The Martyrdom of Man Quotes

“It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels, rather than elevated apes.”
― William Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man

“It is the first and indispensable condition of human progress that a people shall be married to a single land;”
― William Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man [Illustrated]

“Then, if the Earth-wife be fruitful, she will bear them children by hundreds and by thousands; and then calamity will come and teach them by torture to invent.”
― William Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man [Illustrated]

“Where did those? How were they made? What were they made for? In reply to these questions theology is garrulous, but science is dumb.”
― William Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man

“The legend is a fiction, but it illustrates the character of Alexander. Such legends are not related of Genghis Khan, or of Tamerlane by the people whom they conquered.”
― William Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man

“Egypt from the earliest times had been the University of Greece. It had been visited, according to tradition, by Orpheus and Homer: there Solon had studied law-making: there the rules and principles of the Pythagorean order had been obtained : there Thales had taken lessons in geometry: there Democritus had laughed and Xenophanes had sneered. And now every intellectual Greek made the voyage to that country: it was regarded as a part of education, as a pilgrimage to the cradle-land of their mythology.”
― William Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man

“Nature does not contradict herself; the laws which govern the movements of society are as regular and unchangeable as those which govern the movements of the stars.”
― William Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man [Illustrated]