“And I honor the man who is willing to sink
Half his present repute for the freedom to think,
And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,
Will risk t'other half for the freedom to speak,
Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store,
Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower.”
Pt. V - Cooper, st. 3
A Fable for Critics (1848)
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James Russell Lowell 175
American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat 1819–1891Related quotes

“Man is free, but his freedom ceases when he has no faith in it”
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Memoirs (trans. Machen 1894), book 1, Preface http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/c/casanova/c33m/preface2.html
Referenced

The House of the Dead https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=8PhfAAAAMAAJ&rdid=book-8PhfAAAAMAAJ&rdot=1 (1915), as translated by Constance Garnett, p. 16
General

Source: The Doctrine of the Mean

Source: The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil.

“His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.”
The Centaur (1963)
Context: I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.
"Who ’ll turn Grindstones" from Essays from the Desk of Poor Robert the Scribe, Doylestown, Pa., (1815); first published in the Wilkesbarre Gleaner (1811).