| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli: until he could get away, with his plans arranged and everything fixed,
as any other pontiff would have done, he would never have succeeded.
Because the King of France would have made a thousand excuses, and the
others would have raised a thousand fears.
I will leave his other actions alone, as they were all alike, and they
all succeeded, for the shortness of his life did not let him
experience the contrary; but if circumstances had arisen which
required him to go cautiously, his ruin would have followed, because
he would never have deviated from those ways to which nature inclined
him.
I conclude, therefore that, fortune being changeful and mankind
The Prince |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: will become more and more Italian until it is wholly Italian. I
would trust Italy to make and keep the Banca Commerciale Italiana
Italian. I believe the Italian brain is a better brain than the
German article. But still I heard people talking of the
implicated organisation as if it were engaged in the most
insidious duplicities. "Wait for only a year or so after the
war," said one English authority to me, "and the mask will be off
and it will be frankly a 'Deutsche Bank' once more." They assure
me that then German enterprises will be favoured again, Italian
and Allied enterprises blockaded and embarrassed, the good
understanding of Italians and English poisoned, entirely through
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alcibiades I by Plato: SOCRATES: Soul, body, or both together forming a whole.
ALCIBIADES: Certainly.
SOCRATES: But did we not say that the actual ruling principle of the body
is man?
ALCIBIADES: Yes, we did.
SOCRATES: And does the body rule over itself?
ALCIBIADES: Certainly not.
SOCRATES: It is subject, as we were saying?
ALCIBIADES: Yes.
SOCRATES: Then that is not the principle which we are seeking?
ALCIBIADES: It would seem not.
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