Read The Impossible Takes Longer Online
Authors: David Pratt
The Impossible Takes Longer (5 page)
Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957
200. The newspapers, at one time, said that I was dead, but after carefully examining the evidence I came to the conclusion that the statement was false.
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
201. Death is only an incident, and not the most important which happens to us in this state of being . . . Look forward, feel free, rejoice in life, cherish the children, guard my memory. God bless you. Good bye. W.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
Letter to his wife before his departure for France in 1915, to be delivered only after his death
202. Californians, alone among humans, seem to be blissfully unaware of their own personal mortality.
Sheldon Glashow
PHYSICS, 1979
203. We should all like to go out in full summer, with beauty stepping towards us across a lawn.
John Galsworthy
LITERATURE, 1932
204. Jeronimo, my grandfather, swineherd and story-teller, feeling death about to arrive and take him, went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one by one, embracing them and crying because he knew he wouldn't see them again.
Jose Saramago
LITERATURE, 1998
205. That's exactly what is going to happen to me.
Martin Luther King
PEACE, 1964
Dr. and Mrs. King were sitting together when they learned that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated, November 22, 1953
206. All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing. A day will come when science will turn upon its error and no longer hesitate to shorten our woes. A day will come when it will dare and act with certainty; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour, knowing that it has reached its term.
Maurice Maeterlinck
LITERATURE, 1911
207. It isn't decent for Society to make a man do this thing himself.
Percy Bridgman
PHYSICS, 1946
Suicide note; Bridgman was suffering from rapidly advancing bone cancer
208. Man cannot boast of his intelligence until he knows how to contrive a serene death. We cultivate the exact opposite of euthanasia, we know only dysthanasia.
Charles Richet
MEDICINE, 1913
209. The termination of life is becoming more and more a voluntary matter. People can be put on life sustaining machines. They can be kept going more or less indefinitely . . . The questions about life termination are going to affect everybody. And I put that as the top most ethical issue, how we confront that.
Joshua Lederberg
MEDICINE, 1958
210.
My son was killed while laughing at some jest. I would
I knew
What it was, and it might serve me in a time when jests
are few.
Rudyard Kipling
LITERATURE, 1907
211.
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because ourfathers lied.
Rudyard Kipling
LITERATURE, 1907
212.
From little towns in afar land we came,
To save our honor and a world aflame,
By little towns in afar land we sleep,
And trust that world we won for you to keep!
Rudyard Kipling
LITERATURE, 1907
213. Never in the whole field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
Of the Royal Air Force pilots in the Battle of Britain
214. "Not in vain" may be the pride of those who survived and the epitaph of those who fell.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
215. So long as English is spoken, and history studied, men will marvel at the greatness of Sir Winston.
John Cockcroft
PHYSICS, 1951
Tribute to Churchill at Churchill College, Cambridge, January 24, 1965
216. Standing here today, I wish to salute loved ones—and foes. I wish to salute all the fallen of all the countries in all the wars; the members of their families who bear the enduring burden of bereavement; the disabled whose scars will never heal.
Yitzhak Rabin
PEACE, 1994
217. My life's work has been accomplished. I did all that I could.
Mikhail Gorbachev
PEACE, 1990
218. Here lies someone who tried to screw his fellow man as little as possible.
Camilo Jose Cela
LITERATURE, 1989
Epitaph Cela chose for himself
219. He lies here, somewhere.
Werner Heisenberg
PHYSICS, 1932
Epitaph on his gravestone, composed by Heisenberg, author of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
220. When I go from hence, let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable.
Rabindranath Tagore
LITERATURE, 1913
221. Man does not live in a state of nature but in history.
Boris Pasternak
LITERATURE, 1958
222. The past is never dead. It's not even past.
William Faulkner
LITERATURE, 1949
223. No one is free from the history he has inherited.
Willy Brandt
PEACE, 1971
224. It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.
Seamus Heaney
LITERATURE, 1995
225. He who puts out his hand to stop the wheel of history will have his fingers crushed.
Lech Walesa
PEACE, 1983
226. History is neither made nor written without love or hate.
Theodor Mommsen
LITERATURE, 1902
227. History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
228. The vision of the future should shape the agenda for the present.
Shimon Peres
PEACE, 1994
229. A nation which never looks ahead is in for rude awakenings.
John Galsworthy
LITERATURE, 1932
230. The best way to predict the future is to ask a Nobel laureate what is impossible to do.
PaulLauterbur
MEDICINE, 2003
231. In the near future the developments in biology will make problems like no one has ever seen before.
Richard Fey nman
PHYSICS, 1965
232. In the year 2020 you will be able to go into the drug store, have your DNA sequence read in an hour or so, and given back to you on a compact disk so you can analyze it.
Walter Gilbert
CHEMISTRY, 1980
233. If the history of technology tells us anything, it is that the future lies in the world of the very small.
Eric Cornell
PHYSICS, 2001
234. Already the clash of empires is in process of becoming secondary to the clash of civilizations . . . Perhaps in ten years, perhaps in fifty, the dominance of Western civilization itself will be called into question.
Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957
235. You have only to wish it and you can have a world without hunger, disease, cancer and toil—anything you wish, wish anything and it can be done. Or else we can exterminate ourselves . . . at present we are on the road to extermination.
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
MEDICINE, 1937
236. At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past.
Maurice Maeterlinck
LITERATURE, 1911
237. Currently, the central region of the sun, in which hydrogen is converted into helium is moving outward toward the solar surface as more and more hydrogen is consumed. When this helium core grows sufficiently large—in about 6 billion years—the sun will expand into a red giant and move away from its present position on the main sequence. At that time the earth's surface will be hot enough to melt lead, the oceans will boil, and life on earth will end.
Max Delbrilck
MEDICINE, 1969
238. Building for the future is a very difficult thing to do; we cannot hope to complete the work in one generation; all the more reason to begin at once.
Rene Cassin
PEACE, 1968
The humane character of Nobel laureates is identified most clearly in the public mind with such Peace laureates as Albert Schweitzer, Mother Teresa, and Desmond Tutu. The Peace Prize has also been awarded more than twenty times to humanitarian organizations such as the Red Cross, Medecins sans Frontieres, and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
Altruism is a quality that may be observed in the lives of many Nobel laureates. The Swedish writer Selma Lagerlof saved the future laureate Nelly Sachs from the Holocaust in 1940 by sponsoring her emigration to Sweden. Pyotr Kapitsa saved the life of his fellow physicist Lev Landau by intervening with the Soviet authorities to release him from prison. In the 1930s, the laboratory of Niels Bohr in Copenhagen became a haven for Jewish scientists fleeing Nazi Germany, and Bohr was a leading participant in the operation that successfully sent almost all the Danish Jews to Sweden just ahead of the roundup planned by the Nazis. Ernest Rutherford's Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge was another refuge for German scientists, while the efforts of many other laureates in Britain and the United States were instrumental in saving numerous refugees. Many Nobel laureates gave away all or part of their prize money. As a child, Glinter Blobel, in flight with his family from the Russians, saw the magnificent Frauenkirche in
Dresden, which a few days later was destroyed by Allied bombing. When he won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1999, he donated the entire prize money for the restoration of the church and for the construction of a new synagogue in Dresden.
Courage is a subject on which many Nobel laureates can speak with authority. A substantial number served with distinction in the armed forces of their countries. During World War II, many current and future laureates worked in the Resistance in France, Poland, Hungary, and Italy. In fact, almost all the laureates living in France at that time were members of the Resistance, including the Irishman Samuel Beckett and the Pole Georges Charpak.
Imprisonment has been another challenging experience for many winners of the Nobel Prize. They found themselves in prison camps in wartime, as prisoners of war, enemy aliens, persecuted minorities, or resistance fighters. But in addition a number of Peace laureates suffered imprisonment for their work and beliefs, including Menachem Begin, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Shirin Ebadi, Anwar al-Sadat, Andrei Sakharov, Lech Walesa, and Wangari Maathai. Some Literature Prize winners were also prisoners of conscience, including Bertrand Russell, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, and Wole Soyinka.
239. Evil is not the norm. Injustice is not the norm. Poverty is not the norm. War is not the norm . . . The norm is goodness. The norm is compassion. The norm is gentleness.
Desmond Tutu
PEACE, 1984
240. There is no simple choice between the children of light and the children of darkness. Good and evil are not symmetrically distributed along political lines.
Saul Bellow
LITERATURE, 1976
241. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirring of the good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes, not through states, not between classes, not between political parties either, but right through every human heart and through all human hearts.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
LITERATURE, 1970
242. Evil takes root when one man starts to think that he is better than another.
Joseph Brodsky
LITERATURE, 1987
243. All things truly wicked start from an innocence.
Ernest Hemingway
LITERATURE, 1954
244.1, and few others, know what must be done, if not to reduce evil, at least not to add to it. Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.
Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957
245. A man does not have to be an angel in order to be a saint.
Albert Schweitzer
PEACE, 1952
246. If this is a world of vice and woe, I'll take the vice and you can have the woe.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
247. If you cannot be gold, be silver.
Juan Ramon Jimenez
LITE RATuRE, 1956
248. Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
249.1 can no longer bear to be human and I will no longer try.
Samuel Beckett
LITERATURE, 1969
250. Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.
Jean-Paul Sartre
LITERATURE, 1964
251. A human being is never what he is but the self he seeks.
Octavio Paz
LITERATURE, 1990
252. Great suffering builds up a human being and puts him within reach of self-knowledge.
Anwar al-Sadat
PEACE, 1978
253. He did not remember when he had attained humility, but he knew he had attained it, and he knew it was not disgraceful, and it carried no loss to pride.
Ernest Hemingway
LITERATURE, 1954
254. I have been called indispensable and a miracle worker. I know, because I remember every word I say.
Henry Kissinger
PEACE, 1973
255. The main advantage of being famous is that when you bore people at dinner parties they think it is their fault.
Henry Kissinger
PEACE, 1973
256. At all costs try to avoid granting yourself the status of the victim . . . No matter how abominable your condition may be, try not to blame anything or anybody.
Joseph Brodsky
LITERATURE, 1987
257. The tendency to see oneself perpetually as a victim will lead to the evasion of responsibility and the condoning of evil.
Albert Lutuli
PEACE, 1960
258. Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities, because . . . it is the quality which guarantees all others.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
259. We do not know how to retreat, we know how to advance.
Yasser Arafat
PEACE, 1994
260. When you are in the last ditch, there is nothing left but to sing.
Samuel Beckett
LITERATURE, 1969
261. Grace under pressure.
Ernest Hemingway
LITERATURE, 1954
When asked what he meant by
guts
in an interview with Dorothy Parker
262. If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure that it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
Ernest Hemingway
LITERATURE, 1954
263. A hero is someone who does what he can.
Romain Rolland
LITERATURE, 1915
264. How can we justify our dreams? How can we confirm our beliefs? How can we prove to ourselves that what we have been taught as children is true? How can we alleviate our doubts? How can we, in our own often naturally dormant lives, be inspired to action, sometimes even at the sacrifice of our own immediate well-being? We derive those inspirations from our heroes.
Jimmy Carter
PEACE, 2002
265. One day the South will recognize its real heroes . . . They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience' sake.
Martin Luther King
PEACE, 1964
266. The coward makes himself cowardly. The hero makes himself heroic.
Jean-Paul Sartre
LITERATURE, 1964
267. There are no heroes of action: only heroes of renunciation and suffering. But few of them are known, and even these not to the crowd, but to the few.
Albert Schweitzer
PEACE, 1952
268. What the future has in store for me I do not know. It might be ridicule, imprisonment, concentration camp, flogging, banishment and even death. I only pray to the Almighty to strengthen my resolve so that none of these grim possibilities may deter me from striving, for the sake of the good name of our beloved country, the Union of South Africa, to make it a true democracy and a true union in form and spirit of all the communities in the land.
Albert Lutuli
PEACE, 1960
Statement in November 1952 when dismissed from his position as chief of his Zulu tribe for refusing to resign from the African National Congress
269. It's strange and it's also wonderful to live in a country where there are still heroes.
Nadine Gordimer
LITERATURE, 1991
Speaking of South Africa
270. During my lifetime I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all people live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for, and to see realized. But, my lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.
Nelson Mandela
PEACE, 1993
Speech at his trial in Johannesburg, April 20, 1964
271. The politician wants men to know how to die courageously; the poet wants men to live courageously.
Salvatore Quasimodo
LITERATURE, 1959
272. Don't be downhearted in the thick of the battle. It is the place where all good men would wish to be.
Lester Pearson
PEACE, 1957
273.1 would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government, that I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
274. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
275. Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet—there is where the bullet went through—and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.
Theodore Roosevelt
PEACE, 1906
