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. . . TRYING see "SUCCESS" for related links They fail, and they alone, who have not striven. --Thomas Bailey Aldrich (18361907) American poet, short-story writer, and editor. "Enamoured Architect of Airy Rhyme" Oh, but a man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for? --Andrea Del Sarto [Andrea D'Agnolo] (14861530) Italian painter and draftsman. The intent and not the deed Is in our power; and, therefore, who dares greatly Does greatly. --John Brown (17151766) English clergyman and author. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. --T.S. Eliot (18881965) Anglo-American poet, critic, and dramatist. _Four Quartets_ [1943] "East Coker" Let us resolve to do the best we can with what we've got. --William Feather (18891981) American author and publisher. Somebody said that it couldn't be done, But he with a chuckle replied That 'maybe it couldn't,' but he would be one Who wouldn't say so till he'd tried. So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin On his face. If he worried he hid it. He started to sing as he tackled the thing That couldn't be done, and he did it. --Edgar Guest (18811959) American poet. First stanza, "It Couldn't Be Done" We don't discover what we can't achieve until we make an effort not to try. --Piet Hein (19051996) Danish poet and mathematician. "Making an Effort" The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just. --Abraham Lincoln (18091865) American Republican statesman, President [18611865]. It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded. --Anne Morrow Lindbergh (19062001) American writer and wife of Charles Lindbergh. To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals this alone is worth the struggle. --William Penn (16441718) Quaker leader and advocate of religious freedom who oversaw the founding of the American Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as a refuge for Quakers and other religious minorities of Europe {E.B.}. It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy course; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat. --Theodore Roosevelt (18581919) American Republican statesman and President [19011909]. (Paris Sorbonne, 1910.) Commit yourself to a dream Nobody who tries to do something great but fails is a total failure. Why? Because he can always rest assured that he succeeded in life's most important battle he defeated the fear of trying. --Robert H. Schuller (1926 ) American televangelist. _Tough Times Never Last, But Tough People Do!_ [1984] - The Declaration of Independence states unequivocally that all men are created equal. Yet every day I find reason to believe this to be untrue. I run in a race and half the field beats me. I attend a seminar and can't follow the reasoning of the speaker. I read a book and I am unable to understand what is evident to others. Daily I am instructed in my deficiencies. I do something, physical or mental, and realize how far I fall short of what other people accomplish. Despite the Declaration, we are apparently not born equal. I cannot aspire to win the Boston Marathon. I most certainly will not receive the Nobel Prize for literature. I am surrounded by people who know more, do more, and make more than I do. But, like many others, I identify myself with my performance. I become my marathon time. I become my latest book. I become the last lecture I gave. . . . But I am more than a body-mind complex. I am a soul as well. I share with everyone on this planet one power infinitely more important than talent: willpower. In this power of the soul, all of us are created equal. . . . The will considers the question, Will you or won't you have it so? And in that decision you can be the equal of anyone else. "Effort is the measure of a man," wrote [William] James. How well we know that. I am never content with contentment. I am uneasy when things go easy. "Don't take things easy," said a great physician, "take things hard." Doing one's absolute best becomes the criterion. --George Sheehan, M.D. (19181993) _Personal Best_ [1989], "The Many Levels of Motivation" - You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try. --Beverly Sills (19292007) American opera singer. In Jacqueline Sweeney _Incredible Quotations: 230 Thought-Provoking..._, p. 54 [1997]. Did you ever hear of a man who had striven all his life faithfully and singly towards an object, and in no measure obtained it? If a man constantly aspires, is he not elevated? Did ever a man try heroism, magnanimity, truth, sincerity, and find that there was no advantage in them that it was a vain endeavor? --Henry David Thoreau (18171862) American essayist, poet, and practical philosopher. I always remember an epitaph which is in the cemetery at Tombstone, Arizona. It says: 'Here lies Jack Williams. He done his damnedest.' I think that is the greatest epitaph a man can have. --Harry S. Truman (18841972) American Democratic statesman, President of the U.S. [19451953]. It's better to burn out than it is to rust. --Neil Young - You tried your hardest and you failed miserably. The lesson here is: 'Never Try!' --Homer Simpson  . . see "ANIMALS" for related links see: "PLACES" for related links The presence of the Turks in Europe has been a source of unmitigated evil to everybody concerned. I am not aware of a single interest, Turkish or otherwise, that during nearly 500 years has benefited by that presence. Indeed the record is one of misrule, oppression, intrigue and massacre, almost unparalleled in the history of the Eastern world. --George Nathaniel Curzon, Marquess Curzon (18591925) also called (18981911) Baron Curzon of Kedleston, or (191121) Earl Curzon of Kedleston. British statesman, viceroy of India (18981905), and foreign secretary [19171924]. (Minutes of a meeting of the British cabinet's Eastern Committee (Curzon was chairman) [23 December 1918]. I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character . . . like those among men who live by sharping and robbing, he is generally poor, and often very lousy . . . the turkey is a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America. --Benjamin Franklin (17061790) American politician, inventor, and scientist. _Letter to Sarah Bache_ [January 26, 1784]. The Turks are good workers, honest, in their relations, and a good people as subjects. But as rulers they are insupportable and a disgrace to civilization, as is proved by their having exterminated over a million Armenians and 300,000 Greeks during the last four years. --Eleuthιrios Venizιlos (18641936) Prime minister of Greece [1910-1915, 1917, 1924, 1928-1930].  TURTLES . . see "ANIMALS" for related links We called him Tortoise because he taught us. --Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (18321898) English writer and logician. _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_ [1865], ch. 9 Come crown my brows with leaves of myrtle I know the tortoise is a turtle Come carve my name in stone immortal I know the turtoise is a tortle I know to my profound despair I bet on one to beat a hare I also know I'm now a pauper Because of its tortley turtley torpor --Ogden Nash (19021971) American writer of humorous poetry. - Sign at a London psychiatrist:: "Remember the tortoise you only make headway if you stick your neck out." ----- carapace [KAIR-uh-pace], noun: 1. The thick shell that covers the back of the turtle, the crab, and other animals. 2. Something likened to a shell that serves to protect or isolate from external influence. . . see "TIME" for related links ^^ At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States was already a rich and powerful country, stretching its muscles, reaching out toward an overseas empire. By the end of the century, it was much richer, and much more powerful; the superpower in the world. It had come out on top in two world wars (there were more ambiguous outcomes in some smaller, less glorious wars). Most of its rivals had faded away. When Queen Victoria died, in 1901, the sun never set on the British empire; it controlled a quarter of the world. By 2000 the British empire had been reduced to a pitiful handful of islands; China swallowed Hong Kong in 1997, the last significant outpost of empire; the population of the bits and fragments left over from imperial days (Bermuda, Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, and others) would hardly fill a football stadium. All the other empires, too, had crumbled into dust. Two world wars and the winds of change stripped France of her glory; her African and Asian colonies were long since gone. She too still had an island here and there, and tattered remnants of neocolonialism in French-speaking parts of Africa. Germany lost its empire after the First World War, and had to disgorge its conquests after the Second. The First World War put an end to the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the Second World War put paid to the empire the Japanese had cobbled together. Dutch and Portuguese possessions became independent after World War II; the last Portuguese outpost, Macao, passed to China at the end of 1999. The most recent empire to go was the Soviet Union, which never admitted it was an empire; it collapsed like a house of cards in 1989. At the end of the century, the Russian bear was a sick, limping, lumbering mess. China loomed on the horizon; still something of an empire (certainly, the Tibetans thought so), vast, overpopulated; but so far not a serious rival to American rule in the world. Economically, the United States was the world power, too. Some countries were almost as rich, or even richer, in terms of dollars per capita; but most of these were small, lucky places, awash in oil, like Brunei or Kuwait, or shrewd little statelets, like Singapore. Even the countries that were both big and rich, like Germany and Japan, were far behind the U.S. in total gross national product the United States, with its GNP in the trillions of dollars, was more than twice as mighty in terms of sheer wealth as its nearest rival; and in military and cultural terms, other countries were absolutely nowhere. That left the United States on top of the heap, pretty much alone; it spent more, consumed more, mattered more than any other country; and its movies, its television programs, its popular culture even its language resonated all over the world. From North Pole to South, everybody seemed to know America its blue jeans, its movie stars, its rock-and-roll music, its hamburgers and Coca Cola. American speech was the language of mass culture; it was despised, resented, admired, imitated, feared, and adored, sometimes all at once, and sometimes by the same people. Its politicians strutted and congratulated themselves on American achievements; whether America's preeminence was the result of God, virtue, or economic policies, or as accidental as winning the lottery or discovering oil, its place in the world was undeniable. Will the American hegemony last until 2100? Probably not. Will it shrivel like the British empire, or in some other way? Only time can tell; and time has nothing to say at the moment. --Lawrence M. Friedman (1930 ) _American Law in the 20th Century_ [2002] Ch. 19 "Law: An American Export" pp. 572-573 ^^ ^ In keeping with an age of excess and short memories, the O. J. Simpson murder trial is called the Trial of the Century. It's a foolish label, but inevitable given the hunger of a mass media to hype the latest sensational newsbreak in order to attract higher ratings. Nor does the "Trial of the Century" superlative really fit, ignoring, as it does, others that transfixed the nation throughout the century. In 1906, the trial of Harry K. Thaw for the murder of the great architect Stanford White laid bare the private demimonde arena of immense wealth and hypocrisy that typified the Gilded Age. In 1914, as America was about to step fully onto the world stage with the outbreak of World War I, the trial of Leo Frank for the slaying of little Mary Phagan in Atlanta "the American Dreyfus Case" triggered an outbreak of prejudice against Jews that led to the formation of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and the rebirth of the murderous Ku Klux Klan. In 1921, the murder trial of the immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti, "the poor fish peddler and the poor shoe cobbler," passionately divided Americans along class lines and sparked heated debates about the fairness of American justice. In 1925, the Scopes evolution trial exposed societal conflicts between science and religion, liberalism and conservatism, and pitted the agnostic lawyer Clarence Darrow against the aging, dying fundamentalist orator William Jennings Bryan. In 1948, the Hiss case personified fears about communist subversion that marked the new Cold War era and elevated Richard Nixon into a figure whose actions would deeply affect national political life for the next three decades. In 1951, the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg fueled conspiracy theories about traitors within and provided a backdrop for an era of character assassination known as McCarthyism. Memorable as these are, they pale beside the first national media extravaganza to be called the Trial of the Century. That was the 1935 trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby. --Haynes Johnson (1931 ) American journalist; winner of the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. _The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years_ [2001] ^ It was in 1915 the old world ended. --D.H. (David Herbert) Lawrence (18851930) English novelist and poet. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth; with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without and that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your own institutions ... Your constitution is all sail and no anchor. --Thomas Babington Macaulay (18001859) English politician and historian. To Henry Stephens Randall (American politician) [23 May 1857], in Thomas Pinney (ed.) _The Letters of Thomas Babington Macauley_ [1981] v. 6, p. 96. America is far from perfect. It has blundered through arrogance, selfishness, cynicism, and a great deal through ignorance. But without America, the history of humanity in the 20th century would have been infinitely more tragic. --Dominique Moisi Adjunct director of the French Institute for International Relations in Paris. - Over the course of the succeeding decades, as the laws of war or, as they came to be known, international humanitarian law evolved and expanded, the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] became the legally recognized guardian of these regulations. And yet, the paradox of the success of the Red Cross movement, the advance of international law, and, after World War II, the worldwide diffusion of the concept of human rights and new authority for it, is that all these developments coincide not with a new era in which Kant's perpetual peace was ushered in, but rather with the hideous course of the twentieth century itself. No century has had better norms and worse realities. In the period from the signing of the first Geneva Convention and the subsequent conferences of 1899 and 1907 in The Hague, to the outbreak of World War I, the rights of individuals in wartime were expanded, "aggressive force" was outlawed, and protections for civilians were expanded. Then came the mass slaughter in the trenches of World War I and the Armenian genocide to make a mockery of all that. In the aftermath of that war, in a Europe shocked by the toll exacted by gas attacks, another Hague conference outlawed the use of poison gas and other forms of chemical and biological warfare. Three years later, the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawed war itself. Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first allow to set international legal norms. Nine years later, the Japanese army was murdering Chinese civilians by the hundreds of thousands in Nanking. Four years after that, the Germans put in motion the Final Solution. Four years after that, twenty million Russians were dead and Europe was in ruins. --David Rieff, _A Bed For the Night, Humanitarianism In Crisis_ - Suppose . . . that Lenin had died of typhus in Siberia and Hitler had been killed on the western front in 1916. What would the twentieth century have looked like now? --Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (19172007) American historian. _The Cycles of American History_ [1986] After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for higher things, warmer and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor and by intolerable music. --Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918 ) Russian novelist. The twentieth century will be remembered chiefly, not as an age of political conflicts and technical inventions, but as an age in which human society dared to think of the health of the whole human race as a practical objective. --Arnold Toynbee (18891975) English historian. . . see "TIME" for related links - From Dave Barry's [2005] Year in Review column: President George W. Bush is sworn in for a second term, pledging in his inauguration speech that, over the next four years, he will continue, to the best of his ability, trying to pronounce big words. In a strongly worded rebuttal, the Democratic leadership points out that, when you get right down to it, there IS no Democratic leadership. A study by researchers at the University of Utah proves what many people have long suspected: Everybody talking on a cellphone, except you, is a moron. In economic news, financially troubled Delta Airlines announces that it will no longer offer pillows on its flights, because passengers keep eating them. But the economy gets a boost when the jobless rate plummets, as hundreds of thousands of unemployed cable-TV legal experts are hired to comment on the trial of Michael Jackson. Jackson is charged with 10 counts of being a space-alien freakadelic weirdo. Everybody agrees this will be very difficult to prove in California. In other Washington news, the U.S. Senate approves the appointment of John Negroponte to become the nation's first intelligence czar. His immediate task is to locate his office, which, according to a dossier compiled by the CIA, FBI, NSA and military intelligence, is, quote, ''probably somewhere in the United States or Belgium.'' In world news, members of the newly elected Iraqi parliament demonstrate a surprisingly sophisticated grasp of the principles of American-style democracy by voting to build a $223 million bridge to a virtually uninhabited island off the coast of Alaska. In disturbing medical news, a new study of 1,000 Americans finds that obesity in the United States has gotten so bad that there actually were, upon closer scrutiny, only 600 Americans involved in the study. In book news, millions of youngsters snap up the latest in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter Must Be Like 32 Years Old By Now. The book has a surprise plot twist that upsets some fans: Beloved Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore is killed by Severus Snape, who, moments later, is acquitted by a California jury. But by far the biggest story in August is Hurricane Katrina, a massive, deadly storm that thrashes Florida, then heads into the Gulf of Mexico. For decades, experts have been warning that such a storm, if it were to hit New Orleans, would devastate the city; now it becomes clear that this is exactly what is about to happen. For days, meteorologists are on television warning, dozens of times per hour, that Katrina will, in fact, hit New Orleans with devastating results. Armed with this advance knowledge, government officials at the local, state and federal levels are in a position to be totally, utterly shocked when Katrina of all things devastates New Orleans. For several days chaos reigns, with most of the relief effort taking the form of Geraldo Rivera, who, by his own estimate, saves more than 170,000 people. The month's biggest drama takes place at Los Angeles International Airport, where, as millions of people watch on live TV, a JetBlue airliner with the nose wheel turned sideways manages to land safely, after which it is immediately purchased by NASA. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein goes on trial, facing charges of genocide, human-rights violations, and failure to pay more than $173 billion in parking tickets. In his opening statement, the defiant former dictator tells the court he intends to prove that these crimes were actually committed by Tom DeLay. Also heating up in November is the debate over Iraq, with even Vice President Dick Cheney joining in, fueling rumors that he is still alive. President Bush makes a series of strong speeches, stating that while he ''will not impugn the patriotism'' of those who oppose his administration's policies, they are ''traitor scum.'' This outrages congressional Democrats, who respond with a two-pronged strategy of (1) demanding that the troops be brought home, and (2) voting overwhelmingly against a resolution to bring the troops home. As the troubled year draws to a troubling close, yet another hurricane, Kappa Sigma Gamma, forms in the South Atlantic, threatening to blast the U.S. mainland with a load of energy that, according to the National Hurricane Center, is the equivalent of 17 trillion six-packs of Bud Light. On an even more ominous note, officials of the World Health Organization reveal that in what disease researchers have been calling ''the nightmare scenario'' a mad cow has become infected with bird flu. ''We don't want to cause panic,'' state the officials, ''but we give the human race six weeks, tops.'' - The turn of the century raises expectations. The end of a millennium promise apocalypse and revelation. But at the close of the twentieth century the golden age seems behind us, not ahead. The end game of the 1990s promises neither nirvana nor Armageddon, but entropy. --Robert Hewison (1943 ) British historian. _Future Tense_ [1990] The American century and the European half millennium is coming to an end. The world century is beginning. --Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1943 ) American management consultant and writer. _World Class_ [1995] . . see "HOME & FAMILY" for related links - "Calculating Clara" O'er the rugged mountain's brow Clara threw the twins she nursed, And remarked, 'I wonder now Which will reach the bottom first?' --Harry Graham (18741936) British writer and journalist. _Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes_ [1899] . . see: DEMOCRACY see "EVIL" for other related links - Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny. --Aeschylus (525456 B.C.) Greek tragic dramatist. "Agamemnon" In every tyrant's heart there springs in the end this poison, that he cannot trust a friend. --Aeschylus (525456 B.C.) Greek tragic dramatist. _Prometheus Bound_ - A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. --Aristotle (384322 B.C.) Greek philosopher. - After the Athenians had driven out the tyrant Hippias in 510 B.C., they tried to work out methods to prevent the establishment of another tyranny. Once a year they set up an opportunity for a vote that was aimed not at electing someone, but at exiling someone. Each Athenian could write down the name of a politician he felt was growing too dangerously powerful for the good of the state. If a total of 6000 votes were cast and one man received a majority, he was forced to remain away from Athens for ten years. It was not a disgraceful exile: his property was not confiscated, his family was not mistreated, and, when the decade was up, he was welcomed back. He understood that he had been sent away to be kept from the temptation of trying to upset the democracy. --Isaac Asimov (19201992) Russian-born American author. _Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts_ - Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God. --John Bradshaw (16021659) English lawyer. He presided at the trial of Charles I. Buried in Westminster Abbey, his body was exhumed at the Restoration and hanged in public, like that of Cromwell. Many of the greatest tyrants on the records of history have begun their reigns in the fairest manner. But the truth is, this unnatural power corrupts both the heart and the understanding. --Edmund Burke (17291797) Irish-born Whig politician and man of letters. So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men. --Voltairine de Cleyre (18661912) American anarchist. _Anarchism and American Traditions_ [1908] [C]lose and intimate alliances with despots are never safe to free states. --Demosthenes (c.364c.322 B.C.) Athenian orator and statesman. In _The Greatest Works of the Greatest Authors, Ancient and Modern_ [H.W. Hagemann Pub. Co., 1894], p. 340. Find out just what the people will submit to and you will have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. --Frederick Douglass [Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey] (c.18181895) American abolitionist, reformer, and writer. Of all the tyrannies on human kind The worst is that which persecutes the mind. --John Dryden (16311700) English poet, critic, and dramatist. _The Hind and the Panther_ [1687] Wh[ile] democracy granted democratic methods to us in times of opposition, . . . we National Socialists never asserted that we represented a democratic point of view, but we have declared openly that we used the democratic methods only to gain power and that, after assuming the power, we would deny to our adversaries without any consideration the means which were granted to us in times of our opposition. --Joseph Goebbels (18971945) German Nazi leader & minister of propaganda. 1935 pamphlet, in _Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression_ [1946]. A state that denies its citizens their basic rights becomes a danger to its neighbors as well: internal arbitrary rule will be reflected in arbitrary external relations. The suppression of public opinion, the abolition of public competition for power and its public exercise opens the way for the state power to arm itself in any way it sees fit. A state that does not hesitate to lie to its own people will not hesitate to lie to other states. --Vaclav Havel (1936 ) First President of the Czech Republic. The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it. --John Milton Hay (18381905) U.S. secretary of state [18981905] associated with the Open Door policy toward China. _Castilian Days_ [1871] Any attempt to replace the personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism. --Hermann Hesse (18771962) German novelist, poet, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. _Reflections_ [1974], #32 Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. --C.S. [Clive Staples] Lewis (18981963) British scholar and novelist. _God in the Dock_ [1948] Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called. --John Stuart Mill (18061873) English philosopher and social reformer. - Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst: Every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in, but this attempts a stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity. --Thomas Paine [spelled Pane prior to 1774] (17371809) English-American writer and political pamphleteer. O! ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the Old World is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asian, and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive and prepare in time an asylun for mankind. --Thomas Paine [spelled Pane prior to 1774] (17371809) English-American writer and political pamphleteer. _Common Sense_ [1776] - Those who voluntarily put power into the hand of a tyrant or an enemy, must not wonder if it be at last turned against themselves. --Gaius Julius Phaedrus (c. 15 B.C. c. 50 A.D.) The versifier of Aesop's Fables in Latin. _Fables_ v. I, no. 31 "The Kite and the Pigeons" The people always have some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness.... This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears, he is a protector. --Plato (427?347 B.C.) Greek philosopher. _The Republic_, bk. VIII The more complete the despotism, the more smoothly all things move on the surface. --Elizabeth Cady Stanton (18151902) Leading figure of the Women's Rights movement. Tyranny is the normal pattern of government. It is only by intense thought, by great effort, by burning idealism and unlimited sacrifice that freedom has prevailed as a system of government. And the efforts which were first necessary to create it are fully as necessary to sustain it in our own day. --Adlai E. Stevenson (19001965) American Democratic politician. "The Political Relevance of Moral Principle" a lecture given in Washington, D.C. [18 January 1959]. - Fetters and headsmen were the coarse instruments that tyranny formerly employed; but the civilization of our age has perfected despotism itself. . . . Under the absolute sway of one man the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul; but the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose proudly superior. Such is not the coarse adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved. The master no longer says: "You shall think as I do or you shall die"; but he says: "You are free to think differently from me and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people. . . . Your fellow creatures will shun you like an impure being; and even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they should be shunned in their turn." --Alexis de Tocqueville (18051859) French historian and politician. _Democracy in America_, 1.15 [1835], tr. Henry Reeve and Francis Bowen [1862] Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship. --Harry S. Truman (18841972) American Democratic statesman, President of the U.S. [19451953]. Lecture at Columbia University [28 April 1959]. I would detest individual tyranny less than collective tyranny. A despot always has some good moments; a group of despots, never. --Voltaire (Franηois Marie Arouet) (16941778) French writer and philosopher. _Philosophical Dictionary_ [1764] "Tyranny" TOPICAL When it comes to tyranny, we believe we can offer some personal experience. [...] During the decades of dictatorship, our peoples' attempts to restore freedom and democracy were crushed. Who would have thought in 1956 in Hungary, in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, or in 1980 in Poland, that we could get rid of the dictatorial regimes in our lifetimes and shape our own future? The memories of tyranny are still alive in the minds of many Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, and Slovaks. We also remember the challenges we faced early in our democratic transition. [...] We could not have made it alone. We needed the perseverance and support of Western democracies for freedom to finally arrive. [...] We feel that as free and democratic nations we have a duty to help others achieve the security and prosperity that we now enjoy. That is why we have been a part of the coalition to help democracy emerge in Iraq. [...] The good news is that we are not alone; it's a truly international partnership, based on a U.N. mandate. More than 30 nations are on the ground with the coalition and NATO, and more than 80 have signed up for the "new international partnership" with Iraq. [...] Democratic transition is a long, painful process. It requires sacrifice. But, more than anything, it requires belief that democratic values will prevail and people will have a better life as a result. [...] Maybe it takes countries with vivid recollections of tyranny to serve as the institutional memory of a larger community of democracies. If so, we are ready to fulfill that role." By Rastislav Kacer, Petr Kolar, Janusz Reiter and Andras Simonyi - Respectively the Slovak, Czech, Polish, and Hungarian ambassadors to the U.S. _Wall Street Journal_ [16 December 2005] end page | TABLOIDS - TALENT | TALK - TAYLOR (ELIZABETH) | TAXATION | TEACHERS / TEACHING | TEAMWORK - TELEVANGELISTS | TELEVISION - TELEVISION SHOWS | TEMPER - THANKSGIVING | THATCHER - THINKING | THOUGHT POLICE - THRIFT | TIME | TIME TRAVEL - TODAY | TOLERANCE - TOYS | TRADITION - TRANSIENCE | TRAVEL | TREACHERY - TRIVIA | TROUBLE - TRUST | TRUTH | TRYING - TYRANNY | | R | S | T | U - END | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The End | The Reviews | Photos | |
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