It is said that the Negro is ignorant. But why is he ignorant? It comes with ill grace from a man who has put out my eyes to make ...a parade of my blindness,--to reproach me for my poverty when he has wronged me of my money.... If he is poor, what has become of the money he has been earning for the last two hundred and fifty years? Years ago it was said cotton fights and cotton conquers for American slavery. The Negro helped build up that great cotton power in the South, and in the North his sigh was in the whir of its machinery, and his blood and tears upon the warp and woof of its manufactures.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But man, proud man, Dressed in a little brief authority,... Most ignorant of what he's most assured, His glassy essence, like an angry ape Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As makes the angels weep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Each class of society has its own requirements; but it may be said that every class teaches the one immediately below it; and if t...he highest class be ignorant, uneducated, loving display, luxuriousness, and idle, the same spirit will prevail in humbler life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine-forest. The English mind disliked the French mind... because it was antagonistic, unreasonable, perhaps hostile, but recognized it as at least a thought. The American mind was not a thought at all; it was a convention, superficial, narrow, and ignorant; a mere cutting instrument, practical, economical, sharp and direct. The English themselves hardly conceived that their mind was either economical, sharp or direct; but the defect that most struck an American was its enormous waste in eccentricity. Americans needed and used their whole energy, and applied it with close economy; but English society was eccentric by law and for sake of the eccentricity itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment but as a force; why was she unknown ...in America? for evidently America was ashamed of her, and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her. When she was a true force, she was ignorant of fig-leaves, but the monthly-magazine-made American female had not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam. The trait was notorious, and often humorous, but anyone brought up among Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear and imagination--everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignor...ant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, f...or the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of all my prosecutors ... not one is my peer, but each and all are my political sovereigns; and had your honor submitted my case t...o the jury, as was clearly your duty, then I should have had just cause of protest, for not one of those men was my peer; but, native or foreign born, white or black, rich or poor, educated or ignorant, sober or drunk, each and every man of them was my political superior; hence, in no sense, my peer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When in the enfranchisement of the black men [women] saw another ignorant class of voters placed about their heads, and beheld the... danger of a distinctively "male" government, forever involving the nations of the earth in war and violence; and demanded for the protection of themselves and children, that woman's voice should be heard and her opinions in public affairs be expressed by the ballot, they were coolly told that the black man had earned the right to vote, that he had fought and bled and died for his country. It was not because the three-penny tax on tea was so exorbitant that our Revolutionary fathers fought and died, but to establish the principle that such taxation was unjust. It is the same with this woman's revolution; though every law were as just to woman as to man, the principle that one class may usurp the power to legislate for another is unjust, and all who are now in the struggle from love of principle would still work on until the establishment of the grand and immutable truth, "All governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.... And a man who is puzzled and wonder...s thinks himself ignorant ...; therefore since they philosophized in order to escape from ignorance, evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »