“You inherit your notions from a set of priests that had no wives and no children, or none to speak of, and so let their humanity die out of them.”

—  Oliver Wendell Holmes, book Elsie Venner

Elsie Venner (1859)
Context: You inherit your notions from a set of priests that had no wives and no children, or none to speak of, and so let their humanity die out of them. It didn't seem much to them to condemn a few thousand millions of people to purgatory or worse for a mistake of judgment. They didn't know what it was to have a child look up in their faces and say 'Father!' It will take you a hundred or two more years to get decently humanized, after so many centuries of de-humanizing celibacy.

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Oliver Wendell Holmes photo
Oliver Wendell Holmes135
Poet, essayist, physician 1809–1894

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