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I have borne the musket of a soldier, the traveller’s cane, and the pilgrim’s staff: as a sailor my fate has been as inconstant as the wind: a kingfisher, I have made my nest among the waves.
I have been party to peace and war: I have signed treaties, protocols, and along the way published numerous works. I have been made privy to party secrets, of court and state: I have viewed closely the rarest disasters, the greatest good fortune, the highest reputations. I have been present at sieges, congresses, conclaves, at the restoration and demolition of thrones. I have made history, and been able to write it. ... Within and alongside my age, perhaps without wishing or seeking to, I have exerted upon it a triple influence, religious, political and literary.
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Preface (1833)

 

Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand

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I think it's already apparent that a good part of this Nation understands — if only instinctively — that anything which seems to suggest that God favors a political party or the establishment of a state church, is wrong and dangerous.
Way down deep the American people are afraid of an entangling relationship between formal religions — or whole bodies of religious belief — and government. Apart from constitutional law and religious doctrine, there is a sense that tells us it's wrong to presume to speak for God or to claim God's sanction of our particular legislation and His rejection of all other positions. Most of us are offended when we see religion being trivialized by its appearance in political throw-away pamphlets.
The American people need no course in philosophy or political science or church history to know that God should not be made into a celestial party chairman.

 

Mario Cuomo

 

It is difficult to describe such a character. He was not highly educated but he was able and extremely industrious in technical office work. He was also extremely unscrupulous and very practical. His practicality was obvious even in his speech and appearance. He was a short, stocky man, quite fat, with an oxlike character. He had been a schoolteacher early in his career just as Streicher had been a schoolteacher, so you can see that being a schoolteacher is no sign of education. Technically and officially Bormann was the head of the party. Besides that, however, he was in reality the prime minister because all of Hitler's orders went through his hands. Bormann's real period of power began in 1941, although long before that, as far back as 1937, he had been a strong personal influence on Hitler. It was very strange. You know he was the chief of staff under Hess, but even while Hess was his superior, Bormann was much closer to Hitler in the hierarchy than was Hess. I think that Hess lost all his power because Bormann took it away from him, despite the fact that Hess was Bormann's superior. Bormann virtually became Hess's boss. Bormann entered party history in 1929 when he came to Munich. Before that he lived in my hometown of Weimar and used to chauffeur Sauckel, when the latter made propaganda and campaign speeches in Thuringia. Bormann at that time worked for Sauckel, and in a very minor, subordinate position. In 1929 he began doing financial work within the party. He continued with this task until 1933, when Hess made him his chief of staff.

 

Martin Bormann

 

I recognize and celebrate that our country is founded upon Judeo-Christian values, and I have pledged my life to defend America and all her values, the values that have made us the noblest experiment in history. But public — but political intolerance by any political party is neither a Judeo-Christian nor an American value. ... The political tactics of division and slander are not our values. They are corrupting influences on religion and politics, and those who practice them in the name of religion or in the name of the Republican Party or in the name of America shame our faith, our party and our country.
Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.

 

Jerry Falwell

 

When we went to Bosnia the people in Bosnia welcomed us with open arms, and I would go down the street and people would come up and say, "Admiral, thank you for bringing peace to Bosnia." And my standard answer was this, "I cannot bring peace to this country. Only you can bring peace to this country. I can bring the conditions in which peace can be established, but I cannot bring peace to this country." So the mistake we have made in our country, if we have made a mistake, is that we believe that we can influence or that we can enforce a peace, and we cannot. You can stop the fighting, and we did. And you can put money into a country and you can try to build it up so that the momentum you get from a visible economic engine creates a condition where peace will take hold. But that requires a political will that is not today evident in Bosnia. It was certainly not evident when I was there.
I think we are doing the right thing to put our military into these kinds of operations. No one is better able to do it. Peacekeeping is not a soldier function, but only soldiers can do it, because we've got the organization. We can make things happen in a hurry.

 

Leighton W. Smith

 

Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. 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.

 

Bertolt Brecht