Source: Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943), p. 34
Context: Our preceptors were gentlemen as well as scholars. There was not a grain of sentimentalism in the institution; on the other hand, the place was permeated by a profound sense of justice. … An equalitarian and democratic regime must by consequence assume, tacitly or avowedly, that everybody is educable. The theory of our regime was directly contrary to this. Our preceptors did not see that doctrines of equality and democracy had any footing in the premises. They did not pretend to believe that everyone is educable, for they knew, on the contrary, that very few are educable, very few indeed. They saw this as a fact of nature, like the fact that few are six feet tall. … They accepted the fact that there are practicable ranges of intellectual and spiritual experience which nature has opened to some and closed to others.
“Brothers all
In honour, as in one community,
Scholars and gentlemen.”
Bk. IX, l. 227.
The Prelude (1799-1805)
Reported in Christopher R. Edginton, Peter Chen, Leisure as transformation: Volume 4 (2008), p. 87.
Attributed
“They were gentlemen in the full sense of the word; and what has one not said in saying this?”
Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 17
1860s, Speech to Germans at Cincinnati, Ohio (1861), Commercial version
“These are the sentiments of JUSTICE AND HUMANITY.”
1770s, African Slavery in America (March 1775)
Speech to the American Bar Association (2 September 1925).
Context: The most ominous spirit of our times, as it seems to me, is the indication of the growth of an intolerent spirit. It is the more dangerous when armed, as it usually is, with sincere conviction. It is a spirit whose wrath must be turned away by the soft answers of a sweet reasonableness. It can be exorcised only by invoking the Genius which watched over our infancy and has guided our development— a good Genius— still potent let us believe — the American spirit of civil and religious liberty. Our institutions were not devised to bring about uniformity of opinion; if they had we might well abandon hope. It is important to remember, as has well been said, "the essential characteristic of true liberty is that under its shelter many different types of life and character and opinion and belief can develop unmolested and unobstructed."
Book II, Chapter 5, p. 280
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)
Source: Speech to the Reichstag advocating protective tariffs, quoted in Paul Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (1980), p. 51
"Truth Is the Death of Intention: Benjamin's Esoteric History of Romanticism," Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 31, No. 4, Winter 1992, p. 458
In p. 50.
Sources, Seer of the Fifth Veda: Kr̥ṣṇa Dvaipāyana Vyāsa in the Mahābhārata
