| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority?
Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not
encourage its citizens to put out its faults, and do better than
it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ and
excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington
and Franklin rebels?
One would think, that a deliberate and practical denial
of its authority was the only offense never contemplated by
its government; else, why has it not assigned its definite,
its suitable and proportionate, penalty? If a man who has
no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: PROTARCHUS: That is a very serious question, Philebus, to which Socrates
has ingeniously brought us round, and please to consider which of us shall
answer him; there may be something ridiculous in my being unable to answer,
and therefore imposing the task upon you, when I have undertaken the whole
charge of the argument, but if neither of us were able to answer, the
result methinks would be still more ridiculous. Let us consider, then,
what we are to do:--Socrates, if I understood him rightly, is asking
whether there are not kinds of pleasure, and what is the number and nature
of them, and the same of wisdom.
SOCRATES: Most true, O son of Callias; and the previous argument showed
that if we are not able to tell the kinds of everything that has unity,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: face I could perceive no answerable sentiment. It was plain she
attached no moment to the act, and I blamed myself for my own more
uneasy consciousness.
The sight and (if I may so call it) the acquaintance of the mother
confirmed the view I had already taken of the son. The family
blood had been impoverished, perhaps by long inbreeding, which I
knew to be a common error among the proud and the exclusive. No
decline, indeed, was to be traced in the body, which had been
handed down unimpaired in shapeliness and strength; and the faces
of to-day were struck as sharply from the mint, as the face of two
centuries ago that smiled upon me from the portrait. But the
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