“The headlong stream is termed violent But the river bed hemming it in is Termed violent by no one.”

When you name yourself, you always name another.

For time flows on, and if it did not, it would be a bad prospect for those who do not sit at golden tables.

General, your tank is a powerful vehicle It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. But it has one defect: It needs a driver.

Only bad generals need heroes.

I don’t trust him. We’re friends.

But something’s missing.

Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.

One must live well to know what living is.

For the task assigned them Men aren’t smart enough or sly Any rogue can blind them With a clever lie.

The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.

Do not fear death so much but rather the inadequate life.

People cannot remain good unless good is expected of them.

In the contradiction lies the hope.

One cannot be arraigned for declaring a war, which every ruler has to do once in a while, but only for running a war badly.

The worst illiterate is the political illiterate. He hears nothing, sees nothing, takes no part in political life. He doesn’t seem to know that the cost of living, the price of beans, of flour, of rent, of medicines all depend on political decisions.

What’s a joy to the one is a nightmare to the other.

The best verse hasn’t been rhymed yet, The best house hasn’t been planned, The highest peak hasn’t been climbed yet, The mightiest rivers aren’t spanned.

Those from whom we were born have long since departed, and those with whom we grew up exist only in memory. We, too, through the approach of death, become, as it were, trees growing on the sandy bank of a river.

It was the last time she’d see the river from that window. The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way.

You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone.

In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.

THE HOT (AND SERIOUSLY COOL) ENERGY that comes from the musical gospel preached by the title character of FELA! feels as if it could stretch easily to the borders of Manhattan and then across a river or two. There should be dancing in the streets!

We are on the Colorado — that means something more to me than electric power or a harnessed river.

Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?