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I Quotes

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All I Quotes

“It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.”

“It would be well for those interested to reflect whether there now exists, or ever has existed, a wealthy and civilized community in which one portion did not live on the labor of another; and whether the form in which slavery exists in the South is not but one modification of this universal condition... Let those who are interested remember that labor is the only source of wealth, and how small a portion of it, in all old and civilized countries, even the best governed, is left to those by whose labor wealth is created.”

“It would be well to realize that the talk of ‘humane methods of warfare’, of the ‘rules of civilized warfare’, and all such homage to the finer sentiments of the race are hypocritical and unreal, and only intended for the consumption of stay-at-homes. There are no humane methods of warfare, there is no such thing as civilized warfare; all warfare is inhuman, all warfare is barbaric; the first blast of the bugles of war ever sounds for the time being the funeral knell of human progress… What lover of humanity can view with anything but horror the prospect of this ruthless destruction of human life. Yet this is war: war for which all the jingoes are howling, war to which all the hopes of the world are being sacrificed, war to which a mad ruling class would plunge a mad world.”

“It would be wonderful if everyone, everywhere, could slip so easily into the kingdom of heaven, and just as easily stay there forever. But alas! the facts of human nature forbid it. People require teaching, training, purifying, disciplining, and preparing, before they can do so […] Purification of the heart and calming of the mind are necessary prerequisites for penetrating into the Overself […] The attempt to ignore order of development in the Quest, to leap from the lowest to the highest stages, to miss all the intervening ones, is an attempt to get something for nothing. It cannot succeed. For the influx of Spirit needs a chalice clean enough to be fit for it, large enough to hold it. What would happen if the influx were poured into a dirty, cracked, tiny, and weak vessel? […]  the mind, nerves, emotions, and body of the man shall be gradually made capable of sustaining the influx of the Solar Force, or Spirit-Energy.”

“It would be wonderful to become what Oprah has become: she is in such a class of her own, as an entrepreneur, as a performer and an icon. The idea of building a series of programmes and choosing people that I think have talent to do them would be a very interesting idea. I would love to show that television can have soul, depth and range.”

“It would be wrong of me to suppose that just because I can form private mental images, that everyone can. As Francis Galton and William James long ago showed, a small proportion of adults-and some of these extremely intelligent-are unable to form such visual images. Berkeley's point is that it would be equally arrogant for these non-thinkers or non-image formers to claim that everyone is like them in the relevant respect. The temptation to pontificate in that way reveals a narrowness and unwillingness to see the world from another perspective.”

“It would be wrong to interpret the growth of British national consciousness in this period in terms of a new cultural and political uniformity being resolutely imposed on the peripheries of the island by its centre. For many poorer and less literate Britons, Scotland, Wales and England remained more potent rallying calls than Great Britain, except in times of danger from abroad. And even among the politically educated, it was common to think in terms of dual nationalities, not a single national identity.”

“It would convert the Treasury of the United States into a manufactory of paper money. It makes the House of Representatives and the Senate, or the caucus of the party which happens to be in the majority, the absolute dictator of the financial and business affairs of this country. This scheme surpasses all the centralism and all the Caesarism that were ever charged upon the Republican party in the wildest days of the war or in the events growing out of the war.”