
“If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.”
Source: The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir (2008), p. 72.
“If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.”
Their Morals and Ours (1938)
Context: (On the American Civil War) "History has different yardsticks for the cruelty of the Northerners and the cruelty of the Southerners in the Civil War. A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!"
“He went down to hell, but it was to break the chains, not to bind them.”
Letter II
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: I would not so dishonour God as to lend my voice to perpetuate all the mad and foolish things which men have dared to say of Him. I believe that we may find in the Bible the highest and purest religion..... most of all in the history of Him in whose name we all are called. His religion — not the Christian religion, but the religion of Christ — the poor man's gospel; the message of forgiveness, of reconciliation, of love; and, oh, how gladly would I spend my life, in season and out of season, in preaching this! But I must have no hell terrors, none of these fear doctrines; they were not in the early creeds, God knows whether they were ever in the early gospels, or ever passed His lips. He went down to hell, but it was to break the chains, not to bind them.
"Humane Literacy" (1963).
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
“My pen and paper cause a chain reaction, to get your brain relaxing.”
"Infinite"
1990s, Infinite (1996)
Speech on being elected to the Belgian Academy, as quoted in “Lady of Letters” Pt. 4, Earthly Paradise (1966) ed. Robert Phelps