"A Native Hill"
The Long-Legged House (1969)
Context: We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us... We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.
“Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.”
Source: Life on the Mississippi
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Mark Twain 637
American author and humorist 1835–1910Related quotes
Diary (27 October 1883)
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922 - 1926)
Address to young Muslims in Casablanca on 19 August 1985, during the pope's apostolic journey to Morocco
Source: Libreria Editrice Vaticana http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/speeches/1985/august/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_19850819_giovani-stadio-casablanca_en.html
Context: We hope for lives whose story leaves us looking admirable; we like our weaknesses to be hidden and deniable... We want to enjoy our lives, and we want to enjoy them with a good conscience... Ethics is disturbing. We are often vaguely uncomfortable when we think of such things as exploitation of the world's resources, or the way our comforts are provided by the miserable labour conditions of the third world... Racists and sexists, like antebellum slave owners in America, always have to tell themselves a story that justifies their system.
Simon Blackburn, Being Good (2001)
Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.51 p. 4
Religious-based Quotes
Speech in the US House of Representatives on April 2, 1828, as quoted in The Life of Colonel David Crockett (1884) by Edward Sylvester Ellis and in the January 1867 issue of Harper's magazine ("Davy Crockett's Electioneering Tours"), p. 606-611. Known as the "Not Yours to Give" speech. Though it may have expressed his attitudes on the issue, there has been dispute as to the authenticity of this speech as there is no known record of it prior to this 1884 work.