Overcome Quotes - page 37
It is not a head in a charger that the dancers of our time ask, but the souls of them that sit at the feast. For in making them slaves, and leading them to unlawful loves, and besetting them with harlots, they do not take off the head, but slay the soul... For you will not surely tell me, that when full of wine, and drunken, and looking at a woman who is dancing and uttering base words, thou dost not feel anything towards her, neither art hurried on to profligacy, overcome by your lust... For though the daughter of Herodias be not present, yet the devil, who then danced in her person, in theirs also holds his choirs now, and departs with the souls of those guests taken captive.
John Chrysostom
The irony is that McCain had the best shot of any Republican candidate to win the election, despite his unpopularity with the party base. Given his record, he was better-positioned than any other Republican to overcome his association with the Bush administration. Simply put, however, he never did this. There is much to admire in McCain. Deep down, he is an honorable, principled man who has served his country for the majority of his life. His maverick label has been tarnished, fairly or not, but he has reached across the aisle on big issues on multiple occasions. True, he did and said things during this campaign that go against the convictions that many people believe he holds true. But it was an exhausting campaign, and things are always said that are regretted later by both sides. He was gracious in his concession speech - probably the best speech he's given in the entire campaign - and he deserves our respect.
John McCain
In each art the difficulty of the form is a substitution for the difficulty of direct apprehension and expression of the object. The first difficulty may be more or less overcome, but the second is insuperable; thus every poem begins, or ought to, by a disorderly retreat to defensible positions. Or, rather, by a perception of the hopelessness of direct combat, and a resort to the warfare of spells, effigies, and prophecies. The relation between the artist and reality is an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you know that you can approach that reality only by indirect means.
Richard Wilbur