“Adam's temperament was the first command the Deity ever issued to a human being on this planet. And it was the only command Adam would never be able to disobey. It said, "Be weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable." The later command, to let the fruit alone, was certain to be disobeyed. Not by Adam himself, but by his temperament”
which he did not create and had no authority over.
"The Turning Point of my Life", §3, Harper's Bazar, February 1910, as reprinted in Essays and Sketches of Mark Twain (1995), ed. Stuart Miller, ISBN 1566198798
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Mark Twain637
American author and humorist 1835–1910Related quotes
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement
1950s, Rediscovering Lost Values (1954)
Context: Now that isn't the only thing that convinces me that we've strayed away from this attitude, this principle. The other thing is that we have adopted a sort of a pragmatic test for right and wrong—whatever works is right. If it works, it's all right. Nothing is wrong but that which does not work. If you don't get caught, it's right. [laughter] That's the attitude, isn't it? It's all right to disobey the Ten Commandments, but just don't disobey the eleventh, "Thou shall not get caught." [laughter] That's the attitude. That's the prevailing attitude in our culture. No matter what you do, just do it with a bit of finesse. You know, a sort of attitude of the survival of the slickest. Not the Darwinian survival of the fittest, but the survival of the slickest—whoever can be the slickest is the one who right. It's all right to lie, but lie with dignity. [laughter] It's all right to steal and to rob and extort, but do it with a bit of finesse. It's even all right to hate, but just dress your hate up in the garments of love and make it appear that you are loving when you are actually hating. Just get by! That's the thing that's right according to this new ethic. My friends, that attitude is destroying the soul of our culture. It's destroying our nation.
Archibald Wavell, 1st Earl Wavell (1883–1950) senior officer of the British Army
II – The General and His Troops.
"Generals and Generalship" (1939)
Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist
Did Adam have a Bellybutton?: And other tough questions about the Bible (2000)
Michael Walzer (1935) American philosopher
"The Obligation to Disobey," Ethics, Vol. 77, No. 3 (April 1967), p. 163
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) Italian Dominican scholastic philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church
in Aquinas: Selected Political Writings (Basil Blackwell: 1974), p. 183
Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard
Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism
Source: 1840s, The Concept of Anxiety (1844), p. 44-45