1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)
“Can it be doubtful that this is still the rule of human education; that the human creature needs first of all to be educated not that he may speak, but that he may have something weighty and valuable to say! If speech is the bank-note of an inward capital of culture, of insight and noble human worth, then speech is precious, and the art of speech shall be honored. But if there is no inward capital; if speech represent no real culture of the mind, but an imaginary culture; no bullion, but the fatal and now almost hopeless deficit of such? Alas, alas, said bank-note is then a forged one; passing freely current in the market; but bringing damages to the receiver, to the payer, and to all the world, which are in sad truth infallible, and of amount incalculable.”
1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)
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Thomas Carlyle 481
Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian… 1795–1881Related quotes
1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)
“Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and”
This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Context: Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.
Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234 (2002) (Opinion of the Court).
and many after him
Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City
"Under One Small Star"
Poems New and Collected (1998), Could Have (1972)
Context: I know I won't be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.
Letter to Lyudmila Shestakova, July 30, 1868; Jay Leyda and Sergei Bertensson The Musorgsky Reader (1947) p. 113.