"Einstein's Reply to Criticisms" (1949), The World As I See It (1949)
Context: There are few enough people with sufficient independence to see the weaknesses and follies of their contemporaries and remain themselves untouched by them. And these isolated few usually soon lose their zeal for putting things to rights when they have come face to face with human obduracy. Only to a tiny minority is it given to fascinate their generation by subtle humour and grace and to hold the mirror up to it by the impersonal agency of art. To-day I salute with sincere emotion the supreme master of this method, who has delighted — and educated — us all.
The Tatler No. 63 (September 1709)
Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (2003)
“Plato by a goodly similitude declareth, why wise men refrain to meddle in the commonwealth. For when they see the people swarm into the streets, and daily wet to the skin with rain, and yet cannot persuade them to go out of the rain, they do keep themselves within their houses, seeing they cannot remedy the folly of the people.”
Quam ob rem pulcherrima similitudine declarat Plato, cur merito sapientes abstineant a capessenda quippe republica. Cum populum videant in plateas effusum assiduis imbribus perfundi, nec persuadere queant illis, ut se subducant pluviae, tectaque subeant. Gnari nihil profuturos sese si exeant, quam ut una compluantur, semet intra tecta continent habentes satis, quando alienae stultitiae non possunt mederi, si ipsi saltem sint in tuto.
Source: Utopia (1516), Ch. 1 : Discourses of Raphael Hythloday, of the Best State of a Commonwealth
"The Greeks and Us", p. 15
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
Source: Aspects of the Novel (1927), Chapter Nine: Conclusion
Context: If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people — a very few people, but a few novelists are among them — are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is against such a search: organized religion, the state, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent.
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)
Elric, chewing on a piece of barely palatable salt beef, remarked that this seemed a quality of a good deal of society, throughout the multiverse.
Book 2, Chapter 4 “Land at Last!” (p. 241)
The Elric Cycle, The Revenge of the Rose (1991)
Der eitle, schwache Mensch sieht in Jedem einen Richter, der stolze, starke hat keinen Richter als sich selbst.
Source: Aphorisms (1880/1893), p. 34.
