"The Commercial Motive" Christian Century 40 (Feb 22, 1923)
“In the name of the dogma of struggle for existence and natural selection, they paint for us in the saddest colors this primitive humanity whose hunger and thirst, always badly satisfied, were their only passions; those sombre times when men had no other care and no other occupation than to quarrel with one another over their miserable nourishment. To react against those retrospective reveries of the philosophy of the eighteenth century and also against certain religious doctrines, to show with some force that the paradise lost is not behind us and that there is in our past nothing to regret, they believe we ought to make it dreary and belittle it systematically. Nothing is less scientific than this prejudice in the opposite direction. If the hypotheses of Darwin have a moral use, it is with more reserve and measure than in other sciences. They overlook the essential element of moral life, that is, the moderating influence that society exercises over its members, which tempers and neutralizes the brutal action of the struggle for existence and selection. Wherever there are societies, there is altruism, because there is solidarity.”
Source: The Division of Labor in Society (1893), p. 153
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Émile Durkheim 43
French sociologist (1858-1917) 1858–1917Related quotes

Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 167
Context: The French philosophy of the eighteenth century was in full strength. Those were the years in which Voltaire ruled European opinion, and Turgot could not but take account of his influence. Yet no one could apparently be more unlike those who were especially named as the French philosophers of the eighteenth century. He remained reverential; he was never blasphemous, never blatant; he was careful to avoid giving needless pain or arousing fruitless discussion; and, while the tendency of his whole thinking was evidently removing him from the orthodoxy of the Church, his was a broader and deeper philosophy than that which was then dominant.

Speech at the 5th Levantine Fair (6 September 1934) in reference to German Nordicism; quoted in Hitler's Ten-year War on the Jews http://books.google.com/books?id=vCA4AAAAIAAJ&q=%22Thirty+centuries+of+history+allow+us+to+look+with+supreme+pity%22&dq=%22Thirty+centuries+of+history+allow+us+to+look+with+supreme+pity%22&pgis=1 (1946) by the Institute of Jewish Affairs
1930s

On special role of caste in Indian society in page=12.
History, Society, and Land Relations: Selected Essays

Address given in Bombay (26 September 1896), Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 1, p. 410 (Electronic Book), New Delhi, Publications Division Government of India, 1999, 98 volumes.
1890s

Speech to the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford (27 February 1940), quoted in The Times (28 February 1940), p. 10
Foreign Secretary