Category: Thought

I deny that villany is ever necessary. It is impossible that it should ever be necessary for any reasonable creature to violate all the laws of justice, mercy, and truth. No circumstances can make it necessary for a man to burst in sunder all the ties of humanity. It can never be necessary for a rational being to sink himself below a brute. A man can be under no necessity of degrading himself into a wolf. The absurdity of the supposition is so glaring, that one would wonder any one can help seeing it.

John Wesley, Thoughts Upon Slavery (1774).

Passion and prejudice govern the world; only under the name of reason. It is our part, by religion and reason joined, to counteract them all we can.

John Wesley, Letter to John Benson (October 5, 1770); published in Wesley’s Select Letters (1837), p. 207.

[Everything] ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development.

George Santayana, Reason in Common Sense (1905).

Not all the evils of our condition are such as we can justly blame others for; and, I repeat, many of them are such as no changes of institutions can quickly remedy.  To discern between the evils that energy can remove and the evils that patience must bear, makes the difference between manliness and childishness, between good sense and folly.

Mary Ann Evans writing as George Eliot, in The Essays of George Eliot (1883), “Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt” (January 1868) — signed by the hero of her 1866 social novel Felix Holt, The Radical.

He’s a Fool that makes his Doctor his Heir.

Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (1733).

Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.

George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (1896).

Make yourself known as a philosopher, that is a free man.

If we are going to defend freedom, we have to have to defend ‘two and two equals four.’

David Icke on the Rich in Success podcast.

You don’t comb the mirror, you comb your own hair and the mirror changes.

[I]f adaptation is everywhere and always going on, then adaptive modifications must be set up by every change of social conditions.

To which there comes the undeniable corollary that every law which serves to alter men’s modes of action — compelling, or restraining, or aiding, in new ways — so affects them as to cause, in course of time, fresh adjustments of their natures. Beyond any immediate effect wrought, there is the remote effect, wholly ignored by most — a re-moulding of the average character: a re-moulding which may be of a desirable kind or of an undesirable kind, but which in any case is the most important of the results to be considered.

Herbert Spencer, “The Sins of Legislators,” in The Man versus the State (1884).