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Quotes by Playwright
"The extraordinary exertions of the colonies, in cooperation with British measures, against the French, in the late war, were acknowledged by the British parliament to be more than adequate to their ability."
"The honorable William Penn, late governor of Pennsylvania, was chosen agent to the Court of Britain, and directed to deliver the petition to the King himself and to endeavor by his personal influence to procure a favorable reception to this last address."
"The love of domination and an uncontrolled lust of arbitrary power have prevailed among all nations and perhaps in proportion to the degrees of civilization."
"The study of the human character opens at once a beautiful and a deformed picture of the soul."
"General Washington had rather incautiously encamped the bulk of his army on Long Island - a large and plentiful district about two miles from the city of New York."
"The British were indeed very far superior to the Americans in every respect necessary to military operations, except the revivified courage and resolution, the result of sudden success after despair."
"The progress of the American Revolution has been so rapid and such the alteration of manners, the blending of characters, and the new train of ideas that almost universally prevail, that the principles which animated to the noblest exertions have been nearly annihilated."
"A declaration of the independence of America, and the sovereignty of the United STates was drawn by the ingenious and philosophic pen of Thomas Jefferson, Esquire, a delegate from the state of Virginia."
"It may be a mistake, that man, in a state of nature, is more disposed to cruelty than courtesy."
"Public emergencies may require the hand of severity to fall heavily on those who are not personally guilty, but compassion prompts, and ever urges to milder methods."
"Democratic principles are the result of equality of condition."
"By the Declaration of Independence, dreaded by the foes an for a time doubtfully viewed by many of the friends of America, everything stood on a new and more respectable footing, both with regard to the operations of war or negotiations with foreign powers."
"But truth is most likely to be exhibited by the general sense of contemporaries, when the feelings of the heart can be expressed without suffering itself to be disguised by the prejudices of man."
"Before this address to my countrymen is closed, I beg leave to observe, that as a new century has dawned upon us, the mind is naturally led ot contemplate the great events that have run parallel with and have just closed the last."
"A superfluity of wealth, and a train of domestic slaves, naturally banish a sense of general liberty, and nourish the seeds of that kind of independence that usually terminates in aristocracy."
"On the evening of December 25, General Washington in a most severe season crossed the Delaware with a part of his army, then reduced to less than 2000 men in the whole."
"The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts."
5
"A culture, we all know, is made by its cities."
4
"Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven."
4
"Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole."
Love,
3
"If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average."
5
"Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god."
3
"The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island."
4
"This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo."
4
"Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves."
4
"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."
6
"With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy."
"There is no greater glory than love, nor any great punishment than jealously."
"Dreaming of a tomorrow, which tomorrow, will be as distant then as 'tis today."
"Harmony is pure love, for love is complete agreement."
"How happy I am to go to the front at last. To do my bit. To prove with my life what I think I feel."
Life,
"The working class will not halt until socialism has been realized."
"We revolutionaries acknowledge the right to revolution when we see that the situation is no longer tolerable, that it has become a frozen. Then we have the right to overthrow it."
"Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth."
"Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother?"
"After that I could never pass a dead man without stopping to gaze on his face, stripped by death of that earthly patina which masks the living soul. And I would ask, who were you? Where was your home? Who is mourning for you now?"
"The revolution is like a vessel filled with the pulsating heartbeat of millions of working people."
"Gradually I became aware of details: a company of French soldiers was marching through the streets of the town. They broke formation, and went in single file along the communication trench leading to the front line. Another group followed them."
"Each had defended his own country; the Germans Germany, the Frenchmen France; they had done their duty."
"At that moment of realization I knew that I had been blind because I had wished not to see; it was only then that I realised, at last, that all these dead men, French and Germans, were brothers, and I was the brother of them all."
"As a boy I used to go to the Chamber of Horrors at the annual fair, to look at the wax figures of Emperors and Kings, of heroes and murderers of the day. The dead now had that same unreality, which shocks without arousing pity."
"And the spirit of revolution will not die while the hearts of these workers continue to beat."
"Later we learned that it was one of our own men hanging on the wire. Nobody could do anything for him; two men had already tried to save him, only to be shot themselves."
Men,
"We thrust our fingers into our ears to stop its moan; but it was no good; the cry cut like a drill into our heads, dragging minutes into hours, hours into years. We withered and grew old between those cries."
"Soldiers and peasants lived together on friendly terms; they knew each other and their everyday routines, and trusted each other; they shook their heads together over the war."
"And suddenly, like light in darkness, the real truth broke in upon me; the simple fact of Man, which I had forgotten, which had lain deep buried and out of sight; the idea of community, of unity."
"That's the penalty we have to pay for our acts of foolishness, someone else always suffers for them."
"A veritable incubator of short cuts, schemes and devices to overcome the truth."
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