19th March, 1872. – Birthday. My Jesus, my king, my life, my all; I again dedicate my whole self to Thee. Accept me, and grant, Gracious Father, that ere this year is gone I may finish my task. In Jesus’ name I ask it. Amen, so let it be.
I will try and remember always to approach God in secret with as much reverence in speech, posture, and behavior as in public. Help me, Thou who knowest my frame and pitiest as a father his children.
To be aroused in the dark by five feet of cold, green snake gliding over one’s face is unpleasant.
Education has been given us from above for the purpose of bringing to the benighted the knowledge of the Saviour.
It is far easier to travel than to write about it.
I am willing to go anywhere, anywhere, anywhere-provided it be forward.
The mere animal pleasure of travelling in a wild unexplored country is also great. The effect of travel on a man whose heart is in the right place is that the mind is made more self-reliant: it becomes more confident of its own resources, there is greater presence of mind.
I am a missionary, heart and soul.
Oh, that I could dedicate my all to God. This is all the return I can make Him.
If success attend me, grant me humility; If failure, resignation to Thy will.
Dehumanization isn’t a way of talking. It’s a way of thinking – a way of thinking that, sadly, comes all too easily to us. Dehumanization is a scourge, and has been so for millennia. It acts as a psychological lubricant, dissolving our inhibitions and inflaming our destructive passions. As such, it empowers us to perform acts that would, under other circumstances, be unthinkable.
Before dehumanizing a population, we set them apart as a “race.” That is, a variety of people who are fundamentally different from “us.” The folk notion of race is very much an artificial construction.
Rather than looking for explanations for why all people deserve to be treated with compassion and respect, we ought to be working at creating a world in which people are treated with compassion and respect. Human rights aren’t lying around waiting to be discovered. They’re made, not found.
Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts. – Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand.
The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
It is not all pleasure this exploration.
I have avoided giving offence to intelligent Arabs, who have pressed me, asking if I believed in Mohamad by saying, “No I do not: I am a child of Jesus bin Miriam,” avoiding anything offensive in my tone, and often adding that Mohamad found their forefathers bowing down to trees and stones, and did good to them by forbidding idolatry, and teaching the worship of the only One God. This, they all know, and it pleases them to have it recognised.
With others arguments are useless, and the only answer I care to give is the remark of an English sailor, who, on seeing slave-traders actually at their occupation, said to his companion, “Shiver my timbers, mate, if the devil don’t catch these fellows, we might as well have no devil at all.
The impressive record of atrocities racked up by the human race does not suggest that our conduct is guided by sympathy for others.
For dehumanization to occur the target group must first be essentialized. They, the others, must be seen as a distinct kind of person: not just superficially different, but radically so. This pattern is borne out by all of the cases of dehumanization that have been surveyed so far in this book.