Authors: David Pratt

The Impossible Takes Longer (12 page)

BOOK: The Impossible Takes Longer

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677. It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

André Gide
LITERATURE, 1947

678. Paris proves that the city—simply a place where many people five, work and play—can be one of the marvels of human creativity.

Sheldon Glashow
PHYSICS, 1979

679. Paris is very beautiful this fall. It was a fine place to be quite young in and it is a necessary part of man's education. We all loved it once and we lie if we say we didn't. But she is like a mistress who does not grow old and she has other lovers now.

Ernest Hemingway
LITERATURE, 1954

680. If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

Ernest Hemingway
LITERATURE, 1954

681. Paris . . . the only city besides New York where one feels what a city truly means—something created by generations of human beings to be their permanent assertion of communal pride.

Salvador Luria
MEDICINE, 1969

ISRAEL

682. If I am proud of anything, it is that I have been granted the privilege of living in the land which God promised our forefathers to give us, as it is written.

Shmuel Agnon
LITERATURE, 1966

683. Always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem . . . After all my possessions had been burned, God gave me the wisdom to return to Jerusalem. I returned to Jerusalem and it is by virtue of Jerusalem that I have written all that God has put into my heart and into my pen.

Shmuel Agnon
LITERATURE, 1966

684. I do not stand here alone, today, on this small rostrum in Oslo. I am the emissary of generations of Israelis, of the shepherds of Israel, just as King David was a shepherd, of the herdsmen and dressers of sycamore trees, as the Prophet Amos was; of the rebels against the establishment, like the Prophet Jeremiah, and of men who go down to the sea, like the prophet Jonah. I am the emissary of the poets and of those who dreamed of an end to war, like the Prophet Isaiah . . . I stand here mainly for the generations to come, so that we may all be deemed worthy of the medallion which you have bestowed on me today. I stand here as the emissary of our neighbors who were our enemies. I stand here as the emissary of the soaring hopes of a people which has endured the worst that history has to offer and nevertheless made its mark—not just on the chronicles of the Jewish people but on all mankind. With me here are five million citizens of Israel—Jews and Arabs, Druze and Circassians—five million hearts beating for peace—and five million pairs of eyes which look to us with such great expectations for peace.

Yitzhak Rabin
PEACE, 1994

THE THIRD WORLD

685. When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

Desmond Tutu
PEACE, 1984

686. Asia is not going to be civilised after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia, and she is too old.

Rudy ard Kipling
LITERATURE, 1907

687.
Now, it is not good for the Christian's health
to hustle t
he
Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles, and he weareth the Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: "A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East."

Rudyard Kipling
LITERATURE, 1907

688. The developing countries themselves must restructure their national psychologies in the direction of greater responsibility for their own fates. It is time they stopped blaming their misfortunes on colonialism and neocolonialism.

Andrei Sakharov
PEACE, 1975

689. In the name of the Third World: Be not spectators to our miseries.

Naguib Mahfouz
LITERATURE, 1988

HEAVEN AND HELL

690. Once in Hawaii I was taken to see a Buddhist temple. In the temple a man said, "I am going to tell you something that you will never forget." And then he said, "To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell."

Richard Feynman
PHYSICS, 1965

691. Many believe that the new discoveries may lead either to immense progress or to equal catastrophe, to paradise or to hell. I, however, think that this earth will remain what it always was; a mixture of heaven and hell, a battlefield of angels and devils.

Max Born
PHYSICS, 1954

692. The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950

693. Hell is other people.

Jean-Paul Sartre
LITERATURE, 1964

694. Here as hereafter the alternative to hell is purgatory.

T. S. Eliot
LITERATURE, 1948

695. Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane,
so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever
ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though
plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.

George Bernard Shaw
LITERATURE, 1925

HOME AND THE HOMELAND

696. Everyone ought to have a home to get away from.

Sinclair Lewis
LITERATURE, 1930

697. A home from which you can be ejected at any time is no true home.

Shmuel Agnon
LITERATURE, 1966

698. No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there—well or poorly.

Joseph Brodsky
LITERATURE, 1987

On leaving the Soviet Union in 1972

699. Wherever I go, wherever I happen to be, I shall always know where I really am. I can never lose my way because I know that I have my living roots there, deep down in the soil of my village, in that land out of which I grew.

Anwar al-Sadat
PEACE, 1978

700. It is suicide to be abroad. But what is it to be at home? . . . What is it to be at home? A lingering dissolution.

Samuel Beckett
LITERATURE, 196 9

701. If my theory of relativity is proven correct, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.

Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921

702. Sweet is the land where one is born. It has no price. All other land is bitter.

Miguel Angel Asturias
LITERATURE, 1967

Politics and Economics

The Nobel awards are a highly political phenomenon. This is most evident in the case of the Peace Prize. Winners of this prize include three U.S. presidents and two vice presidents; presidents of the former Soviet Union, South Africa, Costa Rica, South Korea, Egypt, the Palestine Authority, and Poland; prime ministers of France, Canada, Sweden, Japan, and Israel; two secretaries-general of the United Nations; and numerous ambassadors from various countries.

Because the Peace Prize (and on occasion the Literature Prize) has often honored and encouraged resistance to oppression, it has frequently provoked political controversy. During the Cold War, Nobel selections were periodically attacked as pro-capitalist by the East and pro-communist by the West. Conservatives in the United States denounced the prize as anti-American when it was awarded to domestic critics such as Sinclair Lewis, Linus Pauling, and Martin Luther King, or to foreign critics such as Dario Fo, Elfriede Jelinek, and Harold Pinter.

Much greater controversy arose with the award of the Literature Prize to Boris Pasternak in 1958. His major novel,
Dr. Zhivago,
was still banned in the Soviet Union, and he eventually declined the prize when told that if he went to Sweden to accept it, he would not

be permitted to return to the USSR. The experience of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn was similar when he was awarded the Literature Prize in 1970. His Nobel lecture was smuggled to Stockholm by a Swedish friend in 1972. Published by the Nobel Foundation, it caused a sensation; it was in this speech that Solzhenitsyn first used the term
Gulag
Archipelago.

A more vicious campaign against the prize was waged by Adolf Hider. The fuhrer was enraged when the Peace Prize was awarded in 1935 to Carl von Ossietzky, who was, and remained, in a concentration camp for his opposition to the Nazis. Hitler forbade any German to accept the prize in the future, so a number of German scientists had to wait until after the Second World War to receive their prizes.

POLITICS AND POLITICIANS>

703. Politics is a great enemy of love.

Octavio Paz
LITERATURE, 1990

704. Ninety percent of politicians give the other ten percent a bad name.

Henry Kissinger
PEACE, 1973

705. Politicians think of the next election while statesmen think of the next generation. People elect the best politicians and then are astonished when they discover they have gotten poor statesmen.

Albert Szent-Györgyi
MEDICINE, 1937

706. To govern is to educate. A statesman is that person who tells people what people need to know. A politician is that person who tells people what people want to hear.

Oscar Ariás Sanchez
PEACE, 1987

707. No politician will worry much about anything that can't be photographed.

George Stigler
ECONOMICS, 1982

708. I believe . . . that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens, to shoot his like in the name of some idea is more problematic than for someone who has read no Dickens . . . Lenin was literate. Stalin was literate, so was Hider; as for Mao Zedong, he even wrote verse. What all these men had in common, though, was that their hit list was longer than their reading list.

Joseph Brodsky
LITERATURE, 1987

709. Foreign policy is merely domestic policy with its hat on.

Lester Pearson
PEACE, 1957

710. No foreign policy—no matter how ingenious—has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of few and carried in the hearts of none.

Henry Kissinger
PEACE, 1973

GOVERNMENT

711. Governments never learn. Only people learn.