20th century

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In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

Guy Debord

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The Society of the Spectacle

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Buy Society of the Spectacle at Amazon Buy Society of the Spectacle at Amazon

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Debord, Guy. La societe du spectacle [The Society of the Spectacle]. Buchet-Chastel, 1967, ch. 1, sect. 1.

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The Fifth Amendment is an old friend and a good friend. It is one of the great landmarks in man's struggle to be free of tyranny, to be decent and civilized. It is our way of escape from the use of torture.

William O. Douglas

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Douglas, William. An Almanac of Liberty. Doubleday & Co., 1954, p. 238.

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At three years of age, the child's whole emotional life plan has been laid down, his emotional disposition set. At that age, the parents have already determined for him whether he is to grow into a happy person, wholesome and good-natured, whether he is to be a whining, complaining neurotic, an anger-driven, vindictive, over-bearing slave driver, or one whose every move in life is definitely controlled by fear.

John B. Watson

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Watson, John B. "Are You Giving Your Child a Chance?" McCall's, 1927.

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In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school-
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said, "Our casualties were low."

Randall Jarrell

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Jarrell, Randall. Losses. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1948, I. 22.

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The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream. For those who did, it unlocked its gates and its treasures, not caring who they were or where they came from.

Moss Hart

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On New York City.

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Hart, Moss. Act One. Random House, 1959, pt. 2.

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If God has died in the blare of the twentieth century and in houses too new and cheap to be haunted, one must seek him in the old quiet places, where he might still live on in retirement.

Wilfrid Sheed

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Sheed, Wilfrid. The Good Word & Other Words. E. P. Dutton, 1978, pt. 1, ch. 12.

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There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on bath sides; and almost every individual involved, no matter where he stood, combined some or all of these antithetical qualities in his own person, in his own acts.... It will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims.

Dalton Trumbo

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On the Hollywood blacklist of suspected communists during the Red Scare.

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Original Citation

Trumbo, Dalton. Speech accepting an award from the Writers' Guild. 13 Mar. 1970, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

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Trumbo, Dalton. Quoted in Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical, written by Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo. University Press of Kentucky, 2015, ch. 22.

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This happened near the core
Of a world's culture. This
Occurred among higher things.
This was a philosophical conclusion.
Everybody gets what he deserves.

Alan Bold

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June 1967 at Buchenwald

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Bold, Alan. A Perpetual Motion Machine. Chatto & Windus, 1969.

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The first fall of snow is not only an event, but it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of world and wake up to find yourself in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment, then where is it to be found?

J.B. Priestley

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Priestley, J. B. "First Snow." Apes and Angels. Methuen, 1928.

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Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth... Is that it is alive... Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, cleaming membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos... It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun.

Lewis Thomas

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Thomas, Lewis. "The World's Biggest Membrane." The New England Journal of Medicine, 13 Sept. 1973.

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We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth's creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take in the idea of dying, unable to sit still.

Lewis Thomas

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Thomas, Lewis. Address given at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. c. 1978, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York City, NY, USA.

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Self-government is our right, a thing born in us at birth, a thing no more to be doled out to us, or withheld from us, by another people than the right to life itself-than the right to feel the sun, or smell the flowers, or to love our kind.

Roger Casement

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Casement, Roger. King's Bench. R vs Casement [1017] KB 98, 134. 29 June 1916.

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Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds,-and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of-wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor ever eagle flew-
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

John Gillespie Magee, Jr

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Magee, John Gillespie, Jr. "High Flight." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 12 Nov. 1941.

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This book is about the organization man...The people I am talking about...are not the workers, nor are they the white-collar people in the usual, clerk sense of the word. These people only work for the Organization. The ones I am talking about belong to it as well.

William H. Whyte, Jr.

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The Organization Man

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Whyte, William H, Jr. The Organization Man. Simon & Schuster, 1956, ch. 1.

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How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century.

Aneurin Bevan

In Place of Fear

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Bevan, Aneurin. In Place of Fear. William Heinemann, 1952, ch. 1.

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Of all the questions you might want to ask
about angels, the only one you ever hear
is how many can dance on the head of a pin.

No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time
besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin
or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth
or guiding a boy and a girl across a rickety wooden bridge.

Billy Collins

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Read Questions About Angels at Poetry Foundation

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Collins, Billy. Questions About Angels. Quill, 1991.

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Years ago we discovered the exact point, the dead center of middle age. It occurs when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush up the net.

Franklin P. Adams

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Adams, Franklin P. Nods and Becks. Whittlesey House, 1944.

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Behind the black portent of the new atomic age lies a hope which, seized upon with faith, can work our salvation…we must elect world peace or world destruction.

Bernard Baruch

Address to the U.N. Atomic Energy Commission, June 14, 1946

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Baruch, Bernard M. Address to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. First session of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. 14 June 1946, Hunter College, New York, NY, USA.

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The identity crisis... Occurs in that period of the life cycle when each of you must forge for himself some central perspective and direction, some working unity, out of the effective remnants of his childhood and the hopes of his anticipated adulthood.

Erik Erikson

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Erikson, Erik. Young Man Luther. W. W. Norton & Company, 1958, ch. 1.

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America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else; when discovered it was not wanted; and most of the exploration for the next fifty years was done in the hope of getting through or around it. America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy.

Samuel Eliot Morison

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Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Oxford History of the American People. Oxford University Press, 1965, ch. 2.

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