#ect

Someone asked me...how it felt and I was reminded of a story that a fellow townsman of ours used to tell--Abraham Lincoln. They asked him how he felt once after an unsuccessful election. He said he felt like a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark. He said that he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh. ↗

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

#lincoln #losing #elections

Elections determine who is in power, but they do not determine how power is used. ↗

— Paul Collier

#elections #power #elections

One of the hallmarks of our politics now is that we tend to elect those who can campaign over those who can lead; ↗

— Ethan Canin

#elections

Every four years we go through the same cycle of hope and disillusionment. ↗

— Sheri Holman

#election #elections

The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man's opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic. ↗

— Cormac McCarthy

#nihilism #philosophy #theology #elections

Nobody's perfect. We're all just one step up from the beasts and one step down from the angels. ↗

— Jeannette Walls

#beasts #mankind #perfection #mankind

Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions.: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn't flat or linear. It has no outline. It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternate version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces. ↗

— Kate Morton

#memory #war #perspective

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. ↗

— James Crumley

#detective-novel #mystery #alcohol

We emphasize that such a form of communication is not absent in man, however evanescent a naturally given object may be for him, split as it is in its submission to symbols. ↗

— Jacques Lacan

#communication #emphasize #evanescent #form #given

Which is why we cannot say of the purloined letter that, like other objects, it must be or not be in a particular place but that unlike them it will be and not be where it is, wherever it goes. ↗

— Jacques Lacan

#goes #letter #like #must #objects