Blue Government Ensign

Famous quotes containing the words blue, government and/or ensign:

    It was beginning winter,
    An in-between time,
    The landscape still partly brown:
    The bones of weeds kept swinging in the wind,
    Above the blue snow.
    Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)

    During the first formative centuries of its existence, Christianity was separated from and indeed antagonistic to the state, with which it only later became involved. From the lifetime of its founder, Islam was the state, and the identity of religion and government is indelibly stamped on the memories and awareness of the faithful from their own sacred writings, history, and experience.
    Bernard Lewis, U.S. Middle Eastern specialist. Islam and the West, ch. 8, Oxford University Press (1993)

    How oft when men are at the point of death
    Have they been merry! which their keepers call
    A lightning before death: O, how may I
    Call this a lightning? O my love! my wife!
    Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,
    Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty:
    Thou art not conquered; beauty’s ensign yet
    Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
    And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)