A Quote by Seamus Heaney

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.
There's something about night and day, and life and death, but animals are also mentioned a lot of times in the bible, showing up in places of desolation, or after destruction, or after the humans left the place, suddenly they would show up.
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are cavalry charges in a battle - they are limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.
Good times are a reminder and a reward for dealing with the difficult and challenging times we all go through. The trick is to celebrate the good times in advance of the difficult times. Always remember, good times await you after the difficult times pass.
Few times in history do totalitarian or authoritarian regimes successfully repress their people for more than two generations, and zero times in history do these regimes last much longer than that, relatively speaking.
I studied about the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War and about how the Constitution was written by men, many of whom were slave owners. So I suppose the travel ban strikes me as coming from an era I thought we'd left behind, but I guess we haven't entirely left it behind.
If we talk about changes of power in Russia, that has occurred several times in the past century. After Stalin came Khrushchev, who implemented his legacy quite radically, one could say. But there was no blood, nonetheless. After Brezhnev came Gorbachev. I'm not talking about the ones who were in power for only a short period of time. Gorbachev, too, left a very radical legacy.
The entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things β€” not merely industrious, but to love industry β€” not merely learned, but to love knowledge β€” not merely pure, but to love purity β€” not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice.
I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children - not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women - not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.
[Saddam Hussein] could have easily reconstituted a program. He was a threat to peace before we went in. He'd have been a threat to peace had we left him in power. Oftentimes history judges you on the decisions you make.
As the organized Left gained cultural power, it turned into a monster that found perpetual victimhood, combined with thought and speech control, the most efficient way to hold on to that power. Suddenly it was the Left, the protector of liberty, that was setting rules about what could and could not be said or even thought.
Peace is not merely the absence of war. Nor can it be reduced solely to the maintenance of a balance of power between enemies. Nor is it brought about by dictatorship. Instead, it is rightly and appropriately called "an enterprise of justice" (Is. 32:7). Peace results from that order structured into human society by its divine founder, and actualized by men as they thirst after ever greater justice.
When you care about human beings, you do your best to not repress and to not let people to repress and to not arm people to repress.
I've played against Aguero a couple of times. He starts behind you so he's always offside, but you don't know where he is. You look behind to the right and he'll go to your left. He's so tough to find. You've got to learn and work out how to stop them.
The operations of the federal government will be most extensive and important in times of war and danger; those of the state governments, in times of peace and security.
There are times throughout history and it doesn't take long for either an American or a German, to think about times in the history of their country where the law provided the Government to do things which were not right.
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