Editors persevered for a good while in saying that Brown was crazy; but at last they said only that it was "a crazy scheme," and t...he only evidence brought to prove it was that it cost him his life. I have no doubt that if he had gone with five thousand men, liberated a thousand slaves, killed a hundred or two slaveholders, and had as many more killed on his own side, but not lost his own life, these same editors would have called it by a more respectable name. Yet he has been far more successful than that. He has liberated many thousands of slaves, both North and South. They seem to have known nothing about living or dying for a principle. They all called him crazy then; who calls him crazy now?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
With the present wage conditions there are thousands of young women who are living in a state of semi-starvation and they are alwa...ys surrounded by the most terrible temptation. Oh, I know that some of [the] greatest reformers insist that a girl's virtue is not affected by under-nourishment, disease and nervous collapse; but if these well housed, well fed, well dressed people were put in a dirty, ugly room, if their clothes did not protect them from the cold, if their stomachs were never filled, would not even the staunchest lose some of her self-respect when looking forward to an old age? It is only a matter of wonder to me that so many girls keep clean and decent through it all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does... not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public, he offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin--and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of livin...g in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary masterplan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people's own failure as individuals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... that's what living happens to be ... the physiological denial of reverence and good manners and Christianity.... At your age o...ne's quite old enough to know what the essence of life really is. Shamelessness, that's all; pure shamelessness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The plant is not a mere product of the soil, but a living process centred in itself, the essence of which has nothing to do with t...he character of the soil. In the same way the art-work must be regarded as a creative formation, freely making use of every precondition. Its meaning and its own individual particularity rests in itself, and not in its preconditions. In fact one might also describe it as a being that uses man and his personal dispositions merely as a cultural medium or soil, disposing his powers according to his own laws, while shaping itself to the fulfillment of its own creative purpose.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not likely,... let me live as I will, that I shall ever be a rich woman, if I am to live in America; the cost of one's exist...ence here is something fabulous, and the amount of discomfort one obtains for money, that purchases a liberal allowance of luxury as well as comfort in Europe, is by no means a small item of annoyance in one's daily life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It may cost me twenty thousand francs; but for twenty thousand francs, I will have the right to rail against the iniquity of human...ity, and to devote to it my eternal hatred.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This is what no one warns you about, when you decide to have children. There is so much written about the cost and the changes in ...your way of life, but no one ever tells you that what they are going to hand you in the hospital is power, whether you want it or not.... I should have known, but somehow overlooked for a time, that parents become, effortlessly, just by showing up, the most influential totems in the lives of their children.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »