“You can lock the door upon them, but they burst open their shaky lattices and call out over the house-tops so that men cannot but hear. You hounded wild Rousseau into the meanest garret of the Rue St. Jacques and jeered at his angry shrieks. But the thin, piping tones swelled a hundred years later into the sullen roar of the French Revolution, and civilization to this day is quivering to the reverberations of his voice.”
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)
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Jerome K. Jerome 87
English humorist 1859–1927Related quotes
“If your wife locks you out of the house, you don't have a problem with your door.”
Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Source: Masks of the Illuminati
Conversation of 1930, in Personal Recollections (1981) by Rush Rhees, Ch. 6
Variant: Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.
Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 175
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), p. 153
