Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery, Chapter XVI: Europe.
No man who continues to add something to the material, intellectual, and moral well-being of the place in which he lives is long left without proper reward.
My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.
George Eliot, Letter to Charles Bray (November 15, 1857).
There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 1876.
Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.
Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, Chapter XI: “Making Their Beds Before They Could Lie On Them” (1901).
Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.
George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, 1858.
Nor during the Age of Innovation have the poor gotten poorer, as people are always saying. On the contrary, the poor have been the chief beneficiaries of modern capitalism. It is an irrefutable historical finding, obscured by the logical truth that the profits from innovation go in the first act mostly to the bourgeois rich.
Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010).
The blessed work of helping the world forward, happily does not wait to be done by perfect men.
George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, 1858.
An army is a diversion of energy from the productive life of a nation.
Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, 1943.
Nice distinctions are troublesome. It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green, to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion.
George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, 1858.
The change in rhetoric has constituted a revolution in how people view themselves and how they view the middle class, the Bourgeois Revaluation. People have become tolerant of markets and innovation.
Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010).