“They who have put out the people's eyes reproach them of their blindness.”
Apology for Smectymnuus (1642), section VIII
Source: An apology for Smectymnuus with the reason of church-government by John Milton ...
Context: So little care they of beasts to make them men, that by their sorcerous doctrine of formalities, they take the way to transform them out of Christian men into judaizing beasts. Had they but taught the land, or suffered it to be taught, as Christ would it should have been in all plenteous dispensation of the word, then the poor mechanic might have so accustomed his ear to good teaching, as to have discerned between faithful teachers and false. But now, with a most inhuman cruelty, they who have put out the people’s eyes, reproach them of their blindness; just as the Pharisees their true fathers were wont, who could not endure that the people should be thought competent judges of Christ’s doctrine, although we know they judged far better than those great rabbis: yet “this people,” said they, “that know not the law is accursed.”
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John Milton 190
English epic poet 1608–1674Related quotes
Fragment iv.
Golden Sayings of Epictetus, Fragments
“If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out.”
Section 196 of the Code of Hammurabi (translated by Leonard William King, 1910).
Alternately translated as: If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye.
“You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.”
As quoted in Art and the Message of the Church (1961) by Walter Ludwig Nathan, p. 120.
“There are people who take the heart out of you, and there are people who put it back.”
“Dead Man’s Shoes”, p. 143, quoting Elizabeth David
The Ivory and the Horn (1996)
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man will poke out his eye to fit in.”
12 December 2010
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2010