A Quote by James Russell Lowell
For there's nothing we read of in torture's inventions, Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
This is the patent age of new inventions for killing bodies, and for saving souls. All propagated with the best intentions.
The vast majority of our teachers, our principals and our PTAs are well informed and well meaning, but even those with the best intentions can benefit from cultural competency training.
Without action, the best intentions in the world are nothing more than that: intentions.
There is no dunce like a mature dunce.
Only by himself, with one acre and a house, will a dunce be a dunce. Once he manages to gain power, he'll turn into a scoundrel.
It's an astonishing skill that people can read, and read well. Very few people can read well. For instance, I have to be very careful with irony, saying something while meaning the exact opposite.
I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: 'If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.' Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
...And another item from the growing file of people who voluntarily wear dunce caps... You'll be talking cordially to someone and make an offhand reference, 'I recently read where--' and they'll cut you off and say, 'Oh, I don't read'... This is a tragedy on so many different levels. First, because they don't read, they don't know enough to keep it to themselves. Next, and this is the most amazing part, they use a demeaning tone like I'm the stupid one for wasting time with books.
Men are in fact, quite unable to control their own inventions; they at best develop adaptability to the new conditions those inventions create.
Our cultural dilemma has nothing to do with children who don't read very well. It lies instead in the difficulty of finding a way to restore meaning and purpose to modern life.
How much a dunce that has been sent to roam, excels a dunce that has been kept at home.
Although human ingenuity may devise various inventions which, by the help of various instruments, answer to one and the same purpose, yet will it never discover any inventions more beautiful, more simple or more practical than those of nature, because in her inventions there is nothing lacking and nothing superfluous; and she makes use of no counterpoise when she constructs the limbs of animals in such a way as to correspond to the motion of their bodies, but she puts into them the soul of the body.
You can have the best intentions in the world but if you do nothing, you are nothing.
From his style, you’d think Jason Brannon was the dark double of Ray Bradbury. He cares more about character and realism than most writers I’ve read and his plots flow like well-orchestrated music. Indeed, Brannon’s writing has a classical feel, reminiscent of the best traditional work in the genre, even when he’s going for gut-wrenching terror and torture in-extremis.
If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest. To read Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, and their compeers in prose, is to read in condensed form what all others have diluted.
This is the patent-age of new inventions For killing bodies, and for saving souls, All propagated with the best intentions; Sir Humphrey Davy's lantern, by which coals Are safely mined for in the mode he mentions, Tombuctoo travels, voyages to the Poles, Are ways to benefit mankind, as true, Perhaps, as shooting them at Waterloo.
Related Authors
Alexander Pope Quotes
English
Poet
Emily Dickinson Quotes
American
Poet
George Herbert Quotes
British
Poet
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes
American
Poet
Homer Quotes
Greek
Poet
Horace Quotes
Roman
Poet
John Milton Quotes
English
Poet
Khalil Gibran Quotes
Lebanese
Poet
Lord Byron Quotes
British
Poet
Maya Angelou Quotes
American
Poet
Oscar Wilde Quotes
Irish
Poet
Ovid Quotes
Roman
Poet
T. S. Eliot Quotes
American
Poet
Walt Whitman Quotes
American
Poet
William Butler Yeats Quotes
Irish
Poet