A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.
--
"Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," Polemic (March 1947) - Full text online]George Orwell
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The duration of every political phase is just as long as it takes to unveil its shortcomings and evil. While discovering its defects, it makes way for a new phase, liberated from these failings. Thus, these impairments that appear in a situation and destroy it are the very forces of human evolution, as they raise humanity to a more corrected state.
Yehuda Ashlag
They that endeavour to abolish vice destroy also virtue, for contraries, though they destroy one another, are yet the life of one another.
Sir Thomas Browne
Her hands came out of her sleeves. There was a rod of blinding silver in each. Before I could stir she had brought the rods together, crossing them before her smiling face. At the intersection forces of tremendous power blazed into an instant's being, forces that streamed from the poles of the world and could touch only for the beat of a second if that world were not to be shaken into fragments. I felt the building reel below me.
I felt the gateway open.Henry Kuttner
Our dreams of a pure virtue are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to exercise the virtue of responsibility toward a community of nations only by courting the prospective guilt of the atomic bomb.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Princes may make laws and repeal them, but they can neither make nor destroy virtue, and how indeed should they be able to do what is impossible to the Deity himself? Virtue being as immutable in its nature as the divine will which is the ground of it.
Ethan Allen
Orwell, George
Osama bin Laden
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