The lover of romance may lie in the sun, caring not for the time of day and content to watch the butterflies that cross his blue sky on the way from one flower to another. But the historian is an entomologist who must be stirring. He must catch the moths, which are his facts, in the net which is his memory, and he must fasten them upon his paper with sharp pins, which are dates.
Francis Marion Crawford, Don Orsino (1891).
Constantly writer after writer would come to me in Hollywood to invite me into Communist activities and I would laugh at them and point out the utter inconsistency of a man making fifteen hundred dollars a week or more, doing next to nothing, going for a philosophy which would destroy just that and put them back where they were when the golden cornucopia splayed them.
Jack Woodford (1894–1971) was a successful American pulp novelist and non-fiction writer of the 1930s and 1940s. He had a brief stint in Hollywood, and wrote about his literary adventures in his 1962 autobiography.
All sentient life is concerned with property, either instinctively or rationally. No organism capable of volitional action can escape the demands arising within it for some kind of property relationship. Survival of all beings capable of consciousness is predicated directly upon some kind of property relationship.
Robert LeFevre, The Philosophy of Ownership (1966), first page.
Having heard all of this you may choose to look the other way but you can never again say you did not know.
Anti-slavery politician William Wilberforce (1759-1833), closing a speech in House of Commons (1791), as quoted in Once Blind: The Life of John Newton (2008) by Kay Marshall Strom, p. 225.
So is there no kind of life more wicked than that of mercenary Souldiers, who without any respect had to the equity of the Cause, fight only for plunder and pay.
Hugo Grotius, The Most Excellent Hugo Grotius His Three Books Treating of the Rights of War and Peace (W. Evats, B.D., translators) p. 426.
Gene’s whole vision was that minorities weren’t on set because we were minorities, we were on set because in the future our diverse world would all be working together as equals. I understand that everyone needs to see role models that can inspire them and talk to them and represent them, but I believe we need to move to a future that transcends race, gender, or anything else. We’re all people.
Nichelle Nichols, in “Uhura Fest: ‘Star Trek’ legend Nichelle Nichols talks Wizard World Philly and transcending race,” by Jerome Maida, The Philadelphia Enquirer (May 29, 2017). Ms. Nichols, who died on July 30, 2022, played Lieutenant Nyota Uhura on the Star Trek television show and in the first six Star Trek movies.
Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people.
John Adams, Novanglus: or, A History of the Dispute with America, From Its Origin, in 1754, to the Present Time (1775), No. 3, first published in the Boston Gazette.
Freedom of thought and the right of private judgment, in matters of conscience, driven from every other corner of the earth, direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum.
Sam Adams, Speech, State House of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (August 1, 1776).
We reason deeply, when we forcibly feel.
No one can hate petitions worse than I, and no one has less faith in them than I. But for my champion I am willing to try any means that invades no other’s right, even though I have little hope in it.
Voltairine de Cleyre, address to the Unity Congregation, Philadelphia, appealing for petitions against the imprisonment of Moses Harman (1890).