Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.
The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity …. The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) English writer, lexicographer, critic
The Rambler, #2 (24 Mar 1750)
(Source)
If I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I’ll walk up to God in a manly way and say, “Sir, I made an honest mistake.”
No man who is not willing to bear arms and to fight for his rights can give a good reason why he should be entitled to the privilege of living in a free community.
With heapy Fires our chearful Hearth is crown’d;
And Firs for Torches in the Woods abound:
We fear not more the Winds, and wintry Cold,
Than Streams the Banks, or Wolves the bleating Fold.[Hic focus et taedae pingues, hic plurimus ignis
semper, et adsidua postes fuligine nigri;
hic tantum Boreae curamus frigora, quantum
aut numerum lupus, aut torrentia flumina ripas.]Virgil (70-19 BC) Roman poet [b. Publius Vergilius Maro; also Vergil]
Eclogues [Eclogae, Bucolics, Pastorals], No. 7 “Meliboeus,” l. 49ff (7.49-52) [Thyrsis] (42-38 BC) [tr. Dryden (1709), l. 70ff]
(Source)
Francis Bacon refers to Virgil's use of a Latin proverb about wolves not caring about the numbers of sheep they face.
(Source (Latin)). Alternate translations:
A hearth, fat Pyne, nor ample fire we lack,
With daily smoke, our Chimney peeces black:
The cold of Boreas here we fear no more,
Than Wolves our Cattell, or fierce streams the shore.
[tr. Ogilby (1649)]
Here on this hearth, with resinous billets piled,
The pine-branch blazes; and the rafters, soil'd
With constant smoke, bespeak the warmth within:
Nor more we care for winter's snow-clad scene
Than wolves respect the numbers of the fold,
Or streams their banks, in mountain-torrent rolled.
[tr. Wrangham (1830), l. 67ff]
Here is a glowing hearth, and resinous torches; here is always a great fire, and lintels sooted with conitnual smoke. here we just as much regard the cold of Boreas, as either wolf does the number [of sheep], or impetuous rivers their banks.
[tr. Davidson (1854)]
Warm hearth, good faggots, and great fires you'll find
In my home: black with smoke are all its planks:
We laugh, who're in it, at the chill north wind,
As wolves at troops of sheep, mad streams at banks.
[tr. Calverley (c. 1871)]
Here is a glowing hearth, and oily brands of pine, here an everblazing fire, and door-posts black with never-ceasing soot; sitting here we heed the chilly blasts of Boreas just as much as the wolf heeds the number of the flock, or torrent floods the bank.
[tr. Wilkins (1873)]
Great store of wood, the unctuous pine.
The smoke-stained rafter, all are mine:
I fear no more the northern cold
Than floods the reeds, or wolves the fold.
[tr. King (1882), l. 648ff]
Here with fat logs heap'd up for winter store,
Plenty as heart could wish, our fagots roar:
With smoke the groins and girders always black,
And boar's chine seasoning in the chimney rack,
We care as much for the North wind or frost,
As wolves for number of the fleecy host,
Or mountain torrent for its bank, when first
O'er granite peaks a lowering cloud has burst.
[tr. Palmer (1883)]
Here is a hearth, and resinous logs, here fire
unstinted, and doors black with ceaseless smoke.
Here heed we Boreas' icy breath as much
as the wolf heeds the number of the flock,
or furious rivers their restraining banks.
[tr. Greenough (1895)]
Here is a glowing hearth, and resinous torches ; here is always plenty of fire, and lintels blackened with continual smoke. Here we as much regard the cold of Boreas as either the wolf does the number [of the sheep], or foaming rivers their banks.
[tr. Bryce (1897)]
Here is the hearth and resinous billets; here the fire ever burns high and the doorposts are black with constant soot: here we care as much for the freezing North as the wolf for the flock's multitude, or rivers in flood for their banks.
[tr. Mackail (1899)]
Here glows a ruddy hearth, with pitch pine logs
Ever alight -- and doorposts, black with smoke.
We heed no more the northern cold, than does
The wolf the flock, or flooded streams their banks.
[tr. Mackail/Cardew (1908)]
My hearth is piled with faggots of pitch-pine.
Free burns my faithful fire, and every hour
My walls are black with smoke; we heed no more
The frosts of Boreas than the wild wolf fears
The gathered sheep, or swollen stream its shore.
[tr. Williams (1915)]
With me you will find a hearth and pitchy brands; with me a good fire ever blazing and doorposts black with many a layer of soot. Here we care as much for the chill blasts of Boreas as the wolf for the number of sheep or rushing torrents for their banks.
[tr. Fairclough (Loeb) (1916)]
Here are fires never-failing and pine-faggots good
Under soot-blackened rafter we laugh at the cold,
As high banks are laught at by rivers in flood,
Or as one wolf derideth the numberless fold.
[tr. Royds (1922)]
Here is the hearth, logs rich in resin, a big fire all the time, and doorposts blackened by the constant smoke. We care as little here about the North Wind and the cold as a wolf cares for numbers, or rivers for their banks in time of spate.
[tr. Rieu (1949)]
Here we have pitch-pine logs and a blazing hearth-fire
With uprights always sootily flagged: we are harassed
No more by northern blizzards than wolves are flustered
By sheep in hosts or torrents by bordering boulders.
[tr. Johnson (1960)]
Oh here’s a hearth and pine logs in plenty,
doorposts black with winter-long smoke:
What are sheep-hordes to wolf, or high banks to flood-water?
what do we care for the north wind’s cold stroke?
[tr. Day Lewis (1963)]
We have a hearth with a fire that's always going,
Fed with resiny pinelogs from the woods;
Doorposts black with soot; we're bothered by
The winter cold no more than wolves by sheep
Or torrents by the banks that try to hold them.
[tr. Ferry (1999)]
Here is a hearth, and soaked pine torches, here a good fire
always, and door posts ever black with soot:
here we care as much for the freezing Northern gale,
as wolves for counting sheep, foaming rivers for their banks.
[tr. Kline (2001)]
Here is the hearth and the well-fueled torches, here
there's always an abundant fire, and the doorposts
are black with constant soot. Here we heed the
North Wind's blasts just as much as the wolf heeds
the number or the raging rivers heed their banks.
[tr. Bestiara Latina (2006)]
When public men indulge themselves in abuse, when they deny others a fair trial, when they resort to innuendo and insinuation, to libel, scandal, and suspicion, then our democratic society is outraged, and democracy is baffled. It has no apparatus to deal with the boor, the liar, the lout, and the antidemocrat in general.
If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can’t be done.
Peter Ustinov (1921-2004) English actor, author, director
Newspaper column, The European
Rarely cited. Referenced here, and reprinted in Ustinov Still At Large (1995).
The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.
The Bible (The Old Testament) (14th - 2nd C BC) Judeo-Christian sacred scripture [Tanakh, Hebrew Bible], incl. the Apocrypha (Deuterocanonicals)
Isaiah 11:6 [KJV (1611)]
(Source)
Alternate translations:
Wolves and sheep will live together in peace,
and leopards will lie down with young goats.
Calves and lion cubs will feed together,
and little children will take care of them.
[GNT (1976)]
The wolf will live with the lamb, the panther lie down with the kid, calf, lion and fat-stock beast together, with a little boy to lead them.
[NJB (1985)]
The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
The leopard lie down with the kid;
The calf, the beast of prey, and the fatling together,
With a little boy to herd them.
[JPS (1985)]
The wolf shall live with the lamb;
the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
the calf and the lion will feed together,
and a little child shall lead them.
[NRSV (1989 ed.)]
Manhood begins when we have in any way made truce with Necessity; begins even when we have surrendered to Necessity, as the most part only do; but begins joyfully and hopefully only when we have reconciled ourselves to Necessity; and thus, in reality, triumphed over it, and felt that in Necessity we are free.
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) Scottish essayist and historian
“Burns,” Edinburgh Review No. 96, Art. 1 (1828-12)
(Source)
A review of Lockhart, The Life of Robert Burns (1828).
Our ignorance of history makes us calumniate our own time. We have always been like this. Some calm years have deceived us. That is all. I too believed in the softening of manners. We must erase this error and esteem ourselves no more than people esteemed themselves in the time of Pericles or Shakespeare, atrocious epochs in which fine things were done.
[On a toujours été comme ça. Quelques années de calme nous ont trompés. Voilà tout. Moi aussi, je croyais à l’adoucissement des mœurs. Il faut rayer cette erreur et ne pas s’estimer plus qu’on ne s’estimait du temps de Péricles ou de Shakespeare, époques atroces où on a fait de belles choses.]
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) French writer, novelist
Letter to George Sand (8 Sep 1871) [tr. Tarver]
(Source)
Original French.
Alternate translation: "Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times."
Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end — where all men and all churches are treated as equal — where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice — where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind — and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) US President (1961-63)
Speech, Greater Houston Ministerial Association (12 Sep 1960)
(Source)
Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.
Lawrence J. Peter (1919-1990) American educator, management theorist
The Peter Principle (1969)
See Richard Cumberland.
You’ll never get mixed up if you simply tell the truth. Then you don’t have to remember what you have said, and you never forget what you have said.
I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree; “That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heaven goes.”
I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to joy, and makes right royal kings and queens of common clay. It is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it, earth is heaven, and we are gods.
It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is as true of men as of dogs.
Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) American writer, philosopher, longshoreman
“Thoughts of Eric Hoffer,” New York Times Magazine (1971-04-25)
(Source)
Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die; and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life. Both life and death are parts of the same Great Adventure.
Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me. It is an uncomfortable doctrine which the true ethics whisper into my ear. You are happy, they say; therefore you are called upon to give much.
There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It’s very hard in military or in personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair.
We have to recognise, that the gin-palace, like many other evils, although a poisonous, is still a natural outgrowth of our social conditions. The tap-room in many cases is the poor man’s only parlour. Many a man takes to beer, not from the love of beer, but from a natural craving for the light, warmth, company, and comfort which is thrown in along with the beer, and which he cannot get excepting by buying beer. Reformers will never get rid of the drink shop until they can outbid it in the subsidiary attractions which it offers to its customers.
I do not speak for my church on public matters — and the church does not speak for me.
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) US President (1961-63)
Speech, Greater Houston Ministerial Association (12 Sep 1960)
(Source)
When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities.
Matt Groening (b. 1954) American cartoonist, writer, producer
Life in Hell, “Basic Sex Facts For Today’s Youngfolk”
Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.
David Franzoni (b. 1947) American screenwriter
Gladiator (2000)
Screenplay, with John Logan, William Nicholson. The words are attributed in the movie to Marcus Aurelius, though they are not found in his writings. In his Meditations 9.3, though, he writes, "Do not despise death, but welcome it gladly" (or, alternately, "smile at its coming.")
My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.
All great human deeds both consume and transform their doers. Consider an athlete, or a scientist, or an artist, or an independent business creator. In service of their goals they lay down time and energy and many other choices and pleasures; in return, they become most truly themselves. A false destiny may be spotted by the fact that it consumes without transforming, without giving back the enlarged self. Become a parent is one of these basic human transformational deeds. By this act, we change our fundamental relationship with the universe — if nothing else, we lose our place as the pinnacle and end-point of evolution, and become a mere link.
Administrivia: Great Googley-Moogley!
I’ve found the FastSearch add-in for MT to be pretty handy — quick, and eminently configurable to look like any other page here. But it does have some limitations, most especially in not being able to search by author.
So I’ve added into the sidebar a customized Google search bar, which harnesses the power of Google (yadda-yadda) and does a search just within the site. It should be a good additional tool for folks (myself included) to use in accessing content here at WIST. It’s advantages:
1. It’s Google-fast. Whee!
2. It searches everything on the page, including the author and biography and all that.
A few limits the Google search has:
1. As I have it set up, the result page isn’t very customized. A little WIST logo, that’s it. There are some ways to do more of that sort of thing (bringing results to one of my own pages, for example), but that was more time than I had to immediately invest.
2. The search isn’t very discriminating content-wise, just as Google is not. You may get individual quotations back, author pages back, even the front page (if that’s where a quote match was), all mixed together. If I’d known I was doing this, I would have organized the virtual pages here differently — but I didn’t, and it’s kind of too late now. You also end up with any sort of match — if I have a particular word in the sidebar, it will flood every result.
3. It’s a Google search result — you get a little context, but not necessarily the whole quote.
4. The content is limited to the last time Google crawled the page. A quote I entered in the past few days most likely won’t show up (not sure how often Google crawls here, but it’s not hourly, that’s for sure).
But that all said, I’m pretty happy with it as an added tool in the WIST tool kit. Heck, if it works out well here, I might use it on my main blog …
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty—power is ever stealing from the many to the few…. The hand entrusted with power becomes … the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: only by unintermitted Agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.
I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish — where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source — where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials — and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) US President (1961-63)
Speech, Greater Houston Ministerial Association (12 Sep 1960)
(Source)
What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, the guns of our war steamers, or the strength of our gallant and disciplined army. These are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All of them may be turned against our liberties, without making us stronger or weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, every where. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.
I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.
Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BC-AD 65) Roman statesman, philosopher, playwright [Lucius Annaeus Seneca]
Moral Essays, “On Tranquility of Mind [De Tranquillitate Animi]“
Alt trans. by W.B. Langsdorf (1900): "Should I be surprised that dangers which have always surrounded me should at last attack me? A great part of mankind, when about to sail, do not think of a storm. I shall never be ashamed of a reporter of bad news in a good cause."
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) US President (1961-63)
Inaugural address (20 Jan 1961)
(Source)
One of the seven quotations by JFK at his grave site in Arlington National Ceremony.
Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism — victimless collecting, as it were … in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.
I have ever thought religion a concern purely between our god and our consciences, for which we were accountable to him, and not to the priests. I never told my own religion, nor scrutinised that of another. I never attempted to make a convert, nor wished to change another’s creed. I have ever judged of the religion of others by their lives: and by this test, my dear Madam, I have been satisfied yours must be an excellent one, to have produced a life of such exemplary virtue and correctness. For it is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read. By the same test the world must judge me.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) American political philosopher, polymath, statesman, US President (1801-09)
Letter to Margaret Bayard Smith (6 Aug 1816)
(Source)
Most of us lead lives of chaotic improvisation from day to day, bawling for peace while plunging grimly into fresh disorders.
Edward Abbey (1927-1989) American anarchist, writer, environmentalist
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1991)
(Source)
Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn’t even get out of committee.
F. Lee Bailey (1933-2021) American criminal lawyer, writer [Francis Lee Bailey, Jr.]
Congressional testimony
Quoted in Newsweek (17 Apr 1967)
Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretences to both.
William Hazlitt (1778-1830) English writer
The Round Table, ch. 32 “On Religious Hypocrisy” (1817)
Full text.