I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature; and that power, whether vested in many or a few, is ever grasping, ...and, like the grave, cries, "Give, give!" The great fish swallow up the small; and he who is most strenuous for the rights of the people, when vested with power, is as eager after the prerogatives of government. You tell me of degrees of perfection to which human nature is capable of arriving, and I believe it, but at the same time lament that our admiration should arise from the scarcity of the instances.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes... of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They will mark the stone-battlements And the circle of them... With a bright stain. They will cast out the dead A sight for Priam's queen to lament And her frightened daughters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Word in the desert Is most attacked by voices of temptation,... The crying shadow in the funeral dance, The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is an evil world. The fires of hatred and violence burn fiercely. Evil is powerful, the devil covers a darkened earth with his ...black wings. And soon the end of the world is expected. But mankind does not repent, the church struggles, and the preachers and poets warn and lament in vain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although I could lament in the language and feelings of David for Absalom, I am constrained to say, peace to his manes. Let us wee...p for the living, and not for the dead.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.... Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay, Exacted by thy fate, on the just day. Oh, could I lose all father now! For why Will man lament the state he should envy? To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage, And, if no other misery, yet age? Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry; For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such, As what he loves may never like too much.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in.... Fear a...nd resentment of what is new is really a lament for the memories of our childhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two ban...al dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it!--that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms--nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »