penn gave God thanks that he permitted him to suffer so early in His cause, and went into the city, where he held forth, and made a great number of converts; and being young, handsome, and of a graceful figure, both court and city ladies flocked very devoutly to hear him. The patriarch Fox, hearing of his great reputation, came to London — notwithstanding the length of the journey — purposely to see and converse with him. They both agreed to go upon missions into foreign countries; and accordingly they embarked for Holland, after having left a sufficient number of laborers to take care of the London vineyard.
The History of the Quakers (1762)
Arthur Horeanu (2004) Romanian singer-songwriter
As an answer to: "What inspired you when you chose the band's [Arthur in Neverland] name?" genunderground.ro (January 20, 2021) https://genunderground.ro/rumpelstiltskin-printre-printisori-un-interviu-cu-arthur-in-neverland/?fbclid=IwAR1xdfMzYGpjSOJ2rcor_UYENEgr8ve1AInYG11734t45oPrScajUrauyNw,
Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist
are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?
1980s
Source: EWD648.
Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist
Source: "Forced Emigration," New York Daily Tribune, 22 March 1853.
“Broadly speaking, short words are best, and the old words, when short, are best of all.”
Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Speech on receiving the London Times Literary Award November 2, 1949
Never Give In! The Best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches, Hyperion (2003), p. 453 ISBN ISBN 1401300561
Post-war years (1945–1955)
Source: Never Give In!: The Best of Winston Churchill's Speeches
“The sweetness of love is short-lived, but the pain endures.”
Thomas Malory (1405–1471) English writer, author of ''Le Morte d'Arthur''
“Fate is fickle, and the company of unwilling friends short lived.”
Brian Jacques (1939–2011) British fiction writer known for Redwall animal fantasy novels
Source: The Ribbajack: and Other Haunting Tales
“Life is too short to waste time on books that end badly”
Jayne Ann Krentz (1948) American novelist
Source: Running Hot
Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo
Source: Magic Bleeds
Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933) American diplomat
Time Is
Undated
Source: Time Is...
Too slow for those who wait,
Too swift for those who fear,
Too long for those who grieve,
Too short for those who rejoice,
But for those who love,
Time is Eternity. (Music and Other Poems, 1904)
“Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.”
Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer
“People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.”
Lionel Shriver book We Need to Talk About Kevin
Source: We Need to Talk About Kevin
“The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.”
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher
“Life is too short, or too long, for me to allot myself the luxury of living it so badly.”
Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes
Variant: Life is too short, or too long, for me to allow myself the luxury of living it so badly.
Source: Eleven Minutes
“While there may not be a book in every one of us, there is so often a damned good short story.”
Jeffrey Archer (1940) English author and former politician
“I’d rather be short, fat, and ugly than take after that man. (Nick)”
Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist
Source: Infinity
Marya Hornbacher book Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
Source: Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
“Life is short. Kiss slowly, laugh insanely, love truly and forgive quickly”
Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist
https://www.facebook.com/11777366210/posts/10159064721041211/?
“The short memories of the American voters is what keeps our politicians in office.”
Will Rogers (1879–1935) American humorist and entertainer
Janette Rallison (1966) American writer
Source: My Unfair Godmother
Neil deGrasse Tyson book The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist
Source: The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist
Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737–1814) writer and botanist from France
Source: Paul and Virginia by Bernardin de St. Pierre, Fiction, Literary
“It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
It will be short, it will not be simple”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist
“Did anybody tell you that you're a few french fries short of a Happy Meal?”
Susan Elizabeth Phillips (1948) American writer
Source: This Heart of Mine
“She laughed, and drank more beer. “Take a long trace off a short bridge, vampire.”
Kresley Cole American writer
Source: Lothaire
“We are not quite novels.
We are not quite short stories.
In the end, we are collected works.”
Gabrielle Zevin (1977) American writer
Source: The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
Alice Childress (1916–1994) American playwright and author
“You never know, life is short but it’s wide”
Wendy Mass book Every Soul a Star
Source: Every Soul a Star