Category: Thought

[I]n the good town of Newcastle you will not find a dozen men, unless in some way practically connected with school work, who really understand our present code or have given their attention to the many serious questions involved in it. When this divorce between public intelligence and the directing department has existed for some time, the people begin to be accustomed to see a great system in operation in their midst, settled and worked for them in all its main lines by an office, morally, if not physically, some hundreds of miles away, and presently, with very few searchings of heart and very little intelligence exercised, they simply accept it and let themselves and their children be molded by it into — a something that they don’t exactly understand, and about which in the pressure of life they don’t find time to ask many questions. They are stupefied by the system, just because so little is required of them, mentally or practically, as individuals.

Auberon Herbert, letter to the editor, Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, as reprinted in The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, 1885.

As centuries pass by, the mass of works grows endlessly, and one can foresee a time when it will be almost as difficult to educate oneself in a library, as in the universe, and almost as fast to seek a truth subsisting in nature, as lost among an immense number of books; then one would have to undertake, out of necessity, a labor that had been neglected, because the need for it had not been felt.
If we think of the image of literature in times before the invention of printing, we see a small number of men of genius busy creating, and a countless throng of workers busy transcribing. If we anticipate centuries to come, and think of the image of literature once printing, which never rests, has filled huge buildings with books, we will find it once more split into two classes of men. There will be those who read little and immerse themselves in new research or what they take to be new (for if we already are ignorant of part of what is contained in so many books published in all sorts of languages, we will know still far less about what is in those books increased a hundred-, a thousand-fold); the others, workmen incapable of producing anything, will be busy leafing through those books night and day, and separating out what they deem worthy of being anthologized and preserved. Is this prediction not already being fulfilled?

Denis Diderot, “Encyclopédie,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, Vol. 5 (1755), pp. 635–648A.

We shall not suddenly wear out our inherited natures.

Auberon Herbert, letter to the editor, Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, as reprinted in The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, 1885.

People stop thinking when they cease to read.

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.

Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery, Chapter XVI: Europe.

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).