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Since my interview with you on the 18th I have felt that I ought not longer retain my commission in the Army ... It would have been presented at once, but for the struggle it has cost me to separate myself from a service to which I have devoted all the best years of my life, and all the ability I possessed ... I shall carry with me to the grave the most grateful recollections of your kind consideration and your name and fame will always be dear to me. Save for defense of my native state, I never desire again to draw my sword.
--
Letter to General Winfield Scott (20 April 1861); as quoted in Personal Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of Gen. Robert E. Lee (1875) by John William Jones, p. 139, after turning down an offer by Abraham Lincoln of supreme command of the U. S. Army.

 

Robert E. Lee

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Now he was indifferent to all "questions" save that prime solicitude of the human race, how to hold its own against the hostile forces everywhere leagued against it. Life was a perpetual struggle, and, let dreamers say what they might, could never be anything else; he, for one, perceived no right that he had to claim exemption from the doom of labour. Had he felt an impulse to any other kind of work, well and good, he would have turned to it; but nothing whatever called to him with imperative voice save this task of tilling his own acres. It might not always satisfy him; he took no vow of one sole vocation; he had no desire to let his mind rust whilst his hands grew horny. Enough that for the present he had an aim which he saw as a reality.

 

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Posthumous fame, book fame, nerd fame is not like the good kind of fame. It might last for centuries and let antique egg heads torture the young from the grave, but it just doesn't pay the bills.

 

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We see that all of Islam, all of its practices & beliefs were not presented by the Prophet in the first year, but rather presented over a period of 23 years. He presented them in a gradual way. First he presented the idea of monotheism. For 3 years he added nothing to the admonition, "Say: 'God is One,' & be saved." What is the prescribed fast? pilgrimage? poor-due? These had not as yet been presented. Thus the people who accepted Islam in the first 3 years and came to believe in the oneness of God and died were possibly people who drank wine, did not perform the prescribed fast, had not performed the prescribed pilgrimage & had not participated in the struggle in God's way [jihad]. His method was to gradually present Islam. He first presented an intellectual world view.

 

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