Quote#Politics & Power
If a state should pass laws forbidding its citizens to become wise…
Quote byJohn Lancaster Spalding · 1840–1916
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 62.
English (original)
If a state should pass laws forbidding its citizens to become wise and holy, it would be made a byword for all time. But this, in effect, is what our commercial, social, and political systems do. They compel the sacrifice of mental and moral power to money and dissipation.
— John Lancaster Spalding
More from John Lancaster Spalding
True readers … are ready to go through a whole volume, if there be but hope of finding in it a single genuine thought or the mere suggestion even of a truth which has some fresh application to life.
Each one fashions and bears his world with him, and that unless he himself become wise, strong and loving, no change in his circumstances can make him rich or free or happy.
However firmly thou holdest to thy opinions, if truth appears on the opposite side, throw down thy arms at once.
The strong man is he who knows how and is able to become and be himself; the magnanimous man is he who, being strong, knows how and is able to issue forth from himself, as from a fortress, to guide, protect, encourage, and save others.
The world is chiefly a mental fact. From mind it receives the forms of time and space, the principle of casuality[sic], color, warmth, and beauty. Were there no mind, there would be no world.
To ask them to read books whose life-breath is pure thought and beauty is as though one asked them to read things written in a language they do not understand and have no desire to learn.