“The question I should like to put to them is, in a nutshell, this: "Do you despise or do you respect mankind, you - its future saviours?"”
Dostoyevsky, in a letter to Katkov, the reactionary editor of The Moscow Herald, in which The Brothers Karamazov was serialized
As quoted by David Magarshack in his 1958 translation of The Brothers Karamazov
Context: The modern negationist declares himself declares himself openly in favour of the devil's advice and maintains that it is more likely to result in man's happiness than the teachings of Christ. To our foolish but terrible Russian socialism (for our youth is mixed up in it) it is a directive and, it seems, a very powerful one: the loaves of bread, the Tower of Babel (that is, the future reign of socialism) and the complete enslavement of the freedom of conscience - that is what the desperate negationist is striving to achieve. The difference is, that our socialists (and they are not only the hole-and-corner nihilists) are conscious Jesuits and liars who do not admit that their ideal is the ideal of the coercion of the human conscience and the reduction of mankind to the level of cattle. While my socialist (Ivan Karamazov) is a sincere man who frankly admits that he agrees with the views of the Grand Inquisitor and that Christianity seems to have raised man much higher than his actual position entitles him. The question I should like to put to them is, in a nutshell, this: "Do you despise or do you respect mankind, you - its future saviours?"
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky 155
Russian author 1821–1881Related quotes
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Examples of self-translation (c. 2004), Quotes - Zitate - Citations - Citazioni
Source: Speech to the Police Federation conference in Eastbourne (18 May 1976) regarding the Federation's campaign on law and order, quoted in The Times (19 May 1976), p. 5
LiNK’s Hannah Song: Forever Committed to a Cause https://web.archive.org/web/20160414025408/ttp://www.mochimag.com/article/links-hannah-song-forever-committed-to-a-cause (2010)
On the subject of the rule in Shelley's Case (1 Rep. 104a); reported in James William Norton-Kyshe, Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904), p. 170.
Source: Thank You and You're Welcome (2009), p.3-4
“What do you despise? By this you are truly known.”
A few sites, perhaps most of them deriving their information from its previous placement among the "Attributed" quotes here, credit this to Michelangelo, but so far as definite citations go, it almost certainly originated with Frank Herbert when he used the phrase in the novel Dune (1965).
Misattributed
Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 8 (p. 64)