--- Becky Chalmers, in A Psalm for the Wild-built (2021), p. 135
Excerpt
“Find the strength to do both,” Mosscap said, quoting the phrase painted on the wagon.
“Exactly,” Dex said.
“But what’s both?”
Dex recited: “ ‘Without constructs, you will unravel few mysteries. Without knowledge of mysteries, your constructs will fail. These pursuits are what makes us, but without comfort, you will lack the strength to sustain either.’ ”
“Is that from your Insights?” Mosscap asked.
“Yeah,” Dex said.
--- Wendell Mayes, line given to Adm. Nimitz-character, played by Henry Fonda, in the movie "In Harm's Way"
--- JP de Vries (yours truly), though I imagine I saw this somewhere once.
A slightly longer version:
Politics is the business of trying to make you live according to my values, including spending your money on my priorities.
--- Latin saying, via Jason Zweig's essay in the WSJ, "Donald Trump’s Ageless Advice for Mark Zuckerberg," 5 November 2021
Excerpt
The Latin saying “nomen est omen” can be loosely translated as “your name is your fate.” By renaming itself Meta, Facebook has identified itself inextricably with a metaverse future. In the eyes of the public, the business will become what it is named. That could end up making the company even more of a lightning rod for criticism than it already is.
In another excerpt he compares names with strategies, which resonates for me with mythology: it's easier to grab onto a god's name than to understand what they represent.
That’s because a name is easier to criticize than a strategy, says Margaret Wolfson, founder of River and Wolf LLC, a naming agency in New York. “To talk about a strategy takes a lot more time and analysis,” she says. “But names are handles: They’re easy to grab onto, and criticizing them can turn into a blood sport.”
--- (update 13 Dec 2023) the earliest match using “war” attributed to popular author Fannie Hurst by QuoteInvestigator, 2 Aug 2021
--- (original post 4 Nov 2021) attributed to Leon Trotsky for X = "the dialectic" and "war", see Wikipedia entry
From QuoteInvestigator (QI)
The earliest match using “war” located by QI appeared in the “Cleveland Plain Dealer” of Ohio in 1941. The popular author Fannie Hurst used the expression while addressing a “Freedom Day” rally in Cleveland. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:
“We may not be interested in this war, but it is interested in us. I’m not trying to sell it to you, but no one can evade the fact that we are in the path of the storm. We dare not be disunited when liberty, the most precious jewel in our national strongbox, is at stake.
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
QI has found no substantive evidence that Leon Trotsky employed the saying about war. QI conjectures that the attribution to Trotsky occurred via a multistep process that began with statements about dialectics.
From Wikipedia, accessed 4 Nov 2021
This was attributed to Trotsky in an epigraph in Night Soldiers: A Novel (1988) by Alan Furst but it may actually be a revision of a statement earlier attributed to Trotsky: "You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you." Only a very loose translation of "the dialectic" would produce "war."
...
In a later work, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (2000) by Michael Walzer, the author states: "War is most often a form of tyranny. It is best described by paraphrasing Trotsky's aphorism about the dialectic: 'You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.'"
This statement on dialectic itself seems to be a paraphrase, with the original in In Defense of Marxism Part VII : "Petty-Bourgeois Moralists and the Proletarian Party" (1942) — where Trotsky publishes a letter to Albert Goldman (5 June 1940) has been translated as "Burnham doesn't recognize dialectics but dialectics does not permit him to escape from its net."
--- Peter Heehs, in "Myth, History, and Theory," History and Theory 33(1), 1–19, https://doi.org/10.2307/2505649, paraphrasing William H. McNeill (I think)
William H. McNeill also is interested in the relationship between historiography and mythology. So-called scientific history, he asserts, is itself the result of a belief system with unquestioned assumptions. All such systems, the scientific included, are mythic. In a world of competing sets of assumptions, each group affirms its own beliefs in order "to live more comfortably, insulated from troublesome dissent." (This is reminiscent of the effort of Hobsbawm's inventors to avoid anxiety in an ever-changing world by linking up with an invariant past.) Every group calls other belief-systems myths, its own the truth; but of course other groups do the same. Formerly historians believed they were in a position to decide which "truth" was true and which was "myth." But this is not possible in the postmodern age. The best historians can do is to try to "attain better historiographical balance between Truth, truths and myth." When historians exert themselves to produce a presentation of "truths" (not Truth) that is credible and intelligible to a given audience, the result is what "might best be called mythistory." (Citation: William H. McNeill, "Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History and Historians," American Historical Review 91 (1986), 4, 8.