When I see British people sitting in the court to try me, remembering that the English people are proud of that word "Fair play," I am confident that I will be blessed by God and by man also. Not only Bishop Bourget spoke to me in that way, but Father Jean-Baptiste Bruno, the priest of Worcester, who was my director of conscience, said to me: "Riel, God has put an object into your hands the cause of the triumph of religion in the world, take care, you will succeed when most believe you have lost." I have got those words in my head, those words of J. B. Bruno and the late Archbishop Bourget.
Louis Riel
I have not assumed to myself that I had a mission. I was working in Manitoba first and I did all I could to get free institutions for Manitoba. They have those institutions today in Manitoba and they try to improve them, while myself who obtained them, I am forgotten as if I was dead. But after I had obtained with the help of others a constitution for Manitoba, when the government at Ottawa was not willing to inaugurate it at the proper time, I have worked till the inauguration should take place and that is why I have been banished for five years. I had to rest five years. I was unwilling to do it. I protested. I said : Oh my God ! I offer you all my existence for that cause and please to make of my weakness an instrument to help men in my country. And seeing my intentions, the late Archbishop Bourget said "Riel has no narrow views, he is a man to accomplish great things" and he wrote that letter of which I hope that the Crown has at least a copy. And in another letter when I became what Drs. believed to be, insane, Bishop Bourget wrote again and said "Ye be blessed by God and man and take patience in your evil." Am I not taking patience I Will I be blessed by man as I have been by God?
I say that, I have been blessed by God and I hope that you will not take that as a presumptuous assertion. It has been a great success for me to come through all the dangers I have in that 15 years. If I have not succeeded in wearing a fine coat myself I have at the same time the great consolation of seeing that God has maintained my views; that he has maintained my health sufficiently to go through the world and that he has kept me from bullets when bullets marked my hat.Louis Riel
"History has not yet registered a stable appraisal for Giordano Bruno" writes Giorgio de Santillana in The Age of Adventure. Perceptions of Bruno were volatile enough in his lifetime; many have remained polarized to this day. Radoslav Tsanoff calls Bruno "the outstanding philosopher of the Renaissance," and Harold Hoffding cites Bruno's work as "the greatest philosophical thought-structure executed by the Renaissance." Yet Bertrand Russell despairs of crediting Bruno with philosophy at all: "There were fruitful intuitions lost in that disorder, but they had not yet reached the point of precision at which philosophy begins." The chasm of opinion dividing Bruno, even to this day, is one of the many improbables of this turbulent and exultant figure.
Giordano Bruno
Joyce gives the ghost guises like Saint Bruno and The Nolan of the Cabashes and Noland's brown and Nolan Browne and Bruno Nowlan and Nolans Brumans and Mr. Brown and Bruno Nolan and many others. The encyclopedic Joyce was deeply impressed by Bruno's heady coincidence of contraries, and was no doubt sympathetic to Bruno's hectic and finally tragic bouts with the Inquisition. McLuhan the Joycean scholar was certainly conscious of Joyce's debt to Bruno. But I like to think there was more: that when "Bruno Nolan" winked from one of paper sleeves, McLuhan made a recognition as if glimpsing a companion from across the centuries and winked back.
Giordano Bruno
He was drawn to the centers of learning to announce his startling philosophy; from most he was curtly expelled... He was contradictory, capricious, often insufferable: his moods could flash abruptly from antic lampooning to raw invective, from wild exhilaration to fierce bitterness, from clownishness to a blackdog melancholy. "Gay in sorrow, sorrowful in gaiety," he said of himself, and the contraries of the tempestuous Bruno survive in his writings, where exalted and discerning passages seem to bob and dip in great waves of bombast... Controversial and largely dismissed in his lifetime, Bruno fared no better after his death. If his ideas were disputed, so was his martyrdom. For centuries, rumor and doubt shrouded the terrible fire in the Campo dei Fiore and as late as 1885 there are references to the "legends" of Bruno's burning at the stake... Only in the twentieth century has Bruno begun emerging from his long neglect into prominence.
Giordano Bruno
"Do not be deceived by the way men of bad faith misuse words and names," the Black Pope was saying, and now his head was quite powdered with snow. "It used to be only the English who excelled in the deception of words. Then the French went even beyond them, and now the whole world is adept at it."
R. A. Lafferty
Riel, Louis
Riemen, Rob
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