Henry David Thoreau Quotes
Time cannot bend the line which God has writ.
Thoreau, Henry David. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. James Munroe and Company, 1849, p. 336.
This quotation is sometimes used as an illustration of a difficulty that many Western officials have in dealing with Islamic governments. Failure of their plans, policies, and strategies do not become a learning experience or an example to guide the future. The failure was the will of Allah and not the result of the policy. So repeating the strategy of staying with the policy is not per se destructive or useless. Allah may favor it the next time. So there are no consequences of bad policies. Only destiny which Allah has shaped for any of a thousand reasons which are not known to man.
Henry David Thoreau was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience" (originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government"), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.
