Letter (1820), quoted in "The Red Harlot of Liberty: The Rise and Fall of Frances Wright" by Kimberly Nichols in Newtopia Magazine (15 May 2013)
Context: Is not an hereditary nobility inconsistent with liberty? I will ask more, is it not inconsistent with public virtue? Not only does it lodge authority with the unskillful but with those whose interest it is to abuse it. It does more – it degrades the minds of men, it corrupts their hearts and debases their understanding, leading them to attach honor and to yield respect to something else than talent and virtue.
“When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.”
1770s, Common Sense (1776)
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Thomas Paine 262
English and American political activist 1737–1809Related quotes
“We are a kind of posterity in respect to them.”
Letter to William Strahan (1745); reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Epistles
Johnny Got His Gun (1938)
Context: Remember this well you people who plan for war. Remember this you patriots, you fierce ones, you spawners of hate, you inventors of slogans. Remember this as you have never remembered anything else in your lives. We are men of peace, we are men who work and we want no quarrel. But if you destroy our peace, if you take away our work, if you try to range us one against the other, we will know what to do. If you tell us to make the world safe for democracy we will take you seriously and by god and by Christ we will make it so. We will use the guns you force upon us, we will use them to defend our very lives, and the menace to our lives does not lie on the other side of a nomansland that was set apart without our consent it lies within our own boundaries here and now we have seen it and we know it.
“We are always doing something for Posterity, but I would fain see Posterity do something for us.”
No. 587 (20 August 1714).
The Spectator (1711–1714)
“We should not miss the present opportunity or we shall be blamed by posterity.”
Quoted in "Enter Japan" - "Time Magazine" article - July 8, 1940
“Virtue, if not in action, is a vice,
And, when we move not forward, we go backward.”
The Maid of Honour (c. 1621; printed 1632), Act I, scene i.
“We cannot defer this responsibility to posterity. Time will not wait.”
UN Address (1999)
Context: We cannot defer this responsibility to posterity. Time will not wait. Democracy, civilization itself, is at stake. Within the next few years we must change the basic structure of our global community from the present anarchic system of war and ever more destructive weaponry to a new system governed by a democratic UN federation.
Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Printing the picture and controlling its formation, p. 79