Men often make up in wrath what they want in reason.

 

Men often make up in wrath what they want in reason.
--
Reported in Maturin Murray Ballou, Treasury of thought: Forming an encyclopedia of quotations from Ancient and Modern Authors (1884), p. 23.

 

William R. Alger

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I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

 

William Blake

 

Your Dollar is your only Word,
The wrath of it your only fear.
You build it altars tall enough
To make you see, but your are blind;
You cannot leave it long enough
To look before you or behind.

 

Edwin Arlington Robinson

 

The present system of taking oaths is horrible. It is awfully absurd to make a man invoke God's wrath upon himself, if he speaks false; it is, in my judgment, a sin to do so.

 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 

I don't make sense in this interview. I don't make sense in photo shoots. I don't make sense unless I'm making music. And the music is literally the only reason I'm here. I know I'm not the tall, dark, handsome rock star guy. I know I'm not the most charismatic person. I know I'm not that interesting or funny. It really is about me being a musician and a songwriter. That is the only reason I exist here.

 

Patrick Stump

 

A democracy is peace-loving. It does not like to go to war. It is slow to rise to provocation. When it has once been provoked to the point where it must grasp the sword, it does not easily forgive its adversary for having produced this situation. The fact of the provocation then becomes itself the issue. Democracy fights in anger — it fights for the very reason that it was forced to go to war. It fights to punish the power that was rash enough and hostile enough to provoke it — to teach that power a lesson it will not forget, to prevent the thing from happening again. Such a war must be carried to the bitter end.
This is true enough, and, if nations could afford to operate in the moral climate of individual ethics, it would be understandable and acceptable. But I sometimes wonder whether in this respect a democracy is not uncomfortably similar to one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin: he lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment; he is slow to wrath — in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but, once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat. You wonder whether it would not have been wiser for him to have taken a little more interest in what was going on at an earlier date and to have seen whether he could have prevented some of these situations from arising instead of proceeding from an undiscriminating indifference to a holy wrath equally undiscriminating.

 

George F. Kennan