| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Tin Woodman of Oz by L. Frank Baum: when she noticed the prisoners and stopped to inspect
them.
"Dear me!" said Til; "what dreadful creatures. Where
did they come from?"
"We captured them," replied one of the Loons.
"And what are we going to do with them?" inquired the
girl Loon.
"Perhaps we'll condemn 'em and puncture 'em,"
answered the King.
"Well," said she, still eyeing the "I'm not sure
they'll puncture. Let's try it, and see."
The Tin Woodman of Oz |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: States. In the opinion of some of them the death penalty ought to
be replaced everywhere by imprisonment for life.
"I don't agree with you," said their host the banker. "I have not
tried either the death penalty or imprisonment for life, but if
one may judge _a priori_, the death penalty is more moral and
more humane than imprisonment for life. Capital punishment kills
a man at once, but lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly. Which
executioner is the more humane, he who kills you in a few minutes
or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?"
"Both are equally immoral," observed one of the guests, "for they
both have the same object -- to take away life. The State is not
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: much I desire to serve them. Ha! here is Hepzibah herself!"
Such was the case. The vibrations of the Judge's voice had
reached the old gentlewoman in the parlor, where she sat, with
face averted, waiting on her brother's slumber. She now issued
forth, as would appear, to defend the entrance, looking, we must
needs say, amazingly like the dragon which, in fairy tales, is
wont to be the guardian over an enchanted beauty. The habitual
scowl of her brow was undeniably too fierce, at this moment, to
pass itself off on the innocent score of near-sightedness; and it
was bent on Judge Pyncheon in a way that seemed to confound, if not
alarm him, so inadequately had he estimated the moral force of a
House of Seven Gables |
