“Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”
Source: Proverbs of Hell
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
William Blake 249
English Romantic poet and artist 1757–1827Related quotes

Darwiniana: the Origin of Species (1860) http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/8thdr10.txt
1860s
Context: It is true that if philosophers have suffered their cause has been amply avenged. Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain. But orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget; and though, at present, bewildered and afraid to move, it is as willing as ever to insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains the beginning and the end of sound science...

“We are grown-up infants, and God is a sort of 'wet nurse' to humanity.”
Eminent Indians (1947)

“Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth...”
All Gall Is Divided (1952)

Cassandra (1860)
“Hope! thou nurse of young desire.”
Love in a Village (1762), Act i, scene 1.

A Summary View of the Rights of British America http://alexpeak.com/twr/jefferson/#1784 (July 1774)
1770s
Context: For the most trifling reasons, and sometimes for no conceivable reason at all, his majesty has rejected laws of the most salutary tendency. The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But previous to the infranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa. Yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty’s negative: thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few British corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of human nature deeply wounded by this infamous practice.