1768
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791)
“Dr. Blair, relying on the internal evidence of their antiquity, asked Dr. Johnson whether he thought any man of a modern age could have written such poems? Johnson replied, "Yes, Sir, many men, many women, and many children."”
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), p. 213.
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James Macpherson 46
Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician 1736–1796Related quotes
Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 2, p. 26
Samuel Johnson
(1709–1784) English writer
September 14, 1777, p. 341
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol III
Charles James Fox
(1749–1806) British Whig statesman
Samuel Johnson in conversation with James Boswell (11 June 1784), quoted in James Boswell, Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 1292.
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March 1781
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791)
Cesar Chavez
(1927–1993) American farm worker, labor leader, and civil rights activist
Lessons of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1990)
Robert Anton Wilson
(1932–2007) American author and polymath
Source: Everything Is Under Control (1998), p. 361; some of Wilson's account of the suppression of Reich's ideas and work are technically exaggerative: though many of Reich's books mentioning his concepts of orgone energy and the "orgone accumulators" of his laboratory were destroyed the destruction of his equipment and books was not actually total.
Context: Dr. Wilhelm Reich was condemned for unscientific claims by the Food and Drug Administration in 1956 because of his theories about sexual freedom and his discovery of an alleged "orgone" energy. He quickly became the most world-famous victim of the FDA's quest to impose One True Faith on medical practice in the United States, because the Feds not only destroyed all the equipment in Dr. Reich's experimental laboratory but burned all his books, too, in an incinerator, and then they put him in jail where he died of a heart attack.
Since many disapprove of this unconstitutional way of silencing heresy, Dr. Reich has remained a center of controversy. … In addition to his bio-physical heresies, Dr. Reich vastly offended many people by his sociological theory, which holds that fascism is just an exaggerated form of the basic structure of sex-negative societies and has existed under other names in every civilization based on sexual repression. In this theory, the character and muscular armor of the average citizen — a submissive and frightened attitude anchored in body reflexes — causes the average person to want a strong authority figure above them. Tyranny, in this model, is not created by tyrants alone but by neurotic masses who want tyrants.
