The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it.
Unbroken Evolution under uniform conditions pleased every one – except curates and bishops; it was the very best substitute for religion; a safe, conservative practical, thoroughly Common-Law deity.
I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.
Charles Sumner’s mind had reached the calm of WATER which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contains nothing but itself.
Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.
The photograph is a coarse fraud, and seems to delight only in taking the whole beauty out of the picture.
As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it’s a bore.
All taxation is an evil, but heavy taxes, indiscriminately levied on every everything are one of the greatest curses that can afflict a people.
Laplace would have found it child’s-play to fix a ratio of progression in mathematical science between Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton and himself.
The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.
The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.
The world is coming to an end in 1950.
We shall some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and our immortality.
His brothers were the type; he was the variation.
Politics is simply the organization of hatreds.
Energy is the inherent effort of every multiplicity to become unity.
In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.
American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.
The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.
The philosopher says – I am, and the church scouts his philosophy. She answers: – No! you are NOT, you have no existence of your own. You were and are and ever will be only a part of the supreme I AM, of which the church is the emblem.