What we call little things are merely the causes of great things; they are the beginning, the embryo, and it is the point of depar...ture which, generally speaking, decides the whole future of an existence. One single black speck may be the beginning of a gangrene, of a storm, of a revolution.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... one of the blind spots of most Negroes is their failure to realize that small overtures from whites have a large significance ...... I now realize that this feeling inevitably takes possession of one in the bitter struggle for equality. Indeed, I share it. Yet I wonder how we can expect total acceptance to step full grown from the womb of prejudice, with no embryo or infancy or childhood stages.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nearly a million species of animals are already known. Of these, only a few thousand are endowed with anything which can be called... intelligence, only a few tens with high intelligence, and only one with conceptual thought. In the same way, there are hundreds of known religions; it had better be left to more orthodox writers than myself to enumerate those which can be called high religions. Animal evolution witnesses to a central upward trend of biological progress; it also shows us the retention of low types along with high, the throwing out of blind-alley side branches of specialisation at every level, and sometimes even degeneration. Religious evolution also shows a central progress--but equally the production of bizarre side-branches, the permanent confining of the religious spirit in low-level embodiments, its projection into every conceivable cul-de-sac, its too frequent bending over from upward to downward growth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The student of Nature wonders the more and is astonished the less, the more conversant he becomes with her operations; but of all ...the perennial miracles she offers to his inspection, perhaps the most worthy of admiration is the development of a plant or of an animal from its embryo.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That those tribes [the Sac and Fox Indians] cannot exist surrounded by our settlements and in continual contact with our citizens ...is certain. They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great th...inker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost ...like to try to say it all in a single word.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, c...ivil list and services list--the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
History counts its skeletons in round numbers. A thousand and one remains a thousand,... as though the one had never existed: an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle, ... emptiness running down steps toward the garden, nobody's place in line.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »