William Winwood Reade Quotes (32 quotes)

William Winwood Reade: 32 quotes3 likes

Famous William Winwood Reade Quotes

“Men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels, rather than elevated apes.”

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter III, "Liberty"

“Let me recommend this book – one of the most remarkable ever penned.”

Sherlock Holmes, in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of the Four, ch. 2.
Criticism of The Martyrdom of Man

“The first rational exposition of the relations of mankind to the mystery which shrouds the how and wherefore of man’s existence.”

William Winwood Reade

Sir Harry Johnston Liberia (1906), vol. 1, p. 257.
Criticism of The Martyrdom of Man

“As a single atom man is an enigma: as a whole he is a mathematical problem. As an individual he is a free agent, as a species the offspring of necessity.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter II, "Religion", pp. 143-4.

“The Supreme Power is not a Mind; not a Force; not a Being, but something higher than a Being; something for which we have no words, something for which we have no ideas.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter IV, "Intellect"

“And then, the Earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet and sun from sun. The Earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the Universe. Finally, men will master the forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter IV, "Intellect"

William Winwood Reade Quotes about men

“As the saints and prophets were often forced to practise long vigils and fastings and prayers before their ecstasies would fall upon them and their visions would appear, so Virtue in its purest and most exalted form can only be acquired by means of severe and long continued culture of the mind. Persons with feeble and untrained intellects may live according to their conscience; but the conscience itself will be defective. … To cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty; and when this truth is fairly recognized by men, the religion which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted and that it should be subservient to faith, will inevitably fall.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter IV, "Intellect", p. 540.

“All doctrines relating to the creation of the world, the government of man by superior beings, and his destiny after death, are conjectures which have been given out as facts, handed down with many adornments by tradition, and accepted by posterity as "revealed religion". They are theories more or less rational which uncivilised men have devised in order to explain the facts of life, and which civilised men believe that they believe.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter II, "Religion", p. 138.

“There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies rather than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents. 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

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter III, "Liberty", p. 315.

“All men indeed cannot be poets, inventors or philanthropists; but all men can join in that gigantic and godlike work, the progress of creation. Whoever improves his own nature improves the universe of which he is a part.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter IV, "Intellect"

“If Christianity were true religious persecution would become a pious and charitable duty: if God designs to punish men for their opinions it would be an act of mercy to mankind to extinguish such opinions. By burning the bodies of those who diffuse them many souls would be saved that would otherwise be lost, and so there would be an economy of torment in the long run. It is therefore not surprising that enthusiasts should be intolerant.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter II, "Religion", p. 178.

William Winwood Reade Quotes

“The essence of religion is inertia; the essence of science is change. It is the function of the one to preserve, it is the function of the other to improve. If, as in Egypt, they are firmly chained together, either science will advance, in which case the religion will be altered, or the religion will preserve its purity, and science will congeal.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter I, "War", p. 27.

“One book that has influenced the writer very strongly is Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man…It is still an extraordinarily inspiring presentation of human history as one consistent process.”

William Winwood Reade

H. G. Wells The Outline of History (1920) p. vii.
Criticism of The Martyrdom of Man

“Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought nothing out but loads of dung. That was their return cargo. London turns dirt into gold. Rome turned gold into dirt.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter IV, "Intellect", pp. 383-4.

“As for the system of the Commune, which makes it impossible for a man to rise or fall, it is merely the old caste system revived; if it could be put into force, all industry would be disheartened, emulation would cease, and mankind would go to sleep.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter IV, "Intellect", p. 408.

“Open the book of universal history at what period we may, it is always the India trade which is the cause of internal industry and foreign negotiation.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter I, "War", p. 40.

“Our enlightened posterity will look back upon us who eat oxen and sheep, just as we look upon cannibals.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter IV, "Intellect"

“If we look into ourselves we discover propensities which declare that our intellects have arisen from a lower form; could our minds be made visible we should find them tailed.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter III, "Liberty", p. 314.

“We live between two worlds; we soar in the atmosphere; we creep upon the soil; we have the aspirations of creators and the propensities of quadrupeds. There can be but one explanation of this fact. We are passing from the animal into a higher form, and the drama of this planet is in its second act.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter III, "Liberty", p. 316.

“If indeed there were a judgment-day, it would be for man to appear at the bar not as a criminal but as accuser.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter IV, "Intellect", p. 417.

“A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter IV, "Intellect", p. 385.

“It is a sure criterion of the civilisation of ancient Egypt that the soldiers did not carry arms except on duty, and that the private citizens did not carry them at all.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter I, "War", p. 13.

“In Europe itself it is not probable that war will ever absolutely cease until science discovers some destroying force so simple in its administration, so horrible in its effects, that all art, all gallantry, will be at an end, and battles will be massacres which the feelings of mankind will be unable to endure.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter IV, "Intellect", pp. 405-6.

“A day will come when the European god of the nineteenth century will be classed with the gods of Olympus and the Nile.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter IV, "Intellect"

“The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food. Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter III, "Liberty", p. 315.

“The one, the outstanding, dramatic, imaginative, historical picture of life, to be inspired by Victorian science.”

William Winwood Reade

V. S. Pritchett in The New Statesman and Nation vol. 25 (1943), p. 323.
Criticism of The Martyrdom of Man

“Doubt is the offspring of knowledge: the savage never doubts at all.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter II, "Religion", p. 189.

“It may safely be asserted that the art of war will soon be reduced to a simple question of expenditure and credit, and that the largest purse will be the strongest arm.”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter I, "War", pp. 24-5.

“Reade was an emancipating writer because he seemed to speak as man to man to resolve history into an intelligible pattern in which there was no need for miracles. Even if he was wrong, he was grown-up.”

William Winwood Reade

George Orwell Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (1970) vol. 4, p. 147.
Criticism of The Martyrdom of Man

“It made me what I am.”

William Winwood Reade

Cecil Rhodes, quoted in Robert I. Rotberg The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power (1988) p. 100.
Criticism of The Martyrdom of Man

“What a state of society is this in which free-thinker is a term of abuse, and in which doubt is regarded as sin?”

William Winwood Reade

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter IV, "Intellect", p. 541

William Winwood Reade

The Martyrdom of Man (1872)

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