Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by Billi

It's exactly 70 years ago:

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: The Four Freedoms

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

• The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.
  
• The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.
  
• The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.
  
• The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the world.

- Full speech you can find here: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/spee...urfreedoms.htm

Wonderful goals, though by no means easy ones, and I hope one day the world achieves them. Thanks for that quote.

[WT Sharpe]

.....Let me make the newspapers and I care not what is preached in the pulpit or what is enacted in Congress.
..........— Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), American orator, abolitionist. Address, "The Press," (pub. 1863). Quoted in The Great Thoughts (1985, Introduction and a new compilation © 1996 by David Laskin) by George Seldes.

[kennyc]

Wonderful Billi! Thank you!

[kennyc]

From this month's Narrative Magazine:

The Making of a Writer
A Journal
by Gail Godwin

August 1963–December 1968

1963
London, England
August 7

It is with immense relief that I close the door to my room on the top floor of a Chelsea house, settle into a comfortable bed, and listen to the sounds of the night, the muffled hum of traffic down by the embankment, the tuned-down rock and roll of a German radio program (bringing back the night I was interrogated in a East Berlin police station, fall 1961). True, time is the villain and we are trapped in him. True, love is sometimes not returned. True, friends are sometimes false. But to be aware of this—all of it—and still want to go on living, that is the triumph. It is the reward.

.....

available at (must register and log in unfortunately, but it's a great site):

http://www.narrativemagazine.com/iss.../making-writer

[poohbear_nc]

Originally Posted by kennyc

From this month's Narrative Magazine:

The Making of a Writer
A Journal
by Gail Godwin

August 1963–December 1968

1963
London, England
August 7

It is with immense relief that I close the door to my room on the top floor of a Chelsea house, settle into a comfortable bed, and listen to the sounds of the night, the muffled hum of traffic down by the embankment, the tuned-down rock and roll of a German radio program (bringing back the night I was interrogated in a East Berlin police station, fall 1961). True, time is the villain and we are trapped in him. True, love is sometimes not returned. True, friends are sometimes false. But to be aware of this—all of it—and still want to go on living, that is the triumph. It is the reward.

.....

available at (must register and log in unfortunately, but it's a great site):

http://www.narrativemagazine.com/iss.../making-writer

Wow! This made me stop, re-read, ponder, and shake my head in silent agreement. So profound a thought expressed in such simple words. Wow!

[BenG]

Those Winter Sundays
Robert Hayden


Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by BenG

Those Winter Sundays
Robert Hayden


Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Excellent. I love that one!

[WT Sharpe]

.....What rage for fame attends both great and small!
.....Better be damned than mentioned not at all!
..........— Peter Pindar (né John Wolcot) (1738-1819), English poet, satirist. To the Royal Academicians (1782-1785).


@KennyC & BenG - really great quotes! BenG -- yours reminds me of the line from the old Animals song, We Gotta Get out of This Place: "See my daddy in bed a-dyin' -- see his hair been turnin' gray -- he's been workin' and slavin' his life away..."

[Falcao]

Latin
De religione curam principi esse; unam illi retindenam; puniendos, nisi aliter expediat, qui dissentiunt; falsam pacem esse tolerantismum; hunc esse Divini Numinis irrisionem, publicae felicitatis, et legum destructorem.

English
The prince should take care of religion; to keep only one; to punish dissidents; if another thing is not convenient. Tolerantism is a false peace; a ridicule of the divinity and destroyer of the public happiness and of the laws.

Justus Lipsius, cited in Juan Bautista Morales. Disertación contra la tolerancia religiosa [Dissertation against religious toleration]. Mexico, 1831.

[WT Sharpe]

.....What is robbing a bank compared with founding a bank?
..........— Bertolt Brecht (1898 – 1956), German dramatist, producer, and poet. The Threepenny Opera (1928).

[astrangerhere]

"I realized that the world did not exist for my benefit. It followed that the ratio of pleasant and unpleasant things around me would not change. It wasn't up to me. It was clear that the best thing to do was to adopt a sort of muddled cheerfulness."

- Banana Yoshimoto from the excellent novella Kitchen, published in Japan in 1988.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

"I realized that the world did not exist for my benefit. It followed that the ratio of pleasant and unpleasant things around me would not change. It wasn't up to me. It was clear that the best thing to do was to adopt a sort of muddled cheerfulness."

- Banana Yoshimoto from the excellent novella Kitchen, published in Japan in 1988.

Thanks for that!

[BenG]

the con job
Charles Bukowski


the ground war began today
at dawn
in a desert land
far from here.
the U.S. ground troops were
largely
made up of
Blacks, Mexicans and poor
whites
most of whom had joined
the military
because it was the only job
they could find.

the ground war began today
at dawn
in a desert land
far from here
and the Blacks, Mexicans
and poor whites
were sent there
to fight and win
as on tv
and on the radio
the fat white rich newscasters
first told us all about
it
and then the fat rich white
analysts
told us
why
again
and again
and again
on almost every
tv and radio station
almost every minute
day and night
because
the Blacks, Mexicans
and poor whites
were sent there
to fight and win
at dawn
in a desert land
far enough away from
here.

[kennyc]

Oh wow! That's excellent Ben. Bukowski is amazing sometimes!

(I presume this was about the Iraq invasion)

And that book looks very interesting! Added to my wish list.

[WT Sharpe]

.....It was true, the bill was said to be founded on necessity; but what was this? Was it not necessity, which had always been the plea of every illegal exertion of power, or exercise of oppression? Was not necessity the pretence of every usurpation? Necessity was the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It was the argument of tyrants: it was the creed of slaves.
..........— William Pitt (1759-1806), English statesman. The Speeches of the Right Honourable William Pitt in the House of Commons in Four Volumes, Inscribed by W.S. Hathaway, Vol. I (London, 1806). Speech on the India Bill (November 18, 1783), page 90.