There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
Once apparently the chief concern and masterpiece of the gods, the human race now begins to bear the aspect of an accidental by-product of their vast, inscrutable and probably nonsensical operations.
Character in decay is the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction.
The most lovely moving picture actor, considered in the light of genuine aesthetic values, is no more than a piece of vulgarity; his like is to be found, not in the Uffizi gallery or among the harmonies of Brahms, but among the plush sofas, rococo clocks and hand-painted oil-paintings of a third-rate auction room.
The truth is the passion of a small and aberrant minority of men, most of them pathological. They are hated for telling it while they live, and after they die they are swiftly forgotten. What remains to the world, in the field of wisdom, is a series of long-tested and solidly-agreeable lies.
One cannot enter a State legislature or a prison for felons without becoming, in some measure, a dubious character.
As animals go, even in so limited a space as our world, man is botched and ridiculous. Few other brutes are so stupid, so docile or so cowardly.
Don’t tell me. I have been there. No longer ago than last Tuesday – or was it last Monday? – I went into one of those big restaurants on the Unter den Linden and ordered a small steak, French fried potatoes, a piece of pie and a cup of coffee – and what do you think those thieves charged me for it? Three marks fifty. That’s eighty-seven and a half cents. Why, a man could have got the same meal at home for a dollar.
They are brothers to the fox who boasted that he had made the hounds run...
His condition had plainly improved. Once a slave, he was now only a serf. Once condemned to silence, he was now free to criticize his masters, and even to flout them, and the ordinances of God with them...
My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between that other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even to be malicious.
The common man is a fool.
In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished. The triumph of sin in 1865 would have stimulated and helped to civilize both sides.
No doubt a cosmos afflicted with nothing worse than an infection of Beethovens would not think it worth while to send for the doctor. But a cosmos infested by Socialists, Scotsmen and stockbrokers must suffer damnably. No wonder the sun is so hot and the moon is so diabetically green.
It takes advantage of every passing craze and delusion of the mob to dispose of those who oppose it, and it maintains a complex and highly effective machine for launching such crazes and delusions when the supply of them lags.
One man who minds his own business is more valuable to the world than 10,000 cocksure moralists.
No writer, in truth, is ever really a free agent. What he does in his trade is determined not only by his immediate environment and the ideational currents of his time, but also and more especially by the play of inherited forces and predispositions within him.
It is a tragic but inescapable fact that most of the finest fruits of human progress, like all of the nobler virtues of man, are the exclusive possession of small minorities, chiefly unpopular and disreputable.
For every subtle and complicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer, which is wrong.
I believe that it is something quite different, and that that something may be described briefly as a desire to shine in the world without too much effort. The young theologue, in brief, is commonly an ambitious but somewhat lazy and incompetent fellow, and he studies theology instead of medicine or law because it offers a quicker and easier route to an assured job and public respect.
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.