| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: That, Socrates, is certainly inconceivable.
You see then, Critias, that I was not far wrong in fearing that I could
have no sound notion about wisdom; I was quite right in depreciating
myself; for that which is admitted to be the best of all things would never
have seemed to us useless, if I had been good for anything at an enquiry.
But now I have been utterly defeated, and have failed to discover what that
is to which the imposer of names gave this name of temperance or wisdom.
And yet many more admissions were made by us than could be fairly granted;
for we admitted that there was a science of science, although the argument
said No, and protested against us; and we admitted further, that this
science knew the works of the other sciences (although this too was denied
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: was not overthrown by one head, but tumbled down at the touch of a mere
hat; though, true enough, that hat was a three-cornered Napoleon hat.
While the bourgeois' republicans were engaged in the Assembly with the
work of splicing this Constitution, of discussing and voting, Cavaignac,
on the outside, maintained the state of siege of Paris. The state of
siege of Paris was the midwife of the constitutional assembly, during
its republican pains of travail. When the Constitution is later on
swept off the earth by the bayonet,
it should not be forgotten that it was by the bayonet, likewise--and the
bayonet turned against the people, at that--that it had to be protected
in its mother's womb, and that by the bayonet it had to be planted on
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alcibiades I by Plato: ALCIBIADES: Nay, I should like you to be the speaker.
SOCRATES: What, do you not wish to be persuaded?
ALCIBIADES: Certainly I do.
SOCRATES: And can you be persuaded better than out of your own mouth?
ALCIBIADES: I think not.
SOCRATES: Then you shall answer; and if you do not hear the words, that
the just is the expedient, coming from your own lips, never believe another
man again.
ALCIBIADES: I won't; but answer I will, for I do not see how I can come to
any harm.
SOCRATES: A true prophecy! Let me begin then by enquiring of you whether
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