Quotes About Permanence

Unceasing warfare gives rise to its own social conditions, which have been similar throughout the ages. One such condition is a permanent state of alertness to ward off attack. Another is the rule of the autocrat. —CAMMAR PILRU, Ixian Ambassador in Exile Treatise on the Downfall of Unjust Governments

Those without a true sense of history fail to see how volatile and transient human leadership is, even on the scale of empires. When viewed from the perspective of a mere lifetime, we tend to see our governmental structures as permanent and unchangeable. This is entirely false. —FAYKAN CORRINO I, first Emperor after the Butlerian Jihad

Negro slavery was specifically mentioned, and was given permanence; there never could be a law "denying or impairing the right of property in Negro slaves," and slavery was fully protected in territories then or later acquired.

No one knows any longer whether the reintroduction of the bear in Pyrenees, kolkhozes, aerosols, the Green Revolution, the anti-smallpox vaccine, Star Wars, the Muslim religion, partridge hunting, the French Revolution, service industries, labour unions, cold fusion, Bolshevism, relativity, Slovak nationalism, commercial sailboats, and so on, are outmoded, up to date, futuristic, atemporal, nonexistent, or permanent.

Lead me, guide me to the light of your paper. Keep me in your arc of acuity. And when the ream is spent. Write a poem on my back. I'll never wash it off.

Some seem to regard existence here as camping out, and never make a real home, living in their trunks for years. Even those that have homes are making changes all the time, trading one for another, or building afresh. yes, really, it's almost like living in a big tent, with houses instead of tents.

To live in the hearts we leave behind is to live forever.

It never happens that a new constellation suddenly rises out of the east. There is an order, a predictability, a permanence about the stars. In a way, they are almost comforting.

You don't understand. When a life is completed, it ought to be put away. It's like a sonnet. When you've written the final couplet, why go on any further? You only destroy the part that's already written!

It is in the nature of things to want to believe that what's familiar and comfortable will last forever.

Everything changes with time's passage. Only change itself is constant.

But nothing was permanent; all things must change. And no matter the beliefs of some and the wishes of others, life had a way of surprising you.

past, it's so now, and I would be willing to bet it'll be so forever.

Life was uncertain. Death was forever.

It is in the nature of things to want to believe that what's familiar and comfortable will last forever.

Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.

No one remembers the singer. The song remains.

EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS, STAYS HAPPENED. What kind of philosophy is that? THE ONLY ONE THAT WORKS.

The thing about stories is you have to pick the ones that last.

The night is always old. He'd walked too often down dark streets in the secret hours and felt the night stretching away, and known in his blood that while days and kings and empires come and g, the night is always the same age, always aeons deep. Terrors unfolded in the velvet shadows and while the nature of the talons may change, the nature of the beast does not.

Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but Arsenic is for ever.

Say what you like. Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever.

Is it dead?' said Gurder. 'It can't die! It's existed for thousands of years!' Gurder shook his head. 'Sounds like a good reason for dying,' he said.