Remark Quotes - page 8
God said, "I am tired of kings,”-
But that was a long while ago!
And meantime man said, "No,-
I like their looks in their robes and rings.”
So he crowned a few more,
And they went on playing the game as before,
Fighting and spoiling things.Man said, "I am tired of kings!
Sons of the robber-chiefs of yore,
They make me pay for their lust and their war;
I am the puppet, they pull the strings;
The blood of my heart is the wine they drink.
I will govern myself for awhile I think,
And see what that brings!”Then God, who made the first remark,
Smiled in the dark.
Henry van Dyke
If we endeavor to form our conceptions upon history and life, we remark three classes of men. The first consists of those for whom the chief thing is the qualities of feelings. These men create art. The second consists of the practical men, who carry on the business of the world. They respect nothing but power, and respect power only so far as it [is] exercized. The third class consists of men to whom nothing seems great but reason. If force interests them, it is not in its exertion, but in that it has a reason and a law. For men of the first class, nature is a picture; for men of the second class, it is an opportunity; for men of the third class, it is a cosmos, so admirable, that to penetrate to its ways seems to them the only thing that makes life worth living.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Our enemies, who, I may parenthetically remark, are attempting to change their constitution, appear to have no notion that what we want is not so much a change of the form of the apparatus of government as a change in the hearts by which that government is to be directed and animated, and if we are to judge, and surely we may judge without unfairness, of a man's heart by what he does, I would ask you whether those who have made mankind pale with horror over their early barbarities and brutal excesses in Belgium show the least sign that four years of war has in any material respect improved their disposition. Brutes they were when they begun the war, and, as far as we can judge, brutes they remain at the present moment.
Arthur Balfour
A few years ago I had occasion to visit Peru, and I got to know a fine philosopher and a truly wonderful human being-Francisco Miro Casada. Miro Casada has been an idealist all his life, while being, at the same time, a man of great experience (a former member of several governments and a former Ambassador to France). I found him a man who represents the social democratic vision in its purest form. Talking to him, and to my other friends in Peru (who represented quite a spectrum of political opinion), I heard something that was summed up in a remark he, Miro Casada, made to me, "Whenever you have a Republican president, we get a wave of military dictatorships in Latin America".
Hilary Putnam