Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it,
so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late;
the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect:
like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee
when the discourse is changed, or the company parted;
or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine,
after the patient is dead.
Jonathan Swift, The Examiner No. XIV, November 1710
The only certainty, it seems to me,
is that those who believe they are certainly right are certainly wrong.
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary
And yet in our world
everybody thinks of changing humanity,
and nobody thinks of changing himself.
Leo Tolstoy, Some Social Remedies
Pretending bad things aren’t happening is not a great survival strategy.
Martha Wells, Rogue Protocol
If their work is satisfying
people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense.
No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax,
or how Bach spent his weekends.
J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes
When one faints, people shout for water, eau de cologne, smelling salts;
but when one is about to despair the cry is, Get me possibility, get possibility!
Possibility is the only saving remedy;
given a possibility, the desperate man breathes once more, he revives again,
for without possibility a man cannot, as it were, draw breath.
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
December 1952
There are few of us now, soon
There will be none. We were comrades
Together, we believed we
Would see with our own eyes the new
World where man was no longer
Wolf to man, but men and women
Were all brothers and lovers
Together. We will not see it.
We will not see it, none of us.
It is farther off than we thought.
In our young days we believed
That as we grew old and fell
Out of rank, new recruits, young
And with the wisdom of youth,
Would take our places and they
Surely would grow old in the
Golden Age. They have not come.
They will not come. There are not
Many of us left. Once we
Marched in closed ranks, today each
Of us fights off the enemy,
A lonely isolated guerrilla.
All this has happened before,
Many times. It does not matter.
We were comrades together.
Life was good for us. It is
Good to be brave — nothing is
Better. Food tastes better. Wine
Is more brilliant. Girls are more
Beautiful. The sky is bluer
For the brave — for the brave and
Happy comrades and for the
Lonely brave retreating warriors.
You had a good life. Even all
Its sorrows and defeats and
Disillusionments were good,
Met with courage and a gay heart.
You are gone and we are that
Much more alone. We are one fewer,
Soon we shall be none. We know now
We have failed for a long time.
And we do not care. We few will
Remember as long as we can,
Our children may remember,
Some day the world will remember.
Then they will say, “They lived in
The days of the good comrades.
It must have been wonderful
To have been alive then, though it
Is very beautiful now.”
We will be remembered, all
Of us, always, by all men,
In the good days now so far away.
If the good days never come,
We will not know. We will not care.
Our lives were the best. We were the
Happiest men alive in our day.
Kenneth Rexroth