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A pupil having asked him should one return good for evil, Confucius replied: “With what then will you recompense kindness? Return good for good, and for evil, justice.”
The greatest fortune of a people would be to keep ignorant persons from public office, and secure their wisest men to rule them.
It is easier to be original in error than in truth, for every truth displaces a thousand falsehoods.
Copernicus had reduced the earth to a speck among melting clouds; Darwin reduced man to an animal fighting for his transient mastery of the globe. Man was no longer the son of God; he was the son of strife, and his wars made the fiercest brutes ashamed of their amateur cruelty. The human race was no longer the favored creation of a benevolent deity; it was a species of ape, which the fortunes of variation and selection had raised to a precarious dignity, and which in its turn was destined to be surpassed and to disappear. Man was not immortal; he was condemned to death from the hour of his
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(“Lasciate ogni sper-anza, voi ch’entrate!”),
KELLOGG, J. H., The New Dietetics;
Library.) 52. MILTON, J., Lycidas, L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, Sonnets, Areopagitica,
BEARD, C. and M., The Rise of American Civilization.
*Books marked with a star are recommended for purchase. Number of books starred, 27; approximate cost (based upon a survey of secondhand bookstores), $90. Number of volumes in the list: 151; approximate cost (based upon a survey of secondhand bookstores), $300. Time required for reading: 4 years at 7 hours per week, 10 hours per volume.
When we take a total view, and compare our modern existence, precarious and chaotic as it is, with the ignorance, superstition, brutality, cannibalism, and diseases of primitive peoples, we are a little comforted: the lowest strata of our race may still differ only slightly from such men, but above those strata thousands and millions have reached to mental and moral heights inconceivable, presumably, to the early mind. Under the complex strain of city life we sometimes take imaginative refuge in the quiet simplicity of savage days, but in our less romantic moments we know that this is a
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Our thousand fads of diet and drugs predispose us to the belief that we must be ridden with disease as compared with simpler men in simpler days, but this is a delusion. We think that where there are so many doctors there must be more sickness than before. But in truth we have not more ailments than in the past, but only more money; our wealth allows us to treat and cherish and master illnesses from which primitive men died without even knowing their Greek names.
We think there is more violence in the world than before, but in truth there are only more newspapers; vast and powerful organizations scour the planet for crimes and scandals that will console their readers for stenography and monogamy; and all the villainy and politics of five continents are gathered upon one page for the encouragement of our breakfasts. We conclude that half the world is killing the other half, and that a large proportion of the remainder are committing suicide. But in the streets, in our homes, in public assemblies, in a thousand vehicles of transportation, we are
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We dislike education, because it was not presented to us in our youth for what it is. Consider it not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates, but as an ennobling intimacy with great men. Consider it not as the preparation of the individual to “make a living,” but as the development of every potential capacity in him for the comprehension, control, and appreciation of his world. Above all, consider it, in its fullest definition, as the technique of transmitting as completely as possible, to as many as possible, that technological, intellectual, moral, and artistic heritage through which
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I envy those Chinese schoolboys who were made to memorize every word of Confucius. I have found every line profound and applicable, and sometimes I think that if these maxims had sunk into my memory for twenty years, I might have in me a little of the poise of soul, the simple dignity, the quiet understanding, the depth of character, the infinite courtesy that I have found in the educated Chinese everywhere.
In Western civilization, printing helped money and muskets to liberate the middle class and put an end to the rule of the knights and the priests. It enabled the people to read the Bible, and so engendered the Reformation. It immensely widened the circle to which a writer might address his ideas. And by transferring the making of books from monks to printers’ devils, and the patronage of books from the aristocracy and the church to the commonalty and the laity, it made possible the propaganda and development of democracy and free thought.
” I never cease admiring the French Enlightenment; all in all I consider it the peak of human history, greater even than Periclean Greece, or Augustan Rome, or Medicean Italy. Never had men thought so bravely, spoken so brilliantly, or lifted themselves to a greater height of culture and courtesy. “Alas!” said Louis XVI, standing in his Temple prison before the books of Voltaire and Rousseau, “these are the men that have destroyed France.” Yes, they had destroyed one France, but they had liberated another, not to speak of freeing America through their disciples, Washington, Franklin, and
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