There are varieties of theories of revolution. According to one of these theories, only one of these theories, revolutions occur when there is an explosion of rising expectation. And amongst the lower strata in Iranian society, we are witnessing an increasing rise of the expectation and it's clear that the regime is incapable of satisfying these demands.
With a popular show, you know that there's expectations there, so that's a little nerve-wracking when you're new and you're just trying to find your legs on something, but it's exciting, too, because that's what we work so hard for.
I see knowledge increasing and human power increasing, I see everincreasing possibilities before life, and I see no limits set to it all. Existence impresses me as a perpetual dawn. Our lives, as I apprehend them, swim in expectation.
The case for trade is not just monetary, but moral. Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy.
We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors' victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.
Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive; survival -going on living- thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it; because it does not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will, to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on.
William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour. We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.
There have been occasions in my later life (I suppose as in most lives) when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all its interest and romance, to shut me out from anything save dull endurance any more. Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and blank, as when my way in life lay stretched out straight before me through the newly-entered road of apprenticeship to Joe.