“Had the Pilgrim Fathers been met on Plymouth Rock by immigration officials; had their children been placed immediately in good free schools, and given the care of doctors, dentists, and nurses; had they found themselves in infinitely better circumstances than they had ever enjoyed in England, indulging in undreamed-of luxuries, and taught by kind-hearted philanthropists,—what pioneer virtues would they have developed, what sons would they have bred, what honours would history have accorded them? If our early settlers were masterful, they earned the right to mastery, and the price they paid for it was endurance. To the sacrifices which they made, to their high courage and heroic labours, we owe law, liberty, and well-being.”

in "The Modest Immigrant" (1916)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Had the Pilgrim Fathers been met on Plymouth Rock by immigration officials; had their children been placed immediately …" by Agnes Repplier?

Agnes Repplier11

American essayist 1855–1950

Related quotes

“If we had never met Picasso, would Cubism have been what it is? I think not. The meeting with Picasso was a circumstance in our lives.”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

Source: 1946 - 1963, In conversation with Dora Vallier' (1954), p. 265

“What would become of history, had we not a dependence on the veracity of the historian, according to the experience, what we have had of mankind?”

David Hume book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

§ 8.18
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

“Indeed, had his father kept the boy at home, and given him half an hour's direction every day, he would have done more for him than school ever could do for them. Of course, school-taught men and boys looked down on home-bred boys, and rather prided themselves on their own ignorance, but the man of sixty can generally see what he needed in life, and in Henry Adams's opinion it was not school.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Other children had fathers and mothers and honored them, and they prospered and lived to a ripe old age; but he was often bitter towards his father and mother and dishonored them in his heart. His mother had cuckolded his father, and his father had betrayed his mother, and both of them had betrayed the boy. The only consolation was that he had a Father in heaven. And yet—it would have been better to have a father on earth.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book One: The Revelation of the Deity

“My mother loved children -- she would have given anything if I had been one.”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

“Had this act not been done by me, of course it would have been better for me. But circumstances were beyond my control.”

Nathuram Godse (1910–1949) Assassin of Mahatma Gandhi

Nathuram Godse: Why I Assassinated Gandhi (1993)

“Children are made to learn bits of Shakespeare by heart, with the result that ever after they associate him with pedantic boredom. If they could meet him in the flesh, full of jollity and ale, they would be astonished, and if they had never heard of him before they might be led by his jollity to see what he had written. But if at school they had been inoculated against him, they will never be able to enjoy him. The same sort of thing applies to music lessons. Human beings have certain capacities for spontaneous enjoyment, but moralists and pedants possess themselves of the apparatus of these enjoyments, and having extracted what they consider the poison of pleasure they leave them dreary and dismal and devoid of everything that gives them value. Shakespeare did not write with a view to boring school-children; he wrote with a view to delighting his audiences. If he does not give you delight, you had better ignore him.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Part III: Man and Himself, Ch. 20: The Happy Man, p. 201
1950s, New Hopes for a Changing World (1951)

“It is very difficult for us, placed as we have been from earliest childhood in a condition of training, to say what would have been our feelings had such training never taken place.”

George Gabriel Stokes (1819–1903) British mathematician and physicist

[George Gabriel Stokes, Natural theology: The Gifford lectures, delivered before the University of Edinburgh in 1893, Adamant Media Corporation, 1893, 1421205122, 4]

“What happens to all the laws placed on the statute book? If half the hopes of their promoters had been realised, would not the millennium have arrived ere this?”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The John Clifford Lecture at Coventry (14 July 1930), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 46.
1930
Context: There is a saying as old as the Greeks that it is more important to form good habits than to frame good laws. There is an undercurrent of suspicion that this is true and that, like patriotism, legislation is not enough. The hopes held out when laws are framed are not always realised when laws are passed... What happens to all the laws placed on the statute book? If half the hopes of their promoters had been realised, would not the millennium have arrived ere this?

“You know that if you had been in charge of creation you would have found some medium less heart-breaking than Time to stage it in.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

“Poor Little Warrior!” p. 79
Short fiction, Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Agnes Repplier11

Related quotes

Related topics