[Hemingway] always used to bawl me out for including so much topical stuff. He always claimed that was a great mistake, that in fifty years nobody would understand. He may have been right; it's getting to be true.
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Discussion session with students at Union College, Oct 16 1968, reproduced in John Dos Passos: The Major Nonfictional Prose, ed. Donald PizerJohn Dos Passos
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An intelligent man said that the world felt Napoleon as a weight, and that when he died it would give a great oof of relief. This is just as true of Byron, or of such Byrons of their days as Kipling and Hemingway: after a generation or two the world is tired of being their pedestal, shakes them of with an oof, and then—hoisting onto its back a new world-figure—feels the penetrating satisfaction of having made a mistake all its own.
Randall Jarrell
No one can understand history without continually relating the long periods which are constantly mentioned to the experiences of our own short lives. Five years is a lot. Twenty years is the horizon to most people. Fifty years is antiquity. To understand how the impact of destiny fell upon any generation of men one must first imagine their position and then apply the time-scale of our own lives.
Winston Churchill
Although the socialist economies, including those led by communist parties in various parts of the world, have been beset by economic and political problems (including the ' oppression ), the aims and objectives that have previously attracted people towards socialism remain still important as they were fifty years ago. The concepts of social justice are also constantly re-emerged after they were weakened by the difficulties encountered in implementing various projects. (Ch. 2.5, p. 51)
Amartya Sen
Who would have thought around 1900 that in fifty years time we would know so much more and understand so much less.
Albert Einstein
"I'll be seventy years old soon. Well, Nahum, if you asked me whether I shall die and be buried in a Jewish State I would tell you Yes; in ten years, fifteen years, I believe there will still be a Jewish State. But ask me whether my son Amos, who will be fifty at the end of this year, has a chance of dying and being buried in a Jewish State, and I would answer: fifty-fifty."
David Ben-Gurion
Dos Passos, John
Dostoevsky, Fyodor
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