All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life, revolution, starvation, devaluation of currency and terror, ep...idemics, emigration; I have seen the great ideologies of the masses grow and spread out before my eyes. Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and, above all, that archpestilence, nationalism, which poisoned our flourishing European culture. I had to be a defenseless, powerless witness to the most inconceivable setback of humanity, its return to a barbarism we had thought had long since passed into oblivion with its deliberate and programmatic antihumane dogma.... (We had to witness) wars ... concentration camps, tortures, mass pillaging and bombings of defenseless cities ... bestialities (which had not been known for fifty generations).... But, paradoxically, I also saw the same human race rise to technical and intellectual heights never even dreamt of ... the conquest of the air through the airplane, the one-second transmission of the human word across the globe and, thus the conquest of space, the splitting of the atom, the conquest of the most treacherous diseases ... almost daily progress in making possible what was still impossible yesterday. Never before our time did humanity as a whole act more satanically and never did it accomplish such godlike deeds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The form of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crime...s of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanation of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's a bad town to bring an appetite to, soldier. We've been here since yesterday morning and we've been living on boiled hay and ...razor blades.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It seems only yesterday that we saw The movie with the cows in it... And turned to one at your side, who burped As morning saw a new garnet-and-pea-green order propose Itself out of the endless bathos, like science-fiction lumps.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns And the miraculous cure at the fountain;... Yesterday the Sabbath of Witches. But today the struggle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Your letter is come; it came indeed twelve lines ago, but I could not stop to acknowledge it before, & I am glad it did not...r />arrive till I had completed my first sentence, because the sentence had been made since yesterday, & I think forms a very good beginning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mrs. Hall, of Sherborne, was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she was expected, owing to a... fright. I suppose that she happened unawares to look at her husband.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our good schools today are much better than the best schools of yesterday. When I was your age and a pupil in school, our teachers... were our enemies. Can any thing ... be more painful to a friendly mind, than a necessity of communicating disagreeable intelligence? Indeed it is sometimes difficult to determine, whether the relator or the receiver of evil tidings is most to be pitied.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »