What Does God Want Us to Do About Russia? (1948)
Context: Western man has progressively accepted the use of violence during the years since the outbreak of the First World War. In that war the Germans began the practice of indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations of British cities.... The peoples of the Allied world and of neutral countries were shocked and outraged by this evidence of German inhumanity and bestiality... the dropping of bombs on men, women and children sleeping peacefully in their beds in great cities.... By the year 1945 most people of the United Nations were rejoicing over the winning of the war through the destruction from the air of numerous German and Japanese cities, and were revealing scarcely a qualm of conscience over this unequaled devastation and annihilation. The practice from which they had recoiled in horror less than three decades previously, they were now using with cold premeditation and concentrated skill. And nothing like the havoc they wrought had ever before been seen on this earth.
Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 235
“Progression has not been the character of the history of man.”
More Worlds Than One: The Creed of the Philosopher and the Hope of the Christian (1856), "Religious Difficulties", p. 157-158
Context: The history of the human species is the history of a variety of races in every stage of civilization and barbarism, and the great majority of which have neither an intellectual, nor a moral, nor a religious progressive history. Progression has not been the character of the history of man. Without alluding to his primeval fall from his high estate, we have only to cast our eyes over the globe, and look at the intellectual, moral, and religious catastrophes which it presents to us, — at ages of light and darkness, — at alternations of progress and decline, — at the highest civilization sinking into the lowest barbarism. Mark those eastern lands, now involved in darkness, from which the beams of knowledge first radiated on mankind. Study the extinction of morality in many regions of the earth where its great lessons were first taught by our Saviour and His apostles; and above all, mark the total suppression of the Christian faith in European communities, where it has been displaced by a religion whose doctrines were preached by conquest, and whose decalogue was dictated by the sword.
Energy and vibration: energy, sound, heat, light, explosives (1900); Fords, Howard & Hulbert, p. 237
Nature's Miracles (1900)
Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Ch. 1: The New Era in World Politics, § 1 : Introduction: Flags And Cultural Identity
“I am a pacifist in that I believe that no man has a right to do violence to any other man.”
The Trial of Scott Nearing and The American Socialist Society https://archive.org/details/trialofscottnear00neariala (1919)
Context: Q: You are a pacifist even to class struggles?
[Nearing]: I am a pacifist in that I believe that no man has a right to do violence to any other man.
Q: Even in the class struggle?
[Nearing]: Under no circumstances.
This "aphorism" was expressed in different forms by Josh Billings and Socrates. note: Often misquoted as, "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge," and often misattributed to Stephen Hawking.
Source: Cleopatra's Nose: Essays on the Unexpected (1995).
