Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian
The World As Revelation: Names of Gods (1980)
Autobiography (1873)
Context: Moreover, if the character is formed, and the mind made up, on the few cardinal points of human opinion, agreement of conviction and feeling on these, has been felt in all times to be an essential requisite of anything worthy the name of friendship, in a really earnest mind. All these circumstances united, made the number very small of those whose society, and still more whose intimacy, I now voluntarily sought.
Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian
The World As Revelation: Names of Gods (1980)
“I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing — to be clear.”
Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …
Introduction to Nemesis (1989)
General sources
Context: I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing — to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics — Well, they can do whatever they wish.
“Few bipeds, from Adam's time down, have been worthy of the name of man.”
Marguerite Yourcenar book The Abyss
Peu de bipèdes depuis Adam ont mérité le nom d'homme.
"A Conversation in Innsbruck", p. 114
The Abyss (1968)
Sebastian Junger (1962) American author, journalist and documentarian
Source: Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
George Bancroft (1800–1891) American historian and statesman
Literary and Historical Miscellanies (1855), The Necessity, the Reality, and the Promise of the Progress of the Human Race (1854)
Context: No science has been reached, no thought generated, no truth discovered, which has not from all time existed potentially in every human mind. The belief in the progress of the race does not, therefore, spring from the supposed possibility of his acquiring new faculties, or coming into the possession of a new nature.
Still less does truth vary. They speak falsely who say that truth is the daughter of time; it is the child of eternity, and as old as the Divine mind. The perception of it takes place in the order of time; truth itself knows nothing of the succession of ages. Neither does morality need to perfect itself; it is what it always has been, and always will be. Its distinctions are older than the sea or the dry land, than the earth or the sun. The relation of good to evil is from the beginning, and is unalterable.
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist
The Law of Mind (1892)