Why should all the major religions of the modern world include a crucial encounter with wilderness--Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed in ...the desert mountains, Siddhartha in the jungle? And why should the predominant modern view of the origin and development of life have arisen from the five-year wilderness voyage of a Victorian amateur naturalist named Charles Darwin? There evidently is more to wilderness than meets the eye--more than water, timber, minerals, the materials of physical civilized existence.... Placing Darwin in the tradition of Moses and Jesus may seem heresy from both the Judeo-Christian and scientific viewpoints, but I think the roles played by the three figures have been similar. They wrenched their respective cultures out of a complacency that amounted to self-worship and thrust them in new directions that (if not always entirely beneficial) enlarged the human perspective. Moses forced his society to accept a unifying law; Jesus forced his to accept the unity of all humanity; Darwin forced his to accept the unity of all life. I doubt whether any of the three would have been able to influence his society if he had not been fortified by a season in the wilderness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is futile to ask women not to go into business, as futile almost as to insist that water shall not run downhill. One cannot sto...p world movements; and the efforts of women toward emancipation--the natural result of the deadly monotony of their task on the one hand, a jealousy of man's freedom, and a total ignorance of man's struggle as well as of the glory of their own special opportunity--all lead to the condition we are facing to-day. If in any way I can indicate the pain of the struggle, if I can succeed in making women appreciate that there are two sides to the question, one not altogether rosy, and that, although they will undoubtedly win, they will be forced to pay a high price, then I shall have accomplished my purpose.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I wasn't born to be a fighter. I was born with a gentle nature, a flexible character and an organism as equilibrated as it is judg...ed hysterical. I shouldn't have been forced to fight constantly and ferociously. The causes I have fought for have invariably been causes that should have been gained by a delicate suggestion. Since they never were, I made myself into a fighter.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The first year was critical to my assessment of myself as a person. It forced me to realize that, like being married, having child...ren is not an end in itself. You don't at last arrive at being a parent and suddenly feel satisfied and joyful. It is a constantly reopening adventure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Forced labor as a punishment is limited as to time and intensity. The convict retains his rights over his body; he is not absolute...ly tortured and he is not absolutely dominated. Banishment banishes only from one part of the world to another part of the world, also inhabited by human beings; it does not exclude from the human world altogether. Throughout history slavery has been an institution within a social order; slaves were not, like concentration-camp inmates, withdrawn from the sight and hence the protection of their fellow-men; as instruments of labor they had a definite price and as property a definite value. The concentration-camp inmate has no price, because he can always be replaced; nobody knows to whom he belongs, because he is never seen. From the point of view of normal society he is absolutely superfluous.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »