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Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, January 15, 1932
“I believe that the needy in this country during the present depression should be fed and clothed as well as the soldiers in the trenches were in the World War.
“There are people in the world who are lazy. Some of them are among the idle, some of them are among the idle poor. There are those who would duck to the other side of the street if they saw a job coming along to shake hands with them. There are those who have real need, are working against overwhelming odds, are trying everywhere to get something to do, and cannot seem to find any opening.
Relief through philanthropic agencies is not entirely satisfactory, but if a government dole were to be out through, it would be much worse than the present system. The dole in England was a tragic failure.
“While the needy should certainly receive the necessities of life, probably private relief and philanthropic agencies are the best means of giving this help. The best way of all is to get rid of the cause.”
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Earl Bertrand Russell, October 25, 1931
“Big business has more brains than the politicians and appears more likely than they to arrive at the international agreement necessary for the restoration of prosperity.
“Germany is the most dangerous spot in Europe, and there is always the chance Germans will call on Russia to help them. Then you will get another universal change scrimmage.
“If I were in power I would disband the army and navy, thereby affecting a much large economy without anybody being worse off. I would risk disarmament in one country without waiting for the others to follow on the grounds that the country would be much safer without an army and navy.
“If you haven’t got an army nobody will have any reason for attacking you. Denmark, without an armed force, is safer from war at present than any other nation. Nobody would bother to fight them because there wouldn’t be any point to it. Nowadays when nations fight, the result is almost equally disastrous whether they win or lose. However, the attempt to disarm by agreement is not likely to succeed in any very near future. I would disarm and wait for the rest to follow.”
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Stuart Chase, April 5, 1931
“Failure use a surplus of capital correctly in business expansion is one of the causes of the recent depression. Idle capital means idle men and women. Criticism aimed at the wealthy because they spend too much for luxuries misses the point, since the truly wealthy are unable to spend more than a small percentage of their vast incomes.
“The middle classes have tied up too much money by overcautious saving. Capital investment should be controlled so that money can be circulated properly.
“Seven million unemployed constitute a greater menace than Germany in the World War; what America needs most is a 10-year plan that will provide for a minimum wage of $5000 annually by 1942.”
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Dr. Lorine Pruette, Janurary 18, 1931
“Men have made a decided mess of things while running them through the ages. As statistics show that in every 100,000 of the male population of the United States, 610 are criminals, while only 55 women in the same total are criminals, and as men are steadily becoming feminized, it is to be hoped that the change in the men will tend to make the world a better place to live in.”
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Dr. W.E. Burghardt DuBois, November 9, 1930
“The advance of humanity requires that there shall be social equality between the Negro and the white race and if there is going to be social equality there will be intermarriages.
“The colored race will gain more by making the carrying out of their obligations toward the white race their first aim rather than adopting a militant course that might prove antagonistic.”
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Professor Julian Huxley, November 2, 1930
“Darwinism has removed the necessity for a supernatural power in the universe by showing that living things become adapted to their surroundings independent of any conscious foresight in any quarter.
“Since psychology assumed a large place in the intellectual world, God has become a being more and more vague who, even if originally a creator, has become since a spectator to enjoy contemplating the verification of his predictions, involved in the automatic workings of natural law in the universe.
“Religion has steadily progressed throughout its existence in spirituality and morality, and science has contributed much to that progress. Churchgoing has been decreasing for 100 years, owing to the spread of scientific ideas, but a most hopeful thing is that mankind has only 1 million years behind him, while he has hundreds of millions of years before him in which to continue to progress.”
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Abbe Ernest Dimnet, October 19, 1930
“There are various ways of thinking. The first natural way of thinking and not thinking is a rambling way of letting images drift by our eye. When I hear of masterpieces being published weekly, I wait for 12 weeks before deciding to read them. If after 12 weeks the masterpiece is still spoken of, I read it; I read very few, I grant you.”
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John Dewey, April 24, 1930
“I can see no possibility of the development of a robust culture in literature or art commensurate with our natural resources, wealth, and physical strength without more freedom of thought than now exists here. Oppression in that direction does much to cultivate or to keep alive racial and religious distrust or hatreds that might otherwise die out.
“It is no disrespect to the founders of this nation to say that while they won freedom for themselves, they did not for their posterity. Every generation must fight for its own freedom, which with each generation will come in a new form.
“I don’t know why it is that we do not learn from the past, as we ought to, the dangerous futility of repressive measures in the matter of opinions. They never result in anything but violence and disorder, changing the current of constructive into destructive energy.”
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Margaret Slattery, March 2, 1930
“Intolerance and an unwillingness to think have reached such heights in this country today that no questions of prohibition, censorship, or morals can be sanely discussed and solved. Greater desire for the truth and less reinforcement of ideas already held are urgently needed in the solution of problems of widespread public interest.
“The majority of people over 25 years of age have closed minds. Concentration is absolutely essential to success thinking. There must be a will to think. One useful way of thinking is to write two columns. In one column write what you know and in the other what you don’t know and want to know.
“Real thought means concentration. Yet books are read daily, news heard, and sermons and music wasted because many minds fail to retain anything in them. Great mobs think of nothing but millions of trifles that do not matter.
“A second kind of thought is ‘thinking in a straight line.’ All know it when they have to make up our minds on some matter relating to business or the welfare of the family. Creative thought was represented by Montaigne, Kant, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who lived withdrawn from the world and read only what they regarded as good for them.”
Q: Do what we eat and drink have some effect on our thinking?
A: A quart of old wine has improved many a mind.
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Miss Nannie H. Burroughs (president of the National Training School for Women and Girls, Washington, D.C.)
“Discrimination is a breeder of prejudice, idleness, disease, and race antipathy that has cost billions of dollars and millions of lives. The ‘John Crow’ civilization has engendered a double standard deeply imbedded in the blood of both white and colored peoples that 500 years of intensive in the blood of both white and colored peoples that 500 years of intensive application of the teachings of Jesus Christ will be required to remove it.”
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Scott Nearing (communist, economist, and sociologist), Harry Laidler (socialist author and executive director of the League for Industrial Democracy), Robert Fechner (national vice president of the International Machinists’ Union), February 18, 1930
Nearing: “The first prejudice of the American workingman is that it is possible to take one country like the United States, build a tariff wall about it, and maintain prosperity therein despite the rest of the world. Germany tried this. England tried it – and look at England’s unemployment. A world economy is a necessity. The second prejudice is that workingmen seem to believe you can rely on the boss as being big-hearted and generous. In time, workingmen will realize that if they place their hands in those of the bosses, they will be led merely to serfdom.
“The third prejudice is that of the worker in favor of law and order, being imbued with the idea that he must abide by the law and order established by capitalists for their own protection and own profit. In upholding law and order, the worker upholds the political end of the capitalist system. The workingman should set up his own system of law and order.”
Laidler: “Prejudices are belief that the present capitalist order is eternal; that the present economic order is one of unparalleled efficiency; that equality of opportunity now exists, and that people won’t work unless the profit incentive is retained.
“But the capitalistic order is not eternal. All orders throughout history have changed. Modern economic systems are wasteful, resulting in unemployment, wastes in distribution, and wastes of resources. With such astounding big fortunes, privately held, dominating industry, how can you say there is equal opportunity? Profit is not the only incentive to work. There are pride in creation, the desire for human betterment, and other stronger motivating forces.”
Fechner: “My party [trade unionists] is not a panacea for all our economic ills, but a means to guarantee certain rights. An economic system cannot be developed within the life of one generation. It is continually developed out of slowly growing experience. Control of the government is but an echo of the capitalistic power, and we strike at the source of that power – in the workshops, mills, and mines. There the real battle for freedom is being fought. When the right of voluntary association and collective action is won, we make the first step in the democratization of industry.”
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Rev. J. Elliott Ross, January 26, 1930
“You can fall downstairs; you can fall down a well; you can have an instantaneous stroke of paralysis – but you cannot fall instantaneously in love. The school of fiction, the moving pictures, which represent love as coming to people immediately and with uncontrollable force, has done no end of harm. This idea of love is absolutely false. This world would be a terrible place to live in if love came that way. No one would be safe. You might fall in love with your mother-in-law or your best friend’s husband. Love would be like a bolt of lightening. No one could tell where it would strike next. And one experience would not insure immunity. Life would be turned topsy-turvey.
“Shall we go on and demolish the myth of ‘falling in love’? Of course, you may feel immediately that another has a beautiful face, or wonderful eyes, or a musical voice. You may have a desire to know that person more intimately, to hear that voice oftener. But this is not love. It is the merest outpost of love. That desire must be yielded to, that person must be studied in various moods, before the great passion of love can be said to be actually present.
“That gives us a key to the whole question of picking a ‘peach’ in the garden of love. For if we can recognize the beginnings of love, we can resolutely refuse the association which alone can lead to love. If this attraction asserts itself toward what common sense would deem a ‘lemon,’ it can be kept from growing into love.
“Insofar as love is a passion, yes, it is probably temporary by nature. Once its object has been attained, it begins to pall. You can see that more clearly, perhaps, in other passions, it is difficult to live long at any great emotional height. You can’t keep yourself keyed up to a high pitch even of anger. Love is not an exception in this regard. And so you must realize the need of marrying on a firmer basis than a mere passion.”
Archives
David Seabury, October 27, 1929
“Every censor is a libertine afraid he will go bad and so wanting to make restrictions for himself and to put them on others. The romantic love of Romeo and Juliet, in which a couple think each other perfect, is no real foundation for marriage.
“Only real love, based on some resemblance in tastes and a disposition to give in to the extent of 60% in order to preserve mutual compatibility, is likely to maintain a happy marriage. A 600% increase in the annual number of divorces in the United States in the last 30 years proves that marriage today is a botch, showing that while we have grown up we have not learned to adjust ourselves to the grown-up state.
“Recently in a hall where there were 1800 persons, when I asked how many were blissfully happy in marriage, one young woman, only, arose.
“I believe that possibly in the nation there are 10% blissfully happy in marriage and 50% ranging from contentment to misery. As an indicator of how widely sentiment differs on the subject, a president of a woman’s club recently declared that 50% of married people were happy, while a male speaker declared that an estimate of 10% indicate preposterous optimism.
“What state is the most moral to al outward appearances?
Massachusetts.
And what state has the lowest moral standard of the nation? And the answer is Massachusetts. It is the same in Massachusetts as in England. They pull down the blinds.”
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Hereward Carrington, February 17, 1929
“Dreams are inseparable from sleep and there is no one who does not dream each night, though many forget the fact and deny on awakening that they have dreamed something and later recall a forgotten dream. Among the common dreams, mainly due to physical causes affecting the person while asleep, are dreaming of being insufficiently clad in public places, due to chilliness from insufficient bedclothes; also flying, being chased by wild beasts, falling from a great height, and excitedly packing a truck while unable to get the effects into it.
“Nightmares are caused by subconscious fears. Only by psychoanalysis can one really get at the underlying causes of dreams, the average dreamer being able to recall on awakening only a bit of the dream. Among ‘supernormal’ dreams are those willed on a sleeper by another person, by means of telepathy.”
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Clarence Darrow, April 14, 1929
“Prohibition! I’m against it. I don’t believe in it. It’s the work of bigots and fanatics whose only concern is to make others live as they live or pretend to live – mostly pretense. It will never be well enforced in this country, that is, to any great extent. It never can be. So long as people have any regard for their own freedom they will not consent to let somebody else tell them what they may eat and drink; anybody who can do that can just as readily tell them they may believe in or what church they shall go to.
“The 18th amendment can be repealed all right. It will take a little time. As soon as the congressmen think that a majority want it done, they’ll do it. They are not interested in having it enforced. They can get a drink if they want it – most of them do. They are interested in votes.
“A crime wave! There is no such thing. There is a wave of making new laws, and the more laws you make the more victims you get. If you count out the people who are in prison on account of violation of the Volstead Act there wouldn’t be any more crime than there always has been, in spite of the fact that the population has increased. Men are no better and no worse than they always have been and they are no more afraid of being caught and punished than they always have been.
“The only way to respect life is as a huge joke!”
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Dean Roscoe Pound, Harvard Law School, March 31, 1929
“The problem of ordered society could not be discussed today with as much confidence as a century ago. The investigation by a commission into law enforcement proposed by Pres. Hoover will bring all the elements together where they can be thought of intelligently and coherently.
“It is important that men not only be well governed but that they know how, and why, they are governed, and build on the belief that they are well governed. The patient, logical investigation of facts and the bringing to bear on these facts of coherent, intelligent, objective thinking would give society mastery over its problems.”
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J. Edgar Park, February 3, 1929
“Smoking by women is purely a health question, not one of morals. Most women do not enjoy smoking because they are naturally dainty in their tastes, but many of them have become smokers merely to prove that they are just as good as any man.
“Women with families should have jobs in business or industry to take them outside their homes a certain number or hours daily, the children to be looked after in nurseries. Mothers would then regard home as something romantic, instead of being bored as they are now by the never-ending round of daily household drudgery.
“Women are taking more than men to higher education are getting better educated than men, and many of them are going to be eminent, even in scientific lines.
“The world has radically changed since the World War, perhaps owing to the movies, rendering love making a public act, to easy telephone conversation between youth of both sexes, and to alcohol and gasoline.
“Unconventional language by small children, such as demand at the breakfast table that the ‘bloody butterplate be passed’ was considered something not to be rebuked because very likely the offender will not use the expression again if no notice is taken of it the first time.”
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Rev. William A. Bolger, January 27, 1929
“Anyone conversant with social questions in Boston who passed away 10 years ago would be astounded could they return now and find that birth control has ‘broken into respectability’ and that the New York Federation of Women’s Clubs has endorsed that principle. An ancient vice has become for its devotees a great, modern social virtue. We are doomed socially if we are to accept the results implied in the principles of birth control. Among those results will be rejection of that ancient Christian and rational decency regulating sex and family life, still believed in by followers of the historic Christianity and probably by an overwhelming majority of non-Catholics, Christians, and Jews.
“Marriage is the severest test of character and people must be trained for it. Moses and Christ and His church, social welfare, delicate womanhood, and chivalrous manhood all appeal alike for control of the flesh by the spirit.”
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Professor Harry A. Overstreet, December 16, 1928
“Most of the things that are wrong with the world today are due to lack of straight thinking; the world of the future, in which mankind will be prouder of its mentality than of its material possessions, is to be made by the straightest and greatest kind of thinking.
“At present, much of life is made impossible by resting it on what we want to be true, rather than what has been proved by ascertained facts to be true. Mankind is what it thinks.”
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Dr. Will J. Durant. November 18, 1928
“Today despair is the fashion, belief in nothing and hope in less, yet the leaders of current thought declare their disbelief in progress. I believe humanity is steadily moving upward. Furthermore, the best means of settling serious international disputes, without war, is by submitting them to a commission or court composed equally of representatives of the two nations in dispute, its verdict to be final.”
