20th century

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If it were possible to talk to the unborn, one could never explain to them how it feels to be alive, for life is washed in the speechless real.

Jacques Barzun

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The House of Intellect

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Barzun, Jacques. The House of Intellect. Harper & Brothers, 1959, ch. 6.

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All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.

John Kenneth Galbraith

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Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Age of Uncertainty. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1977, ch. 12.

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How simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea... All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart.

Nikos Kazantzakis

Zorba the Greek

Buy Zorba the Greek at Amazon Buy Zorba the Greek at Amazon

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Original Citation

Kazantzakis, Nikos. Βίος και Πολιτεία του Αλέξη Ζορμπά [Life and State of Alexis Zorba]. Athens: Dimitrakou, 1946, ch. 7.

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Current Citation

Kazantzakis, Nikos. Zorba the Greek, translated by Peter Bien. Simon & Schuster, 2014, ch. 7.

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And were an epitaph to be my story
I'd have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone:
I have a lovers quarrel with the world.

Robert Frost

The Lesson for Today

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Frost, Robert. Reading of The Lesson for Today at Harvard University. 20 June 1941, Phi Beta Kappa Society meeting, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.

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If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

Calvin Coolidge

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Coolidge, Calvin. Speech on the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. 5 July 1926, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

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A tough but nervous, tenacious but restless race; materially ambitious, yet prone to introspection, and subject to waves of religious emotion... A race whose typical member is eternally torn between a passion for righteousness and a desire to get on in the world.

Samuel Eliot Morison

On Americans, specifically "Yankees".

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Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Maritime History of Massachusetts 1783-1860. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921, ch. 2.

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The only freedom the gods grant us
Is this: to submit
Of our own free will to their sovereignty
We should do just that,
Since only in the illusion of freedom
Does freedom exist.

Fernando Pessoa

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Pessoa, Fernando (published as Ricardo Reis). "So esta liberdade nos concedem [The only freedom the gods grant us]." Odes. Edições Ática, 1952.

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The reason that no computer program can ever be a mind is simply that a computer program is only syntactical, and minds are more than syntactical. Minds are semantical, in the sense that they have more than a formal structure, they have a content.

John R. Searle

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Searle, John R. "Minds, Brains, and Science." Reith Lectures. BBC Radio 4. 1984. Radio.

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Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.

Countee Cullen

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Incident

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Original Citation

Cullen, Countee. "Incident." Color. Harper & Brothers, 1925, I. 5.

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Current Citation

Cullen, Countee. "Incident." Countee Cullen: Collected Poems, edited by Major Jackson. Library of America, 2013, I. 5.

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Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.

Havelock Ellis

The Dance of Life

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Ellis, Havelock. The Dance of Life. Houghton, Mifflin Company, 1923, ch. 2.

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The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.

Andre Malraux

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Malraux, Andre. Les Noyers de l'Altenburg [The Walnut Trees of Altenburg]. Gallimard, c. 1948.

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The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.

Henry Beston

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Original Citation

Beston, Henry. The Outermost House. Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1928, ch. 1.

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Beston, Henry. The Outermost House. Holt Paperbacks, 2003, ch. 1.

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The inward gates of a bird are always open.
It does not know how to shut them.
That is the secret of its song,
But whether any man's are ajar is doubtful.

Hugh MacDiarmid

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MacDiarmid, Hugh. "On a Raised Beach." Stony Limits and Other Poems. Victor Gollancz, 1934.

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As I sit looking out of a window of the building
I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal.
I look down into the street and see people, each walking with an inner peace,
And envy them-they are so far away from me!
Not one of them has to worry about getting out this manual on schedule.

John Ashbery

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The Instruction Manual

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Ashbery, John. "The Instruction Manual." Some Trees: Yale Series Of Younger Poets. Yale University Press, 1956, I. 1.

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Since the measuring device has been constructed by the observer... We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

Werner Heisenberg

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Original Citation

Heisenberg, Werner. Lecture about the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. Gifford Lectures. 1955-1956, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland.

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Heisenberg, Werner. "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory." Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2007.

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God has pity on kindergarten children.
He has less pity on school children.
And on grownups he has no pity at all,
he leaves them alone,
and sometimes they must crawl on all fours
in the burning sand
to reach the first-aid station
covered with blood.

Yehuda Amichai

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God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children

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Amichai, Yehuda. "God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children." Now and in Other Days. 1955.

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It is useful to distinguish among four factors which give importance, urgency, and inevitability to the advancement of space technology. The first of these factors is the compelling urge of man to explore and to discover, the thrust of curiosity that leads men to try to go where no one has gone before.

James R. Killian

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Killian, James R. "Introduction to Outer Space." Project Mercury: Man-in-space Program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1959. Originally a speech given on 26 Mar. 1958. The White House, Washington, DC, USA.

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A great ball of fire about a mile in diameter, changing colors as it kept shooting upward, from deep purple to orange, expanding, growing bigger, rising as it was expanding, an elemental force freed from its bonds after being chained for billions of years.

William L. Laurence

The New York Times

Reporting on the first detonation of an atomic bomb which occurred in New Mexico on July 16th, 1945.

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Laurence, William L. "Drama of the Atomic Bomb Found Climax in July 16 Test; Drama of the Atomic Bomb Found Climax in New Mexico Test Caravan of Scientists by Night Directions for Observers' Safety Roar Reverberations Over Desert." The New York Times, 26 Sept. 1945.

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