Citadel Quotes

Most men are followers, and implicitly rely upon the judgment of others. They mistake solemnity for wisdom, and regard a grave countenance as the title page and Preface to a most learned volume. So they are easily imposed upon by forms, strange garments, and solemn ceremonies. And when the teaching of parents, the customs of neighbors, and the general tongue approve and justify a belief or creed, no matter how absurd, it is hard even for the strongest to hold the citadel of his soul. In each country, in defence of each religion, the same arguments would be urged. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

Without a strong educational system democracy is crippled. Knowledge is not only key to power. It is the citadel of human freedom. ~ Harry S. Truman

Solitude becomes a sort of tangible enemy, the more dangerous, because it dwells within the citadel itself. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel. ~ John Keats

If it's all true, then we're in the citadel of unbelief, where nightmares are dispatched with Lysol and scalpels and chemotherapy rather than with stakes and Bibles and wild mountain thyme. ~ Stephen King

Every 30 seconds, it transmitted portions of [a Chopin Polonaise] to tell the world that the capital was still in Polish hands. Angered by the unexpected setback, the German High Command decided to pound the stubborn citadel into submission. In round-the-clock raids, bombers knocked out flourmills, gasworks, power plants and reservoirs, then sowed the residential areas with incendiaries. One witness, passing scenes of carnage, enumerated the horrors: 'Everywhere corpses, wounded humans, dead horses . . . and hastily-dug graves.' . . . Finally food ran out, and famished Poles, as one man put it, 'cut off flesh as soon as a horse fell, leaving only the skeleton.' On September 28, Warsaw Radio replaced the polonaise with a funeral dirge.15 ~ Norman Davies

The consensus seemed to be that if really large numbers of men were sent to storm the mountain, then enough might survive the rocks to take the citadel. This is essentially the basis of all military thinking. ~ Terry Pratchett

I'm Egyptian and Muslim, but I grew up in the West, far from my Arab roots. I began 'Sex and the Citadel' to help outsiders - like myself - to better comprehend this pivotal part of the world, up-close and personal. ~ Shereen El Feki

National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars. ~ Carl Sagan

Opinions are not to be learned by rote, like the letters of an alphabet, or the words of a dictionary. They are conclusions to be formed, and formed by each individual in the sacred and free citadel of the mind, and there enshrined beyond the arm of law to reach, or force to shake; ay! and beyond the right of impertinent curiosity to violate, or presumptuous arrogance to threaten. ~ Frances Wright

106. A GREAT CITADEL The most likely allegory is that the Citadel represents philosophy (that is, human reason without the light of God) surrounded by seven walls which represent the seven liberal arts, ~ Dante Alighieri

Since I neither want not can influence the events of the world, my mission is to preserve the internal integrity and equilibrium of my mind; that will be in which the manor in which I recover the purity of the original act; I shall be my own citadel, and to it I shall retire to protect myself against a hostile and corrupt world. I shall be my own citadel and, within it, my own and only citizen. ~ Carlos Fuentes

She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken. And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt or fear, she had practiced denying them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build laughter out of inadequate materials ... She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall. ~ John Steinbeck

Vanity finds in self-love so powerful an ally that it storms, as it were, by a coup de main,, the citadel of our heads, where, having blinded the two watchmen, it readily descends into the heart. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

For I perceived that man's estate is as a citadel: he may throw down the walls to gain what he calls freedom, but then nothing of him remains save a dismantled fortress, open to the stars. And then begins the anguish of not-being. Far better for him were it to achieve his truth in the homely smell of blazing vine shoots, or of the sheep he has to shear. Truth strikes deep, like a well. A gaze that wanders loses sight of God. And that wise man who, keeping his thoughts in hand, knows little more than the weight of his flock's wool has a clearer vision of God than [anyone]. Citadel, I will build you in men's hearts.
/ Wisdom of the Sands by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

But in every way, the shared metaphors we use of female access to power - 'knocking on the door', 'storming the citadel', 'smashing the glass ceiling', or just giving them a 'leg up' - underline female exteriority. Women in power are seen as breaking down barriers, or alternatively as taking something to which they are not quite entitled. ~ Mary Beard

I've always disliked kamikazes, that is, people who commit suicide in order to kill others. Starting with the Japanese ones from World War II. I never considered them Pietro Miccas who torch the powder and go up with the citadel in order to block the arrival of the enemy troops at Torino. I never considered them soldiers. ~ Oriana Fallaci

Imagination is a storm of emotions that has the power to sweep citadels into the wind. ~ Saim .A. Cheeda

Then he says her name. Her real name. The soft music of it hangs suspended in the air between them. Threat or entreaty, she doesn't know, but she feels her resolve weaken. He says it again, this time, it sounds bitter, false in his mouth. A betrayal. The spell is broken. The woman known as Sophie lifts her arm. And shoots. ~ Kate Mosse

And, er, these stories about you..."

"Oh, all true. Most of them. A bit of exaggeration, but mostly true."

"The one about the Citadel in Muntab and the Pash and the fish bone?"

"Oh, yes."

"But how did you get in where half a dozen armed and trained men couldn't even - ?"

"I am a little man and I carry a broom," said Lu-Tze simply. "Everyone has some mess that needs clearing up. What harm is a man with a broom?"

"What? And that was it?"

"Well, the rest was a matter of cookery, really. The Pash was not a good man, but he was a glutton for his fish pie."

"No martial arts?" said Lobsang.

"Oh, always a last resort. History needs shepherds, not butchers."

"Do you know okidoki?"

"Just a lot of bunny-hops."

"Shittake?"

"If I wanted to thrust my hand into hot sand I would go to the seaside."

"Upsidazi?"

"A waste of good bricks."

"No kando?"

"You made that one up. ~ Terry Pratchett

Earlier in the morning Company A, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines had attacked eastward into the ruins of Shuri Castle and had raised the Confederate flag. When we learned that the flag of the Confederacy had been hoisted over the very heart and soul of Japanese resistance, all of us Southerners cheered loudly. The Yankees among us grumbled, and the Westerners didn't know what to do. Later we learned that the Stars and Stripes that had flown over Guadalcanal were raised over Shuri Castle, a fitting tribute to the men of the 1st Marine Division who had the honor of being first into the Japanese citadel. ~ Eugene B. Sledge

In any town in India the European Club is the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British power, the Nirvana for which native officials and millionaires pine in vain. ~ George Orwell

On Saturday, March 2, 1805, Vice President Burr took his leave of the capital with a paean to the Senate, which he called "a sanctuary; a citadel of law, of order, and of liberty; and it is here - it is here, in this exalted refuge; here, if anywhere, will resistance be made to the storms of popular frenzy and the silent arts of corruption; and if the Constitution be destined ever to perish by the sacrilegious hands of a demagogue or the usurper, which God avert, its expiring agonies will be witnessed on this floor."94 ~ Jon Meacham

I brought you back because I could not find the strength to fight her without you but for that same reason I will do everything in my power to see you safely to the Citadel ~ Samantha Shannon

I was being called to surrender the very citadel of my self. I was completely in the dark. I did not really know what repentance was or what I was required to repent of. It was indeed the turning point of my life. ~ Bede Griffiths

A solitary figure stood gazing outward, at the edge of the crenellations ringing the circumference of the great tower soaring up from the top of the massive, mountain-citadel. Shrouded with a regal, proud air, The Unifier, the Lord of far more than Avanor, regarded the heart of His worldly dominion with an invigorating feeling of growing mastery. Yes there was a deep concern weighing upon His mind, of a nature that rarely manifested to His pervasive senses. ~ Stephen Zimmer

Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both:
touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-Am's private own: not spirit, soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone's to take in any any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement. But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too. ~ William Faulkner

Formerly irreconcilable enemies, morality and happiness have fused; today, it is being unhappy that is immoral; the superego has moved into the citadel of felicity and governs it with an iron hand. The end of culpability comes at the price of endless torment. Pleasure is no longer a promise but a problem. The idea of full satisfaction has replaced that of constraint, and it has in turn become a requirement that full satisfaction be achieved. Each of us is responsible for being in good shape, in a good mood, and no longer has to renounce anything; instead, we have to adapt to a process of improvement that rejects any resistance to change. Order has ceased to condemn us or deprive us; now it shows us, with maternal solicitude, how to fulfill ourselves. ~ Pascal Bruckner

The mind which is free from passions is a citadel, for man has nothing more secure to which he can fly for refuge and for the future be inexpugnable . He then who has not seen this is an ignorant man: but he who has seen it and does not fly to this refuge is unhappy. ~ Marcus Aurelius

The City of New York is like an enormous citadel, a modern Carcassonne. Walking between the magnificent skyscrapers one feels the presence on the fringe of a howling, raging mob, a mob with empty bellies, a mob unshaven and in rags. ~ Henry Miller

This I wanted and nothing more. In my old age
like old Goethe to stand before the face of the earth,
and recognize it and reconcile it
with my work built up, a forest citadel
on a river of changeable lights and brief shadows. ~ Czesław Miłosz

Most benefactors are like unskillful generals who take the city and leave the citadel intact. ~ Nicolas Chamfort

The citadel of Machaerus rose east of the Dead Sea on a basalt Peak shaped like a cone, girdled by four deep valleys; two about its sides, one in front, and the fourth behind. ~ Gustave Flaubert

The communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrown of overweening cupidity and selfishness which assiduously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wide disorder the citadel of misrule. ~ Grover Cleveland

The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Gaiety has been the prisoner within a fleshy citadel of deathless pain. ~ The Raveness

Everything was a metaphor; all things were something other than themselves. The pain, for example, was an ocean, and he was adrift on it. His body was a city and his mind a citadel. All communications between the two seemed to have been cut, but within the keep that was his mind he still had power. The part of his consciousness that was telling him the pain did not hurt, and that all things were like other things, was like ... like ... he found it hard to think of a comparison. A magic mirror, maybe. ~ Iain M. Banks

The parochial snobbery of these people was partly responsible for their failure to convert the Indians. Probably they also preferred to take land from heathens rather than from fellow Christians. At any rate, very few Indians were converted, and the Salem folk believed that the virgin forest was the Devil's last preserve, his home base and the citadel of his final stand. To the best of their knowledge the American forest was the last place on earth that was not paying homage to God. ~ Arthur Miller

When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both to resign ourselves to the outward rules of Fate and to recognise that the non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at last so to transform and refashion the unconscious universe, so to transmute it in the crucible of imagination, that a new image of shining gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the world--in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the events of the life of man, even in the very omnipotence of Death--the insight of creative idealism can find the reflection of a beauty which its own thoughts first made. In this way mind asserts its subtle mastery over the thoughtless forces of Nature. The more evil the material with which it deals, the more thwarting to untrained desire, the greater is its achievement in inducing the reluctant rock to yield up its hidden treasures, the prouder its victory in compelling the opposing forces to swell the pageant of its triumph. Of all the arts, Tragedy is the proudest, the most triumphant; for it builds its shining citadel in the very centre of the enemy's country, on the very summit of his highest mountain; from its impregnable watchtowers, his camps and arsenals, his columns and forts, are all revealed; within its walls the free life continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless city new spectacl ~ Bertrand Russell

When the enemy gets to your citadel, your prided epicenter, everything's in play. ~ Bill Maher

Thoughtlessness

There is a Totally Different Quality of Being which Comes by not Thinking,Not good, Not bad, Simply a State of No-thinking. You simply Watch, you simply Remain Conscious, but you don´t Think, and if some Thought Enters, they will Enter, Because Thoughts are not Yours..They are just Floating in the Air. All around there is a no sphere, a Thought-Sphere, all around. Just as there is Air, there is Thought all around you, and it goes on Entering on its Own Accord. It Stops only when you Become more and more Aware. There is something in it. if you become more Aware, a Thought simply Disappears, it Melts, Because Awareness is a Greater Energy than Thought.
Awareness is like Fire to Thought. It is just like you Burn a Lamp in the House and the Darkness cannot Enter, you put the Light off from Everywhere Darkness has Entered, without taking a single Minute, a single Moment, it is there. When the Light Burns in the House, the Darkness cannot Enter. Thoughts are like Darkness, they Enter only if there is no Light within. Awareness is fire.you Become more Aware, less and less Thoughts Enter.
If you Become really Integrated in your Awareness, Thoughts don't Enter you. you have Become an Impenetrable Citadel, nothing can Penetrate you. Not that you are Closed. Remember you are absolutely open,but just the very Energy of Awareness Becomes your Citadel. And when No Thoughts can Enter you, they will Come and they will Bypass you. You will see them Comi ~ Osho

In the Citadel, it was simply called the strangler. Dissolved in wine, it would make the muscles of a man's throat clench tighter than any fist, shutting off his windpipe. They said a victim's face turned as purple as the little crystal seed from which his death was grown, but so too did a man choking on a morsel of food. ~ George R R Martin

I fear the vermin that shall undermineSenate and citadel and school and shrine. ~ Edwin Markham

I know about sureness,' said Didactylos. 'I remember, before I was blind, I went to Omnia once. And in your Citadel I saw a crowd stoning a man to death in a pit. Ever seen that?'
'It has to be done,' Brutha mumbled. 'So the soul can be shriven and-'
'Don't know about the soul. Never been that kind of philosopher,' said Didactylos. 'All I know is, it was a horrible sight.'
'The state of the body is not-'
'Oh, I'm not talking about the poor bugger in the pit,' said the philosopher. 'I'm talking about the people throwing the stones. They were sure all right. They were sure it wasn't them in the pit. You could see it in their faces. So glad it wan't them in the pit that they were throwing just as hard as they could. ~ Terry Pratchett

Manuela de La Mancha," says a deep voice. It sounds strange to hear such a long name, but that's the manada I'm pretending to be from.

"Hola, Marilén," I say to Tiago and Saysa's great-grandmother, whom I met moments ago.

"No sos bruja." You're not a witch.

My tongue feels like sandpaper, and my mouth seals dry. Since our wolf-shadows roam outside the Citadel, and my fangs and claws are retracted, I didn't think there would be any indicator of my identity -

"No te preocupes, no vengo a interrogarte." Don't worry, I'm not here to interrogate you.

She moves closer, and the way her steely eyes seem to see more than others reminds me of Perla. "Toda la vida soñé con conocerte," she whispers. My whole life I've dreamt of meeting you.

Her long black hair is in a tight, elegant bun that pulls her skin, stretching it so that if there's a single wrinkle, I don't see it. "La primera de nosotras que nació fuera de su jaula."

The first of us to be born outside her cage. ~ Romina Garber

The need to create a citadel in which to hide from the world is characteristic of people with a schizoid disposition ~ Anthony Stevens

Sing, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose mind he learned, aye, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea, seeking to win his own life and the return of his comrades. Yet even so he saved not his comrades, though he desired it sore, for through their own blind folly they perished - fools, who devoured the kine of Helios Hyperion; but he took from them the day of their returning. Of these things, goddess, daughter of Zeus, beginning where thou wilt, tell thou even unto us. ~ Homer

You have come from the Citadel - I know, you see, something of your journeyings and history - that great fortress of bygone days, so you must possess some feeling for the past. Has it never struck you that mankind was richer by far, and happier too, a chiliad gone than it is now?" "Everyone knows," I said, "that we have fallen far from the brave days of the past." "As it was then, so shall it be again. Men of Urth, sailing between the stars, leaping from galaxy to galaxy, the masters of the daughters of the sun. ~ Gene Wolfe

In the centre of Bond was a hurricane-room, the kind of citadel found in old-fashioned houses in the tropics. These rooms are small, strongly built cells in the heart of the house, in the middle of the ground floor and sometimes dug down into its foundations. To this cell the owner and his family retire if the storm threatens to destroy the house, and they stay there until the danger is past. Bond went to his hurricane room only when the situation was beyond his control and no other possible action could be taken. Now he retired to this citadel, closed his mind to the hell of noise and violent movement, and focused on a single stitch in the back of the seat in front of him, waiting with slackened nerves for whatever fate had decided for B. E. A. Flight No. 130. ~ Ian Fleming

Anyone who, in intercourse with men, does not occasionally glisten in all the colors of distress, green and gray with disgust, satiety, sympathy, gloominess, and loneliness, is certainly not a man of elevated tastes; supposing, however, that he does not take all this burden and disgust upon himself voluntarily, that he persistently avoids it, and remains, as I said, quietly and proudly hidden in his citadel, one thing is certain: he was not made, he was not predestined, for knowledge. If he were, he would one day have to say to himself: 'The devil take my good taste! but the rule is more interesting than the exception - than myself, the exception!' And he would go down, and above all, he would go 'inside'. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The citadel of Jones was now taken by surprise. All those considerations of honour and prudence which our heroe had lately with so much military wisdom placed as guards over the avenues of his heart, ran away from their posts, and the god of love marched in, in triumph. ~ Henry Fielding

Weep slept. Dreamers dreamed. A grand moon drifted, and, and the wings of the citadel cut the sky in two: light above, dark below. ~ Laini Taylor

Do you believe in ghosts, Maester?" [Jaime] asked Qyburn.
The man's face grew strange. "Once, at the Citadel, I came into an empty room and saw an empty chair. Yet I knew a woman had been there, only a moment before. The cushion was dented where she'd sat, the cloth was still warm, and her scent lingered in the air. If we leave our smells behind us when we leave a room, surely something of our souls must remain when we leave this life? ~ George R R Martin

For several months they'd been drifting toward political involvement, but the picture was hazy and one of the most confusing elements was their geographical proximity to Berkeley, the citadel of West Coast radicalism. Berkeley is right next door to Oakland, with nothing between them but a line on the map and a few street signs, but in many ways they are as different as Manhattan and the Bronx. Berkeley is a college town and, like Manhattan, a magnet for intellectual transients. Oakland is a magnet for people who want hour-wage jobs and cheap housing, who can't afford to live in Berkeley, San Francisco or any of the middle-class Bay Area suburbs. [10] It is a noisy, ugly, mean-spirited place, with the sort of charm that Chicago had for Sandburg. It is also a natural environment for hoodlums, brawlers, teenage gangs and racial tensions.

The Hell's Angels' massive publicity -- coming hard on the heels of the widely publicized student rebellion in Berkeley -- was interpreted in liberal-radical-intellectual circles as the signal for a natural alliance. Beyond that, the Angels' aggressive, antisocial stance -- their alienation, as it were -- had a tremendous appeal for the more aesthetic Berkeley temperament. Students who could barely get up the nerve to sign a petition or to shoplift a candy bar were fascinated by tales of the Hell's Angels ripping up towns and taking whatever they wanted. Most important, the Angels had a reputation for defying police, for successfully ~ Hunter S. Thompson

By integrating women into particularly military institutes, it cripples the readiness of our defense. Schools like The Citadel train young men to confidently lead other young men into a battlefield where one of them will die. And when you have women in that situation, it creates a whole new set of dynamics which are distracting to training these men to kill or be killed. ~ Christine O'Donnell

As a graduate of the Citadel, the military college of South Carolina, I am astonished by Tolstoy's absolute mastery at describing battles and military tactics. If I were teaching military history in any country in the world, I would make War and Peace required reading for anyone who held any ambition for advancement into the officer corps. It should be on the night table of the leader of every country who wishes to send troops into war. No writer has ever described the horror and anarchy of battle with more authority. It is one of the timeless lessons of War and Peace that no one, not Napoleon, nor the Tsar, nor the Russian general Katuzov, has any idea how a war is going to turn out once it is unleashed. Napoleon ~ Leo Tolstoy

What we love intensely or for a long time we are likely to bring within the citadel, and to assert as part of oneself. ~ Nicolas Chamfort

Midnight! the outpost of advancing day!
The frontier town and citadel of night!
The watershed of Time, from which the streams
Of Yesterday and To-morrow take their way,
One to the land of promise and of light,
One to the land of darkness and of dreams! ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Evil has insinuated itself into our very souls and rules over us from the very citadel erected to guard us against it. ~ Miroslav Volf

The irony is that the opposite is true: available people are the ones who are dangerous, because they confront us with the possibility of real intimacy. They might actually hang around long enough to get to know us. They could melt our defenses, not through violence but through love. This is what the ego doesn't want us to see. Available people are frightening. They threaten the ego's citadel. The reason we're not attracted to them is because we're not available ourselves. ~ Marianne Williamson

The cross does not give us a minor shift or two with regard to a few of our ethical and moral and religious values. The cross radically disrupts the very center and citadel of your life from self to Christ. And if the cross has not done that, you're not a Christian! ~ Albert Martin

Vegard and Riston's job today was to guard and protect me. And considering that I was in a tower room in the Guardians' citadel, it looked like a pretty plum assignment. I mean, how much trouble could a girl get into under heavy guard in a tower room? Notice I didn't ask that question out loud. No need to rub Fate's nose in something when I'd been tempting her enough lately.
Phaelan had generously his guard services as well, just in case something happened to me that my Guardian bodyguards couldn't handle. Phaelan's guard-on-duty stance resembled his pirate-on-shore-leave stane of leaning back in a chair with his feet up, but instead of a tavern table, his boots were doing a fine job of holding down the windowsill. I don't know how I'd ever felt safe without him. ~ Lisa Shearin

He reached for her hand and caught it - lightly - and held it. It was small, smooth, and very real. Up in the citadel, Sarai gasped. She felt the warmth of his skin on hers. A blaze of connection - or collision , as though they had long been wandering in the same labyrinth and had finally rounded the corner that would bring them face-to-face. It was a feeling of being lost and alone and then suddenly neither. ~ Laini Taylor

Jocelyn put out her hand, took Luke's, and kissed the back of it lightly. Clary averted her eyes. Her mother turned back to her a moment later. "God, the Clave - if only they would listen." She blew out a frustrated breath. "Clary, we understand why you did what you did last night, but we thought you were safe. Then Helen showed up on our doorstep and told us you'd been injured in the Citadel battle. I nearly had a heart attack when we found you in the square. Your lips and fingers were blue. Like you'd drowned. If it hadn't been for Magnus - " "Magnus healed me? What's he doing here, in Alicante? ~ Cassandra Clare

Earth is our only citadel in the universe; but we have illogically built many more fortresses within this beautiful castle! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

There's nothing better for kids than a bucket and shovel at the beach. I grew up across the marsh from The Citadel. We loved buying chicken necks at the Piggly Wiggly, tying them to a string on a stick and catching blue crabs. ~ Thomas Gibson

Communism is a hateful thing and a menace to peace and organized government; but the communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of overweening cupidity and selfishness, which insidiously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil, which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wild disorder the citadel of rule. ~ Grover Cleveland

The difference between bush and ladder also allows us to put a lid on a fruitless and boring debate. That debate is over what qualifies as True Language. One side lists some qualities that human language has but that no animal has yet demonstrated: reference, use of symbols displaced of in time and space from their referents, creativity, categorical speech perception, consistent ordering, hierarchical structure, infinity, recursion, and so on. The other side finds some counter-example in the animal kingdom (perhaps budgies can discriminate speech sounds, or dolphins or parrots can attend to word order when carrying out commands, or some songbird can improvise indefinitely without repeating itself), and gloats that the citadel of human uniqueness has been breached. The Human Uniqueness team relinquishes that criterion but emphasizes others or adds new ones to the list, provoking angry objections that they are moving the goalposts. To see how silly this all is, imagine a debate over whether flatworms have True Vision or houseflies have True Hands. Is an iris critical? Eyelashes? Fingernails? Who cares? This is a debate for dictionary-writers, not scientists. Plato and Diogenes were not doing biology when Plato defined man as a "featherless biped" and Diogenes refuted him with a plucked chicken. ~ Steven Pinker

Depend on it, I will defend this little citadel to the utmost. ~ Samuel Johnson

There is a monstrous garden in the sky
Nightly they sow it fresh. Nightly it springs,
Luridly splendid, towards the moon on high.
Red-poppy flares, and fire-bombs rosy-bright
Shell-bursts like hellborn sunflowers, gold and white
Lilies, long-stemmed, that search the heavens' height...
They tend it well, these gardeners on wings!

How rich these blossoms, hideously fair
Sprawling above the shuddering citadel
As though ablaze with laughter! Lord, how long
Must we behold them flower, ruthless, strong
Soaring like weeds the stricken worlds among
Triumphant, gay, these dreadful blooms of hell?

O give us back the garden that we knew
Silent and cool, where silver daisies lie,
The lovely stars! O garden purple-blue
Where Mary trailed her skirts amidst the dew
Of ageless planets, hand-in-hand with You
And Sleep and Peace walked with Eternity.....

But here I sit, and watch the night roll by.
There is a monstrous garden in the sky!

(written during an air raid, London, midnight, October 1941) ~ Margery Lawrence

Every select man strives instinctively for a citadel and a privacy, where he is FREE from the crowd, the many, the majority
where he may forget "men who are the rule," as their exception;
exclusive only of the case in which he is pushed straight to such men by a still stronger instinct, as a discerner in the great and exceptional sense. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Once The Boo roamed this campus fierce, alert, and lion-voiced, and his wrath was a terrible thing. He could scream and rant and call us "bums" a thousand times, but he could not hide his clear and overwhelming love of the Corps. The Corps received that love, took it in, felt it in the deepest places, and now, tonight, we give it back at the school where we started out and we give it to The Boo, as a gift, because once, many years ago, The Boo loved us first, when we were cadets of boys and when we needed it the most. ~ Pat Conroy

But young men have not only this frivolous ambition of being thought masters of execution, inciting them on the one hand, but also their natural sloth tempting them on the other. They are terrified at the prospect before them, of the toil required to attain exactness. The impetuosity of youth is disgusted at the slow approaches of a regular siege, and desires, from mere impatience of labour, to take the citadel by storm. They wish to find some shorter path to excellence, and hope to obtain the reward of eminence by other means, than those which the indispensable rules of art have prescribed. ~ Joshua Reynolds

My career still strikes me as miraculous. That a boy raised on Marine bases in the South, taught by Roman Catholic nuns in backwater Southern towns that loathed Catholics, and completed his education with an immersion into The Citadel - the whole story sounds fabricated, impossible even to me. Maybe especially to me. ~ Pat Conroy

There was between 1821 and 1913 a prolonged and atrocious holocaust which we have chosen to forget, and from which we have learned absolutely nothing. In 1821, between 26 March and Easter Sunday, in the name of liberty, the southern Greek Christians tortured and
massacred 15,000 Greek Muslim civilians, looted their possessions, and burned their dwellings. The Greek hero Kolokotronis boasted without qualm that so many were the corpses that his horse's hooves never had to touch the
ground between the town gates of Athens and the citadel. In the Peloponnese, many thousands of Muslims, mainly women and children, were rounded up and butchered. Thousands of shrines and mosques were destroyed, so that even now there are only one or two left in the whole of Greece. ~ Louis De Bernieres

And I have begun thinking of that life as miraculous and lucky. How could a man I had dreaded as my commandant and who tried twice to get me kicked out of college become the subject of the first book I would write? [ ... ] Who could have foreseen the day I would deliver his eulogy at the Summerall Chapel, or that I would give a speech on the night they named the dining room in the new Alumni Hall after him? Not me. Not once. Not ever. ~ Pat Conroy

This nation was established by the God of heaven as a citadel of liberty. A Constitution guaranteeing those liberties was designed under the superintending influence of heaven. ~ Ezra Taft Benson

The brain is the highest of the organs in position, and it is protected by the vault of the head; it has no flesh or blood or refuse. It is the citadel of sense-perception. ~ Pliny The Elder

To endeavor to domineer over conscience, is to invade the citadel of heaven. ~ Charles V

I started the Stress Reduction Clinic in 1979. The idea of bringing Buddhist meditation without the Buddhism into the mainstream of medicine was tantamount to the Visigoths being at the gates about to tear down the citadel of Western civilization. ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

Zeus most glorious and most great, Thundercloud, throned in the heavens! Let not the sun go down and the darkness come, until I cast down headlong the citadel of Priam in flames, and burn his gates with blazing fire, and tear to rags the shirt upon Hectors breast! May many of his men fall about him prone in the dust and bite the earth! ~ Homer

Oh my God. Party punch. He'd brought a woman with the social age of twelve to the Citadel. He deserved everything he got. ~ Annabel Joseph

Do the people of the world not yet realize that by fighting on until the bitter end I am not only performing my sacred duty to my people, but standing guard in the last citadel of collective security? Are they too blind to see that I have my responsibilities to the whole of humanity to face? I must still hold on until my tardy allies appear. And if they never come, then I say prophetically and without bitterness: The West will perish. ~ Haile Selassie

When conditions are such that life offers no earthly hope, somewhere somehow, men must find refuge. Then they fly from the terror without to the citadel within, which famine and pestilence and fire and sword cannot shake. What Goethe calls the inner universe, can live by its own laws, create its own security, be sufficient unto itself, when once reality is denied to the turmoil of the world without. ~ Edith Hamilton

He was a good man ... No. He was a great man. A maester of the Citadel, chained and sworn, and Sworn Brother of the Night's Watch, ever faithful. When he was born they named him for a hero who had died too young, but though he lived a long long time, his own life was no less heroic. No man was wiser, or gentler, or kinder. At the Wall, a dozen lords commander came and went during his years of service, but he was always there to counsel them. He counseled kings as well. He could have been a king himself, but when they offered him the crown he told them they should give it to his younger brother. How many men would do that? He was the blood of the dragon, but now his fire has gone out. He was Aemon Targaryen. And now his watch is ended. ~ George R R Martin

The Sanctuary and its deities were the main source of the city's income. Visitors paid to enter the city. They had to buy the correct apparel to perform rituals in the Sanctuary. They had to pay again to acquire offerings for the gods. Mecca was not just one of the world's oldest shrines, it was a citadel for capitalism. The people who oiled the wheels of Meccan religious life were known as Hums. ~ Ziauddin Sardar

Was there, then, no strength in growing up? No solace in being an adult? No sanctuary in life? No fleshly citadel strong enough to withstand the scrabbling assault of midnights? ~ Ray Bradbury

What cities, as great as this, have ... promised themselves immortality! Posterity can hardly trace the situation of some. The sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins of others ... Here stood their citadel, but now grown over with weeds; there their senate-house, but now the haunt of every noxious reptile; temples and theatres stood here, now only an undistinguished heap of ruins. ~ Oliver Goldsmith

He felt the tremble ... Why? But she was bigger, stronger, more intelligent than
himself, wasn't she? Did she, too, feel that intangible menace, that groping out of
darkness, that crouching malignancy down below? Was there, then, no strength in
growing up? No solace in being an adult? No sanctuary in life? No fleshly citadel strong
enough to withstand the scrabbling assault of midnights? Doubts flushed him. ~ Ray Bradbury

So the women would not forgive. Their passion remained intact, carefully guarded and nurtured by the bitter knowledge of all they had lost, of all that had been stolen from them. For generations they vilified the Yankee race so the thief would have a face, a name, a mysterious country into which he had withdrawn and from which he might venture again. They banded together into a militant freemasonry of remembering, and from that citadel held out against any suggestion that what they had suffered and lost might have been in vain. They created the Lost Cause, and consecrated that proud fiction with the blood of real men. To the Lost Cause they dedicated their own blood, their own lives, and to it they offered books, monographs, songs, acres and acres of bad poetry. They fashioned out of grief and loss an imaginary world in which every Southern church had stabled Yankee horses, every nick in Mama's furniture was made by Yankee spurs, every torn painting was the victim of Yankee sabre - a world in which paint did not stick to plaster walls because of the precious salt once hidden there; in which bloodstains could not be washed away and every other house had been a hospital. ~ Howard Bahr

Softened by Time's consummate plush,
How sleek the woe appears
That threatened childhood's citadel
And undermined the years!
Bisected now by bleaker griefs,
We envy the despair
That devastated childhood's realm,
So easy to repair. ~ Emily Dickinson

Love is a breach in the walls, a broken gate, Love sells the proud heart's citadel to fate. ~ Rupert Brooke

She stared at him breathlessly, seething. It was like hurling herself against a wall of granite, she thought disjointedly; fighting against him hurt her. But if she yielded to the unreasoned impulse of her love at this moment and flung herself into his arms in contrite tears, she would never come so close again to the citadel in his soul that he let no one approach unscathed. ~ Teresa Denys

At the back of it there lies the central citadel of obstinacy: I will not give up my right to myself
the thing God intends you to give up if ever you are going to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. ~ Oswald Chambers

Boots and guns had replaced banners and horses, but the story was the same. Men with black hearts. With black souls. ~ Kate Mosse

From the beginning, I've told journalists that I planned to write better than any writer of my era who graduated from an Ivy League college. It sounds boastful and it is. But The Citadel taught me that I was a man of courage when I survived that merciless crucible of a four-year test that is the measure of The Citadel experience. I'm the kind of writer I am because of The Citadel. ~ Pat Conroy

Frequent and violent temptations were a proof that the citadel of the soul had not fallen and that the devil raged to make it fall. ~ James Joyce

Nothing is more private than a woman's body; it is her physical, emotional, and moral citadel. She cannot be free at all if she is not free to decide for herself, in private, what to do with her body. ~ Lewis B. Smedes

Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish,
A vapor sometime like a bear or lion,
A towered citadel, a pendant rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon't that nod unto the world
And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these
signs:
They are black vesper's pageants. ~ William Shakespeare

If the king had given me for my own
Paris, his citadel,
And I for that must leave alone
Her whom I love so well,
I'd say then to the Crown
Take back your glittering town
My darling is more fair, I swear.
My darling is more fair. ~ Richard Wilbur