Away with the cant of "Measures, not men!"Mthe idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot al...ong. No, Sir, if the comparison must be made, if the distinction must be taken, men are everything, measures comparatively nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Error is a supposition that pleasure and pain, that intelligence, substance, life, are existent in matter. Error is neither Mind n...or one of Mind's faculties. Error is the contradiction of Truth. Error is a belief without understanding. Error is unreal because untrue. It is that which seemeth to be and is not. If error were true, its truth would be error, and we should have a self-evident absurdity--namely, erroneous truth. Thus we should continue to lose the standard of Truth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism--at least in the sense of this work--i...s the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[A toad-eater] is a metaphor taken from a mountebank's boy who eats toads in order to show his master's skill in expelling poison.... It is built on a supposition (which I am afraid is too generally true) that people who are so unhappy as to be in a state of dependence are forced to do the most nauseous things that can be thought on to please and humor their patrons.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The supposition that it was possible for any woman to be so mean-spirited as not at least to wish to tear out her rival's eyes was... too hard for the digestion of the Cry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Enlightenment codified the vision of the world as a unified, self-sufficient Nature, governed by orderly laws, and including m...an within itself as a part of Nature and nothing else. It is the codification, in outline, of the world we now inhabit. The supposition that the Enlightenment is but a kind of continuation and completion of the Reformation is sometimes attacked as naive and over-intellectualist. Yet the logical connection is obviously there: the notion that it is legitimate to scrutinize the claims of a self-proclaimed sacred institution, by checking it against the independent testimony of scripture, would seem to lead naturally to the idea that everything, including scripture itself, can be scrutinized in the light of the independent testimony of "Reason" or fact.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I sometimes compare press officers to riflemen on the Somme--mowing down wave upon wave of distortion, taking out rank upon rank o...f supposition, deduction and gossip.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are few things that we so unwillingly give up, even in advanced age, as the supposition that we still have the power of ingr...atiating ourselves with the fair sex.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear? Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his cometary orbit, ...beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. Somewhere imperceptibly he would hear and somehow reluctantly, suncompelled, obey the summons of recall. Whence, disappearing from the constellation of the Northern Crown he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the constellation of Cassiopeia and after incalculable eons of peregrination return an estranged avenger, a wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources (by supposition) surpassing those of Rothschild or the silver king.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that e...very child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »