A republican government should be based on free and equal education among the people. While we have class and sectarian schools th...e parties supporting them will not give their fullest aid toward building up the public school system. If all of the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money and energies on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals. To be a success a republic must have a homogeneous people, and to do this it must have homogeneous schools.... I grow more and more opposed to [sectarian schools].LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think it saves much confusion to regard religion as quite distinct from morality, or the right conduct of life--as having necess...arily nothing to do with these, but as a system of faith and worship, a belief in something extranatural.... Indeed, the most religious people are by no means the most moral. Hence it is that religion so rarely changes the man, or makes him practically any better. Let us keep things separated, religion by itself, and morality by itself. Religion implies a belief in the supernatural; in a personal deity who takes sides with or against us. A man may be pure, noble, virtuous, high-minded, spiritual, and not have a religion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisp...rudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At first I intended to become a student of the Senate rules and I did learn much about them, but I soon found that the Senate had ...but one fixed rule, subject to exceptions of course, which was to the effect that the Senate would do anything it wanted to do whenever it wanted to do it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two;... Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show To move, but doth if th' other do.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Where dwells the religion? Tell me first where dwells electricity, or motion, or thought or gesture. They do not dwell or stay at ...all. Electricity cannot be made fast, mortared up and ended, like London Monument, or the Tower, so that you shall know where to find it, and keep it fixed, as the English do with their things, forevermore; it is passing, glancing, gesticular; it is a traveller, a newness, a surprise, a secret which perplexes them, and puts them out.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the... fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced--by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Baudelaire compared the great names in art to lighthouses posted along the track of historic time. The simile, as he used it, seiz...es the imagination and represents a great truth, but it allows of an interpretation which the limits of a sonnet form forbade him to develop. He takes the lights of his beacons as much for granted as the sailor does the lights of real lighthouses. But the lighthouses of art do not burn with so fixed and unvarying a lustre. The light they give is always changing insensibly with each generation, now brighter, now dimmer, and often enough growing bright once more. But we sometimes forget that the lights have to be tended or they grow faint and may expire altogether. For them to burn brightly, they must be fed by the devotion of some few spirits in each generation. If that fails for a long period they go out and become one of those dead, ineffectual names which still linger on, obstructions rather than aids to the historical voyager.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, ...which made the Powers behave the way they did. I have no illusions on this score, nor do I believe that any Asian nation or African nation, in the same state of dominance, and with the same system of colonial profit-amassing and plunder, would have behaved otherwise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove might...ier than ten military divisions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »