The progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce, and the diffusion of education, than u...pon the labours of cabinets and foreign offices.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This is an age of intellectual sauces, of essence, of distillation. We have "conclusions" without deductions, "abridgments of hist...ory" and "abridgments of science" without leading facts. We have "animals" for literature, "Cabinet" Encyclopaedias, "Family" Libraries, "Diffusion" Societies, and heaven knows what else! What is all this for? Not to add knowledge to the learned, but to tell points to the ignorant, without giving them the trouble to acquire the links. Oh! it is sad work. And the result will be injurious to all classes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So far as laws and institutions avail, men should have equality of opportunity for happiness; that is, of education, wealth, power.... These make happiness secure. An equal diffusion of happiness so far as laws and institutions avail.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American people owe it to themselves, and to the cause of free Government, to prove by their establishments for the advancemen...t and diffusion of knowledge, that their political Institutions ... are as favorable to the intellectual and moral improvement of Man as they are conformable to his individual and social rights.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[Religious establishment] is adverse to the diffusion of the light of Christianity ... [because] with an ignoble and unchristian t...imidity it would [be] circumscribed, with a wall of defence, against the encroachments of error.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The slave-ship is on her way, crowded with its dying victims; new cargoes are being added in mid-ocean; a small crew of slaveholde...rs, countenanced by a large body of passengers, is smothering four millions under the hatches, and yet the politician asserts that the only proper way by which deliverance is to be obtained is by "the quiet diffusion of the sentiments of humanity," without any "outbreak." As if the sentiments of humanity were ever found unaccompanied by its deeds.... What is that I hear cast overboard? The bodies of the dead that have found deliverance. That is the way we are "diffusing" humanity, and its sentiments with it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there... is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Instead of seeing society as a collection of clearly defined "interest groups," society must be reconceptualized as a complex netw...ork of groups of interacting individuals whose membership and communication patterns are seldom confined to one such group alone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »