| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Europeans by Henry James: "But I thought you had signed"--
"I have not signed!" said the Baroness.
Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately
assist her to embark.
Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice
and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely;
but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not
found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken.
It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared
to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions
of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: To any sovereign state throughout the world."
He who gives himself entirely to his fellow men appears
to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself
partially to them in pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist.
How does it become a man to behave toward the American
government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace
be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize
that political organization as my government which is the
slave's government also.
All men recognize the right of revolution; that is,
the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist,
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift: have not the least tincture left of those infusions, or string of
those weeds, and by consequence the reason for abolishing nominal
Christianity upon that pretext is wholly ceased.
For the rest, it may perhaps admit a controversy, whether the
banishing all notions of religion whatsoever would be inconvenient
for the vulgar. Not that I am in the least of opinion with those
who hold religion to have been the invention of politicians, to
keep the lower part of the world in awe by the fear of invisible
powers; unless mankind were then very different from what it is
now; for I look upon the mass or body of our people here in England
to be as Freethinkers, that is to say, as staunch unbelievers, as
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