Randolph Silliman Bourne (1886–1918) was a progressive writer and “leftist intellectual” born in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and a graduate of Columbia University. Bourne is best known for his essays, especially his unfinished work “The State,” discovered after his death.
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No matter what we have come through, or how many perils we have safely passed, or how many imperfect and jagged – in some places perhaps irreparably – our life has been, we cannot in our heart of hearts imagine how it could have been different. As we look back on it, it slips in behind us in orderly array, and, with all its mistakes, acquires a sort of eternal fitness, and even, at times, of poetic glamour.
—Randolph Bourne
Topics: Reflection
A man with few friends is only half-developed; there are whole sides of his nature which are locked up and have never been expressed. He cannot unlock them himself, he cannot even discover them; friends alone can stimulate him and open him.
—Randolph Bourne
Topics: Friendship
Good friendships are fragile things and require as much care as any other fragile and precious thing.
—Randolph Bourne
Topics: Friendship
Friendships are fragile things and require as much care in handling as any other fragile and precious thing.
—Randolph Bourne
Topics: Friendship, Friends and Friendship
Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue it likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.
—Randolph Bourne
Topics: Society
Diplomacy is a disguised war, in which states seek to gain by barter and intrigue, by the cleverness of arts, the objectives which they would have to gain more clumsily by means of war.
—Randolph Bourne
Topics: Diplomacy
We may by our excessive prudence squeeze out of the life we are guarding so anxiously all the adventurous quality that makes it worth living.
—Randolph Bourne
Topics: Risk, Risk-taking
Our real duty is always found running in the direction of our worthiest desires.
—Randolph Bourne
History remembers only the brilliant failures and the brilliant successes.
—Randolph Bourne
Topics: History
We can easily become as much slaves to precaution as we can to fear. Although we can never rivet our fortune so tight as to make it impregnible, we may by our excessive prudence squeeze out of the life that we are guarding so anxiously all the adventurous quality that makes it worth living.
—Randolph Bourne
Topics: Courage
Good talk is like good scenery — continuous, yet constantly varying, and full of the charm of novelty and surprise.
—Randolph Bourne
Topics: Conversation
Self-recognition is necessary to know one’s road, but, knowing the road, the price of the mistakes and perils is worth paying. The following of that road will be all the discipline one needs. Discipline does not mean being molded by outside forces, but sticking to one’s road against the forces that would deflect or bury the soul. People speak of finding one.
—Randolph Bourne
Topics: Society
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