Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Tamora Pierce

Quote by Tamora Pierce

Work

Tempests and Slaughter

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Tamora Pierce
Tamora Pierce

Tamora Pierce is an American writer known for her young adult literature. Her works often explore themes of gender, power, and growth, and are highly appreciated by young readers. more

You May Also Like

“It is life, not the individual, that is conscienceless. The essential, therefore, is to understand the time for which one is born. He who does not sense and understand its most secret forces, who does not feel in himself something cognate that drives him forward on a path neither hedged nor defined by concepts, who believes in the surface, public opinion, large phrases and ideals of the day — he is not of the stature for its events. He is in their power, not they in his. Look not back to the past for measuring-rods! Still less sideways for some system or other! There are times, like our own present and the Gracchan age, in which there are two most deadly kinds of idealism, the reactionary and the democratic. The one believes in the reversibility of history, the other in a teleology of history. But it makes no difference to the inevitable failure with which both burden a nation over whose destiny they have power, whether it is to a memory or to a concept that they sacrifice it. The genuine statesman is incarnate history, its directedness expressed as individual will and its organic logic as character.”

DestinyMemoryReactionaryTeleologyOrganic Logic
Book:The decline of the West
Create image