Ambitious men spend their youth in rendering themselves worthy of patronage; it is their great mistake. While the foolish creature...s are laying in stores of knowledge and energy, so that they shall not sink under the weight of responsible posts that recede from them, schemers come and go who are wealthy in words and destitute of ideas, astonish the ignorant, and creep into the confidence of those who have a little knowledge.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing--to do just t...hat; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till... they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water until he had learnt to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly ...called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, n...either shall they learn war any more.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... there is a dangerous trend observable in some quarters of the Movement to program Sapphire out of her "evil" ways into a cover...-up, shut-up, lay-back-and-be-cool obedience role. She is being assigned an unreal role of mute servant that supposedly neutralizes the acidic tension that exists between Black men and Black women. She is being encouraged--in the name of revolution no less--to cultivate "virtues" that if listed would sound like the personality traits of slaves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
all ignorance toboggans into know and trudges up to ignorance again:... but winter's not forever, even snow melts; and if spring should spoil the game, what then?