“Detraction paves the way for the very perfections which it doubts and denies.”

— Frederick Douglass

1870s, Self-Made Men (1872)

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Frederick Douglass 274

American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman 1818–1895

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“God's very service is wages; His ways are strewed with roses, and paved with joy that is unspeakable and full of glory, and with peace that passeth understanding.”

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“That it is doubted by single cavillers can very little weaken the general evidence, and some who deny it with their tongues confess it by their fears.”

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Context: “That the dead are seen no more,” said Imlac, “I will not undertake to maintain against the concurrent and unvaried testimony of all ages and of all nations. There is no people, rude or learned, among whom apparitions of the dead are not related and believed. This opinion, which perhaps prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by its truth: those that never heard of one another would not have agreed in a tale which nothing but experience can make credible. That it is doubted by single cavillers can very little weaken the general evidence, and some who deny it with their tongues confess it by their fears.
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“Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.”

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“Culture, when it loses its sacred sense, loses all sense. With the disappearance of the sacred, which imposed limits to the perfection which could be attained by the profane, arises one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization—the illusion that there are no limits to the changes that human life can undergo, that society is 'in principle' an endlessly flexible thing, and that to deny this flexibility and this perfectibility is to deny man's total autonomy and thus to deny man himself.”

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“All that exists that can be denied deserves to be denied; and being truthful means: to believe in an existence that can in no way be denied and which is itself true and without falsehood.”

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“Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.”

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“Every bliss achieved is a masterpiece: the slightest error turns it awry, and it alters with one touch of doubt; any heaviness detracts from its charm, the least stupidity renders it dull.”

Marguerite Yourcenar book Memoirs of Hadrian

Tout bonheur est un chef-d'oeuvre: la moindre erreur le fausse, la moindre hésitation l'altère, la moindre lourdeur le dépare, la moindre sottise l'abêtit.
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“Doubt comes in at the window, when Inquiry is denied at the door.”

Benjamin Jowett (1817–1893) Theologian, classical scholar, and academic administrator

On the interpretation of Scripture http://www.bible-researcher.com/jowett1.html

“Detraction paves the way for the very perfections which it doubts and denies.”

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Frederick Douglass 274

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