| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 2 by Alexis de Toqueville: such a people, the private members of such a community will never
entirely forfeit their independence. But when the equality of
conditions grows up amongst a people which has never known, or
has long ceased to know, what freedom is (and such is the case
upon the Continent of Europe), as the former habits of the nation
are suddenly combined, by some sort of natural attraction, with
the novel habits and principles engendered by the state of
society, all powers seem spontaneously to rush to the centre.
These powers accumulate there with astonishing rapidity, and the
State instantly attains the utmost limits of its strength, whilst
private persons allow themselves to sink as suddenly to the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce: defeated -- the members of the Government party had not been nailed to
their seats! This so enraged the King that the Prime Minister was put
to death, the parliament was dissolved with a battery of artillery,
and government of the people, by the people, for the people perished
from Ghargaroo.
OPTIMISM, n. The doctrine, or belief, that everything is beautiful,
including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and
everything right that is wrong. It is held with greatest tenacity by
those most accustomed to the mischance of falling into adversity, and
is most acceptably expounded with the grin that apes a smile. Being a
blind faith, it is inaccessible to the light of disproof -- an
The Devil's Dictionary |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: own appeal to fact and the opinions of mankind in his more popular works,
and by the use made of his writings in the Middle Ages. No book, except
the Scriptures, has been so much read, and so little understood. The Pre-
Socratic philosophies are simpler, and we may observe a progress in them;
but is there any regular succession? The ideas of Being, change, number,
seem to have sprung up contemporaneously in different parts of Greece and
we have no difficulty in constructing them out of one another--we can see
that the union of Being and Not-being gave birth to the idea of change or
Becoming and that one might be another aspect of Being. Again, the
Eleatics may be regarded as developing in one direction into the Megarian
school, in the other into the Atomists, but there is no necessary connexion
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