#momento

Rising up, rising down! History shambles on! What are we left with? A few half-shattered Greek stelae; Trotsky's eyeglasses; Gandhi's native-spun cloth, Cortes' pieces of solid gold (extorted from their original owner, Montezuma); a little heap of orange peels left on the table by the late Robespierre; John Brown's lengthily underlined letters; Lenin's bottles of invisible ink; one of Di Giovanni's suitcases, with an iron cylinder of gelignite and two glass tubes of acid inside; the Constitution of the Ku Klux Klan; a bruised ear (Napoleon pinched it with loving condescension)... And dead bodies, of course. (They sing about John Brown's body.) Memoirs, manifestoes, civil codes, trial proceedings, photographs, statues, weapons now aestheticized by that selfsame history - the sword of Frederick the Great, and God knows what else. Then dust blows out of fresh graves, and the orange peels go grey, sink, wither, rot away. Sooner or later, every murder becomes quaint. Charlemagne hanged four and a half thousand "rebels" in a single day, but he has achieved a storybook benevolence. And that's only natural: historiography begins after the orange has been sucked,; the peeler believes in the "great and beautiful things," or wants to believe; easy for us to believe likewise, since dust reduced truth and counterfeit to the same greyness - caveat emptor. But ends remain fresh, and means remain inexplicable. Rising up and rising down! And whom shall I save, and who is my enemy, and who is my neighbor? ↗

— William T. Vollmann

#meaning #memory #momentos #war #beauty

The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil. ↗

— Francis Bacon

#evil #good #human #human life #life

And now the momentous day, a day to be forever remembered in the annals of the country, arrived. Early in the morning on the 1st of July the conflict began. ↗

— Edward Everett

#arrived #began #conflict #country #day

In these momentous hours of our history we call on every Hungarian worker who is led by devotion to the people and the country to join our Party, the name of which is the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party. ↗

— Janos Kadar

#country #devotion #every #history #hours

Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became. ↗

— Louis Kahn

#became #column #consider #event #momentous

When I was little I always thought I was marked out, special, on the verge of something momentous. I used to tingle with anticipation. ↗

— Felicity Kendal

#anticipation #i #i always #little #marked

The awakening of the people of China to the possibilities under free government is the most significant, if not the most momentous, event of our generation. ↗

— Woodrow Wilson

#china #event #free #free government #generation

There is an irresistible demand to strengthen the leadership of the constructive forces of the world at the present momentous time. This is true because of stupendous, almost unbelievable changes which have taken place in recent years on every continent. ↗

— John Raleigh Mott

#because #changes #constructive #continent #demand

It is the characteristic excellence of the strong man that he can bring momentous issues to the fore and make a decision about them. The weak are always forced to decide between alternatives they have not chosen themselves. ↗

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#alternatives #always #between #bring #characteristic

The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles. ↗

— Anatole Broyard

#beginning #being #being human #end #epic