Abject Quotes - page 3
All these trod the road to Hell, removing from this house of clay to the pit of perdition. The enemy's country was full, as Hell is full, of wounded who had died on the road. The lowest pit was gorged with miscreants who had surrendered their souls to the lord of Hell. In whatever direction one from the army of Islam hastened, he found everywhere a self-willed one dead; whatever march the illustrious camp made in the wake of the fugitives, it found no foot-space without its prostrate foe. All the Hindus slain, abject and mean, By matchlock-stones, like the Elephants' lords, Many hills of their bodies were seen, And from each hill a fount of running blood.
Babur
That abject, squalid, shameless avowal...It is a very disquieting and disgusting symptom...My mind turns across the narrow waters of Channel and the North Sea, where great nations stand determined to defend their national glories or national existence with their lives. I think of Germany, with its splendid clear-eyed youths marching forward on all the roads of the Reich singing their ancient songs, demanding to be conscripted into an army; eagerly seeking the most terrible weapons of war; burning to suffer and die for their fatherland. I think of Italy, with her ardent Fascisti, her renowned Chief, and stern sense of national duty. I think of France, anxious, peace-loving, pacifist to the core, but armed to the teeth and determined to survive as a great nation in the world. One can almost feel the curl of contempt upon the lips of the manhood of all these people when they read this message sent out by Oxford University in the name of young England.
Winston Churchill
Honor, justice and humanity call upon us to hold and to transmit to our posterity, that liberty, which we received from our ancestors. It is not our duty to leave wealth to our children; but it is our duty to leave liberty to them. No infamy, iniquity, or cruelty can exceed our own if we, born and educated in a country of freedom, entitled to its blessings and knowing their value, pusillanimously deserting the post assigned us by Divine Providence, surrender succeeding generations to a condition of wretchedness from which no human efforts, in all probability, will be sufficient to extricate them; the experience of all states mournfully demonstrating to us that when arbitrary power has been established over them, even the wisest and bravest nations that ever flourished have, in a few years, degenerated into abject and wretched vassals.
John Dickinson (delegate)