Recurrence Quotes
Had we seen an earthquake, or the results of a powerful storm, the devastation and loss would have been awful - but our country has seen terrible tragedies before: fires, earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes. We prayed for the lost, rebuilt for the survivors, and strengthened our laws, dikes, weather warnings and earthquake predictors. We prepare for an eventual recurrence of acts of nature...
But 9-11 was not a natural catastrophe: these events were deliberate, conceived, organized and ruthlessly executed by human beings. And so, their significance must be assessed differently - and the actions to prepare for "next time” must be different, also.
Wesley Clark
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
T. S. Eliot
A change had indeed been brought by the emancipation of the serfs, but there was little outward sign of it. The muzhik remained, to all appearance, what he was before: in fact, as our train drew into St. Petersburg, the peasants, with their sheepskin caftans, cropped hair, and stupid faces, brought back the old impressions so vividly that I seemed not to have been absent a week. The old atmosphere of repression was evident everywhere. I had begun my experience of it under Nicholas I, had seen a more liberal policy under Alexander II, but now found a recurrence of reaction, and everywhere a pressure which deadened all efforts at initiating a better condition of things.
Andrew Dickson White