Famous Mason Quotes

On the first landing, Langdon came face-to-face with a bronze bust of Masonic luminary Albert Pike, along with the engraving of his most famous quote: What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.

Mason, I thought you were on my side?” “I’ve been known to play both. Recent revelation of mine.” Smartass.

The Russian-born novelist's writing habits were famously peculiar. Beginning in 1950, he composed first drafts in pencil on ruled index cards, which he stored in long file boxes. Since Nabokov claimed, he pictured an entire novel in complete form before he began writing it, this method allowed him to compose passages out of sequence, in whatever order he pleased...

There was a café, a minute or two from the Executive Home, that I used to go to every morning. The barista was very young and looked like a non-specific famous person. One day I made a joke about it as he pressed the lid onto my coffee. He said something disappointingly flirtatious in response and by the end of the week I had entered into a mandatory banter relationship with him. It quickly became onerous and I started going to a café that was farther away, where the coffee was less good and where I did not have to talk.

West Country novelist Thomas Hardy almost did not survive his birth in 1840 because everyone thought he was stillborn. He did not appear to be breathing and was put to one side for dead. The nurse attending the birth only by chance noticed a slight movement that showed the baby was in fact alive. He lived to be 87 and gave the world 18 novels, including some of the most widely read in English literature. When he did die, there was controversy over where he should be laid to rest. Public opinion felt him too famous to lie anywhere other than in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, the national shrine. He, however, had left clear instructions to be buried in Stinsford, near his birthplace and next to his parents, grandparents, first wife and sister. A compromise was brokered. His ashes were interred in the Abbey. His heart would be buried in his beloved home county. The plan agreed, his heart was taken to his sister’s house ready for burial. Shortly before, as it lay ready on the kitchen table, the family cat grabbed it and disappeared with it into the woods. Although, simultaneously with the national funeral in Westminster Abbey, a burial ceremony took place on 16 January 1928, at Stinsford, there is uncertainty to this day as to what was in the casket: some say it was buried empty; others that it contained the captured cat which had consumed the heart.

When a boy grows up in a “dysfunctional” family (perhaps there is no other kind of family), his interior warriors will be killed off early. Warriors, mythologically, lift their swords to defend the king. The King in a child stands for and stands up for the child’s mood. But when we are children our mood gets easily overrun and swept over in the messed-up family by the more powerful, more dominant, more terrifying mood of the parent. We can say that when the warriors inside cannot protect our mood from being disintegrated, or defend our body from invasion, the warriors collapse, go into trance, or die. The inner warriors I speak of do not cross the boundary aggressively; they exist to defend the boundary. The Fianna, that famous band of warriors who defended Ireland’s borders, would be a model. The Fianna stayed out all spring and summer watching the boundaries, and during the winter came in. But a typical child has no such protection. If a grown-up moves to hit a child, or stuff food into the child’s mouth, there is no defense—it happens. If the grown-up decides to shout, and penetrate the child’s auditory boundaries by sheer violence, it happens. Most parents invade the child’s territory whenever they wish, and the child, trying to maintain his mood by crying, is simply carried away, mood included. Each child lives deep inside his or her own psychic house, or soul castle, and the child deserves the right of sovereignty inside that house. Whenever a parent ignores the child’s sovereignty, and invades, the child feels not only anger, but shame. The child concludes that if it has no sovereignty, it must be worthless. Shame is the name we give to the sense that we are unworthy and inadequate as human beings. Gershen Kauffman describes that feeling brilliantly in his book, Shame, and Merle Fossum and Marilyn Mason in their book, Facing Shame, extend Kauffman’s work into the area of family shame systems and how they work. When our parents do not respect our territory at all, their disrespect seems overwhelming proof of our inadequacy. A slap across the face pierces deeply, for the face is the actual boundary of our soul, and we have been penetrated. If a grown-up decides to cross our sexual boundaries and touch us, there is nothing that we as children can do about it. Our warriors die. The child, so full of expectation of blessing whenever he or she is around an adult, stiffens with shock, and falls into the timeless fossilized confusion of shame. What is worse, one sexual invasion, or one beating, usually leads to another, and the warriors, if revived, die again. When a boy grows up in an alcoholic family, his warriors get swept into the river by a vast wave of water, and they struggle there, carried downriver. The child, boy or girl, unprotected, gets isolated, and has more in common with snow geese than with people.

The most interesting aspects of the story lie between the two extremes of coercion and popularity. It might be instructive to consider fascist regimes’ management of workers, who were surely the most recalcitrant part of the population. It is clear that both Fascism and Nazism enjoyed some success in this domain. According to Tim Mason, the ultimate authority on German workers under Nazism, the Third Reich “contained” German workers by four means: terror, division, some concessions, and integration devices such as the famous Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude) leisure-time organization. Let there be no doubt that terror awaited workers who resisted directly. It was the cadres of the German Socialist and Communist parties who filled the first concentration camps in 1933, before the Jews. Since socialists and communists were already divided, it was not hard for the Nazis to create another division between those workers who continued to resist and those who decided to try to live normal lives. The suppression of autonomous worker organizations allowed fascist regimes to address workers individually rather than collectively. Soon, demoralized by the defeat of their unions and parties, workers were atomized, deprived of their usual places of sociability, and afraid to confide in anyone. Both regimes made some concessions to workers—Mason’s third device for worker “containment.” They did not simply silence them, as in traditional dictatorships. After power, official unions enjoyed a monopoly of labor representation. The Nazi Labor Front had to preserve its credibility by actually paying some attention to working conditions. Mindful of the 1918 revolution, the Third Reich was willing to do absolutely anything to avoid unemployment or food shortages. As the German economy heated up in rearmament, there was even some wage creep. Later in the war, the arrival of slave labor, which promoted many German workers to the status of masters, provided additional satisfactions. Mussolini was particularly proud of how workers would fare under his corporatist constitution. The Labor Charter (1927) promised that workers and employers would sit down together in a “corporation” for each branch of the economy, and submerge class struggle in the discovery of their common interests. It looked very imposing by 1939 when a Chamber of Corporations replaced parliament. In practice, however, the corporative bodies were run by businessmen, while the workers’ sections were set apart and excluded from the factory floor. Mason’s fourth form of “containment”—integrative devices—was a specialty of fascist regimes. Fascists were past masters at manipulating group dynamics: the youth group, the leisure-time association, party rallies. Peer pressure was particularly powerful in small groups. There the patriotic majority shamed or intimidated nonconformists into at least keeping their mouths shut. Sebastian Haffner recalled how his group of apprentice magistrates was sent in summer 1933 on a retreat, where these highly educated young men, mostly non-Nazis, were bonded into a group by marching, singing, uniforms, and drill. To resist seemed pointless, certain to lead nowhere but to prison and an end to the dreamed-of career. Finally, with astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute. These various techniques of social control were successful.

In 1784, Mozart was also admitted to the Freemasons, and the guild became an important institution to him for the remainder of his life. Many in his social circle were also Masons, he regularly attended meetings at his local lodge, and even composed several pieces of Masonic music, the most famous being a funerary piece he composed on the occasion of the deaths of two close friends.

The seven official founders were as follows: •  Michael Cusack from Carron, County Clare, a teacher •  Maurice Davin from Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, a farmer •  John Wyse Power, a journalist, editor of the Leinster Leader and an ‘associate of the extreme section of Irish Nationalism’ •  James K. Bracken, a building contractor and a monumental mason from Templemore, County Tipperary, who was a prominent member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood •  Joseph P. O’Ryan, who was born in Carrick-on-Suir and practised as a solicitor in Callan and Thurles •  John McKay, a Belfast man then working as a journalist with the Cork Examiner •  District Inspector St George McCarthy, who was born in Bansha, County Tipperary and who was a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary stationed at Templemore THE UNOFFICIAL LIST As well as the official founders a number of other people are reputed to have been present at the meeting. They include Frank Moloney from Nenagh, William Foley from Carrick-on-Suir and Thurles residents T.K. Dwyer, Charles Culhane, William Delahunty, John Butler and Michael Cantwell. There is a strong Kilkenny tradition that Henry Joseph Meagher, father of the famous Lory, Jack Hoyne, who played on Kilkenny’s first All-Ireland winning side in 1904, and a third Tullaroan man, Ned Teehan, also attended the foundation meeting

The journalist Mason Currey, who spent half a decade cataloging the habits of famous thinkers and writers (and from whom I learned the previous two examples), summarized this tendency toward systematization as follows: There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration—that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where … but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration. In a New York Times column on the topic, David Brooks summarizes this reality more bluntly: “[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.

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He smiled and left me to my misgivings about Paris Denard. The man had received too many accolades for too little suffering and now wore them like medals of valor everywhere he went. A little more notoriety and his ego would bring him one short step away from the ugly little snare that waits and watches for those too fond of themselves. It is the same nasty little trap that lures the nouveau rich or puerile famous. As fame and notoriety take hold, suddenly you are surrounded with an ample variety of overindulgences available to you most any time. Innocently you begin sampling the ones that do not offend your morals or ethics while secretly eyeing those that do. After a while, the lines become blurred and they all become indulgences that you rightly deserve, a normal part of the avant-garde life style you lead. The compromises become greater and greater until you are so possessed by overindulgence that you are a person owned by indiscretions, and those who provide them. That is the trap. You lose your self, one sin at a time, until those who specialize in sin can make you serve them and do most anything they require you to do to further their own aims. It is at that point many wealthy or famous individuals decide there is no going back, though they are unwilling to continue. They help fill the news and star magazines with the regretful obituaries of people who gave so much, and who were so dearly loved it seemed unthinkable that they took their own lives. They will always be remembered. There will always be gratitude.

ANYONE WRITING ABOUT Francis Marion immediately confronts the task of sifting fact from folklore. The mythmaking began with the first and highly embellished biography of him, written in 1809 by Mason L. “Parson” Weems, the same man who fabricated the famous story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. The romantic tradition continued with the Walt Disney television series that ran from 1959 to 1961, starring Leslie Nielsen as the Swamp Fox, and took another turn in 2000 with the popular film The Patriot, in which Mel Gibson portrayed a Rambo-like action figure loosely, if inaccurately, based on Marion. As stated on an interpretive marker at Marion’s gravesite in Pineville, South Carolina, much about the Swamp Fox remains obscured by legend, even though his achievements are “significant and real.

It was very brave of them to accept at all, and in hindsight unfair of us to expect them to reveal their innermost psyches to a group of near strangers with a tape recorder set up. They were guarded, very reserved, and we didn’t use any material from their session. We must have had a very clear idea of what we did want, since it would have been unthinkable otherwise for us to turn down two such famous voices. In contrast, Paul’s guitarist Henry McCullough (‘I don’t know, I was really drunk at the time’) and his wife were frighteningly open: they went straight into a story of a recent and somewhat physically violent argument they had had, like some particularly aggressive edition of a Jerry Springer show.

We need to make them fuck, not fall in love,” Lyric says. “Doesn’t romance lead to fucking?” Mason asks.

The journalist Mason Currey, who spent half a decade cataloging the habits of famous thinkers and writers (and from whom I learned the previous two examples), summarized this tendency toward systematization as follows:

Thus, as the Communication is a long sequence of Fortified remounting stations, so is the Line a long sequence of Taverns and Ordinaries, and absences of the same. One day, the Meridian having been closely enough establish’d, and with an hour or two of free time available to them, one heads north, one south, and ’tis Dixon’s luck to discover The Rabbi of Prague, headquarters of a Kabbalistick Faith, in Correspondence with the Elect Cohens of Paris, whose private Salute they now greet Dixon with, the Fingers spread two and two, and the Thumb held away from them likewise, said to represent the Hebrew letter Shin and to signify, “Live long and prosper.” The area just beyond the next Ridge is believ’d to harbor a giant Golem, or Jewish Automaton, taller than the most ancient of the Trees. As explain’d to Dixon, ’twas created by an Indian tribe widely suppos’d to be one of the famous Lost Tribes of Israel, who had somehow given up control of the Creature, sending it headlong into the Forest, where it would learn of its own gift of Mobile Invisibility.

The journalist Mason Currey, who spent half a decade cataloging the habits of famous thinkers and writers (and from whom I learned the previous two examples), summarized this tendency toward systematization as follows: There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration—that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where… but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration.

the king laughed. “You could ask her anything, and she’ll know the answer. Watch. Baroness, who is the wealthiest amongst the nobles at this very moment?” “Lord Allen,” the Baroness chuckled. “And who is the most well connected?” Temin asked with a drunken grin. “Myself, of course,” she replied. “What about the most likely to be killed?” the king chuckled, but the Baroness looked less amused. “Mason Flynt.” Everyone sobered a little as they looked my way, but I couldn’t help laughing. “Damn straight. How about the most likely to be killed by me?” The Baroness calmly sipped her Rosh, but after a moment, she eyed me with a smirk. “That is a question I cannot answer,” she admitted. “Your actions are difficult to predict.” “Are they, though?” I asked with a roguish grin. “I thought I was sooo predictable. I have this annoying habit of protecting civilians at all costs.” Temin snorted through his chicken wing, and the Baroness blushed under my gaze. “True,” she allowed, “but your morals are famously partial. Your dedication to protecting others ceases where any danger to the ones you love begins. This complicates matters exceedingly.” I furrowed my brow as Nulena looked away and finished her drink, but I had too much Rosh in me to try and reason my way through her statement.

Dudley’s bait, but Dudley had said the very thing Harry had been thinking himself . . . maybe he didn’t have any friends at Hogwarts. . . . Wish they could see famous Harry Potter now, he thought savagely as he spread manure on the flower beds, his back aching, sweat running down his face. It was half past seven in the evening when at last, exhausted, he heard Aunt Petunia calling him. “Get in here! And walk on the newspaper!” Harry moved gladly into the shade of the gleaming kitchen. On top of the fridge stood tonight’s pudding: a huge mound of whipped cream and sugared violets. A loin of roast pork was sizzling in the oven. “Eat quickly! The Masons will be here soon!” snapped Aunt Petunia, pointing to two slices of bread and a lump of cheese on the kitchen table. She was already wearing a salmon-pink cocktail dress. Harry washed his hands and bolted down his pitiful supper. The moment he had finished, Aunt Petunia whisked away his plate. “Upstairs! Hurry!” As he passed the door to the living room, Harry caught a glimpse of Uncle Vernon and Dudley in bow ties and dinner jackets. He had only