Date: 1787
"They will not always expertly distinguish the several species of geniuses, the golden, the silver, the brazen, and the iron."
preview | full record— Adams, John (1735-1826)
Date: 1845
"No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose."
preview | full record— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)
Date: 1845
"Under its influence, the tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness."
preview | full record— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)
Date: 1845
"I then presented an appearance enough to affect any but a heart of iron."
preview | full record— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)
Date: 1854
"They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay."
preview | full record— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Date: 1922
"When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected...
preview | full record— Eliot, T. S. (1888-1965)
Date: February 8, 1996
"These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron."
preview | full record— Barlow, John Perry (b. 1947)
Date: 2001
"Pebble, question, soul: no one can see all sides at once, but there is no side that cannot be seen."
preview | full record— Richardson, James (b. 1950)
Date: October 28, 2012
"Each grasped, in the unflinching gaze of the other, a silent acknowledgment of the nobility of man, especially as manifested in work, the work that purified the soul the way steel is purified in the smelter. That sort of thing."
preview | full record— Saunders, George (b. 1958)
Date: June 19, 2013
"Where they (it was held) re-made the world visually and emotionally in the smithies of their tortured souls (to paraphrase James Joyce), Warhol blithely swiped subject matter from mass media."
preview | full record— Sartwell, Crispin (b. 1958)