Quotes about task
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“The best thing about endings is knowing that just ahead is the daunting task to start over.”

Jodi Picoult book Keeping Faith

Source: Keeping Faith

“A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

July 14, 1763, p. 121
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I
Source: The Life of Samuel Johnson, Vol 2

Reading

“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Second Sex

Source: The Second Sex

“The greatest humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves…”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

“When people have a hard task to do - one which stretches them - they become less concerned with trivial matters.”

Idries Shah (1924–1996) writer and Sufi teacher

People

“To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

“A second chance—that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

Henry James book The Middle Years

Source: The Middle Years

Art, Passion, Chance, Madness

“Sociopathy is the inability to process emotional experience, including love and caring, except when such experience can be calculated as a coldly intellectual task.”

Martha Stout (1953) American psychologist

Source: The Sociopath Next Door

Love

“Every man's foremost task is the actualization of his unique, unprecedented and never-recurring potentialities, and not the repetition of something that another, and be it even the greatest, has already achieved.”

Martin Buber (1878–1965) German Jewish Existentialist philosopher and theologian

“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

To Carl Stumpf (1 January 1886)
1920s, The Letters of William James (1920)
Variant: Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task

“Read at every wait; read at all hours; read within leisure; read in times of labor; read as one goes in; read as one goest out. The task of the educated mind is simply put: read to lead.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Education, Time, Waiting, Reading

“Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation

Age, Question, Thinking

“She is carrying herself through the day, and it’s not an easy task.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

“The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people's chances to enjoy theirs.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934) Hungarian American psychologist

Life, People, Learning, Chance

“The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, "I was wrong."”

Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986) American journalist

Pieces of Eight (1982)
Source: Pieces Of Eight

Love, Hate, World

“My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.”

Joseph Conrad Lord Jim

Variant: My task is to make you hear, to make you feel, and, above all, to make you see. That is all, and it is everything.
Source: Lord Jim

Feeling

“Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.”

Peter F. Drucker book The Essential Drucker

Source: The Essential Drucker

People

“The great task of life is to learn the will of the Lord and then do it.”

Ezra Taft Benson (1899–1994) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Life, Learning

“But I think the most important thing those books gave me was a kind of faith. My books promised me that life wasn’t just made up of workaday tasks and prosaic things. The world is bigger and more colorful and more important than that.”

Laura Amy Schlitz (1955) children's author

Source: The Hired Girl

Life, Books, World, Faith

“The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947

People, Fear, Literature, Evil

“We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.”

Abraham Verghese book Cutting for Stone

Source: Cutting for Stone

“Workaholics don't actually accomplish more than nonworkaholics. They may claim to be perfectionists, but that just mean they're wasting time fixating on inconsequential details instead of moving on to the next task.”

David Heinemeier Hansson (1979) programmer, racing driver, creator of Ruby of Rails, 2012-2016 World Endurance Championship driver

Source: Rework

Time

“It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Source: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Art, Music, Feeling, Memory

“If you are facing a difficult task don’t put it off. If you do it will just keep tormenting you.”

Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker

“If you raise your children to feel that they can accomplish any goal or task they decide upon, you will have succeeded as a parent and you will have given your children the greatest of all blessings.”

Brian Tracy (1944) American motivational speaker and writer

Children, Feeling, Parent, For Parents

“You speak of Lord Byron and me; there is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Imagination

“Ah coffee. The sweet balm by which we shall accomplish today's tasks.”

Holly Black (1971) American children's fiction writer

Source: Ironside

Coffee

“Never try to convey your idea to the audience — it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life, and they'll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it.”

Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 152

Life, Idea

“The humblest tasks get beautified if loving hands do them.”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Source: Little Women

Love, Heart Touching, Back To Work

“I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Graduation

“Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time. No one learns more about a problem than the person at the bottom.”

Sandra Day O'Connor (1930) Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Problem, Learning, Time, Personality

“Sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.”

Itzhak Perlman (1945) Israeli-American violinist and conductor

Music

“Most of us are called on to perform tasks far beyond what we believe we can do.”

Lloyd Alexander book The Book of Three

Author's Note
Source: The Chronicles of Prydain (1964–1968), Book I: The Book of Three (1964)
Context: Most of us are called on to perform tasks far beyond what we believe we can do. Our capabilities seldom match our aspirations, and we are often woefully unprepared. To this extent, we are all Assistant Pig-Keepers at heart.

“He leaned upon her as if there was no other support anywhere in the world, and she held him as if she would undertake no other task for all eternity.”

Sharon Shinn (1957) American science fiction writer

Source: Angelica

World, Support

“Our task must be to free ourselves… by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and it's beauty.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Beauty, Nature, Beauty

“The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free is the task.”

André Gide book The Immoralist

Source: The Immoralist

“The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.”

Erich Fromm book The Art of Loving

Source: The Art of Loving

Feeling

“He made me realize that hard work--that the act of finishing, of completing, of accomplishing a task--is joyous”

Sherman Alexie book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“A hundred people is rather a large handful for the four of us to take on," Malcolm pointed out. "Do you have any ideas about how we're going to handle that task?"
"Simple," Halt told him. "We'll surround them.”

John Flanagan (1873–1938) Irish-American hammer thrower

Source: Halt's Peril

People, Idea

“If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first."
This is another way of saying that if you have two important tasks before you, start with the biggest, hardest, and most important task first.”

Brian Tracy (1944) American motivational speaker and writer

Source: Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time

Way

“To endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe.”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

Universe

“The only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.”

David Rakoff (1964–2012) writer

Source: Half Empty

Art

“Even the greatest fool can accomplish a task if it were after his or her heart. But the intelligent ones are those who can convert every work into one that suits their taste.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Fools, Intelligence, Heart

“The never-ending task of self improvement.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Source: Man for Himself (1947), Ch. 4 "Problems of Humanistic Ethics"

Life, Birth, Effort, Personality

“The task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Heart

“There is but one task for all --
One life for each to give.
What stands if Freedom fall?"

[]”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

Source: Complete Verse

Life, Freedom

“An average person who develops the habit of setting clear priorities and getting important tasks completed quickly will run circles around a genius who talks a lot and makes wonderful plans but gets very little done.”

Brian Tracy (1944) American motivational speaker and writer

Personality

“One of the hardest tasks as a human being is knowing when to keep an open mind, and when not to.”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: Stay

“How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Source: The Hero With a Thousand Faces

Learning, Time

“Because your own strength is unequal to the task, do not assume that it is beyond the powers of man; but if anything is within the powers and province of man, believe that it is within your own compass also.
Marcus Aurelius”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations

“Whenever I have endured or accomplished some difficult task -- such as watching television, going out socially or sleeping -- I always look forward to rewarding myself with the small pleasure of getting back to my typewriter and writing something.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Pleasure, Sleep

“I think there's too much mult-tasking going on. I think people need to quiet down and focus and be still more.”

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

People, Thinking

“My books promised me that life wasn’t just made up of workday tasks and prosaic things. The world is bigger and more colorful and more important than that.”

Laura Amy Schlitz (1955) children's author

Life, Books, World, Color

“We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.”

Louise Erdrich (1954) writer from the United States

Source: The Bingo Palace

Life, Understanding, Heart

“Men… performed better when they understood why they were being asked to carry out a task.”

John Flanagan (1873–1938) Irish-American hammer thrower

Source: The Invaders

Men

“The monkeys solved the puzzle simply because they found it gratifying to solve puzzles. They enjoyed it. The joy of the task was its own reward.”

Daniel H. Pink book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Source: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Joy

“We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

Art, Passion, Madness

“Our task is to educate their (our students) whole being so they can face the future. We may not see the future, but they will and our job is to help them make something of it.”

Ken Robinson (1950) UK writer

Source: The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

Education, Future, Help

“Two tasks at the beginning of your life: to narrow your orbit more and more, and ever and again to check whether you are not in hiding somewhere outside your orbit.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

Life

“Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated—the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

Time

“Your most important task as a leader is to teach people how to think and ask the right questions so that the world doesn't go to hell if you take a day off.”

Jeffrey Pfeffer (1946) American academic

People, World, Hell, Question

“Motherhood is a Sisyphean task. You finish sewing one seam shut, and another rips open. I have come to believe that this life I'm wearing will never really fit.”

Jodi Picoult book House Rules

Source: House Rules

Life

“I tried to make meat loaf out of the girl but it becomes too frustrating a task and instead I spend the afternoon smearing her meat all over the walls, chewing on strips of skin I ripped from her body”

Bret Easton Ellis book American Psycho

Source: American Psycho

Girl

“Recovery unfolds in three stages. The central task of the first stage is the establishment of safety. The central task of the second stage is remembrance and mourning. The central focus of the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life.”

Judith Lewis Herman (1942) American psychiatrist

Source: Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

Life

“I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that it was my task to swallow fifty asprin. It was my task:my job for the day.-17 Girl Interrupted”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

Girl

“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality" says Iris Murdoch.
But given the state of the world, is it wise?”

Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) British writer and philosopher

Life, World, Reality

“If you focus on the risks, they'll multiply in your mind and eventually paralyze you. You want to focus on the task, instead, on doing what needs to be done.”

Barry Eisler (1963) American writer

“Will power is but the unflinching purpose to carry the task you set for yourself to fulfillment.”

George S. Clason book The Richest Man in Babylon

Source: The Richest Man in Babylon

“We need faith and the mind of the Lord Jesus to recognize something of lasting value in even our most ordinary tasks.”

Philip Yancey (1949) American writer

Faith

“And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept the unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe- and go on about our tasks”

Tom Robbins Skinny Legs and All

Source: Skinny Legs and All

Life, Death, World, Music

“A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Coffee, Support, Bird, Sun

“Our children may learn about the heroes of the past. Our task is to make ourselves the architects of the future.”

Jomo Kenyatta (1893–1978) First prime minister and first president of Kenya

Children, Learning, Past, Future

“The stars had only one task: they taught me how to read.
They taught me I had a language in heaven
and another language on earth.”

Mahmoud Darwich (1941–2008) Palestinian writer

Source: Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

Star, Reading

“In their work, designers often become expert with the device they are designing. Users are often expert at the task they are trying to perform with the device. […] Professional designers are usually aware of the pitfalls. But most design is not done by professional designers, it is done by engineers, programmers, and managers.”

Donald A. Norman book The Design of Everyday Things

Source: The Design of Everyday Things (1988, 2002), Ch. 6, p. 156.

“There were five issues involved in Bharat Yatra—scarcity of proper food and drinking water, primary education, basic health amenities and fifth - social harmony. I had planned in my mind that we would work in 350 backward districts of the country. In order to perform this task I had decided to quit the post of the President of the Janata Party. But I could not do this. After the Yatra I became trapped in the politics of o”

Chandra Shekhar (1927–2007) Indian politician

Source: Prem Singh Chandra Shekhar’s Unforgettable Resistance to Globalisation http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article219.html, Mainstream Weekly, 2006

Health, Education, Food, Drink

“A vision without a task is but a dream.
A task without vision is but drudgery.
A vision and a task are the hope of the world.”

Dinah Craik (1826–1887) English novelist and poet

Misattributed

World, Dreams, Hope

“We want to stop all immigration from Islamic countries. We want to stimulate voluntary re-emigration to Islamic countries. We want to expel all criminals with dual citizenship and deprive them of their Dutch nationality. We want to de-islamize our nation. Dear Friends, there is a lot of work to do. We, the defenders of freedom and security, have an historic duty. Our generation has been entrusted with a huge task: To oppose Islam and keep the flame of liberty burning. I say it without exaggeration: the future of human civilization depends on us. Now is a time when everyone in the West must do his duty. We are writing history here. So, let us do our duty. Let us stand with a happy heart and a strong spirit. Let us go forth with courage and save freedom!”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Speech http://www.pvv.nl/index.php/36-fj-related/geert-wilders/7981-geert-wilders-speech-danish-free-press-society-copenhagen-2-11-2014.html at the 10 years memorial conference for Theo Van Gogh arranged by the Danish Free Press Society (Copenhagen, 2 November 2014); Video: Geert Wilders speaks in the Danish Parliament Building https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKgpzi0PW0w <br class="br">2010s

Happiness, History, Courage, Freedom

“What plethora of material goods can possibly atone for a waking life so humanly belittling, if not degrading, as the push-button tasks left to human performers?”

Lewis Mumford book The Myth of the Machine

Source: The Myth of the Machine (1967-1970), The Pentagon of Power (1970), p. 352

Life

“[Islamic terrorism] is different from all other forms of terrorism in at least three important respects. First, it rejects all the contemporary ideologies in their various forms; it sees itself as the total outsider with no option but to take control or to fall, gun in hand. It cannot even enter into talks with other terrorist movements which may, in some specific cases at least, share its tactical objectives. Considering itself as an expression of Islamic revival - which must, by definition, lead to the conquest of the entire globe by the True Faith - it bases all its actions on the dictum that the end justifies the means… The second characteristic that distinguishes the Islamic version from other forms of terrorism is that it is clearly conceived and conducted as a form of Holy War which can only end when total victory has been achieved. The term 'low-intensity warfare' has often been used to describe terrorism, but it applies more specifically to the Islamic kind, which does not seek negotiations, give-and-take, the securing of specific concessions or even the mere seizure of political power within a certain number of countries… The third specific characteristic of Islamic terrorism is that it forms the basis of a whole theory of both individual conduct and of state policy. To kill the enemies of Allah and to offer the infidels the choice between converting to Islam or being put to death is the duty of every individual believer as well as the supreme - if not the sole - task of the Islamic state.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Holy Terror: The inside story of Islamic terrorism (1987)

Death, War, Faith, Victory

“I am an optimist about consciousness: I think that we will eventually have a theory of it, and in this book I look for one. But consciousness is not just business as usual; if we are to make progress, the first thing we must do is face up to the things that make the problem so difficult. Then we can move forward toward a theory, without blinkers and with a good idea of the task at hand.”

David Chalmers book The Conscious Mind

The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (1996)

Books, Idea, Business, Problem

“The division of distinctive social roles and tasks, based upon both inherited and socially acquired individual differences, is called social differentiation.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Class and society (1959), p. 4.

“The leader may be chosen by the people, but he is guided by the right; and, in the same way, we may say that the worker may be employed by anyone, but that he is directed by the autonomous ideal in the task.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 76.

People, Way

“There is a divergence between private and social accounting that the market fails to register. One essential task of law and government is to institute the necessary conditions.”

John Rawls book A Theory of Justice

Source: A Theory of Justice (1971; 1975; 1999), Chapter V, Section 42, p. 268

Law

“At the end of the last book he published, The Law of Peoples, Rawls sets out the task of “reconciling” members of “liberal democratic” societies to their social order, and interprets his own previous work as contributing to that enterprise. Hegel tried to “reconcile” Prussians in the early 1820s with the Prussian state by showing that, although that state needed some far-reaching reforms, it was nevertheless fundamentally “rational” and conformed to all the intuitive demands for moral acceptability that its members might impose on it.” Similarly, Rawls’s work was an attempt to reconcile Americans to an idealised version of their own social order at the end of the twentieth century.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), p. 89.

People, Books, Law

“So long as men shall be on earth
There will be tasks for them to do,
Some way for them to show their worth;
Each day shall bring its problems new.And men shall dream of mightier deeds
Than ever have been done before:
There always shall be human needs
For men to work and struggle for.”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

Source: A Heap o' Livin' (1916), Opportunity, p. 40.

Men, Dreams, Way, Problem

“Trying to plant such an oligarchy in the midst of what was otherwise the world's most successful republican regime was no small task, and it required the invention of ideological monstrosities to justify it. In the Southern case, the monstrosities included race-based rationales for the enslavement of Africans.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Bullwhip Feudalism (2018)

World, Success

“I see the task of architecture as the defense of the authenticity of human experience.”

Juhani Pallasmaa (1936) Finnish architect

Encounters (2006).

“Notwithstanding all the differences in the aims and tasks of the Russian revolution, compared with the French revolution of 1871, the Russian proletariat had to resort to the same method of struggle as that first used by the Paris Commune — civil war. Mindful of the lessons of the Commune, it knew that the proletariat should not ignore peaceful methods of struggle — they serve its ordinary, day-to-day interests, they are necessary in periods of preparation for revolution — but it must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

“Lessons of the Commune”, in Zagranichnaya Gazeta, No. 2 (23 March 1908) http://www.marx.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mar/23.htm, as translated by Bernard Isaacs, Collected Works, Vol. 13, p. 478. <br class="br">1900s <br class="br">Variant: The proletariat should not ignore peaceful methods of struggle — they serve its ordinary, day-to-day interests, they are necessary in periods of preparation for revolution — but it must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes. This was first demonstrated by the French proletariat in the Commune and brilliantly confirmed by the Russian proletariat in the December uprising.

War, Peace, Communication, Time

“Partnership is not a posture but a process-a continuous process that grows stronger each year as we devote ourselves to common tasks.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Address in the Assembly Hall at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt

Partnership

“We shall not act unfairly in any way. We shall not allow our understanding to let us down. For a leader who has to take care of a volk/people, cannot govern, driven by emotions or vengefulness. It is our task in these heavy times, while the heart often wants to speak, to let understanding dominate; understanding and faith. Carried by faith in God, the government will not be able to govern unfairly. Faith and understanding does not, however, say that we have to act timidly when greater evils may follow. Power is sometimes the best means to get peace.”

Hendrik Verwoerd (1901–1966) Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958 until his assassination in 1966

Verwoerd in 1960, as quoted and translated by J. J. Venter in H.F. Verwoerd: Foundational aspects of his thought, Koers 64(4) 1999: 415–442

God, People, Peace, Faith

“We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing; but let us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead. Japan, with all her treachery and greed, remains unsubdued. The injury she has inflicted on Great Britain, the United States, and other countries, and her detestable cruelties, call for justice and retribution. We must now devote all our strength and resources to the completion of our task, both at home and abroad. Advance, Britannia! Long live the cause of freedom! God save the King.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Broadcast (8 May 1945) from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Road to Victory: Winston S. Churchill, 1941-1945 (London: Heinemann, 1986), p. 1344
The Second World War (1939–1945)

God, Lie, Justice, Home