“In the name of Purity what lies are told! What queer morality it has engendered.”
Sex Slavery (1890)
Context: In the name of Purity what lies are told! What queer morality it has engendered. For fear of it you dare not tell your own children the truth about their birth; the most sacred of all functions, the creation of a human being, is a subject for the most miserable falsehood. When they come to you with a simple, straightforward question, which they have a right to ask, you say, "Don't ask such questions," or tell some silly hollowlog story; or you explain the incomprehensibility by another — God! You say "God made you." You know you are lying when you say it. You know, or you ought to know, that the source of inquiry will not be dammed up so. You know that what you Could explain purely, reverently, rightly (if you have any purity in you), will be learned through many blind gropings, and that around it will be cast the shadowthought of wrong, embryo'd by your denial and nurtured by this social opinion everywhere prevalent. If you do not know this, then you are blind to facts and deaf to Experience.
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Voltairine de Cleyre 78
American anarchist writer and feminist 1866–1912Related quotes
In che picciolo cerchio, e fra che nude
Solitudini è stretto il vostro fasto!
Lei, come isola, il mare intorno chiude;
E lui, ch'or Ocean chiamate or vasto,
Nulla eguale a tai nomi ha in sè di magno;
Ma è bassa palude, e breve stagno.
Canto XIV, stanza 10 (tr. Wickert)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)
“Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.”
Dentro de nós há uma coisa que não tem nome, essa coisa é o que somos.
Source: Blindness (1995), p. 276
Context: I do have a strong faith and always have had, I’m not a regular churchgoer now but I’m in church a lot – to do readings, to attend events and so on. I had a strong church upbringing which I think has been invaluable to me in terms of a moral compass – of some idea of what’s acceptable and what is not acceptable. I have a Presbyterian nature in that I like its ideas of individual responsibility and democracy. I’m naturally suspicious of people who wear religion heavily on their sleeves – that’s just not me and my style.
Notes from Cambridge, Massachusetts (July 1842) published in Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852), Vol. II, p. 64.
interviewed by Bill Moyers, July 22, 2012 http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/chris_hedges_on_moyers_company_20120722
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), IV : The Essence of Catholicism
