
“No, he is not a ghost; he is a man of Heaven and earth, that is all.”
pg. xx
Native Son (1940)
“No, he is not a ghost; he is a man of Heaven and earth, that is all.”
“Genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out.”
Source: Your Forces and How to Use Them (1912), p. 107
As quoted in a eulogy for Darrow http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/darrow1.htm by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1938)
Source: The Wind in the Willows (1908), Ch. 7
Context: Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.
"The Triumph of Assurance", Orthodox Paradoxes, Or, A Believer Clearing Truth by Seeming Contradictions (1647), p. 48-49.
As quoted in The World's Religions (1976) by Sir James Norman Dalrymple Anderson, p. 61
Source: I Am Legend (1954), Ch. 21
Context: Robert Neville looked out over the new people of the earth. He knew he did not belong to them; he knew that, like the vampires, he was anathema and black terror to be destroyed. And, abruptly, the concept came, amusing to him even in his pain. … Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever.
I am legend.
“The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he…”
[Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, Putney Debates 1647] This is one Liberal Text. And it is more distinctive than may at first appear. It asserts the individual and the value of any individual - even the poorest He. But it asserts it without envy. It does not demand that the rich be made poor - nor even claim that the poor are more deserving than the rich. It demands equality in one thing only, the right to live one's own life.
The Liberal Future (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), p. 12.