There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

-Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)
  Four Quartets,'East Coker', pt.5.

Bad as our urban conditions often are, there isnot a slum in the country which has a third of the infantile death- rate of the royal family in the middle ages.

-Haldane,J(ohn) B(urdon) S(anderson)
 Daedalus, or Science and the Future.

Nothing is more futile than theorizing about music. No doubt there are laws, mathematically strict laws, but these laws are not music; they are only its conditions† The essence of music is revelation.

-Heine, Heinrich
  Letters on the French Stage.

I saw his play under bad conditions. The curtain was up.

-Kaufman, George S(imon)
Of  Alexander Woollcott. Quoted in Scott Meredith George S Kaufman and His Friends (1974).

The news is not a mirror of social conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself.

-Lippmann,Walter
  Public Opinion, ch.23.

The function of news is to signalize an event, the functionoftruth istobring to lightthehiddenfacts, toset them into relationwith each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.

-Lippmann,Walter
  Public Opinion, ch.23.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, and the spirit of conditions that are unspiritual. It is the opium of the people.

-Marx, Karl Heinrich
^4  A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.

We the Peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, whichtwice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to 873 mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignityand worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, and for these ends, to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one anotherasgood neighbours, and tounite our strengthto maintain international peace and security, and to ensure by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples, have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims.

-United Nations Charter
  26 Jun.