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The South Sea Islander must leave his canoe-carving, his sweet rest, and his graceful dances, and become the slave of a slave: trousers, shoddy, rum, missionary, and fatal disease — he must swallow all this civilization in a lump, and neither himself nor we can help him now till social order displaces the hideous tyranny of gambling that has ruined him.

— William Morris

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Society

More quotes by William Morris

Wert thou more fickle than the restless sea,
Still should I love thee, knowing thee for such.

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?

The Earthly Paradise (1868)

If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

Mastership hath many shifts whereby it striveth to keep itself alive in the world.

A Dream of John Ball (1886)

It is for him that is lonely or in prison to dream of fellowship, but for him that is of a fellowship to do and not to dream.

A Dream of John Ball (1886)

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

One country, one constitution, one destiny.

Daniel Webster

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: William Morris (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.