“The world is content with setting right the surface of things.”

— John Henry Newman

Discourse VIII, pt. 8.
The Idea of a University (1873)

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John Henry Newman 37

English cleric and cardinal 1801–1890

Leo Strauss book Thoughts on Machiavelli

Source: Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), p. 13

“The fact is, that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted that mind… From the very first he set before the consciousness things which it could not tolerate.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

“For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

Source: White Noise

“It is useless to seek the soul of things beneath their surface, for their surface is their soul.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

“Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen.”

Horace Mann (1796–1859) American politician

Peter Marshall, US Senate prayer (10 March 1948)
Misattributed

“God grant, that not only the Love of Liberty, but a thorough Knowledge of the Rights of Man, may pervade all the Nations of the Earth, so that a Philosopher may set his Foot anywhere on its Surface, and say, 'This is my Country.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Letter to David Hartley (December 4, 1789); reported in Albert H. Smyth, ed., The Writings of Benjamin Franklin (1907), Volume 10, p. 72; often quoted as, "Where liberty dwells, there is my country".
Decade unclear

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
Context: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

“There are two things that kill a genius — a fatal disease and contentment. When a man is contented he goes to sleep. Voltaire had no chance to be contented, and so he wrote eternally and unceasingly, more than any other man in the history of the world.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Voltaire (1916)

“Is the surface of a planet really the right place for expanding technological civilization?”

Gerard O'Neill (1927–1992) Physicist, author, and inventor

"Is the surface of a planet really the right place for expanding technological civilization?"-Stewart Brand interview July 1975 http://www.nas.nasa.gov/About/Education/SpaceSettlement/CoEvolutionBook/Interview.HTML

“We'll slide down the surface of things…”

Bret Easton Ellis book Glamorama

Glamorama (1998)

“The world is content with setting right the surface of things.”

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John Henry Newman 37

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