There are in every man, always, two simultaneous allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan. Invocation of God, or Spirituality, ...is a desire to climb higher; that of Satan, or animality, is delight in descent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming... to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose--as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to snivelling and giggles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings. These founders of the House of Lords were greedy and ferocious dragoons, sons of greed...y and ferocious pirates. They were all alike, they took everything they could carry, they burned, harried, violated, tortured, and killed until everything English was brought to the verge of ruin. Such, however, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent and dignified men now existing boast their descent from these filthy thieves, who showed a far juster conviction of their own merits, by assuming for their types the swine, goat, jackal, leopard, wolf, and snake, which they severally resembled.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their d...escent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not "Devil's wine," but God's wine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this wh...en I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tolstoy's aristocratic nature is, above all, responsible for the fact that his whole art and thought are rooted in the idea of the... physical, the organic and the natural. Dostoevsky's spiritualism, his speculative mind, his dynamic, dialectical mode of thinking, can be traced back just as definitely to his bourgeois descent and plebeian uprootedness. The aristocrat owes his position to his mere existence, his birth, his race, whereas the plebeian owes it to his talent, his personal ability and achievements.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capita...l. Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen. These need to be exposed and repealed. All laws on corporations, on taxation, on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive change. This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.--How is this?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and desc...ent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »