“Things may be fitting to be done, which are not fitting to be boasted of; for by the perverse judgment of the world, that often becomes the subject of censure, which is, in truth, not only innocent but laudable. What can be more innocent than the indulgence of a natural appetite? Or what more laudable than the propagation of our species?”

— Henry Fielding

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Henry Fielding 70

English novelist and dramatist 1707–1754

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“Your anticipations with regard to the slavery among us were the natural offspring of your just principles and laudable sympathies; but I am sorry to say that the occasion which led to them proved to be little fitted for the slightest interposition on that subject.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Letter to Lafayette (1 February 1830), published in Letters and Other Writings of James Madison (1867), Vol. IV, p. 60 https://books.google.com/books?id=ugpFAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA60#v=twopage&q&f=false
1830s
Context: Your anticipations with regard to the slavery among us were the natural offspring of your just principles and laudable sympathies; but I am sorry to say that the occasion which led to them proved to be little fitted for the slightest interposition on that subject. A sensibility, morbid in the highest degree, was never more awakened among those who have the largest stake in that species of interest, and the most violent against any governmental movement in relation to it. The excitability at the moment, happened, also, to be not a little augmented by party questions between the South and the North, and the efforts used to make the circumstance common to the former a sympathetic bond of co-operation. I scarcely express myself too strongly in saying, that any allusion in the Convention to the subject you have so much at heart would have been a spark to a mass of gunpowder. It is certain, nevertheless, that time, the “great Innovator,” is not idle in its salutary preparations. The Colonization Society are becoming more and more one of its agents. Outlets for the freed blacks are alone wanted for a rapid erasure of the blot from our Republican character.

“Quite often the young person is horrified at innocent animals being driven to the slaughterhouse to satisfy the appetites of the human species which could easily feed itself in other ways.”

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"Introductory Remarks on Vegetarianism", in Vegetarianism and the Jewish Tradition by Louis A. Berman (KTAV Publishing House, 1982), p. xx https://books.google.it/books?id=AIvnwmu5DlUC&pg=PR20.

“The thing done avails, and not what is said about it. An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

" First Visit to England http://www.emersoncentral.com/first_visit_england.htm" in English Traits http://www.emersoncentral.com/english.htm (1856)

“There [is] no innocence more dangerous than the innocence of age.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

“Compared with the greatest poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures, possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth is much more fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically far more poets than he.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/149/mode/1up p. 149

“In arranging the bodies in order of their electrical nature, there is formed an electro-chemical system which, in my opinion, is more fit than any other to give an idea of chemistry.”

Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779–1848) Swedish chemist

Jöns Jacob Berzelius, Essai sur le théorie des proportions chimiques (1819). Translated in Henry M. Leicester and Herbert S. Klickstein, A Source Book in Chemistry 1400-1900 (1952), 260.

“There is proof enough furnished by every science, but by none more than geometry, that the world to which we have been allotted is peculiarly adapted to our minds, and admirably fitted to promote our intellectual progress.”

Benjamin Peirce (1809–1880) American mathematician

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Context: There is proof enough furnished by every science, but by none more than geometry, that the world to which we have been allotted is peculiarly adapted to our minds, and admirably fitted to promote our intellectual progress. There can be no reasonable doubt that it was part of the Creator's plan. How easily might the whole order have been transposed! How readily might we have been assigned to some complicated system which our feeble and finite powers could not have unravelled!

“Cosmology is among the oldest subjects to captivate our species. And it’s no wonder. We’re storytellers, and what could be more grand than the story of creation?”

Brian Greene (1963) American physicist

Source: The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“Usefulness may turn out to be the hardest test of fitness for survival, more important than aggression, more effective, in the long run, than grabbiness.”

Lewis Thomas (1913–1993) American physician, poet and educator

"The Tucson Zoo", p. 10
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Context: Maybe altruism is our most primitive attribute out of reach, beyond our control. Or perhaps it is immediately at hand, waiting to be released, disguised now, in our kind of civilization as affection or friendship or attachment. I can’t see why it should be unreasonable for all human beings to have strands of DNA coiled up in chromosomes, coding out instincts for usefulness and helpfulness. Usefulness may turn out to be the hardest test of fitness for survival, more important than aggression, more effective, in the long run, than grabbiness.

“Actions may be laudable or blameable; but they cannot be reasonable: Laudable or blameable, therefore, are not the same with reasonable or unreasonable. The merit and demerit of actions frequently contradict, and sometimes controul our natural propensities. But reason has no such influence. Moral distinctions, therefore, are not the offspring of reason. Reason is wholly inactive, and can never be the source of so active a principle as conscience, or a sense of morals.”

David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature

Part 1, Section 1
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 3: Of morals

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Henry Fielding 70

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