"I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man's pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on top. — You need take no notice of these ebullitions of spleen, which are probably quite unintelligible to anyone but myself."
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Philosophers from the United StatesPsychologists from the United StatesPresidents of the American Psychological AssociationCritics from the United StatesParapsychologists
Original Language: English
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Sources
Letter to Mrs. Henry Whitman (7 June 1899), in The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James, vol. 2, p. 90 (1926)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_James
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William James
1842 – 1910
US-amerikanischer Philosoph und Psychologe
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