All great things bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming: thus the law of life will have it, the law o...f the necessity of "self-overcoming" in the nature of life--the lawgiver himself eventually receives the call: "patere legem, quam ipse tulisti." In this way Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its own morality; in the same way Christianity as morality must now perish, too: we stand on the threshold of this event. After Christian truthfulness has drawn one inference after another, it must end by drawing its most striking inference, its inference against itself; this will happen, however, when it poses the question "what is the meaning of all will to truth?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Avrum was there in the audience, I believe, in Berkeley on the afternoon in 1941 when, in conformity with the law subsequently enu...nciated by Murphy, what could go wrong, epistemologically, did. G.E. Moore was delivering the Howison Lecture in Wheeler Auditorium, which had a handsome coffered ceiling inset with glass panels. Giving a local angle to his defence of common sense, Moore declared that among the things he knew there and then was that light from the sun was streaming through the roof. Most in the audience were aware, however, that the glass panels were diffusers for electrical illumination; the roof of the building was solid and opaque. Someone had the temerity to point this out to Moore in the question period. He responded, "Oh dear me!" and went on to the next question.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All the followers of science are fully persuaded that the processes of investigation, if only pushed far enough, will give one cer...tain solution to each question to which they can be applied.... This great law is embodied in the conception of truth and reality. The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The representative women of the nation have done their uttermost for the last thirty years to secure freedom for the negro, and so... long as he was lowest in the scale of being we were allowed to press his claims; but now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see "Sambo" walk into the kingdom first. As self-preservation is the first law of nature, would it not be wiser to keep our lamps trimmed and burning, and when the constitutional door is open, avail ourselves of the strong arm and blue uniform of the black soldier to walk in by his side, and thus make the gap so wide that no privileged class could ever again close it against the humblest citizen of the republic?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The judges and lawyers ... consider, not whether the Fugitive Slave Law is right, but whether it is what they call constitutional.... Is virtue constitutional, or vice? Is equity constitutional, or inequity? In important moral and vital questions, like this, it is just as impertinent to ask whether a law is constitutional or not, as to ask whether it is profitable or not.... The question is, not whether you or your grandfather, seventy years ago, did not enter into an agreement to serve the devil, and that service is not accordingly now due; but whether you will not now, for once and at last, serve God,--in spite of your own past recreancy, or that of your ancestor,--by obeying that eternal and only just CONSTITUTION, which He, and not any Jefferson or Adams, has written in your being.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This noon his mind was occupied with a law question, and I referred him to my companion, who was a lawyer. It appeared that he had... been buying land lately (I think it was a hundred acres), but there was probably an incumbrance to it, somebody else claiming to have bought some grass on it for this year. He wished to know to whom the grass belonged, and was told that if the other man could prove that he bought the grass before he, Polis, bought the land, the former could take it, whether the latter knew it or not. To which he only replied, "Strange!" He went over this several times, fairly sat down to it, with his back to a tree, as if he meant to confine us to this topic henceforth; but as he made no headway, only reached the jumping-off place of his wonder at white men's institutions after each explanation, we let the subject die.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I defied nothing at all. I ignored the law because I didn't know it existed. It didn't occur to me that anyone would want to curb ...my inspiration.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 »
To have one's mother-in-law in the country when one lives in Paris, and vice versa, is one of those strokes of luck that one encou...nters only too rarely.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »