Extended families have never been the norm in America; the highest figure for extended-family households ever recorded in American... history is 20 percent. Contrary to the popular myth that industrialization destroyed "traditional" extended families, this high point occurred between 1850 and 1885, during the most intensive period of early industrialization. Many of these extended families, and most "producing" families of the time, depended on the labor of children; they were held together by dire necessity and sometimes by brute force.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which... remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as "right" in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as "brute force."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And befor...e Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives li...ves by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight. It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. But for the green grass, no empire would rise, no man would eat bread: for grain is grass; and Hercules or Napoleon or Henry Ford would alike be denied existence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A chaplain is the minister of the Prince of Peace serving the host of the God of War--Mars. As such, he is as incongruous as a mus...ket would be on the altar at Christmas. Why, then, is he there? Because he indirectly subserves the purpose attested by the cannon; because too he lends the sanction of the religion of the meek to that which practically is the abrogation of everything but brute Force.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Universal manhood suffrage, by establishing an aristocracy of sex, imposes upon the women of this nation a more absolute and cruel... despotism than monarchy; in that, woman finds a political master in her father, husband, brother, son. The aristocracies of the old world are based upon birth, wealth, refinement, education, nobility, brave deeds of chivalry; in this nation, on sex alone; exalting brute force above moral power, vice above virtue, ignorance above education, and the son above the mother who bore him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"All is quiet at Harper's Ferry," say the journals. What is the character of that calm which follows when the law and the slavehol...der prevail? I regard this event as a touchstone designed to bring out, with glaring distinctness, the character of this government. We needed to be thus assisted to see it by the light of history. It needed to see itself. When a government puts forth its strength on the side of injustice, as ours to maintain slavery and kill the liberators of the slave, it reveals itself a merely brute force, or worse, a demoniacal force.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no ...more than corpses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the in...tellect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves. They do everything in their power not to have any. And therefo...re, the great man, in order to exist, must possess a force of attack which is greater than the force of resistance developed by millions of people.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »