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I am interested in the future because I expect to spend the rest of my life in the future.

Charles F. Kettering

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Kettering, Charles F. Spoken during a luncheon. Joint luncheon held by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and the Advertising Club. July 1939, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

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There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. And, dying, it rises above its own agony to out-carol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain.

Colleen McCullough

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The Thorn Birds

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McCullough, Colleen. The Thorn Birds. Harper & Row, 1977, epigraph.

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The pebble
is a perfect creature

equal to itself
mindful of its limits

filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning

Zbigniew Herbert

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Pebble

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Herbert, Zbigniew. "Kamyk [Pebble]." Studium przedmiotu [Subject Study]. Czytelnik, 1961.

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Give us this day our television, and an automobile, but deliver us from freedom.

Masculin Féminin

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Masculin Féminin [Masculine Feminine]. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Anouchka Films-Argos Films/Sandrews-Svenskfilmindustri, 1966.

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Pessimism (or rather what is called such) is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed.

Thomas Hardy

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Hardy, Thomas. Notebook entry. 1 Jan. 1902.

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Hardy, Thomas. Quoted in The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary, written by J. O. Bailey. UNC Press Books, 2018.

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Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain. And the future as the past would be present to its eyes.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

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Laplace, Pierre-Simon. Theorie Analytique des Probabilities [Analytic Theory of Probability]. Paris: Madame Va Courcier, 1812.

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Human contact seemed to her so frail a thing that the hope that two people might want each other in the same way, at the same time and with the possibility of doing something about it, seemed infinitely remote.

Margaret Drabble

The Waterfall

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Drabble, Margaret. The Waterfall. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969.

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If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

United States v. Schwimmer

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Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr. Dissenting Opinion. United States v. Schwimmer. United States Reports, vol. 279, 27 May 1929, pp. 653-655. Justia, supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/279/644/.

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When you consider that God could have commanded anything he wanted-anything!-the Ten have got to rank as one of the great missed moral opportunities of all time. How different history would have been had he clearly and unmistakably forbidden war, tyranny, taking over other people's countries, slavery, exploitation of workers, cruelty to children, wife-beating, stoning, treating women-or anyone-as chattel or inferior beings.

Katha Pollitt

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Stacked Decalogue

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Pollitt, Katha. "Stacked Decalogue." The Nation, 4 Sept. 2003.

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My center is giving way, my right is retreating, situation excellent, I am attacking.

Ferdinand Foch

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Foch, Ferdinand. Message sent during the first Battle of the Marne. 8 Sept. 1914.

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I decided it is better to scream. This pitiful sound, which sometimes, goodness knows how, reaches into the remotest prison cell, is a concentrated expression of the last vestige of human dignity. It is a man's way of leaving a trace, of telling people how he lived and died. By his screams he asserts his right to live, sends a message to the outside world demanding help and calling for resistance. If nothing else is left, one must scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.

Nadezhda Mandelstam

Hope Against Hope

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Mandelstam, Nadezhda. Hope Against Hope. The Chekov Press/Atheneum, 1970, ch. 11.

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If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen

Dulce et Decorum Est

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Original Citation

Owen, Wilfred. "Dulce et Decorum Est." Poems by Wilfred Owen. Chatto & Windus, 1920.

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Owen, Wilfred. "Dulce et Decorum Est." The War Poems Of Wilfred Owen. Random House UK, 2018.

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I never joined the Army because "at ease" was never that easy to me. It seemed rather uptight still. I don't relax by parting my legs slightly and putting my hands behind my back.

Mitch Hedberg

Strategic Grill Locations

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Hedberg, Mitch. Strategic Grill Locations. 7 Sept. 1999, The Laff Stop Comedy Club, Houston, Texas, USA.

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There was a famous story, some reporters asked a door gunner, "How can you shoot women and children?" and he'd answered, "It's easy, you just don't lead 'em so much."

Michael Herr

Dispatches

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Herr, Michael. "Breathing In." Dispatches. Alfred A. Knopf, 1977, pt. 3.

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There is only one question which really matters: why do bad things happen to good people?

Harold S. Kushner

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When Bad Things Happen to Good People

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Kushner, Harold. When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Schocken Books, 1981, ch. 1.

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I live in a rather special world. I know only one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them.

Pauline Kael

Remark in an address to the Modern Language Association after Richard Nixon's landslide election win in 1972.

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Kael, Pauline. Quoted in "Critics Here Focus on Films As Language Conference Opens." Written by Israel Shenker. The New York Times, 28 Dec. 1972. Originally stated in a lecture at the Modern Language Association, Dec. 1972.

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When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.

Nikola Tesla

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Tesla, Nikola. "When Woman is Boss." Interviewed by John B. Kennedy. Collier's magazine, 30 Jan. 1926.

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Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century beings it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

Thomas Mann

The Magic Mountain

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Original Citation

Mann, Thomas. Der Zauberberg [The Magic Mountain]. S. Fischer Verlag, 1924, ch. 5.

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Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Everyman's Library, 2005, ch. 5.

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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.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Solzhenitsyn, Alexander I. "A World Split Apart." Commencement cermony. 8 June 1978, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.

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