Edward Carpenter Quotes

Every human being grows up inside a sheath of custom, which enfolds it as the swathing clothes enfold the infant.

To keep a man (slave or servant) for your own advantage merely, to keep an animal that you may eat it, is a lie. You cannot look that man or animal in the face.

Granting, I say that competition has hitherto been the universal law, the last word, of nature, still if only one man should stand up and say, "It shall be so no more," if he should say, "It is not the last word of my nature, and my acts and life declare that it is not," then that so-called law would be at an end.

Government and laws and police then fall into their places - the earth gives her own laws; Democracy just begins to open her eyes and peep! and the rabble of unfaithful bishops, priests, generals, landlords, capitalists, lawyers, kings, queens. patronisers and polite idlers goes scuttling down into general oblivion; faithfulness emerges, self-reliance, self-help, passionate comradeship.