Gordian Quotes

Founded on rock and facing the night-fouled sea A beacon blinks at its own brilliance, Over and over with cutlass gaze Solving the Gordian waters ... (Richard Wilbur)
As long as 1911, when I was still a member of the Socialist Party, I wrote that the Gordian knot of Trent could be cut only by the sword. At the same date I declared that war is usually the prelude to revolution. It was therefore easy for me, when the Great War broke out, to predict the Russian and the German revolutions.
Benito Mussolini
The problems is mastered - insupportably tiring when it was impending. Deliverance accounts for what sounds like axiom. The Gordian knot need not be cut.
Marianne Moore
if you hope at this juncture to cut the Gordian knots of socialism and communism by appealing to the center of Western capitalism, you will, far from remedying any of the ills of your society, commit a mistake which those to come will have to erase. For if Marxism has come to a deadlock in its social and economic policies, capitalism has also bogged down.
Ruhollah Khomeini
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
Jean Cocteau
As the financial experts all over the world use machines to unwind Gordian knots of financial arrangements so complex that only machines can make - 'derive' - and trade them, we have to wonder: Are we living in a bad sci-fi movie? Is the Matrix made of credit default swaps?
Richard Dooling
Because a judgement on the truth or error of the differing convictions in law is impossible, and because on the other hand a uniform law for all citizens is necessary, the law-giver faces the task of cleaving with a stroke of the sword the Gordian knot which jurisprudence cannot untangle. Since it is impossible to ascertain what is just, it must be decided what is lawful. In lieu of an act of truth (which is impossible) an act of authority is required. Relativism leads to positivism.
Gustav Radbruch