Pendulum Quotes

“Is it true that man was once perfectly pure and innocent, and that he became degenerate by disobedience? No. The real truth is, and the history of man shows, that he has advanced. Events, like the pendulum of a clock have swung forward and backward, but after all, man, like the hands, has gone steadily on. Man is growing grander. He is not degenerating. Nations and individuals fail and die, and make room for higher forms. The intellectual horizon of the world widens as the centuries pass. Ideals grow grander and purer; the difference between justice and mercy becomes less and less; liberty enlarges, and love intensifies as the years sweep on. The ages of force and fear, of cruelty and wrong, are behind us and the real Eden is beyond. It is said that a desire for knowledge lost us the Eden of the past; but whether that is true or not, it will certainly give us the Eden of the future.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“The "mood of the nation," in 1972, was so overwhelmingly vengeful, greedy, bigoted, and blindly reactionary that no presidential candidate who even faintly reminded "typical voters" of the fear & anxiety they'd felt during the constant "social upheavals" of the 1960s had any chance at all of beating Nixon last year--not even Ted Kennedy--because the pendulum "effect" that began with Nixon's slim victory in '68 was totally irreversible by 1972. After a decade of left-bent chaos, the Silent Majority was so deep in a behavorial sink that their only feeling for politics was a powerful sense of revulsion. All they wanted in the White House was a man who would leave them alone and do anything necessary to bring calmness back into their lives”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72

“I swing like a pendulum between
the darkness and the light,
sometimes it feels like gallows
other times it feels like flight.”
― Collette O'Mahony, The Soul in Words: A collection of Poetry & Verse

“The pendulum had swung too far, as always, and now was swinging back, and the horror of intolerance had been loosed upon the land.”
― Clifford D. Simak, Time Is the Simplest Thing

“Science gains from it [the pendulum] more than one can expect. With its huge dimensions, the apparatus presents qualities that one would try in vain to communicate by constructing it on a small [scale], no matter how carefully. Already the regularity of its motion promises the most conclusive results. One collects numbers that, compared with the predictions of theory, permit one to appreciate how far the true pendulum approximates or differs from the abstract system called 'the simple pendulum'.”
― Jean Bernard Léon Foucault

“Swung by the swing of her seat in her tantalizing gait, her hair in plait pictured a pendulum that caressed her bottom.”
― B.S. Murthy, Benign Flame: Saga of Love