Collages (1964), p. 116
Context: Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark.
“The science of human nature belongs to people who are not afraid to live independent lives. They alone have the flexible access to experience which can bring human wisdom and strength into being, and once these assets exist, they will send forth their influence with an authority that cannot be resisted, unmindful of artificial man made boundaries, reaching anywhere in the world.”
A Renegade Psychiatrist's Story
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Paul Rosenfels 9
American sociologist 1909–1985Related quotes
Jerry Mander
(1936) American activist
Source: Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), p. 87
“I cannot bring myself to believe that any human being lives who would do me any harm.”
Abraham Lincoln
(1809–1865) 16th President of the United States
Remark to Gen. Edward H. Ripley (5 April 1865), recalled during Ripley's speech http://books.google.com/books?id=1OoSAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA353&dq=believe at the 41st annual meeting of the Reunion Society of Vermont Officers (1 November 1904)
Posthumous attributions
Rudolf Steiner
(1861–1925) Austrian esotericist
Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path. A Philosophy of Freedom (GA 4), Hudson (1894)/1995.
“The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being.”
Pearl S. Buck
(1892–1973) American writer
"To You on Your First Birthday"
To My Daughters, With Love (1967)
Context: The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.
John Gray
(1948) British philosopher
Sweet Morality (p. 235)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)
Randall Jarrell
(1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist
"The Profession of Poetry," Partisan Review (September/October 1950) [p. 166]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
“No such right of man in man can exist. A human being cannot be justly owned.”
William Ellery Channing
(1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman
A Human Being Cannot Be Justly Owned (1835)
Context: The slave-holder claims the slave as his Property. The very idea of a slave is, that he belongs to another, that he is bound to live and labor for another, to be another’s instrument, and to make another’s will his habitual law, however adverse to his own. Another owns him, and, of course, has a right to his time and strength, a right to the fruits of his labor, a right to task him without his consent, and to determine the kind and duration of his toil, a right to confine him to any bounds, a right to extort the required work by stripes, a right, in a word, to use him as a tool, without contract, against his will, and in denial of his right to dispose of himself, or to use his power for his own good. “A slave,” says the Louisiana code, “is in the power of the master to whom he belongs. The master may sell him, dispose of his person, his industry, his labor; he can do nothing, possess nothing, nor acquire any thing, but which must belong to his master.” “Slaves shall be deemed, taken, reputed, and adjudged,” say the South-Carolina laws, “to be chattels personal in the hands of their masters, and possessions to all intents and purposes whatsoever.” Such is slavery, a claim to man as property. Now this claim of property in a human being is altogether false, groundless. No such right of man in man can exist. A human being cannot be justly owned. To hold and treat him as property is to inflict a great wrong, to incur the guilt of oppression.
Barack Obama
(1961) 44th President of the United States of America
2009, Nobel Prize acceptance speech (December 2009)
Context: We do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place. The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached — their fundamental faith in human progress — that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.
For if we lose that faith — if we dismiss it as silly or naïve; if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace — then we lose what's best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass.
Like generations have before us, we must reject that future. As Dr. King said at this occasion so many years ago, "I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the 'isness' of man's present condition makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal 'oughtness' that forever confronts him."
Let us reach for the world that ought to be — that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.
