Henry Vaughan (1621–1695) Welsh author, physician and metaphysical poet
"They Are All Gone," st. 3.
Silex Scintillans (1655)
“Democracy in its best sense is merely the letting in of light and air.”
On Democracy (6 October 1884)
Context: All free governments, whatever their name, are in reality governments by public opinion, and it is on the quality of this public opinion that their prosperity depends. It is, therefore, their first duty to purify the element from which they draw the breath of life. With the growth of democracy grows also the fear, if not the danger, that this atmosphere may be corrupted with poisonous exhalations from lower and more malarious levels, and the question of sanitation becomes more instant and pressing. Democracy in its best sense is merely the letting in of light and air.
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James Russell Lowell175
American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat 1819–1891Related quotes
“A democracy should not let its dreamers perish. They are its life, its guaranty against decay.”
Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) American architect
Education (1902)
Context: He who knows naught of dreaming can, likewise, never attain the heights of power and possibility in persuading the mind to act.
He who dreams not creates not.
For vapor must arise in the air before the rain can fall.
The greatest man of action is he who is the greatest, and a life-long, dreamer. For in him the dreamer is fortified against destruction by a far-seeing eye, a virile mind, a strong will, a robust courage.
And so has perished the kindly dreamer — on the cross or in the garret.
A democracy should not let its dreamers perish. They are its life, its guaranty against decay.
Thus would I expand the sympathies of youth.
Thus would I liberate and discipline all the constructive faculties of the mind and encourage true insight, true expression, real individuality.
Thus would I concentrate the powers of will.
Thus would I shape character.
Thus would I make good citizens.
And thus would I lay the foundations for a generation of real architects — real, because true, men, and dreamers in action.
Adam Przeworski (1940) Polish-American academic
Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, "Modernization: Theories and Facts", World Politics (Jan., 1997)
Katharine Kerr (1944) American writer
Notes from the "The Pseudo-Iamblichos Scroll" in The Spirit Stone (2007)
Context: In some sense, every magician is a weaver, merely one who works with invisible strands of the hidden light. With it we weave our various forms, just as a weaver produces cloth, and then stitch them into the images we desire, just as a tailor sews cloth into a tunic or robe. If we be journeymen in our craft, forces will come to inhabit our forms, just as a person will come to buy the tunic and place it over his body. But if we have plumbed the secret recesses of our art, if we are masters of our craft, then we can both weave the forms and place our own bodies within them.
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement
1960s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
David Lane (white nationalist) (1938–2007) American white supremacist, convicted felon
Revolution by Number
George Gilder (1939) technology writer
Telecosm : How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionize Our World (2000), p. 31
Context: Let there be light, says the Bible. All the firmaments of technology, all our computers and networks, are built with light, and of light, and for light, to hasten its spread around the world. Light glows on the telescom's periphery; it shines as its core; it illuminates its webs and its links. From Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein to Richard Feynman and Charles Townes, the more men have gazed at light, the more it turns out to be a phenomenon utterly different from anything else. And yet everything else — every atom and every molecula — is fraught with its oscillating intensity.