“We can see in the gladiatorial shows of Rome, which degenerated into the butchery alike of beasts and men, the sure sign of moral decay which ended in the destruction of the empire and the breaking up of the great influence it had cast over the world. It is altogether necessary that we keep our own amusements and recreations within that field which will be prophetic, not of destruction, but of development. It is characteristic of almost the entire American life that it has a most worthy regard for clean and manly sports. It has little appetite for that which is unwholesome or brutal.”

— Calvin Coolidge

1920s, The Democracy of Sports (1924)

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Calvin Coolidge 412

American politician, 30th president of the United States (i… 1872–1933

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“…we find and we know that this attempt in Ireland to make the power and influence of the State the means of supporting one creed against another has been the plague and the scourge of the country—has divided man from man, class from class, kingdom from kingdom, and in this great, and ancient, and noble empire has had the effect of now exhibiting us to the world as a divided country—three kingdoms, two of which we are indeed heartily united and associated, but the third of which offers to mankind a spectacle painful and full of schism and destruction within itself, and alienation and estrangement as regards the Throne and Constitution of this realm.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

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“What good are laws without a religion? We need a religion so distant to that of Rome that we can never return to the religion of Rome. In this century we are furthermore convinced that religion must be based on morality and not morality on religion. Hence we require a reliigion that is faithful to morals, that is virtually their further development, their necessary consequence, and that, in uplifting the soul, can perpetually keep it on the acme of that precious freedom which is now its unique idol.”

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“… happiness does not consist in amusement. In fact, it would be strange if our end were amusement, and if we were to labor and suffer hardships all our life long merely to amuse ourselves…. The happy life is regarded as a life in conformity with virtue. It is a life which involves effort and is not spent in amusement….”

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“The basis of science is the empirical method, which uses the senses to build up a picture of the world; but science tells us that our senses have evolved to help us get by, not to show us the world as it is. Science is only a systematic examination of our impressions, and in the end all each of us has left are our own sensations … The end-result of the empirical method, then, is that each individual is left alone with their own experiences. We can escape this solitude, Balfour suggested, only if we accept that there is a divine mind.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Cross-correspondences (p. 69-70)
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“Now the great temptation of life and the great tragedy of life is that so often we allow the without of our lives to absorb the within of our lives. The great tragedy of life is that too often we allow the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Keep Moving From This Mountain (1965)
Context: Each of us lives in two realms, the "within" and the "without." The within of our lives is somehow found in the realm of ends, the without in the realm of means. The within of our [lives], the bottom — that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion for which at best we live. The without of our lives is that realm of instrumentalities, techniques, mechanisms by which we live. Now the great temptation of life and the great tragedy of life is that so often we allow the without of our lives to absorb the within of our lives. The great tragedy of life is that too often we allow the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live.

“Our treatment of animals is the last moral frontier, the ultimate test of our humanity, the mirror by which we can see most deeply into our own souls.”

Bernard E. Rollin (1943) American philosopher

"The Legal and Moral Bases of Animal Rights", in Ethics and Animals, edited by Harlan B. Miller and William H. Williams (Clifton, NJ: Humana Press, 1983), p. 118 https://books.google.it/books?id=JBPlBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA118.

“The chief danger for a country placed as we are is that of living sullenly in the past, of believing that the world has a duty to keep us in the station to which we are accustomed, and showing bitter resentment if it does not do so. This was the mood of Suez; and it is a mood absolutely guaranteed, not to recreate our past glories, but to reduce us to a level of influence and wealth far lower than that which we need occupy. … Our neighbours in Europe are roughly our economic and military equals. We would do better to live gracefully with them than to waste our substance by trying unsuccessfully to keep up with the power giants of the modern world.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

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“It is the nature of human institutions to degenerate, to lose their vitality, and decay, and the first sign of decay is the loss of flexibility and oblivion of the essential spirit in which they were conceived.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

22 September 1907
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Context: It is the nature of human institutions to degenerate, to lose their vitality, and decay, and the first sign of decay is the loss of flexibility and oblivion of the essential spirit in which they were conceived. The spirit is permanent, the body changes; and a body which refuses to change must die. The spirit expresses itself in many ways while itself remaining essentially the same but the body must change to suit its changing environments if it wishes to live. There is no doubt that the institution of caste degenerated. It ceased to be determined by spiritual qualifications which, once essential, have now come to be subordinate and even immaterial and is determined by the purely material tests of occupation and birth. By this change it has set itself against the fundamental tendency of Hinduism which is to insist on the spiritual and subordinate the material and thus lost most of its meaning. The spirit of caste arrogance, exclusiveness and superiority came to dominate it instead of the spirit of duty, and the change weakened the nation and helped to reduce us to our present conditions.

“Through our scientific genius we made of the world a neighborhood, but we failed through moral commitment to make of it a brotherhood, and so we’ve ended up with guided missiles and misguided men. And the great challenge is to move out of the mountain of practical materialism and move on to another and higher mountain which recognizes somehow that we must live by and toward the basic ends of life. We must move on to that mountain which says in substance,”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Keep Moving From This Mountain (1965)
Context: We have allowed our civilization to outrun our culture; we have allowed our technology to outdistance our theology and for this reason we find ourselves caught up with many problems. Through our scientific genius we made of the world a neighborhood, but we failed through moral commitment to make of it a brotherhood, and so we’ve ended up with guided missiles and misguided men. And the great challenge is to move out of the mountain of practical materialism and move on to another and higher mountain which recognizes somehow that we must live by and toward the basic ends of life. We must move on to that mountain which says in substance, "What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world of means — airplanes, televisions, electric lights — and lose the end: the soul?"

“The radical dynamism into which National Socialism has developed is a dangerous, destructive fever, which spreads at an uncanny rate.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (1939), p. 253

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