Source: Address on Laying the Cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument (1825), p. 71
Context: Mind is the great lever of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are ultimately answered; and the diffusion of knowledge, so astonishing in the last half-century, has rendered innumerable minds, variously gifted by nature, competent to be competitors or fellow-workers on the theatre of intellectual operation.
Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.109
Entry (1954)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)
Context: In products of the human mind, simplicity marks the end of a process of refining, while complexity marks a primitive stage. Michelangelo's definition of art as the purgation of superfluities suggests that the creative effort consists largely in the elimination of that which complicates and confuses a pattern
“All human conflict is ultimately theological.”
In conversation with Hilaire Belloc (around 1890). Reported in Hilaire Belloc, The Cruise of the "Nona" (1925). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958, p. 48.
What Manning meant, Belloc explains, is "that all wars and revolutions, and all decisive struggles between parties of men arise from a difference in moral and transcendental doctrine" (p. 48), since no man, "arguing for what should be among men, but took for granted as he argued that the doctrine he consciously or unconsciously accepted was or should be a similar foundation for all mankind. Hence battle." (p. 49)
Rainforests and the Timeless Metaphors of Dreams by Manav Gupta (August 1997)
"on my eyot, umbilical cords of earth" by Manav Gupta (May 1999)
One minute films on environment consciousness (Commissioned by the Govt. of India) (2005)
1990s
Alfred-Maurice de Zayas 2013 Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order
2013
Variant: Democracy is not an end in itself, but a means to achieve the sacred promises of human dignity, justice and peace
Literary and Historical Miscellanies (1855), The Necessity, the Reality, and the Promise of the Progress of the Human Race (1854)
Context: No science has been reached, no thought generated, no truth discovered, which has not from all time existed potentially in every human mind. The belief in the progress of the race does not, therefore, spring from the supposed possibility of his acquiring new faculties, or coming into the possession of a new nature.
Still less does truth vary. They speak falsely who say that truth is the daughter of time; it is the child of eternity, and as old as the Divine mind. The perception of it takes place in the order of time; truth itself knows nothing of the succession of ages. Neither does morality need to perfect itself; it is what it always has been, and always will be. Its distinctions are older than the sea or the dry land, than the earth or the sun. The relation of good to evil is from the beginning, and is unalterable.
Five Essays on Liberty (2002), Two Concepts of Liberty (1958)
“That life is long which answers life's great end.”
Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night V, Line 773.
