Activists From The United States

"[This work] would be inexcusable to suppose it to be exhaustive. It is not even defensive. It is a projectile, and projectiles do not apologize. It intends to be followed."

"The ideal universe is a universe so ordered or natured as to allow its inhabitants to understand and dominate it sufficient to satisfy their desires, and inhabited by beings with desires so poised and assorted that there is not only not mutual inhibition of desires, but such a dovetailing and intertwining of the consciousnesses that there is mutual aid in the satisfaction of desire—a universe responsive to the whims of its inhabitants, and inhabited by beings socially harmonious and helpful."

"I became a vegetarian by my own reflection. I did not know at the time of the vegetarian movement, and hence, supposed myself among republics of carnivora. It did not seem to me graceful or ideal that I, an ethical being should maintain my existence at the incessant expense of misery and death to others."

"The human race is like a snake—it sheds. Ever and anon, as the ages bloom, old forms of thought are superseded by intellectual bran-news. Shrines at which one generation adores become to the succeeding desolate and despised."

"This is a gray world. There is enough sorrow in it, even though we cease to scourge each other—the sorrow of floods, famines, fires, earthquakes, storms, diseases, and death. We should trust each other, and love each other, and sympathize with and help each other, and be patient and forgiving."

"Look at the manner in which the aborigines are swept away from continent after continent by the sword and beverage of the Aryans. See how the red children of America have been cheated and debauched and driven from homes where they and their fathers had lived from immemorial generations. When the banner of Castile first furled in Bahama breezes, America was inhabited by a noble, magnanimous, and happy people. They were not like the sodden, suspicious, revengeful remnants that to-day huddle on barricaded reserves, the vindictive survivors of four centuries of injustice. They were kind and generous. They came to the invading Europeans as children, with minds of wonder and with hands filled with presents. They were treated by the invaders like refuse. They were plundered, and their outstretched hands cut off and fed to Spanish hounds. They are gone from the valleys where once their camp-smokes curled to heaven, and their quaint canoes ruffle the moonlight of the rivers no more. They that remain are too weak to rise in warlike challenge to the aggressions of the mighty white. But the story of the meeting of the pale and the red, and of the wrongs of the vanquished red, will remain as one of the mournful tales of this world when the kindred of Lo, like fleecy clouds, have melted into the infinite azure of the past.""

"For it must be remembered that there was a time when no set of beings tyrannized and terrorized the planet as do the reigning cutthroats to-day. Estimate finally, if you can, and history will help you, the amount of bloodshed and war and woe necessary to develop those unfinished Troglodytes into beings clever enough to write history and invent gin and originate the hope of heaven. Compute these totalities, and you will know what it has cost to teach you and me and the rest to talk politics and wax sarcastic with our fore limbs in the air. Question: If it has required two or three millions of species struggling for life twenty millions of years to produce a being barely above derision, how long will it take and how many millions of species to evolve a being as nearly divine as the average man thinks he is?"

"Look at human industry! See the pounds of flesh daily torn by men everywhere from the skeletons of each other in the awful riot of business." Just look at it! The inequity, the unconsciousness, the hard-heartedness, the ruffianism, and the infernalism of the industrial relations and conditions of men! Watch an unfortunate approach a rich man's mansion and ask in the most graceful manner for a necessary of life. Observe the egoism the baron shows as he sends the sufferer away unfed. See the lord in his marble palace, upholstered with all the comforts of civilization and stuffed with the dainties of the zones, and around him the men and women who made his wealth feeding on garbage, suffocating in shanties, and working like wretches from morning till night. See the multi-millionaire, scraping the palms of his slaves till the blood starts for the last farthing their struggles have produced, not because he is hungry and would buy, but because he is a ruffian and can. No attention whatever is paid to the fact that some have all they can utilize in the satisfaction of their desires and multiples more, while others just as good-looking and more worthy have nothing. No attention is paid to the fact that this little pill of a world is to man the only accessible portion of the universe; that he is cut off from other balls by leagues of impassable space."

"I sit here tonight in this great city and think back along the years. Life is so full and so different now – full of teaching, writing and problem solving. But, oh, those precious memories away back there in the morning! The prairies are gone, where we used to gather wild strawberries and tiger lilies, but the old school house still stands, I am told, where the High Bank lifts its formidableness above the singing stream."

"Much of the vagueness of the human mind is due to the fact that the mind is largely composed of material derived second-hand from books. The ideas are not read."

"Consciousness arises with, or out of, and accompanies, these clay compounds called creatures, but it does not cause, nor in any way interfere with, their phenomena. If it were possible to construct artificial clods, chemically as accomplished as philosophers, but without any accompanying consciousness, these soulless mechanisms, without will, feeling, or conscious intelligence, simply acting out their chemical and physical affinities, would not behave otherwise in any infinitesimal particular than the real, conscious meditators on things."

"We should be a little more disposed to move along. We live in a world that is neither petrified or perfect. The universe is a liquid. It is flowing. Humanitarianism is in the air."

"I came to the conclusion out there on the Kansas prairies that the animals were not treated right by human beings. I thought we had not even a right to kill them for food and came to the University of Chicago to study the matter. At that time I had never heard of vegetarianism."

"Human nature is defective. It is selfish. It is cruel and revengeful. It is a product of militancy and hate. It is much better adapted to a fighting life, in which it was generated, than it is in cooperation and peace."

"Religion is essentially pre-scientific. It will pass away. It represents a certain stage of mental development. It has been tinkered with and tinkered with until it is about ready for the scrap heap. The more men know of chemistry and physics and evolution and natural law, the less use they have for supernaturalism. No true scientist can pray. Prayer is unscientific. No evolutionist can believe in the divine origin of anything."

"Poor Thomson! How melancholy & helpless. I believe in the perfect parallelism & correlation of the physical & psychical. The anomalous mentality, like that of James Thomson, is caused by some hidden defect in his physical machinery. And I believe that it is to be one of the triumphs of future surgery to rectify many of these soul malformations, such as poor helpless Thomson had to carry thru life."

"It is a fact of our world, tho, that Death is as inevitable as Birth. The coffin is as natural as the cradle."

"I cannot express myself when I get to thinking about these things—these terrible crimes that man is inflicting year after year on millions of his poor, helpless brothers. I become indignant and desperate. I am ashamed of the race of beings to which I belong. It is so cruel and bigoted, so hypocritical, so soul-less and insane. I'd rather be an insect—a bee or a butterfly—and float in dim dreams among the wild flowers of summer than be a man and feel the wrongs and sufferings of this wretched world."

"If we would return to the shaggy condition of primitive ages, we need only acquire an environment which will favor from age to age those whose peripheries retain to the intensest extent the hirsute tendency. If the disparities between the sexual tastes of male and female would be leveled or inverted, the conditions which have caused the existing disparity must be reversed. The horse exposed to a fad for dwarfs would, in the course of ages, the length of time depending on the pitch of discrimination, be dwindled to its fox-like proportions of eocene times. In an environment requiring courage, foxes would either disappear or grow heroic. Serpents could be rendered as loving as doves by a procedure no more laborious than that by which they have been made vindictive. And beardless aesthetes may become philosophers as easily as have men."

"Writing is so unnatural & hard for me that I have a good deal of difficulty in getting myself to undergo the hardship. It's a good deal like "sweating blood" for me. And unless I am driven by terrible feelings or convictions, I am inclined to go on & do nothing. I hate writing. It is the greatest hardship of my life. It seems to me I might be reasonably happy if I weren't everlastingly nagged by the obligation to perpetuate literary things on people."

"I saw the fishes playing there; I saw all that was in the whole world round; In wood, and bower, and marsh, and mead, and field, All things which creep and fly, And put a foot to earth. All these I saw, and say to you, That nothing lives among them without hate."

"There is nothing more frightful to the philosopher than the unconscious tragedies of human reason. Men are somnambulists. Stupefied by the long night of instinct out of which it arose, the human mind is only half awake to the world of reality and duty. George Washington was the father of his country, and a great and good man, but he held human beings as slaves, and paid his hired help in Virginia whisky. It took Americans one hundred years to find out that "all men" includes Ethiopians; yet men who risked their lives in order to achieve personal and political liberty for black men, deliberately doom white women to a similar servitude. A rich man will give millions of dollars to a museum or a university, when he would know, if he had the talent to stop and think, that the thousands who make his wealth work like slaves from morning till night, and feed on garbage and suffocate in garrets, in order that he may be munificent."

"We preach the Golden Rule with an enthusiasm that is well-nigh vehement, and then freckle the globe with huge murder-houses for the expeditious destruction of those who have as good a right to live as we have."

"Is murder stripped of its blackness by become a fine art? All assassination is practically instantaneous and painless, the assassination of men as as well as that of birds and quadrupeds. What would the author of such nonsense think if the assassination of his brother or mother blandly attempted to relieve himself of all guilt by means of the assurance that his victim had experienced no suffering? The crime of extermination does not consist in the creation of pain, but in the destruction of that precious and mysterious essence called life."

"The weak submit because they are helpless and because they are ignorant, because they are incarcerated and disarmed, and because they have been taught and intimidated into believing that the conventional and the legal, whatever they are, have been ordained and established by the immeasurable manufacturer of things."

"The ability to weigh the stars is all right, but it is not more important than the disposition to be just."

"Religion is a strictly human infirmity. No other animal has it. It originated far back in the past, when the human world was young and the mind just beginning to open. It is an anachronism today, with our science and understanding. It survives solely by the force of tradition."

"It is a crime to start a child learning to read and write as soon as it is out of the cradle. We should get ideas before starting on the business of representing them."

"A more pyramidal farce could not be framed at the present stage of the human imagination than that of human industry—the immense privilege and monopoly and the immense flatulence of wealth side by side with the most helpless and sickening deprivation—all brought about and perpetuated by hypocrites who lapse into hysterics over the injunction, "What you do not like when done to yourself do not do to others.""

"Every being is incomparably precious to himself. This is the most mournful feature in human psychology. We did not invent it. It was handed to us along with our fingers and our fondness fo eating. It is the psychic calamity of the animal kingdom."

"The same general moral code applies to every being that feels. In a general way, whatever is right to human beings is right also to non-human beings; and whatever is wrong to human beings is wrong to non-human beings. There are disparities everywhere—disparities in ethical standing, just as there are disparities in usefulness and feeling-power. But there are no greater disparities between men and other animals than there are between different individuals or varieties of the human species. I do not say nor do I believe that a guinea-pig has the same rights to life and to the satisfaction of its desires as an Englishman has. Neither has an Eskimo. But I do say that an ethical system that treats guinea pigs and non-humans generally with the ethical indifference that they receive to-day is a product of human provincialism pure and simple and is destined to become as obsolete as human slavery with the blooming of the ages."

"The earliest examples of human association were those practically of autocentricism. Each individual considered himself the only or chief end for which the universe existed. Each's own individual welfare was the end for which he struggled, and all the rest of the universe, sentient and insentient, was contemplated as means to this."

"The fact that altruism has been evolved by the cooperation of individuals with each other and against others is a significant fact in the analysis and understanding of the ethical phenomena of the earth. To this fact is due the restricted and illogical character of all altruism."

"The long struggle is ended. I must pass away. Good-by. Oh, men are so cold and hard and half conscious toward their suffering fellows. Nobody understands. Oh my mother! and Oh my little girl! What will become of you? And the poor four-footed! May the long years be merciful! Take me to my river. There, where the wild birds sing and the waters go on and on, alone in my groves, forever."

"I wish I could say something that would move you — something that would make you miserable the rest of your days in pity for these poor, helpless, doomed things—something that would make you feel in some measure the pitiable lot, the awful, needless sufferings, of these silent martyrs of our civilization."

"The trouble with all ethical systems of this world has been their partiality. They have been arranged with undue regard for those who invented them. And this defect vitiates the prevailing systems to-day as it has vitiated the systems that have been produced in times gone by."

"Religion has had a natural origin, like coal, and rock salt, and mountains, and river valleys, and everything else. It has been made in the laboratory of human feeling and imagination. The gods did not make men; men made the gods."

"The Black student movement ... raised the questions: Why should we study classical sociological theory and be taught nothing about the history of Black sociological thought, including the works of W. E. B. DuBois, Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Oliver C. Cox and others? Why should we be taught courses on deviance, social disorganization and social problems which take as given that Blacks should be defined as the perpetrators and creators of social pathology and not as its victims?"

"Blacks have always been measured against an alien set of norms. As a result they have been considered to be a deviation from the ambiguous white middle-class model, which itself has not always been clearly defined."

"Mainstream sociology ... reflects the ideology of the larger society, which has always excluded Black lifestyles, values, behavior, attitudes, and so forth from the body of data that is used to define, describe, conceptualize and theorize about the structure and functions of American society."

"You would be better off, frankly, to use the name of Jesus Christ or God in an occasional curse word than to live an ongoing, hypocritical life that blasphemes His name from beginning to end."

"The sinner must feel far worse before he ever has a right to feel any better."

"You hear people say, “Well, I’m an agnostic.” Really? You shouldn’t be proud to be an agnostic because the Latin equivalent is ignoramus. It’s the same word. I’ve never heard anybody say, “I’m personally an ignoramus.” But if you don’t know, you don’t know. That’s what an ignoramus is. If you have an open mind close it, would you please, before you destroy yourself. Close it."

"[P]eople who say, “I am an agnostic,” proudly. From the Greek, “one who doesn’t know.” They do, “I’m an agnostic.” You hear people say that. You know what the Latin word for “agnostic” is? Ignoramus. You hear anybody say, “I am an ignoramus”? Really?"

"You go to Japan. Japan had 250 missionary boards at one time, ministering in Japan. All kinds of Christian institutions, Christian ministries all over, and it is a totally Pagan culture. On the other hand, you go to China and you're going to find several hundred million Christians in a country where Christians were massacred. Why is that? Because that's a purifying process. Hypocrites all abandon religion; they're not going to be phony for something that costs them their life."

"The world will accept you changing your style for them, but pretty soon they’re going to demand that you change your substance. They’re going to demand that you – well, they liked the fact that you’ve taken their method, but they're going to demand you change your message."

"I deplore racism and all the cruelty and strife it breeds. I am convinced the only long-term solution to every brand of ethnic animus is the gospel of Jesus Christ. In Christ alone are the barriers and dividing walls between people groups broken down, the enmity abolished, and differing cultures and ethnic groups bound together in one new people... It is a startling irony that believers from different ethnic groups, now one in Christ, have chosen to divide over ethnicity. They have a true spiritual unity in Christ, which they seem to disdain in favor of fleshly factions."

"In God’s eyes – listen – no one is a victim. We are all perpetrators of open rebellion, scandalous, blasphemous sin against God. We are all rebels, we are all obstinate, we are all stubborn... Here we have the critical fundamental principle of the gospel; no one is a victim. From God’s viewpoint, no one is a victim."

"Any social democrat, no matter their intentions, will always find it easier to move to the right than to the left. ON one side lie guarantees of stability from powerful interests, on the other capital strikes and stubborn resistance."

"It's obvious that things are changing. When I was in high school and told people I was a socialist, they looked at me as if I were crazy. When I tell people I'm a socialist today, they just nod and go about their day - not a hint of revulsion."