Primitive communism, chattel slavery, serf slavery, and wage slavery were necessary stepping-stones in the evolution of society.
Instinct and law demanded of him obedience. But growth demanded disobedience. His mother and fear impelled him to keep away from the white wall. Growth is life, and life is for ever destined to make for light. So there was no damming up the tide of life that was rising within him – rising with every mouthful of meat he swallowed, with every breath he drew. In the end, one day, fear and obedience were swept away by the rush of life, and the cub straddled and sprawled toward the entrance.
Without them, anarchy would reign and humanity would drop backward into the primitive night out of which it had so painfully emerged.
It is what we of the working class preach. We know, and well we know by bitter experience, that no appeal for the right, for justice, for humanity, can ever touch you.
And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.
John Barleycorn makes his appeal to weakness and failure, to weariness and exhaustion. He is the easy way out. And he is lying all the time. He offers false strength to the body, false elevation to the spirit, making things seem what they are not and vastly fairer than what they are.
In short, the things he did were done because it was easier to do them than not to do them.
Insanity? The mental processes of a man with whom one disagrees, are always wrong. Where is the line between wrong mind and sane mind? It is inconceivable that any sane man can radically disagree with one’s most sane conclusions.
In a flash Buck knew it. The time had come. It was to the death.
It was an old song, old as the breed itself – one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad.
Hers was that common insularity of mind that makes human creatures believe that their color, creed, and politics are best and right and that other human creatures scattered over the world are less fortunately placed than they.
He couldn’t fake being their kind. The masquerade would fail, and besides, masquerade was foreign to his nature. There was no room in him for sham or artifice. Whatever happened, he must be real. He.
Compared with White Fang, they were frail and flabby, and clutched life without any strength in their grip. White Fang had come straight from the Wild, where the weak perish early and shelter is vouchsafed to none. In neither his father nor his mother was there any weakness, nor in the generations before them.
Never did he fail to respond savagely to the chatter of the squirrel he had first met on the blasted pine.
She had liked him for himself, that was indisputable. And yet, much as she had liked him she had liked the bourgeois standard of valuation more.
They had seen life, and done deeds, and lived romances, but they did not know it.
All was confusion and action, and every moment life and limb were in peril. There was imperative need to be constantly alert; for these dogs and men were not town dogs and men. They were savages, all of them, who knew no law but the law of club and fang.
These limitations and restraints were laws. To be obedient to them was to escape hurt and make for happiness.
She was pure, it was true, as he had never dreamed of purity; but cherries stained her lips.
The toil of the traces seemed the supreme expression of their being, and all that they lived for and the only thing in which they took delight.