A Quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton
The English are no nearer than they were a hundred years ago to knowing what Jefferson really meant when he said that God had created all men equal.
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Brains and character rule the world. The most distinguished Frenchman of the last century said: Men succeed less by their talents than their character. There were scores of men a hundred years ago who had more intellect than Washington. He outlives and overrides them all by the influence of his character.
If men were equal in America, all these Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as foreigner; there were only free men and slaves.
Without any extraordinary effort of genius, I have discovered that nature was the same three thousand years ago as at present; that men were but men then as well as now; that modes and customs vary often, but that human nature is always the same. And I can no more suppose, that men were better, braver, or wiser, fifteen hundred or three thousand years ago, than I can suppose that the animals or vegetables were better than they are now.
The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.
America, to me, is this enormous contrast between the heady idealism of founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson, who said, 'All men are created equal,' and the reality that he was himself a slave owner.
In spite of what Thomas Jefferson wrote, all men may be created equal, but not to all women.
Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for SOME men to enslave OTHERS is a "sacred right of self-government." These principles can not stand together. They are as opposite as God and mammon; and whoever holds to the one, must despise the other.
It was the contemplation of God that created men who were equal, for it was in God that they were equal.
Jefferson owned slaves. He did not believe that all were created equal. He was a racist.
What good is it to me that Mary gave birth to the son of God fourteen hundred years ago, and I do not also give birth to the Son of God in my time and in my culture? We are all meant to be mothers of God. God is always needing to be born.
I like the idea of something greater than us. We destroy things with our curiosity. We shatter with our best intentions. We are no closer to perfection than we were one hundred years ago, or five hundred.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
It is equally pointless to weep because we won't be alive a hundred years from now as that we were not here a hundred years ago.
Two hundred years ago, we were all busy farming and we all had a role to play. The home was a unit of production. We made food and all the things we needed, we took care of our kids and were connected to purpose in our evolution. When the Industrial Revolution came along, it took away a lot of the work the men had done.
The clergy [in the 14th century] on the whole were probably no more lecherous or greedy or untrustworthy than other men, but because they were supposed to be better or nearer to God than other men, their failings attracted more attention.
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