For, to make deserts, God, who rules mankind,
Begins with kings, and ends the work by wind.[Car pour faire un désert, Dieu, maître des vivants,
Commence par les rois et finit par les vents.]Victor Hugo (1802-1885) French writer
Poem (1876), “The Vanished City [La Ville Disparue],” Legend of the Ages: New Series [La Légende des siècles: La Nouvelle Série], No. 4 (1877) [tr. Carrington (1885)]
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Quotations about:
desolation
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In that strange island Iceland, — burst up, the geologists say, by fire from the bottom of the sea; a wild land of barrenness and lava; swallowed many months of every year in black tempests, yet with a wild gleaming beauty in summertime; towering up there, stern and grim, in the North Ocean with its snow jokuls, roaring geysers, sulphur-pools and horrid volcanic chasms, like the waste chaotic battle-field of Frost and Fire; — where of all places we least looked for Literature or written memorials, the record of these things was written down.
A war which is destroying men as they have never been destroyed before, from which at the best the nations will emerge permanently degraded in their stock, poorer in physique, duller in intelligence, weaker in will than they went in, this war is to be protracted until the whole manhood of Europe is decimated, in order — in order to what? Let us ask in detail.
In order, we are told, that the Germans may ‘feel they are beaten.’ And then? They will be good in future? They will admit they were wrong? They will lick the hand that chastised them? Who believes it? The more completely they are beaten, the more obstinately they will be set on recovery. When France was beaten to the dust in 1870, did she repent for having provoked the war? On the contrary, she gathered up her forces for revenge. And Germany will do the same.G. Lowes Dickinson (1862-1932) British political scientist and philosopher [Goldsworthy "Goldie" Lowes Dickinson]
“The War and the Way Out: A Further Consideration,” sec. 2, Atlantic Monthly (Apr 1915)
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