Why do you think great leaders and great orations are coincident with wars, revolutions, and the founding or … - Mark Helprin

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When something does not insist on being noticed, when we aren't grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event, we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.

Mark Helprin

Why do you think great leaders and great orations are coincident with wars, revolutions, and the founding or ending of governments and states? Common interests then are so clear that speeches are effortlessly drawn, but at present neither the facts nor the consequences are sufficiently clear to make oratory legitimate. This is the kind of war that will wind on and make fools of its partisans and opponents both.

Government, Interests, Partisans, Sufficiently, Thinking, War

Same Author Quotes

How the holy and the profane mix in the light of day and at the end of life is sometimes the most beautiful thing in this world and a compassionate entry into the next. After failure and defeat, a concentration upon certain beauties, though forever lost and unretrievable, can lift the wounded past roundedness and the dying past dying, protecting them with an image, still and bright, that will ride with them on their long ride, never to fade and never to retreat.

Beautiful, Dying, Forever, Light, Past, Wounded

. . . I returned to walking up the mountain, and there, in the dim asexual beauty of reddening dawns and skies that firmed to blue, I discovered my real and appropriate strengths.

Blue, Nature, Real, Skies, Strength, Walking

Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark rooftops. The wind came down from the north like a runner in lacrosse, violent and hard, to batter every living thing. They were there, each one alone in conversation with the stars, mining ephemeral love from cold and distant light.

Dark, Down, Lacrosse, Light, Stars, Thing

We should have absolute control over our borders. If we want cheap labor to depress wages and disempower the unions, then we could have guest workers. But we have to face that issue. What is it that we want to do? Rather than not facing it, and having porous borders, and the effect is that it disempowers the unions.

Depressing, Effect, Issue, Issues, Labor, Should Have

She died on a windy gray day in March when the sky was full of darting crows and the world lay prostrate and defeated after winter. Peter Lake was at her side and it ruined him forever. It broke him as he had not ever imagined he could have been broken. He would never again be young, or able to remember what it was like to be young. What he had once taken to be pleasures would appear to him in his defeat as hideous and deserved punishments for reckless vanity.

Crows, Darting, Sky, Taken, Winter, Young