„Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.“

Quoted in Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson, the Mind On Fire (Univ. of Calif Press 1995), p. 124

Sultãn Qulî Qutb Shãh of Golconda (AD 1507-1543) Dewarconda (Andhra Pradesh)
Tãrîkh-i-Firishta

Quelle: The Cat in the Hat

Quelle: Clockwork Princess

Quelle: 'Salem's Lot

Foreword
After the Fall (1964)

Ode.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Of Frederick the Great
Quelle: Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1765-1770; published 1782), Books VIII-XII, XII

Quelle: The Woman in Black

"Habitations"
Sonnets and Verse (1938)

From Critique of Everyday Life: Volume 1 (1947/1991)
Kontext: Everything great and splendid is founded on power and wealth. They are the basis of beauty. This is why the rebel and the anarchic protester who decries all of history and all the works of past centuries because he sees in them only the skills and the threat of domination is making a mistake. He sees alienated forms, but not the greatness within. The rebel can only see to the end of his own ‘private’ consciousness, which he levels against everything human, confusing the oppressors with the oppressed masses, who were nevertheless the basis and the meaning of history and past works. Castles, palaces, cathedrals, fortresses, all speak in their various ways of the greatness and the strength of the people who built them and against whom they were built. This real greatness shines through the fake grandeur of rulers and endows these buildings with a lasting ‘beauty’. The bourgeoisie is alone in having given its buildings a single, over-obvious meaning, impoverished, deprived of reality: that meaning is abstract wealth and brutal domination; that is why it has succeeded in producing perfect ugliness and perfect vulgarity. The man who denigrates the past, and who nearly always denigrates the present and the future as well, cannot understand this dialectic of art, this dual character of works and of history. He does not even sense it. Protesting against bourgeois stupidity and oppression, the anarchic individualist is enclosed in ‘private’ consciousness, itself a product of the bourgeois era, and no longer understands human power and the community upon which that power is founded. The historical forms of this community, from the village to the nation, escape him. He is, and only wants to be, a human atom (in the scientifically archaic sense of the word, where ‘atom’ meant the lowest isolatable reality). By following alienation to its very extremes he is merely playing into the hands of the bourgeoisie. Embryonic and unconscious, this kind of anarchism is very widespread. There is a kind of revolt, a kind of criticism of life, that implies and results in the acceptance of this life as the only one possible. As a direct consequence this attitude precludes any understanding of what is humanly possible.

In a 2009 interview
Quoted in "Soleimani, a General Who Became Iran Icon by Targeting US" https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/01/02/world/middleeast/ap-ml-iran-qassem-soleimani.html. The Associated Press

Quelle: Content and Rich, Line 57; p. 59.

John Rivers in The Genius and the Goddess (1955)
Kontext: You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.

Quelle: "Second Fig" from A Few Figs from Thistles (1920)

Night, st. 1
1780s, Songs of Innocence (1789–1790)

Handsome Nell (1773) (also known as "My Handsome Nell"), st. 6.
Johnson's The Scots Musical Museum (1787-1796)

LI, last lines
Carmina