“Humanity has a strange fondness for following processions. Get four men following a banner down the street, and, if that banner is inscribed with rhymes of pleasant optimism, in an hour, all the town will be afoot, ready to march to whatever tune the leaders care to play.”
"A Humble Protest," Harvard Monthly, 1916
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John Dos Passos 25
novelist, playwright, poet, journalist, painter 1896–1970Related quotes

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 130
Context: I have not read Nietzsche or Ibsen, nor any other philosopher, and have not needed to do it, and have not desired to do it; I have gone to the fountain-head for information—that is to say, to the human race. Every man is in his own person the whole human race, with not a detail lacking. I am the whole human race without a detail lacking; I have studied the human race with diligence and strong interest all these years in my own person; in myself I find in big or little proportion every quality and every defect that is findable in the mass of the race. I knew I should not find in any philosophy a single thought which had not passed through my own head, nor a single thought which had not passed the heads of millions and millions of men before I was born; I knew I should not find a single original thought in any philosophy, and I knew I could not furnish one to the world myself, if I had five centuries to invent it in. Nietzsche published his book, and was at once pronounced crazy by the world—by a world which included tens of thousands of bright, sane men who believed exactly as Nietzsche believed, but concealed the fact, and scoffed at Nietzsche. What a coward every man is! and how surely he will find it out if he will just let other people alone and sit down and examine himself. The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.

Book II, Ch. 49, p. 384
Selected Messages (1958 - 1980)

<!-- http://www.vialibri.net/552display_i/year_1820_600_491675.html DEAD LINK as of 2014·09·06 --> Letter to William James MacNeven (1820); quoted in "The Red Harlot of Liberty: The Rise and Fall of Frances Wright" by Kimberly Nichols in Newtopia Magazine (15 May 2013) http://newtopiamagazine.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/the-red-harlot-of-liberty-the-rise-and-fall-of-frances-wright/
Context: Another revolution! Naples free and all of Italy in insurrection! How wonderful has been the march of the human mind in these last thirty years … so may it be till the last link of the chains of slavery is broken and the banner of freedom waves over the whole earth!

On Coalition Government (1945)
Source: Memoirs Of A Bird In A Gilded Cage (1969), CHAPTER 5, The Canada Pension Plan, p. 92
“If there is one sound the follows the march of humanity, it is the scream.”

Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, Chapter 3, The Curse of Civil Service Reform

[rediff.com, Fame, http://www.rediff.com/movies/2003/jun/12rani.htm, 23 August, 2006]
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