As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the earl...y Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring,--scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of power,--while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We find the most terrible form of atheism, not in the militant and passionate struggle against the idea of God himself, but in the... practical atheism of everyday living, in indifference and torpor. We often encounter these forms of atheism among those who are formally Christians.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That the Jews assumed a right exclusively to the benefits of God will be a lasting witness against them & the same will it be agai...nst Christians.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Only the old are innocent. That is what the Victorians understood, and the Christians. Original sin is a property of the young. Th...e old grow beyond corruption very quickly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But the People Will not let us alone; will not credit, condone... Art-loves that shun Them (moderate Christians rotting in the sun.)LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We all have known Good critics, who have stamped out poet's hopes;... Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state; Good patriots, who, for a theory, risked a cause; Good kings, who disembowelled for a tax; Good Popes, who brought all good to jeopardy; Good Christians, who sat still in easy-chairs; And damned the general world for standing up.-- Now, may the good God pardon all good men!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now a Jew, in the dictionary, is one who is descended from the ancient tribes of Judea, or one who is regarded as descended from t...hat tribe. That's what it says in the dictionary; but you and I know what a Jew is--One Who Killed Our Lord.... And although there should be a statute of limitations for that crime, it seems that those who neither have the actions nor the gait of Christians, pagan or not, will bust us out, unrelenting dues, for another deuce.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A quiet conscience makes one so serene! Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded... That all the Apostles would have done as they did.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Between a sign and the thing it signifies there is the fixed, determined relationship of cause and effect. We see this in the case... of the footprint in the sand, the tear on the eyelash, or the trademark of a commercial product. But no matter how closely tied a symbol is to the thing symbolized, the relation is variable, flexible, and free. It is in poetry, however, that the symbolic value of words reaches its apex. The cross has become the symbol of Christianity not because of its form but because the Christians, following St. Paul, at a definite moment in their history, decided to adopt the instrument of Christ's torture as their emblem. Similarly, the relation between a word and its meaning depends on its origin, its history, and its usage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »