“The history of credulity would be the most singular page in the great history of mankind. From those vast beliefs which have founded religions and empires, down to the inventions that garnish the last new murder, there has always been a tendency in the human mind to believe with as little expense of the reasoning faculty as possible.”
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Letitia Elizabeth Landon 785
English poet and novelist 1802–1838Related quotes

The Unity of Religious Ideals, Part I : Seeking for the Ideal.
The Spiritual Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan

Parliament of Whores (1991)
Context: Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadows about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 427.
General G. Baker, Jr., "Letter to Draft Board 100, Wayne County, Detroit, Michigan," SOULBOOK, II, (Spring 1965), 133-134, in Black nationalism in America, John H. Bracey (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 506-8. ( page scan from another source http://speakersforanewamerica.com/gendraft.html)

Source: Black Reconstruction in America (1935), p. 727
Context: The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen. It was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Yet we are blind and led by the blind. We discern in it no part of our labor movement; no part of our industrial triumph; no part of our religious experience. Before the dumb eyes of ten generations of ten million children, it is made mockery of and spit upon; a degradation of the eternal mother; a sneer at human effort; with aspiration and art deliberately and elaborately distorted. And why? Because in a day when the human mind aspired to a science of human action, a history and psychology of the mighty effort of the mightiest century, we fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present and guide policy in the future.

A Fragment on Progress (1891)

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 141.