Freemasons

"For my meals I have to approach friends for loans, day after day. To be able to smoke, I have gone to the extreme of picking up cigarette butts in the streets."

"How could I allow him to attack you when I am interested in your prestige? I am sure that when Eduardo de Lete wrote the article he did not intend to allude to you and much less to molest you. He described an individual whose methods are diametrically opposed to yours."

"If our efforts prove useless we shall deplore our defeat; but no bitterness will torture our conscience when from it fatal consequences should emerge, as they ought to."

"You will remember that, walking on the Pascode Recoletos … I told you: "Watch out, for some fine day we shall wake up quarreling without knowing why." You laughed at my witticism and so did I … that occurred to me without reason as a vague presentment."

"I can’t seem to forget the peso Anita sent me. I wish you had contrived somehow not to send it so that you could have bought her a pair of shoes instead. My heart bleeds every time I think of the hard life you and our children lead, and so I am very eager to return home to be able to take care of you and our children."

"The time when they unite and awaken from slumber; on that day, the day of God, the people will demand payment... Who will pay?"

"It’s 5:30 in the afternoon here, while two in the morning there in the Philippines; you already have your Christmas eve mass and noche buena. Here, we spent the entire afternoon reminiscing how joyful Christmas Day there. I imagine Sofia and Anita and all the children in our neighborhood are enjoying right now. If only my will be done, I’d like to spend the next Christmas with you."

"I think we should protect ourselves from the intrigues of our enemies and the naviete of our friends. Having said this, therefore, and with the data you already possess, the circumstances now exists and the time is right for us to abandon the pen; trust me."

"Weyler is going to be relieved. If Burgos takes his place, Calvo y Muñoz may, perhaps, be made Director General by him. I begged the latter in that case first to introduce the bill on representation in the Cortes for the Philippine Islands. He says he will do everything possible. We shall be all right if Burgos comes with Calvo; he is a favorite of the Segundo Cabo there, and Colonel Pazos is a nephew and a right hand man of General Burgos. This Colonel Pazos is one of our collaborators in La Solidaridad and signs himself Padpyvh."

"No doubt the friars will slander my religious sentiments in order that you may not believe my words; but you all know me, and if you do not, there is my daughter (Sofia), at an age when she can not yet dissimulate her real belief; interrogate her, scrutinise her conscience with regard to religious matters, and the judgement which you will then form will enable you to judge the religious sentiments of the father"

"You must always remind her (Sofia) to do well at school. She should avoid those who curse; she ought not to become friendly with them nor turn them into enemies, exercising tact in her avoidance...she should appear dignified to all, and confide only to her mother. This ought never to be far from her thinking: no one can love her in the way her parents love her. If it happens that the world deceives her no one will be frank and honest with her except her parents... all her joys, all her sorrows, all her dreadful fears should be confided only to her mother."

"If you can take advantage of the support of the Gran Familia, now is the time. For Becerra belongs to it, and besides, this oppressive measure (administrative deportation) affects its prestige and good name, since it is its own members and its friends who are subject to this persecution."

"If you have any resentment, I beg you to put it aside; if you consider me at fault, and this fault is pardonable, forgive me… We would much like that you resume writing for it; not only would we strengthen La Solidaridad but we would defeat the friar intrigue in the Philippines."

"I cannot but ask myself, why should a pueblo like Bulacan... be inferior to the pueblo of Malolos? It might be true that Bulacan was not as wealthy or fashionable as Malolos, but surely, its women were not inferior in the aspiration towards knowledge, in the efforts of intellect."

"The Spaniards are frivolous, without ideals, with no other conviction than their own personal and momentary convenience. Believe me, chico, I came here with flattering dispositions, but each day I go on acquiring the very sad conviction of the incompatibility of this race with sentiments of honour. It is sad to acknowledge it, but we will learn nothing from this accursed race..."

"I exhort you with all the ardour of my soul. Learn, instruct, encourage love of study, and you will have fulfilled your mission on earth."

"Senor Manrique Lallave and his companions are going there to carry on some business which they will explain to you. Believing their interests to be antagonistic to those of certain monopolizers of the country, I would wish that, on your part and that of your friends, you would bestow every kind of protection on them, being assured that these gentlemen and the elements on whom they depend, with whom we are in complete understanding, are disposed to render us service in return."

"Let us praise heaven and have faith in the future: We shall see that not even the power of our enemies will weaken our determination to promote the ideals we are fighting for."

"This called for more endurance and patience on their part while peaceful processes were being carried out. But if and when revolution broke out, it was God’s will and would be a fight to the finish irrespective of consequences."

"We will limit ourselves there to precise considerations because duty demands it. In this judgement, unlegislatable right is violated. A sacred freedom is restricted: the Liberty of thought and the right to express one's opinion. Our mission and purpose is to protest, combat, and denounce the cunning politics, the constitutional attempt, the authoritarian repeal (of an ordinance), and the abuse of the Law."

"I have not stopped wishing for the renewal of our former ties, for I believe that slight differences in procedure are not enough to destroy our common principles, purposes, and feelings."

"A constitution as of forged steel; body robust and stocky; the thorax that of an invincible titan; a powerful brain enclosed in a square skull; and an intense and searching eye which emitted an irresistible current that vanquished and fascinated."

"An enlightened intelligence is a sanctuary where the kindness and magnificence of its Creator are better seen."

"The education of the women stimulates and elevates that of the men.. because of their influence in the family as daughter, sister, wife or mother…They are not only a balm to the hardships of life but also an element that influences and guides men along the path of virtue, perversity or cowardice."

"He has a warlike character; is foxy; has much energy and a great talent for satire; kindness; intrepid; ambitious; has no considerations when anything serious is to be done."

"A tireless propagandist in the political struggle, formidable in his attack, expert in his defenses, accurate in the strokes of his pen, unyielding in his arguments, whose knowledge and formidable intelligence commanded the respect even of his enemies, whom he had defeated more than one in contests of the mind."

"Where the women are virtuous, vice is timid, and dignity predominates in the popular custom. But were women are frivolous, men become immoral, vicious and forget or despise their sacred duties."

"‘It follows, therefore, that the astronomers of Alexandria take from the Indians the primitive and fundamental knowledge of the theory of the moon.’"

"These observations must therefore have been made elsewhere, and one can hardly refuse to believe that they were made in India where the Chaldeans seem to have borrowed the first elements of their Astronomy."

"‘Mons. Bailly, the celebrated author of the History of Astronomy, may be regarded as beginning the concert of praises, upon this branch of the science of the Hindus. The grounds of his conclusions were certain astronomical tables; from which he inferred, not only advanced progress in the science, but a date so ancient as to be entirely inconsistent with the chronology of the Hebrew Scriptures. [...] Another cause of great distrust attaches to Mons. Bailly, Voltaire, and other excellent writers in France, abhorring the evils which they saw attached to catholicism, laboured to subvert the authority of the books on which it was founded. Under this impulse, they embraced [...] the tales respecting the great antiquity of the Chinese and Hindus as disproving, entirely, the Mosaic accounts of the duration of the present race of men. [...] The argument [...] by Mons. Bailly, was [...] for a time regarded as a demonstration in form of the falsehood of Christianity.’"

"Even before Jones's announcement, Bailly stated that "the Brahmans are the teachers of Pythagoras, the instructors of Greece and through her of the whole of Europe" (51)."

"The motion of the stars calculated by the Hindus some 4500 years before vary not even a single minute from the modern tables of Cassini and Meyer."

"The astronomer and onetime mayor of Paris, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, in his Histoire de I'astronomie ancienne et moderne (1805), felt that "these tables of the Brahmana are perhaps five or six thousand years old" (53;). Bailly approved of the traditional date of the Kali Yuga, and seemed to have convinced at least some of his colleagues such as Laplace and Playfair of the accuracy of the Indian astronomical claims (Kay, [1924] 1981, 2). This was bitterly opposed by another astronomer, John Bentley ([1825] 1981), with a concern that we have seen was typical for the times: "If we are to believe in the antiquity of Hindu books, as he would wish us, then the Mosaic account is all a fable, or a fiction" (xxvii)."

"That Hindu astronomical lore about ancient times cannot be based on later back-calculation, was also argued by Playfair’s contemporary, the French astronomer jean-Sylvain Bailly: “The motions of the stars calculated by the Hindus before some 4500 years vary not even a single minute from the [modem] tables of Cassini and Meyer. The Indian tables give the same annual variation of the moon as that discovered by Tycho Brahe - a variation unknown to the school of Alexandria and also the Arabs.”"

"The Hindu systems of astronomy are by far the oldest, and that from which the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and even the Jews derived Hindus their knowledge."

"These desires and these rights of the Czecho-Slovak nation get new strength and new emphasis through the progress to date of the world war, for the future of Europe is coming to have a new, democratic appearance. All our political aims likewise must be looked at from a standpoint equally elevated and freedom loving, combined with the old Bohemian honesty, unselfishness and devotion, with the ancient noble consideration for the honor of the Bohemian nation and for the verdict of the future. These great qualities the Bohemian nation manifested through the self-confident calm which it managed to preserve during the war in spite of all provocation, not needing instruction by its delegates or other political counsels. This self-confident calm, this instinct of self-preservation, were the healthiest expression of our national life. This eloquent national silence, unbroken through the severest oppression, was to continue till the end of the world struggle."

"The program of our nation is given by its history and by its racial individuality, by its modern political life and by its rights and by all that which gave rise to these rights and solemnly guaranteed them."

"The people demand of you that you be equal to these great historical times, that you sacrifice all other considerations, that you offer your utmost abilities, that you act at this time as men who are independent, who have no personal ties and obligations, men of supreme moral and national consciousness."

"Anything is true, is essential to the national."

"Beautiful, moral world, created in an angelic way."

"That the new Prime Minister is a man of remarkable originality and force of character, richly endowed with many of the higher qualities which make a great soldier, we learnt to our cost during the war. But until now we have not known that he also has some, at least, of the gifts of a statesman. He may fail, as others with those rare gifts have failed, for want of the much more commonplace but indispensable abilities which are needed for the daily routine of office; but he has proved that he has the largeness of mind which, rising above the trivialities of the day, can discern and grasp the vital factors of the future. No smaller man would have spoken with the daring candour that marks his speech. ... He spoke as the representative of the great united nation. That is the ideal of a statesman – an ideal which throughout the long struggle with General Botha and his gallant countrymen was held up to us constantly as the true goal of our efforts and our sacrifices by the men who were most resolutely bent on overthrowing the old Boer oligarchy as an insuperable barrier to its accomplishment."

"Following the Boer War came a sharp cleavage among the Boers. That great farm-bred soldier and statesman, Louis Botha, accepted the verdict and became the leader of what might be called a reconciled reconstruction. Firm in the belief that the future of South Africa was greater than the smaller and selfish issue of racial pride and prejudice, he rallied his open-minded and far-seeing countrymen around him. Out of this group developed the South African Party which remains the party of the Dutch loyal to British rule. To quote the program of principles, "Its political object is the development of a South African spirit of national unity and self-reliance through the attainment of the lasting union of the various sections of the people." ... In the years immediately following Union the genius of Botha had full play. He wrought a miracle of evolution. Under his influence the land which still bore the scars of war was turned to plenty. He was a farmer and he bent his energy and leadership to the rebuilding of the shattered commonwealths. Their hope lay in the soil. His right arm was Smuts, who became successively Minister of Finance and Minister of Public Defense."

"There was no conspicuous officer in the Army who seemed to be better qualified for the Highest Command than Haig. That is to say, there was no outstanding General fit for so overwhelming a position as the command of a force five times as great as the largest army ever commanded by Napoleon, and many more times the size of any army led by Alexander, Hannibal or Caesar. I have no doubt these great men would have risen to the occasion, but such highly gifted men as the British Army possessed were consigned to the mud by orders of men superior in rank but inferior in capacity, who themselves kept at a safe distance from the slime which they had chosen as the terrain where their plans were to operate."

"There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the freedom of mankind depend alike upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment."

"On April 11th, after a dizzying rush of wounded from the new German offensive...I stumbled up to the Sisters' quarters for lunch with the certainty that I could not go on—and saw, pinned up on the notice-board in the Mess, Sir Douglas Haig's “Special Order of the Day.” Standing there spell-bound, with fatigue and despair forgotten, I read the words which put courage into so many men and women whose need of endurance was far greater than my own. ... Although, since that date, the publication of official “revelations” has stripped from the Haig myth much of its glory, I have never been able to visualise Lord Haig as the colossal blunderer, the self-deceived optimist, of the Somme massacre in 1916. I can think of him only as the author of that Special Order, for after I had read it I knew that I should go on, whether I could or not. There was a braver spirit in the hospital that afternoon, and though we only referred briefly and brusquely to Haig's message, each one of us had made up her mind that, though enemy airmen blew up our huts and the Germans advanced upon us from Abbeville, so long as wounded men remained in Staples, there would be “no retirement.”"

"Helder, waardig en overtuigend was dit betoog, een voorbeeld van bezadigheid en zelfbeheersching, en een treffend bewijs dat Steyn zelfs onder de mees opwindinde omstandigheden zicht zelf volkome meester bleeft"

"We must insure that future generations talk about us as hero's and patriots and not as cowards who gave away our inheritance without a fight. We must endure until the bitter end. I will do so."

"The nation of the Orange Free State stand ready for war in such circumstances where peace cannot be secured with honour, and although we recognize our shortcomings, our nation depend on the power of God to deliver us and secure us a victory. With a deep understanding of what we can expect when we place our trust in the Almighty, our nation will enter the war with courage and will fight until the bitter end to preserve the independence of our beloved fatherland"

"Let us leave nothing unmoved that will help us to become a independent people, and nothing more will be done than to ensure that our children receive a good education."

"The Government (Volksraad) of the Orange Free State, which is much smaller than that of the other states, are determined to uplift the standard of education in the Orange Free State to the same level of other wealthier states."