
Dreams and Facts (1919)
1910s
#55
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
Dreams and Facts (1919)
1910s
1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)
Source: The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), Ch. XVI : The Original Sources of the Knowledge of God, p. 237.
Context: I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children; who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children; whose work serves the earth he lives on and from and with, and is therefore pleasurable and meaningful and unending; whose rewards are not deferred until "retirement," but arrive daily and seasonally out of the details of the life of their place; whose goal is the continuance of the life of the world, which for a while animates and contains them, and which they know they can never compass with their understanding or desire.
The Unforeseen Wilderness : An Essay on Kentucky's Red River Gorge (1971), p. 33; what is likely a paraphrase of a portion of this has existed since at least 1997, and has sometimes become misattributed to John James Audubon: A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 106.
198 U.S. at 79.
1900s, Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905)
“It's wrong to flog a man. It's against his being a man.”
Billy Budd
Billy Budd (1962)