Quotes to inspire and reflect

We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.

 

Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that theU.S.S.R. has placed and is placing medium-and intermediate-range missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no? Don’t wait for the translation. . . . I am prepared to wait for my answer until Hell freezes over, if that’s your decision. And I am also prepared to present the evidence in this room!

 

Our nation stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, theanonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab andanything to win. This is Nixonland. But I say toyou that it is not America.

 

The time to stop a revolution is at the beginning, not the end.

 

I yield to no man—if I may borrow thatmajestic parliamentary phrase—I yield to no man in my belief in the principle of free debate, inside or outside the halls of Congress. The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions. But there is also, it seems to me, a moment at which democracy must prove its capacity to act. Every man has a right to be heard; but no man has the right to strangle democracy with a single set of vocal cords.

 

Let’s talk sense to the American people. Let’stell them the truth, that there are no gains without pains, that we are now on the eve of great decisions, not easy decisions, likeresistance when you’re attacked, but a long, patient, costly struggle which alone can assure triumph over the great enemies of man—war, poverty, and tyranny—and the assaults uponhuman dignity which are the most grievous consequences of each.

 

The problem of cat versus bird is as old as time. If we attempt to resolve it by legislation whoknows but what we may be called upon to takesides as well in the age old problems of dogversus cat, bird versus bird, or even bird versusworm. In my opinion, the State of Illinoisand its local governing bodies already haveenough to do without trying to control felinedelinquency.

 

A society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.

 

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.

 

The Gulag Archipelago had already begun its malignant life and would shortly metastasize throughout the whole body of the nation.

 

A great writer is, so to speak, a second government. That’s why no regime anywhere has ever loved its great writers, only its minor ones.

 

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?

 

Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding.

 

A Boy Named Sue.

 

The separation between the two cultures has been getting deeper under our eyes; there is now precious little communication between them. . . . The traditional culture . . . is, of course, mainly literary . . . the scientific culture is expansive, not restrictive.

 

Our names,

 

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,

 

Do not swear at all.

 

It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night

 

Say to the seceded States, “Wayward sisters, depart in peace.”

 

Et Vigny plus secret ,

 

While the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.

 

Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.

 

In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once she was a lady.

 

I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.

 

Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead

 

The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky Making a new twilight.

 

Then I will no longer

 

who should moor at his edge

 

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,

 

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.

 

To see the earth as we now see it, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night—brothers who see now they are truly brothers.

 

Beneath the blossoms with a pot of wine,

 

Since Life is but a Dream,

 

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

 

Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time.

 

Either this man [Jesus] was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

 

Have you built your ship of death, O have you?

 

We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying.

 

And if tonight my soul may find her peace

 

John Thomas says good-night to Lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart.

 

Why were we crucified into sex?

 

There are only two great diseases in the world today—Bolshevism and Americanism; and Americanism is the worse of the two, because Bolshevism only smashes your house or your business or your skull, but Americanism smashes your soul.

 

It is the three strange angels.

 

In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds.

 

“Normal science” means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice.

 

As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice—there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.

 

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.