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Desiderius Erasmus

Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (27 October 1466 – 12 July 1536) was a Dutch philosopher, humanist and theologian.
 * See also: The Praise of Folly

Quotes

 * Animals only follow their natural instincts; but man, unless he has experienced the influence of learning and philosophy, is at the mercy of impulses that are worse than those of a wild beast. There is no beast more savage and dangerous than a human being who is swept along by the passions of ambition, greed, anger, envy, extravagance, and sensuality.
 * De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis declamatio (1529), translated by Beert C. Verstraete as On Education for Children, in The Erasmus Reader (University of Toronto Press: 1990), p. 73

 * No Man is wise at all Times, or is without his blind Side.
 * The Alchymyst, in Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I.

 * I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.
 * Letter to an unidentified friend (1489), as translated in Collected Works of Erasmus (1974), p. 58

 * A constant element of enjoyment must be mingled with our studies, so that we think of learning as a game rather than a form of drudgery, for no activity can be continued for long if it does not to some extent afford pleasure to the participant.
 * Letter to Christian Northoff (1497), as translated in Collected Works of Erasmus (1974), p. 114

 * You must acquire the best knowledge first, and without delay; it is the height of madness to learn what you will later have to unlearn.
 * Letter to Christian Northoff (1497), as translated in Collected Works of Erasmus (1974), p. 114

 * Do not be guilty of possessing a library of learned books while lacking learning yourself.
 * Letter to Christian Northoff (1497), as translated in Collected Works of Erasmus (1974), p. 115

 * Ad Graecas literas totum animum applicui; statimque ut pecuniam accepero, Graecos primum autores, deinde vestes emam.
 * I have turned my entire attention to Greek. The first thing I shall do, as soon as the money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.
 * Letter to Jacob Batt (12 April 1500); Collected Works of Erasmus Vol 1 (1974)
 * Variant translation: When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

 * In regione caecorum rex est luscus.
 * In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.
 * Adagia (first published 1500, with numerous expanded editions through 1536), III, IV, 96
 * Also in the same passage of the Adagia is a variant: Inter caecos regnat strabus (Among the blind, the squinter rules).

 * The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.
 * Adagia (1508)

 * Bis dat, qui cito dat.
 * He that gives quickly gives twice.
 * Adagia (1508)

 * There are monasteries where there is no discipline, and which are worse than brothels — ut prae his lupanaria sint et magis sobria et magis pudica. There are others where religion is nothing but ritual; and these are worse than the first, for the Spirit of God is not in them, and they are inflated with self-righteousness. There are those, again, where the brethren are so sick of the imposture that they keep it up only to deceive the vulgar. The houses are rare indeed where the rule is seriously observed, and even in these few, if you look to the bottom, you will find small sincerity. But there is craft, and plenty of it — craft enough to impose on mature men, not to say innocent boys; and this is called profession. Suppose a house where all is as it ought to be, you have no security that it will continue so. A good superior may be followed by a fool or a tyrant, or an infected brother may introduce a moral plague. True, in extreme cases a monk may change his house, or even may change his order, but leave is rarely given. There is always a suspicion of something wrong, and on the least complaint such a person is sent back.
 * Letter to Lambertus Grunnius (August 1516), published in Life and Letters of Erasmus : Lectures delivered at Oxford 1893-4 (1894) edited by James Anthony Froude, p. 180

 * I have no patience with those who say that sexual excitement is shameful and that venereal stimuli have their origin not in nature, but in sin. Nothing is so far from the truth. As if marriage, whose function cannot be fulfilled without these incitements, did not rise above blame. In other living creatures, where do these incitements come from? From nature or from sin? From nature, of course. It must borne in mind that in the apetites of the body there is very little difference between man and other living creatures. Finally, we defile by our imagination what of its own nature is fair and holy. If we were willing to evaluate things not according to the opinion of the crowd, but according to nature itself, how is it less repulsive to eat, chew, digest, evacuate, and sleep after the fashion of dumb animals, than to enjoy lawful and permitted carnal relations?
 * In Praise of Marriage (1519), in Erasmus on Women (1996) Erika Rummel

 * I am a lover of liberty. I will not and I cannot serve a party.
 * Spongia adversus aspergines Hutteni (1523), § 176, As quoted in Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1900) by Ephraim Emerton, p. 377
 * Variant: I am a lover of liberty. I cannot and will not serve parties.

 * There is no doubt about Martin Luther's marriage, but the rumour about his wife's early confinement is false; she is said however to be pregnant now. If there is truth in the popular legend, that Antichrist will be born from a monk and a nun (which is the story these people keep putting about), how many thousands of Antichrists the world must have already!
 * Responding to rumours prompted by the marriage of Martin Luther, in a letter to François Dubois (13 March 1526), as translated in The Correspondence of Erasmus : Letters 1658 to 1801, January 1526-March 1527 (1974) edited by Charles Garfield Nauert and Alexander Dalzell, p. 79
 * Paraphrased variant: They say that the Antichrist will be born of a monk and a nun. If so, there must already be thousands of Antichrists.

 * The world thought well of my schoolmaster guardian, because he was neither a liar, nor a scamp, nor a gambler; but he was coarse, avaricious, and ignorant; he knew nothing beyond the confused lessons which he taught to his classes. He imagined that in forcing a youth to become a monk he would be offering a sacrifice acceptable to God. He used to boast of the many victims which he devoted annually to Dominic and Francis and Benedict.
 * As quoted in Life and Letters of Erasmus: Lectures Delivered at Oxford 1893-4 (1899) by James Anthony Froude

 * Wherever you encounter truth, look upon it as Christianity.
 * As quoted in Erasmus of Rotterdam (1934) by Stefan Zweig, Eden Paul, and Cedar Paul, p. 91; reprinted in Erasmus — The Right to Heresy (2008) by Stefan Zweig, p. 62

 * There is nothing I congratulate myself on more heartily than on never having joined a sect.
 * As quoted in Thomas More and Erasmus (1965) by Ernest Edwin Reynolds, p. 248

 * I am a citizen of the world, known to all and to all a stranger.
 * As quoted in Erasmus (1970) by György Faludy, p. 197

 * I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.
 * As quoted in Words from the Wise : Over 6,000 of the Smartest Things Ever Said (2007) by Rosemarie Jarski, p. 312. From The Praise of Folly.

 * For we have in Latin only a few small streams and muddy puddles, while they have pure springs and rivers flowing in gold. I see that it is utter madness even to touch with the little finger that branch of theology that deals chiefly with the divine mysteries, unless one is also provided with the equipment of Greek.
 * As quoted in Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World (2017) by By Eric Metaxas, p. 85

Handbook of the Christian Soldier (1503)

 * Most Christians are superstitious rather than pious, and except for the name of Christ differ hardly at all from superstitious pagans.
 * The Erasmus Reader (1990), pp. 140-141.

 * Whatever you see in the more material part of yourself, learn to refer to God and to the invisible part of yourself. In that way, whatever offers itself to the senses will become for you an occasion for the practice of piety.
 * The Erasmus Reader (1990), p. 141.

 * You venerate the saints, and you take pleasure in touching their relics. But you disregard their greatest legacy, the example of a blameless life. No devotion is more pleasing to Mary than the imitation of Mary's humility. No devotion is more acceptable and proper to the saints than striving to imitate their virtues.
 * The Erasmus Reader (1990), p. 144.

The Praise of Folly (1511 AD)

 * For what is life but a play in which everyone acts a part until the curtain comes down?

 * This type of man who is devoted to the study of wisdom is always most unlucky in everything, and particularly when it comes to procreating children; I imagine this is because Nature wants to ensure that the evils of wisdom shall not spread further throughout mankind.

 * It might be wiser for me to avoid Camarina and say nothing of theologians. They are a proud, susceptible race. They will smother me under six hundred dogmas. They will call me heretic and bring thunderbolts out of their arsenals, where they keep whole magazines of them for their enemies. Still they are Folly's servants, though they disown their mistress. They live in the third heaven, adoring their own persons and disdaining the poor crawlers upon earth. They are surrounded with a bodyguard of definitions, conclusions, corollaries, propositions explicit, and propositions implicit. ...They will tell you how the world was created. They will show you the crack where Sin crept in and corrupted mankind.
 * as quoted by James Anthony Froude, Life and Letters of Erasmus: Lectures Delivered at Oxford 1893-4 (1899)

 * They [the theologians] will explain to you how Christ was formed in the Virgin's womb; how accident subsists in synaxis without domicile in place. The most ordinary of them can do this. Those more fully initiated explain further whether there is an instans in Divine generation; whether in Christ there is more than a single filiation; whether 'the Father hates the Son' is a possible proposition; whether God can become the substance of a woman, of an ass, of a pumpkin, or of the devil, and whether, if so, a pumpkin could preach a sermon, or work miracles, or be crucified. And they can discover a thousand other things to you besides these. They will make you understand notions, and instants, formalities, and quiddities, things which no eyes ever saw, unless they were eyes which could see in the dark what had no existence.
 * as quoted by Froude ibid., (1899)

 * Of how much more passion than reason has Jupiter composed us? putting in, as one would say, "scarce half an ounce to a pound."

The Handbook of the Militant Christian (1514 AD)
(Translated by John P Dolan)

 * Let me mention another requirement for a better understanding of Holy Scripture. I would suggest that you read those commentators who do not stick so closely to the literal sense. The ones I would recommend most highly after St. Paul himself are Origen, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine. Too many of our modern theologians are prone to a literal interpretation, which they subtly misconstrue. p.37

 * In this life it is necessary that we be on our guard. To begin with we must be constantly aware of the fact that life here below is best described as being a type of continual warfare. This is a fact that Job, that undefeated soldier of vast experience, tells us so plainly. Yet in this matter the great majority of mankind is often deceived, for the world, like some deceitful magician, captivates their minds with seductive blandishments, and as a result most individuals behave as if there had been a cessation of hostilities. p.61

 * The things that we can see with our physical eyes are mere shadows of reality. If they appear ugly and ill formed, then what must be the ugliness of the soul in sin, deprived of all light? The soul, like the body, can undergo transformation in appearance. In sin it appears as completely ugly to the beholder. In virtue it shines resplendently before God.

 * Like the body the soul can be healthy, youthful, and so on. It can undergo pain, thirst, and hunger. In this physical life, that is, in the visible world, we avoid whatever would defile or deform the body; how much more, then, ought we to avoid that which would tarnish the soul?

 * I feel that the entire spiritual life consists in this: That we gradually turn from those things whose appearance is deceptive to those things that are real. p. 63

 * Once we have tasted the sweetness of what is spiritual, the pleasures of the world will have no attraction for us. If we disregard the shadows of things, then we will penetrate their inner substance.

 * You worry whether the drought will end. It is far better that you pray that God may water your mind lest virtue wither away in it. You are greatly concerned with money that is lost or being wasted, or you worry about the advance of old age. I think it much to be desired that you provide first of all for the needs of your soul.

 * Origen, of course, is also a great advocate of the allegorical approach. Yet I think you will have to admit that our modem theologians either despise this method of interpretation or are completely ignorant of it. As a matter of fact they surpass the pagans of antiquity in the subtlety of their distinctions. p. 63

 * Anyone who actually admires money as the most precious thing in life, and rests his security on it to the extent of believing that as long as he possesses it he will be happy, has fashioned too many false gods for himself. Too many people put money in the place of Christ, as if it alone has the key to their happiness or unhappiness. p. 100

 * The worst evil is hardness of heart. Those who do not repent, who deliberately remain in their habits of sin, have the the most to fear. p. 146

 * Careful thought about this will reveal how few there are who are truly converted from evil habits, especially among those who have prolonged their lives of sin right up to the end. The path down to evil is quick, slippery, and easy. But to turn and “to go forth to the upper air . . . this is effort, this is toil.” Think of Aesop’s goat before you descend and remember that climbing out is not easy. p. 147

 * Not to be a proud and haughty person, you have to follow the old proverb and “know thyself.” That is to say, you must regard your special talents, whatever beauty or fame you have, as gifts from God, and not as things you earned for yourself. Whatever is low and mean is not God’s doing, however. Here you can only blame yourself. Remember the squalor of your birth and how naked and poor you were when you crawled into the light of day like a little animal. p.154

The Complaint of Peace (1521 A.D.)
(Peace speaks in her own person)

 * Though I certainly deserve no ill treatment from mortals, yet if the insults and repulses I receive were attended with any advantage to them, I would content myself with lamenting in silence my own unmerited indignities and man's injustice.

 * This world, the whole of the planet called earth, is the common country of all who live and breathe upon it.

 * Among the celestial bodies that are revolving over our heads, though the motions are not the same, and though the force is not equal, yet they move, and ever have moved, without clashing, and in perfect harmony.

 * The very elements themselves, though repugnant in their nature, yet, by a happy equilibrium, preserve eternal peace; and amid the discordancy of their constituent principles, cherish, by a friendly intercourse and coalition, an uninterrupted concord.

 * In living bodies, how all the various limbs harmonize, and mutually combine, for common defence against injury! What can be more heterogeneous, and unlike, than the body and the soul? and yet with what strong bonds nature has united them, is evident from the pang of separation. As life itself is nothing else but the concordant union of body and soul, so is health the harmonious cooperation of all the parts and functions of the body.

 * Animals destitute of reason live with their own kind in a state of social amity. Elephants herd together; sheep and swine feed in flocks; cranes and crows take their flight in troops; storks have their public meetings to consult previously to their emigration, and feed their parents when unable to feed themselves; dolphins defend each other by mutual assistance; and everybody knows, that both ants and bees have respectively established by general agreement, a little friendly community.
 * But plants, though they have not powers of perception, yet, as they have life, certainly approach very nearly to those things which are endowed with sentient faculties. What then is so completely insensible as stony substance? yet even in this, there appears to be a desire of union. Thus the loadstone attracts iron to it, and holds it fast in its embrace, when so attracted. Indeed, the attraction of cohesion, as a law of love, takes place throughout all inanimate nature.

 * I need not repeat, that the most savage of the savage tribes in the forest, live among each other in amity. Lions show no fierceness to the lion race. The boar does not brandish his deadly tooth against his brother boar. The lynx lives in peace with the lynx. The serpent shews no venom in his intercourse with his fellow serpent; and the loving kindness of wolf to wolf is proverbial.

 * As Christ had recommended peace during the whole of his life, mark with what anxiety he enforces it at the approach of his dissolution. Love one another, says he; as I have loved you, so love one another; and again, my peace I give unto you, my peace I leave you. Do you observe the legacy he leaves to those whom he loves? Is it a pompous retinue, a large estate, or empire? Nothing of this kind. What is it then? Peace he giveth, his peace he leaveth; peace, not only with our near connections, but with enemies and strangers!

 * As to the people; in all these countries the greater part of the people certainly detest war, and most devoutly wish for peace. A very few of them, indeed, whose unnatural happiness depends upon the public misery, may wish for war; but be it yours to decide, whether it is equitable or not, that the unprincipled selfishness of such wretches should have more weight than the anxious wishes of all good men united.

 * Let the public good overcome all private and selfish regards of every kind and degree; though in truth, even private and selfish regards, and every man's own interest, will be best promoted by the preservation of peace.

 * Finally, every man will become dear and pleasing to every other man; all will be beloved by all! and, what is still more desirable, beloved also by Christ; to become acceptable to whom is the highest felicity of human nature.

Ciceronianus (1528)

 * We must learn how to imitate Cicero from Cicero himself. Let us imitate him as he imitated others.
 * in The Erasmus Reader (1990), p. 130.

 * A speech comes alive only if it rises from the heart, not if it floats on the lips.
 * in The Erasmus Reader (1990), p. 130.

Misattributed

 * Dulce bellum inexpertis.
 * War is sweet to them that know it not.
 * Though Erasmus quoted this proverb in Latin at the start of his essay Bellum [War], and it is sometimes attributed to him, it originates with the Greek poet Pindar ("γλυκύ δ᾽ἀπείρῳ πόλεμος [War is sweet to them that know it not.]"). See also Wiktionary:dulce bellum inexpertis.
 * Variant translations:
 * War is sweet to those not acquainted with it.
 * War is sweet to those who do not know it.
 * War is sweet to those that never have experienced it.
 * War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.

Quotes about Erasmus

 * Erasmus’s Moria … sees through the madness of those who see themselves as reasonable and self-possessed while in reality giving themselves over to rivalry.
 * David Attwell, “The life and times of Elizabeth Costello,” J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual (2006), p. 34

 * What is unique about Folly’s mode of truth is its positionality: it comes “not from ‘the wise man’s mouth’ but from the mouth of the subject assumed not to know and speak the truth.” Folly’s truth entails “a kind of ek-stasis, a being outside oneself, being beside oneself, a state in which truth is known (and spoken) from a position that does not know itself to be the position of truth.”
 * David Attwell, “The life and times of Elizabeth Costello,” J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual (2006), p. 35

 * As a representative of both the feminine and the parodic, Moria does not set out to expose or destroy social conventions: her wisdom lies in working with them, without being ruled by them.
 * David Attwell, “The life and times of Elizabeth Costello,” J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual (2006), p. 35

 * What is the position of someone who sees behind the masks, but refuses to expose them violently? … The Praise of Folly marks out such a position, ‘prudently disarming itself in advance, keeping its phallus the size of the woman’s, steering clear of the play of power, clear of politics.’
 * David Attwell, “The life and times of Elizabeth Costello,” J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual (2006), pp. 35-36

 * Erasmus dramatizes a well-established political position: that of the fool who claims license to criticize all and sundry without reprisal, since his madness defines him as not fully a person and therefore not a political being with political desires and ambitions. The Praise of Folly, therefore sketches the possibility of a position for the critic of the scene of political rivalry, a position not simply impartial between the rivals but also, by self-definition, off the stage of rivalry altogether.
 * J. M. Coetzee, “Erasmus’s Praise of Folly: Rivalry and Madness,” Neophilologus 76 (1992), p. 1

 * Erasmus advises students to read only the best books on the subjects with which they are occupied. He cautions them against loading their memories with the errors of inferior writers which they will afterwards have to throw off and forget. The best description of the state of Europe in the age immediately preceding the Reformation will be found in the correspondence of Erasmus himself. I can promise my own readers that if they will accept Erasmus for a guide in that entangled period, they will not wander far out of the way.
 * James Anthony Froude, Life and Letters of Erasmus: Lectures Delivered at Oxford 1893-4 (1894, 1899)

 * I am going to speak to you this evening about the 'Encomium Moriæ,' if not the most remarkable, yet the most effective of all Erasmus's writings. It originated... in his conversations with More at Chelsea. ...and the title is a humorous play on More's own name.
 * James Anthony Froude, Life and Letters of Erasmus (1894) Lecture VIII

 * Folly, Moria, speaks in her own name and declares herself the frankest of beings. The jester of the age was often the wisest man; the so called wise men were often the stupidest of blockheads: and the play of wit goes on from one aspect to the other, the ape showing behind the purple, and the ass under the lion's skin.
 * James Anthony Froude, Life and Letters of Erasmus (1894) Lecture VIII

 * Meanwhile rational Europe, trying to keep inflammable passion and mad peasant blood within decent bounds, had lost its great spokesman in Erasmus. He died in April. The torch of good reason was for the moment dimmed. Two firebrands, still obscure, were planning the conquest of mankind for a Christ of their own making, each asking his followers to immolate their reason and to bind their will. In 1536 John Calvin published his Institutio. In the same year a Spanish Basque, to be known as Ignatius Loyola, was finishing the studies at Paris that underlay the Society of Jesus. Henry's 'moderation,' on the terms of his own dominance, would push half-evolved Europeans along the road of the modern state, while Calvin and Loyola, borrowing statecraft and rousing the lust of warfare with the breath of the Eternal, would stir in religion precisely the same appetite for earthly dominance. Beside them Erasmus might seem a feeble creature, sitting by his open fire with a glass of Burgundy in front of him. But Erasmus had made the New Testament his labour of love. He was not a hero, like Loyola or Calvin. He was not an 'emperor' as Henry now called himself. He was only a humanist. Beside him the Jesuits, affirming liberty and vowing obedience, or the Calvinists, affirming predestination and applying the scourge, recalled very ancient priesthoods and glorious savage instincts that cry from the caverns to be released even if they must carry a Bible in their hand. Yet the Galilean Jew could not have despised the humanist: if he had rested by the fire with Erasmus, this book of the New Testament on his knees, and a glass of Burgundy before him, perhaps he might have raised those sad eyes to see that truth and charity had lingered for an instant at Basle, finding an honest welcome there that the Word was still alive; that the arm of the law and the methods of torture, to which his own thin hands bore witness, were perhaps not the only ways to prize the divinity in man.
 * Francis Hackett, Henry the Eighth (1929), pp. 296–297

 * Here again you confuse and mix everything up in your usual way.
 * Martin Luther, On the Bondage of the Will

title: Desiderius Erasmus


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Günter Grass

Günter Wilhelm Grass (born 16 October 1927 – 13 April 2015) was a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was widely regarded as Germany's most famous recently living writer.

Quotes

 * Even bad books are books, and therefore sacred.
 * The Tin Drum Book 1, "Rasputin and the Alphabet" (1959), as translated by Ralph Manheim (1961)

 * I shall speak of … how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another … Of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next … Of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis and progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.
 * "On Stasis and Progress"' in Diary of a Snail (1972)

 * We of the long tails! We of the presentient whiskers! We of the perpetually growing teeth! We, the serried footnotes to man, his proliferating commentary. We, indestructible!
 * The Rat (1986), p. 6

 * Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.
 * As quoted in The Boys' Crusade (2003) by Paul Fussell, pg xv  ISBN 0-679-64088-6

Quotes about Grass

 * The creation of the 'Polish Corridor' running from Upper Silesia to Danzig thus left East Prussia as a bleeding chunk of Germany between the Vistula and the Niémen. Was Danzig really a free city? Or was it actually a Polish captive? And was that also the true situation of East Prussia? To assert their claims, the Poles sought to monopolize the Danzig postal service; at the same time, they constructed a rival port, Gdynia, to divert commerce away from the Free City. Danzigers who wished to travel to Germany (including Prussia) required a Polish transit visa. The poisoned atmosphere generated by such petty sources of friction is well preserved in Günter Grass's Danzig trilogy, The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. It is no accident that the most memorable fictional personification of the German catastrophe, the stunted drummer Oscar Matzerath, is born in Danzig in 1924.
 * Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp. 163-164

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Günter Grass


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Louis Rukeyser

Louis Rukeyser (January 30, 1933 – May 2, 2006) was an American financial columnist and television commentator.

Quotes

 * Roaming the world as a foreign correspondent for more than a decade, I was able to observe how a variety of vastly different nations organized themselves economically. The inescapable conclusion was that no politician anywhere on the planet has ever actually created a rupee's worth of prosperity.
 * Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street newsletter, Nov 96

 * Trees don't grow to the sky.
 * On the inevitablility of down markets as well as up markets
 * July 26, 2002, Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street

title: Louis Rukeyser


text:
Chauncey Depew

Chauncey Mitchell Depew (April 23, 1834 - April 5, 1928) was an American attorney, businessman, and Republican politician. He is best remembered for his two terms as United States Senator from New York and for his work for Cornelius Vanderbilt, as an attorney and as president of the New York Central Railroad System.

Quotes

 * The rays from this beacon, lighting this gateway to the continent, will welcome the poor and the persecuted with the hope and promise of homes and citizenship. It will teach them that there is room and brotherhood for all who will support our institutions and aid in our development; but that those who come to disturb our peace and dethrone our laws are aliens and enemies forever.
 * Oration at the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty (28 october 1886)

 * I saw Mr. Lincoln a number of times during the canvass for his second election. The characteristic which struck me most was his superabundance of common sense. His power of managing men, of deciding and avoiding difficult questions, surpassed that of any man I ever met. A keen insight of human nature had been cultivated by the trials and struggles of his early life. He knew the people and how to reach them better than any man of his time. I heard him tell a great many stories, many of which would not do exactly for the drawing-room; but for the person he wished to reach, and the object he desired to accomplish with the individual, the story did more than any argument could have done.
 * Testimony XXIV in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (1886) edited by Allen Thorndike Rice

 * A pessimist is a man who thinks all women are bad. An optimist is a man who hopes they are.
 * As quoted in FPA Book of Quotations : A New Collection of Famous Sayings (1952) by Franklin Pierce Adams

 * I get my exercise acting as pallbearer to my friends who exercise.
 * As quoted in Four Talks for Bibliophiles (1958) by George Allen, p. 70

 * If you will refrain from telling any lies about the Republican Party, I'lll promise not to tell the truth about the Democrats.
 * As quoted in "If Elected I Promise … " Stories and Gems of Wisdom by and About Politicians (1969) by John F. Parker

 * One of the characters of the Senate, and one of the upheavals of the Populist movement was Senator Jeff. Davis, of Arkansas. Davis was loudly, vociferously, and clamorously a friend of the people. Precisely what he did to benefit the people was never very clear, but if we must take his word for it, he was the only friend the people had. Among his efforts to help the people was to denounce big business of all kinds and anything which gave large employment or had great capital. I think that in his own mind the ideal state would have been made of small landowners and an occasional lawyer. He himself was a lawyer.
 * My Memories of Eighty Years (1922), p. 184

 * Something must be done, and that speedily, to bridge the widening chasm between the Executive and the Congress. Our experience with President Wilson has demonstrated this. As a self-centered autocrat, confident of himself and suspicious of others, hostile to advice or discussion, he became the absolute master of the Congress while his party was in the majority. The Congress, instead of being a co-ordinate branch, was really in session only to accept, adopt and put into laws the imperious will of the president. When, however, the majority changed, there being no confidence between the executive and the legislative branch of the government, the necessary procedure was almost paralyzed. The president was unyielding and the Congress insisted upon the recognition of its constitutional rights. Even if the president is, as McKinley was, in close and frequent touch with the Senate and the House of Representatives, the relation is temporary and unequal, and not what it out to be, automatic. Happily we have started a budget system; but the Cabinet should have seats on the floor of the Houses, and authority to answer questions and participate in debates.
 * My Memories of Eighty Years (1922), p. 189

 * There are millions of stories in the world, and several hundred of them good ones.
 * My Memories of Eighty Years (1922), p. 292

 * A witty illustration or an apt story will accomplish more than columns of argument.
 * My Memories of Eighty Years (1922), p. 318

 * While conditions in the United States because of the World War are serious, they are so much better than in the years following the close of the Civil War, that we who have had the double experience can be greatly encouraged. Then one-half of our country was devastated, its industries destroyed or paralyzed; now we are united and stronger in every way. Then we had a paper currency and a dangerous inflation, now we are on a gold standard and with an excellent banking and credit system. The development of our resources and wonderful inventions and discoveries since the Civil War place us in the foremost position to enter upon world commerce when all other nations have come as they must to co-operation and co-ordination upon lines for the preservation of peace and the promotion of international prosperity.
 * My Memories of Eighty Years (1922), p. 352

Quotes about Depew

 * "He is one of the foremost orators in the country, and as an after-dinner speaker is unrivaled. He charms a cultivated audience by his subtle humor, and a general audience by his flowing wit; is, in fact, so flexible that he can readily and easily adapt himself to circumstances."
 * Allen Thorndike Rice in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (1886), p. 637

title: Chauncey Depew


text:
Thomas J. Watson

Thomas John Watson, Sr. (February 17, 1874 – June 19, 1956) was the president of International Business Machines (IBM), who oversaw that company's growth into an international force from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Quotes

 * Nothing so conclusively proves a man's ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself.
 * Watson (1939) in: American druggist Vol 100. p. 40.

 * If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.
 * Attributed to Watson in: Roger von Oech (1982), A Whack on the Side of the Head and Industrial participation (1987) Nr 594-603. p. 262.

 * If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less than excellent work.
 * Attributed to Watson in: William G. Dickerson (1995) In search of the ultimate practice. p. 19.

 * Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of "crackpot" than the stigma of conformity.
 * Attributed to Watson in: Georg Blair, Sandy Meadows (1996) A Real-Life Guide to Organizational Change. p. 117.

 * A man is known by the company he keeps. A company is known by the men it keeps.

Misattributed

 * All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.
 * Actually a remark by Nicholas Murray Butler.
 * Source: American Dental Association (1959) The Journal of the American Dental Association. Vol 59. p. 289.
 * Quoted by Watson in comments about "Think" and attributed to Nicholas Murray Butler - IBM Archives: Comments on "THINK" - Transcript

 * I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
 * Often dated to 1943. Thorough research of Watson's writings and statements have produced no example of him saying this. It appears to be a corruption of a remark by Howard H. Aiken that four or five computers could meet all of the United Kingdom's computing needs. See Ralph Keyes (2006), The Quote Verifier. See also Thomas J. Watson § Famous attribution

title: Thomas J. Watson


text:
Horace Greeley

Horace Greeley (3 February 1811 – 29 November 1872) was an American editor of a leading newspaper, New York Tribune, a founder of the Liberal Republican Party, a reformer and a politician.

Quotes

 * If any young man is about to commence the world, we say to him, publicly and privately, Go to the West.
 * As quoted in New Yorker (25 August 1838); often paraphrased as "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country", sometimes misattributed to John L. Soule

1860s

 * One of the most happiest and most convincing political arguments ever made in this City... No man ever made such an impression on his first appeal to a New-York audience.
 * As quoted in New York Tribune (28 February 1860).

 * The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages.
 * As quoted in The American Conflict, A History of the Great Rebellion (1864).

 * My leading idea was the establishment of a journal removed alike from servile partisanship on the one hand and from gagged, mincing neutrality on the other.
 * On the founding of the New-York Tribune, in Recollections of a Busy Life (1868), p. 137.

The Prayer of the Twenty Millions (1862)

 * Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley (19 August 1862)

 * I do not intrude to tell you--for you must know already--that a great proportion of those who triumphed in you election, and of all who desire the unqualified suppression of the Rebellion now desolating our country, are sorely disappointed and deeply pained by the policy you seem to be pursuing with regard to the slaves of the Rebels. I write only to set succinctly and unmistakably before you what we require, what we think we have a right to expect, and of what we complain.
 * I. We require of you, as the first servant of the Republic, charged especially and preeminently with this duty, that you EXECUTE THE LAWS. Most emphatically do we demand that such laws as have been recently enacted, which therefore may fairly be presumed to embody the present will and to be dictated by the present needs of the Republic, and which, after due consideration have received your personal sanction, shall by you be carried into full effect, and that you publicly and decisively instruct your subordinates that such laws exist, that they are binding on all functionaries and citizens, and that they are to be obeyed to the letter.
 * II. We think you are strangely and disastrously remiss in the discharge of your official and imperative duty with regard to the emancipating provisions of the new Confiscation Act. Those provisions were designed to fight Slavery with Liberty. They prescribe that men loyal to the Union, and willing to shed their blood in her behalf, shall no longer be held, with the Nations consent, in bondage to persistent, malignant traitors, who for twenty years have been plotting and for sixteen months have been fighting to divide and destroy our country. Why these traitors should be treated with tenderness by you, to the prejudice of the dearest rights of loyal men, We cannot conceive.
 * III. We think you are unduly influenced by the counsels, the representations, the menaces, of certain fossil politicians hailing from the Border Slave States. Knowing well that the heartily, unconditionally loyal portion of the White citizens of those States do not expect nor desire chat Slavery shall be upheld to the prejudice of the Union--(for the truth of which we appeal not only to every Republican residing in those States, but to such eminent loyalists as H. Winter Davis, Parson Brownlow, the Union Central Committee of Baltimore, and to The Nashville Union)--we ask you to consider that Slavery is everywhere the inciting cause and sustaining base of treason: the most slaveholding sections of Maryland and Delaware being this day, though under the Union flag, in full sympathy with the Rebellion, while the Free-Labor portions of Tennessee and of Texas, though writhing under the bloody heel of Treason, are unconquerably loyal to the Union. So emphatically is this the case, that a most intelligent Union banker of Baltimore recently avowed his confident belief that a majority of the present Legislature of Maryland, though elected as and still professing to be Unionists, are at heart desirous of the triumph of the Jeff. Davis conspiracy; and when asked how they could be won back to loyalty, replied "only by the complete Abolition of Slavery." It seems to us the most obvious truth, that whatever strengthens or fortifies Slavery in the Border States strengthens also Treason, and drives home the wedge intended to divide the Union. Had you from the first refused to recognize in those States, as here, any other than unconditional loyalty--that which stands for the Union, whatever may become of Slavery, those States would have been, and would be, far more helpful and less troublesome to the defenders of the Union than they have been, or now are.
 * IV. We think timid counsels in such a crisis calculated to prove perilous, and probably disastrous. It is the duty of a Government so wantonly, wickedly assailed by Rebellion as ours has been to oppose force to force in a defiant, dauntless spirit. It cannot afford to temporize with traitors nor with semi-traitors. It must not bribe them to behave themselves, nor make cheat fair promises in the hope of disarming their causeless hostility. Representing a brave and high-spirited people, it can afford to forfeit anything else better than its own self-respect, or their admiring confidence. For our Government even to seek, after war has been made on it, to dispel the affected apprehensions of armed traitors that their cherished privileges may be assailed by it, is to invite insult and encourage hopes of its own downfall. The rush to arms of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, is the true answer at once to the Rebel raids of John Morgan and the traitorous sophistries of Beriah Magoffin.
 * V. We complain that the Union cause has suffered, and is now suffering immensely, from mistaken deference to Rebel Slavery. Had you, Sir, in your Inaugural Address, unmistakably given notice that, in case the Rebellion already commenced were persisted in, and your efforts to preserve the Union and enforce the laws should be resisted by armed force, you would recognize no loyal person as rightfully held in Slavery by a traitor, we believe the Rebellion would therein have received a staggering if not fatal blow. At that moment, according to the returns of the most recent elections, the Unionists were a large majority of the voters of the Slave States. But they were composed in good part of the aged, the feeble, the wealthy, the timid--the young, the reckless, the aspiring, the adventurous, had already been largely lured by the gamblers and negro-traders, the politicians by trade and the conspirators by instinct, into the toils of Treason. Had you then proclaimed that Rebellion would strike the shackles from the slaves of every traitor, the wealthy and the cautious would have been supplied with a powerful inducement to remain loyal. As it was, every coward in the South soon became a traitor from fear; for Loyalty was perilous, while Treason seemed comparatively safe. Hence the boasted unanimity of the South--a unanimity based on Rebel terrorism and the fact that immunity and safety were found on that side, danger and probable death on ours. The Rebels from the first have been eager to confiscate, imprison, scourge and kill: we have fought wolves with the devices of sheep. The result is just what might have been expected. Tens of thousands are fighting in the Rebel ranks to-day whose, original bias and natural leanings would have led them into ours.
 * VI. We complain that the Confiscation Act which you approved is habitually disregarded by your Generals, and that no word of rebuke for them from you has yet reached the public ear. Fremont's Proclamation and Hunter's Order favoring Emancipation were promptly annulled by you; while Halleck's No. 3, forbidding fugitives from Slavery to Rebels to come within his lines-- an order as unmilitary as inhuman, and which received the hearty approbation of every traitor in America-- with scores of like tendency, have never provoked even your own remonstrance. We complain that the officers of your Armies have habitually repelled rather than invited approach of slaves who would have gladly taken the risks of escaping from their Rebel masters to our camps, bringing intelligence often of inestimable value to the Union cause. We complain that those who have thus escaped to us, avowing a willingness to do for us whatever might be required, have been brutally and madly repulsed, and often surrendered to be scourged, maimed and tortured by the ruffian traitors, who pretend to own them. We complain that a large proportion of our regular Army Officers, with many of the Volunteers, evince far more solicitude to uphold Slavery than to put down the Rebellion. And finally, we complain that you, Mr. President, elected as a Republican, knowing well what an abomination Slavery is, and how emphatically it is the core and essence of this atrocious Rebellion, seem never to interfere with these atrocities, and never give a direction to your Military subordinates, which does not appear to have been conceived in the interest of Slavery rather than of Freedom.
 * VII. Let me call your attention to the recent tragedy in New Orleans, whereof the facts are obtained entirely through Pro-Slavery channels. A considerable body of resolute, able-bodied men, held in Slavery by two Rebel sugar-planters in defiance of the Confiscation Act which you have approved, left plantations thirty miles distant and made their way to the great mart of the South-West, which they knew to be the indisputed possession of the Union forces. They made their way safely and quietly through thirty miles of Rebel territory, expecting to find freedom under the protection of our flag. Whether they had or had not heard of the passage of the Confiscation Act, they reasoned logically that we could not kill them for deserting the service of their lifelong oppressors, who had through treason become our implacable enemies. They came to us for liberty and protection, for which they were willing render their best service: they met with hostility, captivity, and murder. The barking of the base curs of Slavery in this quarter deceives no one--not even themselves. They say, indeed, that the negroes had no right to appear in New Orleans armed (with their implements of daily labor in the cane-field); but no one doubts that they would gladly have laid these down if assured that they should be free. They were set upon and maimed, captured and killed, because they sought the benefit of that act of Congress which they may not specifically have heard of, but which was none the less the law of the land which they had a clear right to the benefit of--which it was somebody's duty to publish far and wide, in order that so many as possible should be impelled to desist from serving Rebels and the Rebellion and come over to the side of the Union, They sought their liberty in strict accordance with the law of the land--they were butchered or re-enslaved for so doing by the help of Union soldiers enlisted to fight against slaveholding Treason. It was somebody's fault that they were so murdered--if others shall hereafter stuffer in like manner, in default of explicit and public directions to your generals that they are to recognize and obey the Confiscation Act, the world will lay the blame on you. Whether you will choose to hear it through future History and 'at the bar of God, I will not judge. I can only hope.
 * VIII.	On the face of this wide earth, Mr. President, there is not one disinterested, determined, intelligent champion of the Union cause who does not feel that all attempts to put down the Rebellion and at the same time uphold its inciting cause are preposterous and futile--that the Rebellion, if crushed out tomorrow, would be renewed within a year if Slavery were left in full vigor--that Army officers who remain to this day devoted to Slavery can at best be but half-way loyal to the Union--and that every hour of deference to Slavery is an hour of added and deepened peril to the Union, I appeal to the testimony of your Ambassadors in Europe. It is freely at your service, not at mine. Ask them to tell you candidly whether the seeming subserviency of your policy to the slaveholding, slavery-upholding interest, is not the perplexity, the despair of statesmen of all parties, and be admonished by the general answer.
 * IX. I close as I began with the statement that what an immense majority of the Loyal Millions of your countrymen require of you is a frank, declared, unqualified, ungrudging execution of the laws of the land, more especially of the Confiscation Act. That Act gives freedom to the slaves of Rebels coming within our lines, or whom those lines may at any time inclose--we ask you to render it due obedience by publicly requiring all your subordinates to recognize and obey it. The rebels are everywhere using the late anti-negro riots in the North, as they have long used your officers' treatment of negroes in the South, to convince the slaves that they have nothing to hope from a Union success-that we mean in that case to sell them into a bitter bondage to defray the cost of war. Let them impress this as a truth on the great mass of their ignorant and credulous bondsmen, and the Union will never be restored-never. We cannot conquer Ten Millions of People united in solid phalanx against us, powerfully aided by the Northern sympathizers and European allies. We must have scouts, guides, spies, cooks, teamsters, diggers and choppers from the Blacks of the South, whether we allow them to fight for us or not, or we shall be baffled and repelled. As one of the millions who would gladly have avoided this struggle at any sacrifice but that Principle and Honor, but who now feel that the triumph of the Union is dispensable not only to the existence of our country to the well being of mankind, I entreat you to render a hearty and unequivocal obedience to the law of the land.

1870s

 * The masses of our countrymen, North and South, are eager to clasp hands across the bloody chasm which has so long divided them.
 * Acceptance of Liberal Republican nomination as President (29 May 1872)

 * [U]nder the Constitution in its most liberal interpretation, and admitting our cherished American doctrine of equal human rights, if a white man pleases to marry a black woman, the mere fact that she is black gives no one a right to interfere to prevent or set aside such marriage.
 * HORACE GREELEY’S VIEWS ON VIRGINIA 2 (1872)

1890s

 * The Republic needed to be passed through chastening, purifying fires of adversity and suffering: so these came and did their work and the verdure of a new national life springs greenly, luxuriantly, from their ashes.
 * Greeley on Lincoln (1893), edited by Joel Benton, p. 78.

Attributed

 * There aren't half enough of them going there as it is.
 * Reply to a missionary who asked Greeley for a subscription to "help keep people from going to hell", as quoted in "Grab-bag Education", The Book of Journeyman (1930) by Albert Jay Nock

Quotes about Greeley

 * We need a daily paper edited and composed according to woman’s own thoughts, and not as a woman thinks a man wants her to think and write. As it is now, the men who control the finances control the paper. As long as we occupy our present position we are mentally and morally in the power of the men who engineer the finances. Horace Greely once said that women ought not to expect the same pay for work that men received. He advised women to go down into New Jersey, buy a parcel of ground, and go to raising strawberries. Then when they came up to New York with their strawberries the men wouldn’t dare to offer them half price for their produce. I say, my journalistic sisters, that it is high time we were raising our own strawberries on our own land.
 * Susan B. Anthony, Remarks to the Woman’s Auxiliary Congress of the Public Press Congress (May 23, 1893)

 * While I think as badly of slavery as Horace Greeley did, I am not ashamed that my family were slaveholders. It was our inheritance. Neither am I ashamed that my ancestors were pirates and cattle thieves. People must be judged by the standard of their own age. If it was right to own slaves as property, it was right to fight for it.
 * John S. Mosby, letter to Samuel "Sam" Chapman (4 June 1907).

 * Mr. Greeley tells us that marriage, being a Divine institution, nothing but death should ever separate the parties; but when he was asked, "Would you have a being who, innocent and inexperienced, in their youth and ardor of affection, in the fond hope that the sentiment was reciprocated, united herself to one she loved and cherished, and then found (no matter from what cause) that his profession was false, his heart hollow, his acts cruel, that she was degraded by his vice, despised for his crimes, cursed by his very presence, and treated with every conceivable ignominy-would you have her drag out a miserable existence as his wife?" "No, no," says he; "in that case, they ought to separate." Separate? But what becomes of the union divinely instituted, which death only should part?...Mr. Greeley asks, "How could the mother look the child in the face, if she married a second time?" With infinitely better grace and better conscience than to live as some do now, and show their children the degrading example, how utterly father and mother despise and hate each other, and still live together as husband and wife. She could say to her child, "As, unfortunately, your father proved himself unworthy, your mother could not be so unworthy as to continue to live with him. As he failed to be a true father to you, I have endeavored to supply his place with one, who, though not entitled to the name, will, I hope, prove himself one in the performance of a father's duties.
 * Ernestine Rose, 1860 speech anthologized in Mistress of Herself edited by Paula Doress-Worters (2008)

 * I know Horace Greeley has been most eloquent, for weeks past, on the holy sacrament of ill-assorted marriages; but let us hope that all wisdom does not live, and will not die, with Horace Greeley. I think, if he had been married to the New York Herald, instead of the Republican party, he would have found out some Scriptural arguments against lifelong unions, where great incompatibility of temper existed between the parties.
 * Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1860 speech anthologized in Mistress of Herself edited by Paula Doress-Worters (2008)

title: Horace Greeley


text:
User:FeloniousMonk

A Few Notes About Me
With full credit to Eloquence for living up to his handle and formulating a Rationalist canon so succinctly.

Declaration of bias:  I am opposed to irrationalism, be it in the form of organized religion, miracle healers or postmodernism. I am in favor of personal liberties.  I am in favor of democracy and capitalism.  I am in favor of a working social system.  I am not a pacifist.

I am a Rationalist by choice, an atheist by default. I agree with Asimov when he said: "The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending."

title: User:FeloniousMonk


text:
Ann Richards

Dorothy Ann Willis Richards (September 1, 1933 – September 13, 2006) was an American politician from Texas. She first came to national attention as the witty keynote speaker at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. Considered the first woman elected Governor of Texas in her own right, she served in that post from 1991 to 1995; she was defeated for re-election in 1994 by George W. Bush.

1988

 * … we're going to tell how the cow ate the cabbage.
 * Poor George, he can't help it — he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.
 * 1988 Democratic National Convention keynote address

 * I am delighted to be here with you this evening, because after listening to George Bush all these years, I figured you needed to know what a real Texas accent sounds like.
 * 1988 Democratic National Convention keynote address

2001

 * Oh, absolutely. No question about it. And the state of Texas, when I was governor, we built an awful lot of prisons. And to be frank with you, I made a deal, and the deal was that I would help pass the legislation and be for building a lot more prisons in Texas if I could get rehab programs for people who were alcoholics and drug abusers because I knew that over 80 percent of the crime committed in Texas was committed by people under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
 * Ann Richards Discusses Texas, Politics and Humor on Larry King Live, CNN, January 23 2001

 * But I'll tell you something sort of interesting. There's something, you know, there's something a little scary about funny women. Well, they're threatening. And there was a survey done one time where they asked women what they were most afraid of from men. And the -- their response was they were most afraid of being hit or beaten or hurt from men. And they asked men what they were most afraid of from women, and they said being laughed at.
 * Ann Richards Discusses Texas, Politics and Humor on Larry King Live, CNN, January 23 2001

2006

 * The regular Democratic Party and its organization was run by men who looked on women as little more than machine parts.

 * I have seen the very bottom of life: I was so afraid I wouldn’t be funny anymore. I just knew that I would lose my zaniness and my sense of humor. But I didn’t. Recovery turned out to be a wonderful thing.

 * The public does not like you to mislead or represent yourself to be something you're not. And the other thing that the public really does like is the self-examination to say, you know, I'm not perfect. I'm just like you. They don't ask their public officials to be perfect. They just ask them to be smart, truthful, honest, and show a modicum of good sense.

 * Oh, I would probably have raised more hell.

Misattributed

 * If you give us the chance, we can perform. After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels
 * Keynote address, 1988 Democratic National Convention
 * Earlier use in Frank and Ernest (c. 1982), by Bob Thaves, as the characters observe a billboard for a "Fred Astaire Film Festival: "Sure he was great, but don't forget that Ginger Rogers did everything that he did… backwards and in high heels."
 * Quoted in

 * He was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. [about George Bush, Sr.]
 * Earlier use by Barry Switzer

title: Ann Richards