Quotes I Like
Eugenics and Other Evils – Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Most Eugenists are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of translating the one into the other, however obviously they mean the same thing. Say to them "The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females"; say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them "Murder your mother," and they sit up quite suddenly. Yet the two sentences, in cold logic, are exactly the same. Say to them "It is not improbable that a period may arrive when the narrow if once useful distinction between the anthropoid homo and the other animals, which has been modified on so many moral points, may be modified also even in regard to the important question of the extension of human diet "; say this to them, and beauty born of murmuring sound will pass into their face. But say to them, in a simple, manly, hearty way " Let's eat a man!" and their surprise is quite surprising. Yet the sentences say just the same thing.
Education - Herbert Spencer
While rules lying isolated in the mind — not joined to its other contents as outgrowths from them — are continually forgotten, the principles which these rules express piecemeal become, when once reached by the understanding, enduring possessions. While the rule-taught youth is at sea when beyond his rules, the youth instructed in principles solves a new case as readily as an old one. Between a mind of rules and a mind of principles, there exists a difference such as that between a confused heap of materials and the same materials organized into a complete whole with all its parts bound together.