Fist Quotes - page 4
Crookebackt hee was, toothshaken, and blere eyed,
Went on three feete, and somtyme, crept on fowre,
With olde lame boanes, that ratled by his syde,
His scalpe all pild, and hee with eld forlore:
His withred fist still knocking at Death's dore,
Fumbling, and driveling, as hee drawes his breath,
For briefe, the shape and messenger of Death.
Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset
As the entire middle class, the bourgeois and petty bourgeois intelligentsia, boycotted the Soviet government for months after the October Revolution and crippled the railroad, post and telegraph, and educational and administrative apparatus, and, in this fashion, opposed the workers government, naturally all measures of pressure were exerted against it. These included the deprivation of political rights, of economic means of existence, etc., in order to break their resistance with an iron fist. It was precisely in this way that the socialist dictatorship expressed itself, for it cannot shrink from any use of force to secure or prevent certain measures involving the interests of the whole.
Rosa Luxemburg
Excuse me,” she said hesitantly, "but what effect do these minor planets have on our behavior and fortunes? I mean, you know, astrological influence?”
He looked at her. "None.”
"None at all.”
"No.”
"But if the planets affect our fortunes-” She stumbled to a stop at the dispassionately scornful look on the pale man's face, the slow way he shook his head. "Surely you'll agree that the planets order and control our destinies?”
"They do not.”
"Not at all?”
"Then what does? Control our destinies, I mean.”
"The only external forces that have any influence on us are those we can see every day: the smile, the frown, the fist, the brick wall. What you call ‘destiny' is merely a semantic fallacy, the attribution of purpose to blind causality. Insofar as any of us are compelled to resist the flow of random events, we are driven solely by internal drives and forces.
Michael Swanwick