12 quotes
As against Jesus, the historic choice of the mass-man goes regularly to some Barabbas.
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943)
According to my observations, mankind are among the most easily tamable and domesticable of all creatures in the animal world.
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943)
They accepted the fact that there are practicable ranges of intellectual and spiritual experience which nature has opened to some and closed to others.
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943)
Personal publicity of every kind is utterly distasteful to me, and I have made greater efforts to escape it than most people make to get it.
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943)
Our preceptors were gentlemen as well as scholars. There was not a grain of sentimentalism in the institution; on the other hand, the place was permeated by a profound sense of justice.
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943)
Above all things the mass-mind is most bitterly resentful of superiority. It will not tolerate the thought of an elite; and under a political system of universal suffrage, the mass-mind is enabled to make its antipathies prevail.
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943)
Reading implies a use of the reflective faculty, and very few have that faculty developed much beyond the anthropoid stage, let alone possessing it at a stage of development which makes reading practicable.
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943)
I could see how "democracy" might do very well in a society of saints and sages led by an Alfred or an Antoninus Pius. Short of that, I was unable to see how it could come to anything but an ochlocracy of mass-men led by a sagacious knave.
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943)
Culture is knowing the best that has been thought and said in the world; in other words, culture means reading, not idle and casual reading, but reading that is controlled and directed by a definite purpose.
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943)
So far are they from displaying any overweening love of freedom that they show a singular contentment with a condition of servitorship, often showing a curious canine pride in it, and again often simply unaware that they are existing in that condition.
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943)
It is certainly true that whatever a man may do or say, the most significant thing about him is what he thinks; and significant also is how he came to think it, why he continued to think it, or, if he did not continue, what the influences were which caused him to change his mind.
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943)
Considering mankind's indifference to freedom, their easy gullibility and their facile response to conditioning, one might very plausibly argue that collectivism is the political mode best suited to their disposition and their capacities. Under its regime, the citizen, like the soldier, is relieved of the burden of initiative and is divested of all responsibility, save for doing as he is told.
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943)