| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli: them.
Agathocles, the Sicilian,[*] became King of Syracuse not only from a
private but from a low and abject position. This man, the son of a
potter, through all the changes in his fortunes always led an infamous
life. Nevertheless, he accompanied his infamies with so much ability
of mind and body that, having devoted himself to the military
profession, he rose through its ranks to be Praetor of Syracuse. Being
established in that position, and having deliberately resolved to make
himself prince and to seize by violence, without obligation to others,
that which had been conceded to him by assent, he came to an
understanding for this purpose with Amilcar, the Carthaginian, who,
The Prince |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: no small difficulty that I found the place; for as I came to it and
went to it before on the south and east side of the island, coming
from the Brazils, so now, coming in between the main and the
island, and having no chart for the coast, nor any landmark, I did
not know it when I saw it, or, know whether I saw it or not. We
beat about a great while, and went on shore on several islands in
the mouth of the great river Orinoco, but none for my purpose; only
this I learned by my coasting the shore, that I was under one great
mistake before, viz. that the continent which I thought I saw from
the island I lived in was really no continent, but a long island,
or rather a ridge of islands, reaching from one to the other side
Robinson Crusoe |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: class in society, and that every child seen speaking to another child
with a lower-class badge, or any child wearing a higher badge than
that allotted to it by, say, the College of Heralds, should
immediately be skinned alive with a birch rod. It might even be
insisted that girls with high-class badges should be attended by
footmen, grooms, or even military escorts. In short, there is hardly
any limit to the follies with which our Commercialism would infect any
system that it would tolerate at all. But something like a change of
heart is still possible; and since all the evils of snobbery and
segregation are rampant in our schools at present we may as well make
the best as the worst of them.
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