“Youth's the season made for joys,
Love is then our duty.”
John Gay (1685–1732) English poet and playwright
Act II, sc. iv, air 22
The Beggar's Opera (1728)
Variant: The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.
“Youth's the season made for joys,
Love is then our duty.”
John Gay (1685–1732) English poet and playwright
Act II, sc. iv, air 22
The Beggar's Opera (1728)
“The first duty of the officer is to challenge whatever seems illusory.”
S.L.A. Marshall (1900–1977) United States Army general and Military historian
The Soldier's Load and the Mobility of a Nation (1950)
Hugh Blair (1718–1800) British philosopher
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 345.
Alan Rusbridger (1953) British newspaper editor
Rusbridger (2011). As cited in: Benedetta Brevini, Arne Hintz, Patrick McCurdy (2013) Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society. p. 1994.
2010s
Friedrich Nietzsche book The Dawn
Man verdirbt einen Jüngling am sichersten, wenn man ihn anleitet, den Gleichdenkenden höher zu achten, als den Andersdenkenden.
The Dawn, Sec. 297
Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) American journalist
Free Speech and Plain Language (1936)
Context: I had a desultory talk with one devotee of expediency not long ago, a good friend and a thoroughly excellent man. He was all worked up over the activities of Communists and what he called pink Socialists, especially in the colleges and churches. He said they were corrupting the youth, and he was strong for having them coerced into silence. I could not see it that way. I told him it seemed pretty clear that Mr. Jefferson was right when he said that the effect of coercion was "to make one half the people fools and the other half hypocrites, and to support roguery and error all over the earth"; look at Germany and Italy! I thought our youth could manage to bear up under a little corrupting — they always have — and if they were corrupted by Communism, they stood a first-rate chance to get over it, whereas if they grew up fools or hypocrites, they would never get over it.
I added that Mr. Jefferson was right when he said that "it is error alone which needs the support of government; truth can stand by itself." One glance at governments anywhere in the world proves that. Well, then, the surest way to make our youth suspect that there may be something in Communism would be for the government to outlaw it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet
Voluntaries
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Source: Emerson: Poems
Pierre Stephen Robert Payne (1911–1983) British lecturer, novelist, historian, poet and biographer
Introduction, p. viii
The Corrupt Society - From Ancient Greece To Present-Day America (1975)
Lal Bahadur Shastri (1904–1966) The second Prime Minister of the Republic of India and a leader of the Indian National Congress party
Corruption