“Oceans of horse-hair, continents of parchment, and learned-sergeant eloquence, were it continued till the learned tongue wore itself small in the indefatigable learned mouth, cannot make unjust just.”
1840s, Past and Present (1843)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Thomas Carlyle 481
Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian… 1795–1881Related quotes

William A. Fowler's speech at the Nobel Banquet http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1983/fowler-speech.html, December 10, 1983.

1940s, Address accepting the Presidency of the CIO (1952)
Just sit down on a doorstep with a peasant in a village of Northern India and take on the task of trying to explain to him why America, conceived in freedom and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, a nation that can split the atom, that can make a pursuit ship go three times as fast as sound and yet, in this twentieth century, we can't live together in brotherhood and we continue to discriminate against Negroes. It will tax your ingenuity, and you will give them no answers. You can only give them excuses. And excuses are not good enough, if we are going to win the struggle of freedom in the world.
Source: Address accepting the Presidency of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Atlantic City, New Jersey, December 4, 1952, as quoted in Walter P Reuther: Selected Papers (1961), by Henry M. Christman, p. 51

“Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less.”
1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)
Context: Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less. He may learn that what he thought was true was not true. By the elimination of a false premise, his basic capital wealth which in his given lifetime is disembarrassed of further preoccupation with considerations of how to employ a worthless time-consuming hypothesis. Freeing his time for its more effective exploratory investment is to give man increased wealth.
Variant: …it’s not just learning that’s important. It’s learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things that matters.
Source: Excerpt from his poem “three thousand lost kisses” https://poets.org/poem/three-thousand-lost-kisses

Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference

“For the school of grammar has primacy: it is the fairest foundation of learning, the glorious mother of eloquence.”
Prima enim grammaticorum schola est fundamentum pulcherrimum litterarum, mater gloriosa facundiae.
Bk. 9, no. 21; p. 122.
Variae

“In such business
Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th’ ignorant
More learned than the ears.”

“Kindness has converted more sinners than either zeal, eloquence, or learning.”
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 363.