Source: On Nature (1874), p. 102
Context: Conformity to nature has no connection whatever with right and wrong. The idea can never be fitly introduced into ethical discussions at all, except, occasionally and partially, into the question of degrees of culpability. To illustrate this point, let us consider the phrase by which the greatest intensity of condemnatory feeling is conveyed in connection with the idea of nature - the word "unnatural." That a thing is unnatural, in any precise meaning which can be attached to the word, is no argument for its being blamable; since the most criminal actions are to a being like man not more unnatural than most of the virtues.
“Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.”
Book I, 1258b.4
Politics
Context: Money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.
Letter to Major-General John Sullivan (15 December 1779), published in The Writings of George Washington (1890) by Worthington Chauncey Ford, Vol. 8, p. 139
1770s
Context: A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man, that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of his friends, and that the most liberal professions of good will are very far from being the surest marks of it. I should be happy that my own experience had afforded fewer examples of the little dependence to be placed upon them.
“Most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust and diabolical.”
Speech in Parliament on the American Revolutionary War (February 26, 1781), reported in Hansard (Vol. 22), p. 487, Debate on Mr. Fox's Motion for a Committee.
Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 2
Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Pin-hole as a substitute for the lens, p. 61
“Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions, he added parenthetically, out of.”
Source: Eyeless in Gaza
Race: A Study in Modern Superstition (1937)
Context: Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word "race" has a fair claim to being the most common, most ambiguous and most explosive. No one today would deny that it is one of the great catchwords about which ink and blood are spilled in reckless quantities. Yet no agreement seems to exist about what race means.
Source: 'Parliamentary Reform', Quarterly Review, 117, 1865, p. 550
'Parliamentary Reform', Quarterly Review, 117, 1865, p. 550
