Work as if you were in the early days of a better nation.
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Frontispiece.
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Variants on this epigraph appear in other books by Alasdair Gray; one of them, "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation", is now engraved on a wall of the Scottish Parliament building. They are all loose paraphrases of a couplet from Dennis Lee's "Civil Elegies": And best of all is finding a place to be in the early days of a better civilization.Alasdair Gray
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A source of strength in the early days was that groups in various parts of the world were prepared to construct experimental computers without necessarily intending them to be the prototype for serial production. As a result, there became available a body of knowledge about what would work and what would not work.
Maurice Wilkes
To disgust men with their work is a serious blunder on the part of human society; what could be more natural than their liking for what they do? Work keeps off boredom, vice, and poverty. It is the remedy for all imagined evils. "The souls' joy lies in doing," said Shelly. Active work saves man from himself; indolence make shim a prey to useless regrets, dangerous reveries, enviousness, and hate. Also the first rule of the art of governing is, at all costs, to keep a nation at work. A bored nation is impossible to govern, but a nation occupied by work which it believes to be useful and accomplishes on its own initiative is already a happy one.
Andre Maurois
They [the Beatles] came backstage after one of my lectures, and they said to me: 'Even from an early age we have been seeking a highly spiritual existence. We tried drugs and that didn't work.' They are such practical and intelligent young boys that it took them only two days to find that Transcendental Meditation is the answer.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
Back in the days (a later reflection on his early Parish years, fh) when I was in Paris in my studio in ‘La Ruche’, through the partition I heard two Jewish emigrants arguing: ‘Well, what would you say? Wasn’t Antokolsky a Jewish artist? And Israels? And what about Liebermann?‘ The dim light of the lamp lit up my picture, which was upside down (that’s the way I work – so consider yourself yourselves lucky!). As morning came, and the Parisian sky started to brighten up, I had to laugh about the futile comments of my neighbours on the fate of Jewish art: ‘You two windbacks can carry on – but I’ve got work to do.
Marc Chagall
But I respectfully suggest, Major, that the responsibility is slightly above your pay grade, to decide whether to take the nation to war alone, or to take the nation to war part way, or to take the Nation to work half-way. That is a real tough decision.
Joseph (Joe) Biden
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