Andrew Dickson White Quotes

A change had indeed been brought by the emancipation of the serfs, but there was little outward sign of it. The muzhik remained, to all appearance, what he was before: in fact, as our train drew into St. Petersburg, the peasants, with their sheepskin caftans, cropped hair, and stupid faces, brought back the old impressions so vividly that I seemed not to have been absent a week. The old atmosphere of repression was evident everywhere. I had begun my experience of it under Nicholas I, had seen a more liberal policy under Alexander II, but now found a recurrence of reaction, and everywhere a pressure which deadened all efforts at initiating a better condition of things.

Nothing during the American struggle against the slave system did more to wean religious and God-fearing men and women from the old interpretation of Scripture than the use of it to justify slavery.

He [Paolo Sarpi] was one of the two foremost Italian statesmen since the Middle Ages, the other being Cavour.

For similar folly, our own country, in the transition from the colonial period, also paid a fearful price; and from a like catastrophe the United States has been twice saved in our time by the arguments formulated by Turgot.

Carlyle uttered a pregnant truth when he said that the history of any country is in the biographies of the men who made it.

[Cornell University will be] an asylum for Science — where truth shall be sought for truth's sake, not stretched or cut exactly to fit Revealed Religion.

Refusing to heed his argument the French people had again to be punished more severely than in John Law's time: the over-issue of assignats and mandats during the Revolution came forty years after his warning; and paper money inflation was again paid for by widespread bankruptcy and ruin.

Of all tyrannies of unreason in the modern world, one holds a supremely evil preeminence. It covered the period from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, and throughout those hundred years was waged a war of hatreds,—racial, religious, national, and personal;—of ambitions, ecclesiastical and civil;—of aspirations, patriotic and selfish;—of efforts, noble and vile. During all those weary generations Europe became one broad battlefield,—drenched in human blood and lighted from innumerable scaffolds. In this confused struggle great men appeared—heroes and martyrs, ruffians and scoundrels: all was anarchic. The dominant international gospel was that of Machiavelli.

The work of this young professor (Thomasius) and his disciples was to dethrone the heavy Protestant orthodoxy which had nearly smothered German patriotism, to undermine the pedantry which had paralyzed German scholarship, to substitute thought for formulas, to bring right reason to bear upon international and municipal law, to discredit religious intolerance, to root out witchcraft persecution and procedure by torture from all modern codes, and to begin that emancipation, of public and especially university instruction from theological control, which has given such strength to Germany, and which today is invincibly making its way in all other lands, including our own.

My early years abroad were spent mainly upon the European Continent, and public duties since have led me to make prolonged stays in various Continental states—France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Russia—where the study of Continental statesmen has been almost forced upon me.

My purpose in writing these essays has been to acquaint men who are interested in the bearings of modern history on public life with sundry statesmen whose time was devoted not to seeking office or to winning a brief popular fame by chicanery or pettifoggery, but to serving the great interests of modern states and, indeed, of universal humanity. I would present these statesmen and their work as especially worthy to be studied by those who aspire to serve their country in any way.

Living in filth was regarded by great numbers of holy men, who set an example to the Church and to society, as an evidence of sanctity. St. Jerome and the Breviary of the Roman Church dwell with unction on the fact that St. Hilarion lived his whole life long in utter physical uncleanliness; St. Athanasius glorifies St. Anthony because he had never washed his feet; St. Abraham's most striking evidence of holiness was that for fifty years he washed neither his hands nor his feet; St. Sylvia never washed any part of her body save her fingers; St. Euphraxia belonged to a convent in which the nuns religiously abstained from bathing. St. Mary of Egypt was emninent for filthiness; St. Simon Stylites was in this respect unspeakable - the least that can be said is, that he lived in ordure and stench intolerable to his visitors.

The young man [Turgot] destined for an ecclesiastical career was placed within walls carefully designed to keep out all currents of new thought; his studies, his reading, his professors, his associates, all were combined to keep from him any results of observation or reflection save those prescribed: probably, of all means for stifling healthy and helpful thought, a theological seminary, as then conducted—whether Catholic or Protestant, Jewish or Mohammedan, was the most perfect.

The British representative was an ambassador, and had a spacious, suitable, and well-furnished house in which he could entertain fitly and largely, and to which the highest Russian officials thought it an honor to be invited. The American representatives were simply ministers; from time immemorial had never had such a house; had generally no adequate place for entertaining; had to live in apartments such as they might happen to find vacant in various parts of the town—sometimes in very poor quarters, sometimes in better; were obliged to furnish them at their own expense; had, therefore, never been able to obtain a tithe of that social influence, so powerful in Russia, which was exercised by the British Embassy.

He [Turgot] now, in 1749, at the age of twenty two, wrote... a letter which has been an object of wonder among political thinkers ever since. Its subject was paper money. Discussing the ideas of John Law, and especially the essay of Terrasson which had supported them, he dissected them mercilessly, but in a way useful not only in those times but in these. ...Terrasson's arguments in behalf of unlimited issues of paper had been put forth in 1720. ...and he declared that the material used for bearing the sign of value is indifferent ...and that if a sovereign issues enough of paper promises, he will be able to loan or even to give money in unlimited amounts to his needy subjects. ...without danger of depreciation. ...Terrasson also made the distinction between the note of a business man and notes issued by a government, that the former comes back and must be paid, but that the latter need not come back and can be kept afloat forever by simple governmental command, thus becoming that blessed thing—worshiped widely, not many years since, in our own country—"fiat money."