Contention is inseparable from creating knowledge. It is not contention we should try to avoid, but discourses that attempt to sup...press contention.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No legislation can suppress nature; all life rushes to reproduction; our procreative faculties are matured early, while passion is... strong, and judgment and self-restraint weak. We cannot alter this, but we can alter what is conventional. We can refuse to brand an act of nature as a crime, and to impute to vice what is due to ignorance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting dru...nk on bogey tales.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How frail and ephemeral ... is the material substance of letters, which makes their very survival so hazardous. Print has a perman...ence of its own, though it may not be much worth preserving, but a letter! Conveyed by uncertain transportation, over which the sender has no control; committed to a single individual who may be careless or inappreciative; left to the mercy of future generations, of families maybe anxious to suppress the past, of the accidents of removals and house-cleanings, or of mere ignorance. How often it has been by the veriest chance that they have survived at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While I am in favor of the Government promptly enforcing the laws for the present, defending the forts and collecting the revenue,... I am not in favor of a war policy with a view to the conquest of any of the slave States; except such as are needed to give us a good boundary. If Maryland attempts to go off, suppress her in order to save the Potomac and the District of Columbia. Cut a piece off of western Virginia and keep Missouri and all the Territories.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the outcome of the Clarence Thomas hearings and his subsequent appointment to the Supreme Court shows how misguided, narrow no...tions of racial solidarity that suppress dissent and critique can lead black folks to support individuals who will not protect their rights.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Caution has its place, no doubt, but we cannot refuse our support to a serious venture which challenges the whole of the personali...ty. If we oppose it, we are trying to suppress what is best in man--his daring and his aspirations. And should we succeed, we should only have stood in the way of that invaluable experience which might have given a meaning to life. What would have happened if Paul had allowed himself to be talked out of his journey to Damascus?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What then is the relation of law to morality? Law cannot prescribe morality, it can prescribe only external actions and therefore ...it should prescribe only those actions whose mere fulfillment, from whatever motive, the state adjudges to be conducive to welfare. What actions are these? Obviously such actions as promote the physical and social conditions requisite for the expression and development of free--or moral--personality.... Law does not and cannot cover all the ground of morality. To turn all moral obligations into legal obligations would be to destroy morality. Happily it is impossible. No code of law can envisage the myriad changing situations that determine moral obligations. Moreover, there must be one legal code for all, but moral codes vary as much as the individual characters of which they are the expression. To legislate against the moral codes of one's fellows is a very grave act, requiring for its justification the most indubitable and universally admitted of social gains, for it is to steal their moral codes, to suppress their characters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Republics demanded virtue. Monarchies could rely on coercion and "dazzling splendor" to suppress self-interest or factions; republ...ics relied on the goodness of the people to put aside private interest for public good. The imperatives of virtue attached all sorts of desiderata to the republican citizen: simplicity, frugality, sobriety, simple manners, Christian benevolence, duty to the polity. Republics called on other virtues--spiritedness, courage--to protect the polity from external threats. Tyrants kept standing armies; republics relied on free yeomen, defending their own land.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I want to celebrate these elms which have been spared by the plague, these survivors of a once flourishing tribe commemorated by a...ll the Elm Streets in America. But to celebrate them is to be silent about the people who sit and sleep underneath them, the homeless poor who are hauled away by the city like trash, except it has no place to dump them. To speak of one thing is to suppress another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »