| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Crito by Plato: who visits him before the dawn has broken; he himself has been warned in a
dream that on the third day he must depart. Time is precious, and Crito
has come early in order to gain his consent to a plan of escape. This can
be easily accomplished by his friends, who will incur no danger in making
the attempt to save him, but will be disgraced for ever if they allow him
to perish. He should think of his duty to his children, and not play into
the hands of his enemies. Money is already provided by Crito as well as by
Simmias and others, and he will have no difficulty in finding friends in
Thessaly and other places.
Socrates is afraid that Crito is but pressing upon him the opinions of the
many: whereas, all his life long he has followed the dictates of reason
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: woman feels herself cheated if she has never known, like the women she
sees about her, a happy love? Ah! why was Michel Chrestien so
respectful? Why did he not seek to meet me? There again was another
mockery! But what of that? in falling, I have lost everything; I have
no illusions left; I had tasted of all things except the one fruit for
which I have no longer teeth. Yes, I found myself disenchanted with
the world at the very moment when I was forced to leave it.
Providential, was it not? like all those strange insensibilities which
prepare us for death" (she made a gesture full of pious unction). "All
things served me then," she continued; "the disasters of the monarchy
and its ruin helped me to bury myself. My son consoles me for much.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pivot of Civilization by Margaret Sanger: civilization are foredoomed to failure.
We can hope for no advance until we attain a new conception of sex,
not as a merely propagative act, not merely as a biological necessity
for the perpetuation of the race, but as a psychic and spiritual
avenue of expression. It is the limited, inhibited conception of sex
that vitiates so much of the thought and ideation of the Eugenists.
Like most of our social idealists, statesmen, politicians and
economists, some of the Eugenists suffer intellectually from a
restricted and inhibited understanding of the function of sex. This
limited understanding, this narrowness of vision, which gives rise to
most of the misconceptions and condemnations of the doctrine of Birth
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