Henry David Thoreau Quotes

But a people unable to reform will not be able to preserve its old culture either.

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.

And History will smile to think that this is the species for which Socrates and Jesus Christ died.

I would love it if we made more comparisons between current issues and issues of the past. Maybe we'd realize that sometimes 'current issues' and 'past issues' are one and the same. Our world's people still fight over natural resources, kill in the name of religion, occupy regions and give them up - just as we did 'so long ago.'

Preserving tradition has become a nice hobby, like stamp collecting.

Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.

We live in this miraculous technological environment, and yet our human behaviour is still governed by basic impulses from prehistoric times.

The human race was always interesting and we know by its past that it will always continue so, monotonously.

The world in which we live today-reflecting in so many way the opposite of our sweetness and love-reminds us how desperately important it is to break the spell that's been cast on the human race and retrieve our shining self.

I like Silver Surfer because he's the most philosophical, always philosophizing about the human race and the human condition and why people are the way they are, why they don't appreciate this wonderful planet they live on... he has a nice moral tone.

Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.

I don't think there will ever be a time when people will stop wanting to bring about change.

Don't underestimate the power of events that happened a long time ago. That is the tragic flaw of modern man.

Man, while he loves, is never quite depraved.

The example alone of a vicious prince will corrupt an age; but that of a good one will not reform it.

Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.

We have resorted to every means to win back the position that Adam lost. We have tried through education, through philosophy, through religion, through governments to throw off our yoke of depravity and sin. All our knowledge, all our inventions, all our developments and ambitious plans move us ahead only a very little before we drop back again to the point from which we started. For we are still making the same mistake that Adam made - - we are still trying to be king in our own right, and with our own power, instead of obeying God's law.

The chance is the remotest, Of its going much longer unnoticed, That I'm not keeping pace With the headlong human race

Every generation wants to be the last.

As Americans, preserving the best of our traditions, we have the right- nay the duty-to fight for participation in the forward march of humanity

Resistance to improvement contradicts the noblest instincts of the race. It begets its opposite. The fanaticism of reform is only the raging of the accumulated waters caused by the obstructions which an ultra conservatism has thrown across the stream of progress; and revolution itself is but the sudden overwhelming and sweeping away of impediments that should have been seasonably removed.

We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. If they do, it is our duty as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children. If necessary, bone by bone.

It is part of the pholosophic dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves.

...you will do more harm than good by attempting to supplant old dogmas and customs with new dogmas. It will be the same in the end except that the old is less militant, less dangerous than a new order imposed by enthusiasts.

SAD, BUT ONE DAY OUR KIDS WILL HAVE TO VISIT MUSEUMS TO SEE WHAT A LADY LOOKS LIKE.