With the present wage conditions there are thousands of young women who are living in a state of semi-starvation and they are alwa...ys surrounded by the most terrible temptation. Oh, I know that some of [the] greatest reformers insist that a girl's virtue is not affected by under-nourishment, disease and nervous collapse; but if these well housed, well fed, well dressed people were put in a dirty, ugly room, if their clothes did not protect them from the cold, if their stomachs were never filled, would not even the staunchest lose some of her self-respect when looking forward to an old age? It is only a matter of wonder to me that so many girls keep clean and decent through it all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The human race is yet in its infancy--no, not infancy; infancy is innocent and sweet--it is in its ugly boyhood, half way between ...the child and the man--in a state of semi-barbarism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life. In theological terms, one mi...ght say that all men, left to themselves, become gnostics. They may swagger like peacocks, but in their heart of hearts they all think sex an indignity and wish they could beget themselves on themselves. Hence the aggressive hostility toward women so manifest in most club-car stories.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Dogmatic theological statements are neither logical propositions nor poetic utterances. They are "shaggy dog" stories; they have a... point, but he who tries too hard to get it will miss it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns And the miraculous cure at the fountain;... Yesterday the Sabbath of Witches. But today the struggle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Orthodox Judaism is a thicket of detailed injunctions, Biblical commandments elaborated during centuries of prohibited proselytizi...ng, functioning to limit interaction with outsiders. At the opposite extreme, Islam, still the most rapidly expanding of faiths, demands little immediate knowledge from those who would convert. The convert is permitted to enter and then to learn by participation, although there are plenty of detailed regulations and abstruse theological ideas to be pursued later, and the regulations do effectively separate believers from nonbelievers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As liberty and intelligence have increased the people have more and more revolted against the theological dogmas that contradict c...ommon sense and wound the tenderest sensibilities of the soul.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It goes without saying that religion thus conceived is the opposite of magic. The latter is essentially selfish, the former admits... of and often even demands disinterestedness. The one claims to force the compliance of nature, the other implores the favor of a god. Above all, magic works in an environment which is semi-physical and semi-moral--the magician, at all events is not dealing with a person; whereas on the contrary it is from the god's personality that religion draws its greatest efficacy. Granted that primitive intelligence thinks it perceives around it, in phenomena and in events, elements of personality rather than complete personalities, religion, as we have just understood it, will ultimately reinforce these elements to the extent of completely personifying them; whereas magic looks upon them as debased, dissolved, as it were, in a material world in which their efficacy can be tapped.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They can never have known old monks, wise, shrewd, unerring in judgment, and yet aglow with passionate insight, so very tender in ...their humanity. What miracle enables these semi-lunatics, these prisoners of their own dreams, these sleepwalkers, apparently to enter more deeply each day into the pain of others? An odd sort of dream, an unusual opiate which, far from turning him back into himself and isolating him from his fellows, unites the individual with mankind in the spirit of universal charity!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: pers...ons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »