
The Oath of the Horatii, by Jacques-Louis David, 1784. Louvre, Paris.
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Miscellany
A character in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, which is set in the run-up to the July Revolution in France, says at one point, “Politics…is a stone tied round the neck of literature which submerges it in less than six months. Politics in the midst of imaginative matter is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert. The noise is racking without being energetic. It does not harmonize with the sound of any instrument.”
The only justification of rebellion is success.
—Thomas B. Reed, 1878