
Inhumanity of Slavery. Extract from A Lecture on Slavery, at Rochester. December 8, 1850
1850s, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)
Speech in Parliament on the American Revolutionary War (February 26, 1781), reported in Hansard (Vol. 22), p. 487, Debate on Mr. Fox's Motion for a Committee.
Inhumanity of Slavery. Extract from A Lecture on Slavery, at Rochester. December 8, 1850
1850s, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)
Jane to Helen Burns (Ch. 6)
Jane Eyre (1847)
Context: If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust; the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should — so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.
Telegram to the League of Nations on the Second Italo-Abyssinian War (10 May 1936), as quoted in Days of Emperor and Clown : The Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935-1936 (1973) by James Dugan and Laurence Davis Lafore, p. 204.
Context: We have decided to bring to an end the most unequal, most unjust, most barbarous war of our age, and have chosen the road to exile in order that our people will not be exterminated and in order to consecrate ourselves wholly and in peace to the preservation of our empire's independence … we now demand that the League of Nations should continue its efforts to secure respect for the covenant, and that it should decide not to recognize territorial extensions, or the exercise of an assumed sovereignty, resulting from the illegal recourse to armed force and to numerous other violations of international agreements.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 230)
Kim Il-sung to the Swedish communist leader Frank Baude in 1993. Quote and translated fr Mot strömmen, pg. 186: "Engels kallade en gång den brittiska armén den mest brutala armén. Under andra världskriget överträffade den tyska fascistarmén brittiska armén i barbari. Ingen mänsklig hjärna kunde någonsin föreställa sig mer djävulska och förfärliga grymheter än dem som begicks av Hitler-skurkarna vid den tiden. Men i Korea har amerikanerna långt mer överträffat hitleristerna."
“Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.”
Book I, 1258b.4
Politics
Context: Money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.
Source: On Nature (1874), p. 102
Context: Conformity to nature has no connection whatever with right and wrong. The idea can never be fitly introduced into ethical discussions at all, except, occasionally and partially, into the question of degrees of culpability. To illustrate this point, let us consider the phrase by which the greatest intensity of condemnatory feeling is conveyed in connection with the idea of nature - the word "unnatural." That a thing is unnatural, in any precise meaning which can be attached to the word, is no argument for its being blamable; since the most criminal actions are to a being like man not more unnatural than most of the virtues.
“Time is the most wicked of all villains.”
Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 5 (p. 25)
Lecture II, section 35.
The Eagle's Nest (1872)
Context: We shall be remembered in history as the most cruel, and therefore the most unwise, generation of men that ever yet troubled the earth: — the most cruel in proportion to their sensibility, — the most unwise in proportion to their science. No people, understanding pain, ever inflicted so much: no people, understanding facts, ever acted on them so little.