Status Updates From A Connecticut Yankee in Kin...

“The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn’t prepared for him.”

“A man who hasn’t had much experience, and doesn’t think, is apt to measure a nation’s prosperity by the mere size of the prevailing wages; if the wages be high, the nation is prosperous; if low, it isn’t. Which is an error. It isn’t what sum you get, it’s how much you can buy with it, that’s the important thing; and it’s that that tells whether your wages are high in fact or only high in name.”

“No people in the world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed must begin in blood, whatever may answer afterward. If history teaches anything, it teaches that.”

“Their entire being was reduced to a monotonous dead level of patience, resignation, dumb uncomplaining acceptance of whatever might befall them in this life. Their very imagination was dead.”

"ادیبان آلمانی هرگاه ادیبانه در دریای جمله‌ای فرو روند چمان در آن غو‌طه‌ور می‌شوند، که وقتی از سوی دیگر اقیانوس سر برمی‌آورند، هنوز فعل جمله در دهان‌شان مانده است."

“Training—training is everything; training is all there is to a person. We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us.”

“You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing.”

“To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags—that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it.”

This book flip-flops between deep hard topics and lighthearted humor in a confusing way.

“I was afraid of a United Church; it makes a mighty power, the mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into selfish hands, as it is always bound to do, it means death to human liberty and paralysis to human thought.