Here, for example, are a few of the doctrinal parallels: Instead of God, the Communists believe in history as a final principle an...d omnipotent judge. They regard "the great task of making history" as the highest activity open to mankind; it is their equivalent for doing God's will on earth. To be cast "into the dustbin of history" is like being cast into hell. Instead of Divine Providence, the Communists believe in the Marxian dialectic as the principle that shapes our lives in society. Since the dialectic consists of three parts--thesis, antithesis, synthesis--it also bears some relation to the Christian Trinity; and it is the subject of quite as many learned disputations. Instead of Divine Grace, they believe in a spirit emanating from the working class; almost by magic it transforms one's doubts and weariness into renewed hope.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We me...et at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications. Consider the girls in a factory,--never alone, hardly in their dreams. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live. The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Settlement ... is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by ...the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everything that was ever to happen to me in the future had its germ or impulse in the conditions of my life on Dover Street. My fr...iendships, my advantages and disadvantages, my gifts, my habits, my ambitions--these were the materials out of which I built my after life, in the open workshop of America. My days in the slums were pregnant with possibilities; it only needed the ripeness of events to make them fruit forth in realities. Steadily as I worked to win America, America advanced to lie at my feet. I was an heir, on Dover Street, awaiting maturity. I was a princess waiting to be led to the throne.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than ...forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While there are practical and sometimes moral reasons for the decomposition of the family, it coincides neither with what most peo...ple in society say they desire nor, especially in the case of children, with their best interests.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Within the university ... you can study without waiting for any efficient or immediate result. You may search, just for the sake o...f searching, and try for the sake of trying. So there is a possibility of what I would call playing. It's perhaps the only place within society where play is possible to such an extent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In abnormal times like our own, when institutions are changing rapidly in several directions at once and the traditional framework... of society has broken down, it becomes more and more difficult to measure any type of behavior against any other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »