Reverse Brute

Famous quotes containing the words reverse and/or brute:

    They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
    Bible: Hebrew Isaiah, 2:4.

    The words reappear in Micah 4:3, and the reverse injunction is made in Joel 3:10 (”Beat your plowshares into swords ...”)

    When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs ... I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)